Jonathan Hedgecock
I once read a description of what it’s like being a priest which describes exactly how I see it: “trying to help other people have the sort of relationship with God that I wish I had myself”. I seem to spend far more of my life grappling to try to understand what God is doing than I ever spend being calm, serene and certain – which is what I suppose I used to think priests were like…until I became one!
For me, it has always been the times when I’m wrestling with God, through studying, asking questions, or trying to live with answers that can sometimes seem very uncomfortable, that have revealed most to me about God’s love alive in our world. So I suppose I’ve given up the unhelpful image of serenity in return for a search for God that always involves being up to the elbows in the messy stuff that surrounds most of us most of the time as we try to navigate work, family life, church, or all of the above, from day to day.
Having said that, there’s some poetry which speaks to me very deeply about where God is to be found, beneath and at the centre of everything that we do. It helps to remind me why I believe connecting with God in our everyday lives is so important. And it’s poetry that sustains me in all of the frantic activity that surrounds my full time day job (I’m a consulting engineer in a small business based on
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
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