Another Sunday in Lockdown

It was another Sunday in lockdown. On Sundays I go to church! Our church buildings are holy places, if only because of their use by generation after generation. Sadly, they are not yet all open after lockdown, not even for private prayer but the churchyards are open.
All Saints, Horstead was this Sunday's church of choice. Simon Knott wrote a nice piece about the church on his Norfolk Churches website. I came with a bunch of memories, memories that triggered Psalm 42 in my heart and mind. "As the deer longs for flowing streams...."  Oh! The river flows quietly beyond the churchyard and God's here sure enough. It is the later verses that come first to mind:




Wandering through grass among the graves. I remember my brothers and sisters in Christ who have gone before me. 
For most of the 1980s I was Rector here.  Names and stories come to mind. They died and were buried in the Christian faith. 
It is true that we are mortal, "The days of man are like grass,  when the wind blows over it it is gone and its place will know it no more". But "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive".  I have every confidence the souls of the departed are in God' safe keeping.

 My sadness, was about empty churches. Not just empty shut up churches during lockdown but the gradually emptying of village churches during the years before lockdown. As the psalm has it:
These things I remember,
   as I pour out my soul:
how I went with the throng,*
   and led them in procession to the house of God,
with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving,
   a multitude keeping festival.
There's no doubt in my mind that Christianity still has a Gospel - good news - for this and subsequent generations.  How that can best be shared and celebrated in a post-pandemic world?  Is the question.

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