For the last 20 years I have been on holiday for a few days with my friends, and the holidays we have been on have been fantastic and all very different. Whilst we are away, we do some things together and some on our own or with part of the group. I can remember special parts of each holiday but somewhere that opened my eyes to a new experience took place in York. I went to an art exhibition. It wasn’t just paintings but art in many different mediums and including some art installations. The one that blew my mind was an installation about music. When you entered the room there was a circle of speakers on stands. The circle was large and there must have been 30 or so speakers. What you had to do was walk around and listen to each speaker individually. When you did this, you could hear an instrument playing on its own. Each speaker had a different instrument. When you had listened to all these lovely sounds, you then had to go to the centre of the circle and listen at the speaker there. This combined all the instruments into a stunning orchestral piece. It was truly beautiful and a good example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The combined sound was far more than the sum of its individual parts. The bible says much the same thing when it says “There is one body, but it has many parts. But all its many parts make up one body. It is the same with Christ.” The consensus is the Paul wrote this epistle and what he is talking about is the gifts that we are all given. We are not all priests or singers in the choir, but some will provide tea and biscuits or arrange flowers, open or close the church, clean the church and, numerous other activities that seem menial or of no consequence. Each and everyone of these events is just as essential and together make the whole the full orchestra. We need to remember each of our individual speakers are necessary for the wonderful whole of the church life.
This month’s book choice is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. It tells of the comfort and solidarity in ,community.
God Bless
Maureen Kendall