The Empty Nest

I've been thinking, in recent weeks, about the ministry of a country vicar who died a few years ago. This man was a fine priest, faithful to his people and to God. He was also something of a mystic. In some ways his ministry was a 20th century echo of that of Kilvert, whose diaries from a previous century described pastoral visits to isolated farms and homesteads, and the thoughts that he had as he walked the country lanes. The priest I was remembering also had an affinity with nature and he was fond of slipping his hand into a nest which the bird had recently vacated. He liked to feel the warmth in the nest.

That image of the empty nest, still warm, and to which the bird will return, is the image which carries me into this penitential season of Lent, which begins to today. Let me try and explain this.

To place one's hand into the living nest of a bird is to touch the wonder of nature. And, for those of us who spend out time rushing around, sitting in cars or buses, clacking away on the keyboard of a computer or watching the activities of world-wide humanity through the window of a television screen, it is no bad thing to have contact with the wonder and the beauty of a bird's nest, and to feel the life of that habitation in its warmth.

The image, however, does say something about loss. It is only possible to touch the nest because the bird has left. Indeed, there is a sense of intrusion for this nest was never intended for the human hand. Christians need to have a good understanding of loss. St Paul teaches us that loss is worthwhile if it means the knowledge of God in Christ Jesus, for to have that knowledge is worth everything. Furthermore, to embrace discipleship and be part of the apostolic mission means laying oneself open to all kinds of loss, physical and emotional.

We heard some of that in the second letter to the Corinthians this evening where as servants of God we have commended ourselves .... through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labours, sleepless nights, hunger, etc.
The early Church faces up to the very real possibility of loss, including the loss of life in pursuit of a vocation to proclaim Christ. And when we proclaim Christ, we are proclaiming Christ crucified and that represents the greatest loss of all. For the Son of God to give up his life on the cross was to pay a huge price, and he was prepared to go to that point because it was the will of his Father. By what Jesus taught and by what he did, we know that to lose one's life is to gain a greater life.

The experience of loss for the sake of Christ is to open our minds and our hearts to the values of God's kingdom, and we are introduced to a new dimension of human experience which is the knowledge of God and the promise of eternal life. All of that derives from a willingness to experience loss. In the weeks that follow we do well to meditate on the concept of loss and our experience of it. We may choose the simple device of giving up a pleasure, such as eating chocolate, to stimulate our meditation. Equally, we may be reflecting on personal losses we have known such as the death of someone special, or the ending of an important relationship, or a disappointment at school or at work. Some of these memories will no doubt be raw and unresolved - the penitential season of Lent affords the possibility of doing some work on that.

The empty nest could also be seen as a metaphor for the absence of God. God does seem to be absent much of the time and, down the ages, spiritual writers such as the prophet Isaiah, and later the Reformation divine Martin Luther, thought he was a God who hid himself. Many of the psalms address this issue directly by urging God to demonstrate his presence among us.
Lord why do you hide your face from me? (Psalm 88: 14)
Or How long, Lord, will you hide yourself from sight? (Psalm 89: 46).
The fact that God is hidden from us, and appears to be absent from us, is a reality of the spiritual life. Indeed, Jesus himself, at that pivotal moment of dying on the cross, cried out My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
It is a cry of the human heart. Yet the absence of God or the hiddenness of God, does not prevent us from being able to find him when he chooses to reveal himself. The hand in the nest is reassured by the warmth of the absent bird to know that this is a place of continuing habitation. The bird will return once the hand and its owner have left the scene. There is, through the warmth of the nest, the promise of that return, and we are encouraged to persevere in our search.

Our meditation then, is moving into a new area of asking how we encounter God. Part of the discipline of faith is to commit to the activity of searching for God. This discipline requires us to be innovative, to experiment, to explore new avenues if God is to be found and encountered. This could be better expressed as 'God disclosing Himself to us'. The Church has long taught that God reveals Himself to people according to their ability to receive, and we might take comfort from the knowledge that, despite how it may seem to us, the absent God is never totally absent. We might wish to take this further and say that God is really present in absence. God is present in our loss, in our grief and in our confusion. Just how he is present needs to be explored.

Where might this meditation lead us? I suspect that one of the growth points in our spiritual life is the realisation that God is here among us (and here with me) in ways that we never imagined. It comes with the realisation that where we are now, God has gone before us and that He is always bigger than we are and greater than the world that we inhabit. This defines the I/Thou relationship between the believer and God. In his poem, 'The Church Porch', the Anglican priest-poet, George Herbert, expressed this most succinctly:
When once thy foot enters the church, be there.
God is more there than thou:
for thou art there only by his permission.

The sense of wonder when the hand is slipped into the warm nest suggests something of this relationship. We begin today a long process of prayer and meditation as we approach the Passion of Christ. Beyond that lies the promise of shaking of our spiritual foundations with the triumph of life over death. Amidst those celebrations there will be that telling little story of a doubtful disciple who could only believe if he slipped his hands into the wounds of the crucifixion on the body of the risen Christ. He had to stretch out his hand and touch, and feel the warmth of the resurrection life. Thomas was not rebuked by Jesus for this. Instead, Jesus said:
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed;
blessed are those for whom the absence of God has not been a hindrance to their faith.

Contact with the wonder of nature, loss, hiddenness, absence and presence. May we all grow in the spiritual journey that awaits us this Lent.