JUST IN PASSING - The View from the Vicarage

 

 

This year Trinity Sunday ushers in the month of June and I am reminded of St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, holding up the trefoil of a shamrock to use as a preaching aid when explaining the Holy Trinity. Fittingly the Liturgical colour for the many following weeks of Trinity-tide is green, for it is a time when Christians, as individuals and in their corporate form as the Church, try to make some progress with regard to spiritual growth.

 

 As anyone who has ever been through the growth-spurts of adolescence knows, growth can be both painful and embarrassing. As a particularly shy teenager I wished at time that the earth would yawn a wide chasm and simply swallow me. My feet were always too big and my coordination was in the constant condition of being totally cross-wired. I was the epitome of that wonderfully onomatopoeic Yiddish phrase being a “klutz”! Being as blind as a bat and pimply to boot did not precisely improve matters either.

 

What made it almost tolerable was that others around me were going through the same patterns of growth too. I shudder to think of the impact that eighty-something testosterone-charged, loud, gawky boys had on their surroundings. The staff at our school and the community in which we lived had been through the experience a great many times before and continued to do so after us, and still survives.

 

It seemed that grace and growth just didn’t go together. Looking back, I see that in fact they were intimately linked. There can be no growth without grace and no grace without growth.  Put into the spiritual context, this takes on a much deeper meaning.   Whatever our chronological age, we all need to grow in grace and have grace to grow.  We need the trust and faith in God to be able to breach the restrictions of the mundane. As in the growing seed, the tender shoots of our being must be free to reach upwards and outwards towards Divine love, as if it were towards the sun. It is only when we have experienced his growth that we can begin to understand what St Paul was referring to when he wrote in his letter to the Galatians’  Church:-