Leave us not pictureless

We are briefly carrying on from the diocesan Lent Course based on pictures from the Methodist Modern Art Collection – simply because it seemed a shame not to include something from its range of Easter and Pentecost pictures which, quite naturally, were not appropriate for use in Lent and Holy Week.  Yesterday I was preparing a session for tomorrow evening (a session which is also a response to the Archbishops’ call for prayer in the week before Pentecost) and was struck by the way the artists have had to move into abstract art to do the job for this season.  And then I arrived for Matins this morning and saw this.  I’ve posted before pictures of the light in St Nicolas’, including light from this south aisle window, but this is what it was doing with the temporary south aisle curtaining just now. 

The Collect for today is ‘leave us not comfortless’ which echoes older translations of John 14 now more often rendered more literally as ‘leave us not orphans’, and I recall students of Greek philosophers being described as ‘orphaned’ when their teacher died so it may almost be ‘leave us not guru-less’.  Leave us not adrift.  There have been moments in the week when I’ve not been keen to go on plugging away at things – one of them was receiving an e-mail summarising the twenty-six further points the Diocesan Advisory Committee would like addressed before it will support the proposal for work on the roof behind this curtain – and moments when it has seemed worthwhile being here for the long haul – two separate ones were pieces of pastoral work which stem back eight and twelve years.  Leave us not without a sense that you are in the patterns and absence of patterns in front of us.  That would be enough.