Interrupted

Breakfast on Tuesday was fun as we celebrated a birthday in the vicarage, but then on my way around to the Abbey for Morning Prayer I remembered that I was in a bad mood with somebody and it rose to the top of my priorities— aren’t we dim? Anyway, we gathered quietly in St Aldhelm’s Chapel and at 9am the liturgy began and shortly we arrived at the psalm for the day, Psalm 36. It was all about the wicked, oh excellent I thought, it’s all about that person who’d put me in a bad mood. But as I read on, even in my coffee-free daze, I realised that the wickedness the psalmist sings about is not just everybody else’s wickedness and by the end of verse 4 I was in that ‘guilty as charged’ place that we often inhabit devotionally. Fortunately the psalmist changes tack in 5, your love O LORD reaches to the heavens, and by verse 7 I was approaching restoration through how priceless is your unfailing love. God is kind.

I turned into a schoolboy during the Old Testament reading. Most days at Morning Prayer Annette is there with us, but not last Tuesday—until Micah 7:2. ‘All men lie in wait to shed blood, each hunts his brother with a net’ or ‘each hunts his brother with Annette’ as I heard it. That’s where she is, hanging out with King Hezekiah. Snigger.

But the set readings weren’t finished with me yet. We sat down from the hymn and in the silence of the Abbey John 19 was read; Christ was crucified, and Christ breathed his final breath.  John 19 is much easier packaged on Good Friday, in late October it is horrendous. Somehow in Holy Week we shape the rhythm of the week to make a place for the cross on the Friday, but last Tuesday it was a holy interruption of God. Think each thought with the cross in mind, live each moment with the cross before you. And of course we don’t, and I didn’t, and perhaps one of the greatest sins of the church is our forgetfulness. But with Christ before me, as I hope he is before you now, for just a moment I remembered that his humanity was lost that I might recover mine, and his breathing stopped, that I might breathe again.