(Originally from Pastor Sid’s Weekly Blog). . .
Last week I was chairing the meeting of our Saskatchewan Synod and in the somewhat arcane workings of the ecclesiastical ballot found myself elected Bishop. In a 24 hour period my life took an abrupt 180 degree turn–from the familiar world of the parish pastor to a world that is for the most part rather unknown to me. It was a wildly fast “call process” that felt like being “torn” out of the familiar and “thrust” into the unfamiliar. It is true that, as the days pass, life is getting “normal again” in the midst of the grief of endings and the excitement of beginnings. But it is not the “getting back to normal” that strikes me today. It is the “tearing open” that keeps on raising questions for me as the week goes on–the “tearing open” that happens to all of us.
The “tearing open” that happened to a lost son (Lk 15) when he found that the life that he had thought to be just fine was lying in ruins at his feet. The “tearing open” that happened to the same lost son when he found himself unexpectedly enfolded in his father’s arms. The “tearing open” that we experience when we hold this child in our arms, or when we stand on that sunny day under that oak tree and place the sign of the cross on our mother’s casket. In those moments of broken hearts, broken by grief or broken by blessing–we know something, don’t we? Something deep and of the Spirit. I wonder what that is exactly?
I wonder–as I listen to Leonard Cohen’s haunting Anthem–why it is that the cracks are so often, “how the light gets in.
