Debbie, our ordinand, now knows where she’s going to go to
serve her curacy, and she and I had a meeting to catch up last week. She told
me how she’d help to facilitate a meditation session with a group from Al-Anon,
the network supporting people who care for those with alcohol problems, working
with a secular facilitator. Obviously this wasn’t about religion in any way,
but Debbie suggested they retell the story of the Prodigal Son using an
all-female ‘cast’ to think about issues of betrayal and forgiveness. They’d
agreed they would stop at the point the errant child comes home, but the other
facilitator ran ahead and, not actually being aware of how the story was
supposed to end, as the parent welcomed the child and offered forgiveness.
When Debbie asked her about it, she said she’d been
overtaken by some phrases she’d remembered and couldn’t get out of her mind: ‘Love
is patient, love is kind, love bears all things, suffers all things’. She
couldn’t remember where she’d heard them (my guess is at a wedding). ‘It comes
from the Bible,’ Debbie gently offered, beginning a conversation about the
Bible, about Jesus and about forgiveness.
No comments:
Post a Comment