wonderful exchange

Tomorrow is Pentecost, so my mind is filled with rushing wind and dancing flame and thoughts about the flow of energy — God’s and ours. But the wind stirred an old memory, an old conversation that I need to discharge here, lest it get in the way of the sermon.

(and there is a trick about preparing sermons — you must first get rid of all the preachable thoughts you don’t intend to use…)

The conversation took place years ago, in my first year at university. I have no idea what led to it or what it was about, but it began something like this:

‘What about passion then? Do you think it can be good? Or is it always dangerous?’

There were three of us in the room, with certain predictable roles.

The questioner was expert and guide, agent provocateur.

I was Miss Manners — the one with a rather prissy sense of New England propriety and decorum. The sort that spends hours embroidering large red A’s for the Hester Prynne’s of the world.

And the third often tried to make Hester Prynne look like a shrinking violet.

Given the casting, I knew what we were each supposed to say. But I was equally sure I had no idea what I thought. Passion just wasn’t part of Miss Manners’ curriculum. Not a category of thought ready to be discussed.

So seventeen years later, I find the answer pressing its way into a sermon.

Passion is often good. And always dangerous.

Though it is even more dangerous in its absence.

Let us hope it blows in on the wind.

Addendum: if any of you don’t know Hester Prynne,
stop now, turn off your computer, and go read The Scarlet Letter. Right now. Today. Indeed, let’s make it required reading for all Anglicans by Lambeth 2008. That should help sort out the debate.

I have just returned from a nicely varied day. A wedding rehearsal this morning on an island not my own. An attempt at a ‘getting to know you meeting’ with someone who in the end did not have time. Then a long journey from Largs to Glagow, doubled by a slow burning VW van (circa 1967) blocking the road. A meeting in Glasgow (one of the enjoyable sort, where one actually feels one is doing what one is called to), then dinner with a friend.

On the way home, I knew I would miss the 9pm ferry, so stopped at Tescos, where there were hundreds of young children and infants looking pale and exhausted. When I commented to the woman on the till, she said, ‘Oh, it’s early yet. There’ll be children here till my shift finishes at 11.30.’

The self-righteous, dogmatic school teacher in me arose to lament the loss of bed time. I never had a bed time, mind, but there is a significant difference between being alowed to fall asleep randomly after an eveing at home, and being taken on chores at all hours.

So many children in perfectly ‘normal’ and ‘good’ homes suffer damage each day by the very routines we put them through — and by the constant low-level stress of trying to do more than is possible or wise. It is one of the things that nags at me and I wish we could better address as a church. But would anyone pause long enough to listen?