Abstract
All over the UK this year young people have gathered at Christian festivals to explore, learn, debate, sing, discuss, create and encounter God. From Spring Harvest, to New Wine, from Solas to Greenbelt, thousands have come together with a purpose of festival worship and encounter. And in the more secular settings the same has occurred, between international Scout camps and music Festivals such as Rock Ness and Glastonbury. Mud, wellingtons, pop up tents, stalls advising on a whole range of lifestyle choices from fair trade to safe sex, in between hotdogs and falafel bars, have created temporarily leisured atmospheres where everyday life is forgotten and new experiences take shape.
Every year usually around midsummer, I make my way to the isle of Iona for Community Week, the time when the scattered community of which I am a member, gathers together to celebrate, learn and pray together. New members of the community are ‘hallowed’, there is a great feast, islanders, guests, families, residents and volunteers come together to sing, praise, and catch up with one another. Over the course of six days there is laughter and reflection, a pilgrimage around the small island, intense discussions and workshops on various concerns: nuclear disarmament; Israel/ Palestine; work with young people, asylum and sanctuary and the ways in which we continue, often against the grain, to attempt to offer hospitality to guests from all over the world. These are holiday times, members bring their children and over the years we watch them grow. Mostly it isn’t all that clear which child belongs with whom. The rhythm of meal times and times of worship in the abbey church, of a children’s programme and the intensely communal atmosphere of dormitories and tables and shared meals means families and friends are mixed up with strangers and newcomers, staff and volunteers. Over the course of a week a new community is mixed and made.
Whilst the mixings on a remote, small Hebridean island have their own singularity and purpose the experience of being on holiday or at festivals is regularly one where the routines and habits of everyday life are messed up. For many years I have been involved in researching the effects, positive and negative, of travel and tourism, especially with regard to the potential for intercultural encounter and openness to hospitality. Findings from such research are very mixed but what is clear is that holidays and holiday-making offer occasions for renewal and for change. It seems likely that the Festival of the Passover in Jerusalem a couple of thousand years ago would have seen kids running about and playing with each other, parents meeting up with family and friends and attention being paid through food and worship to the things which are important: relations with God; relations of kin. Space away from the routines of meals and work allows for other experiences to take shape and for new habits to be welcomed and entertained. Where the focus is on a religious festival it is no surprise that the strength of ritual and worship and teaching on things that really matter in life might draw in young people; and here Jesus was no exception. When routines are mixed up then things go missing or go wrong – it’s why holiday insurance has its premiums.
Lost children announcements are part of the summer family festival scene. In the melee it’s hard to keep track, especially of 12 year olds who are too cool to hold hands with adults. On Iona the safety of children’s programmes means parents can take a break for a while and focus on their own spiritual journey and life of prayer and reflection. I don’t suppose it’s that different from the Passover story of Jesus’s disappearance and certainly it makes it entirely understandable why his parents would not even have noticed he’d been left behind. How many of us have not been loath to leave the wonderful experiences of community, worship, sharing and praise that festivals and gatherings for worship collectively can engender. Tears are often shed as the ferry leaves the Iona jetty at the end of a week together, particularly by the young folk as they leave new, but now firm friends.
And when it happens that the deeper wheels of conviction and what we sometimes call conversion, or calling, have turned and God’s choosing of us and loving of us has been heard deeply then remaining in prayer and teaching seems to cancel out all other demands. The language we use to describe these experiences betrays our formation as Christians: ‘I was saved; I was converted; I accept Jesus Christ; I turned to Christ; I felt loved by a force and power beyond myself; I chose to serve, I asked for grace and forgiveness, I touched the garment….’ None of these phrases ever seems adequate and some of them curl the toes. But spiritual experiences escape the everyday and change the everyday into a touching place with the incarnate God, into a relationship with the Son and an openness to Spirit. For all who have turned and chosen to live a life of faithfulness and prayer, of study of scripture and action for Gospel-inspired justice and peace it seems in those times of initial choosing and of their festive renewing that there can be nothing else to life. It is all consuming – rather like the experiences of falling in love so beautifully described in Song of Songs. It often needs us to be away from the routines of everyday life, the concerns of the examination and assessment cycles which dominate youth and childhood, routines of family and community life, of work and weekends, for us to have the space to choose or renew. This is why the work and youth camps of religious organizations are so important to spiritual formation – times to practise different, regular, routine habits of worship, study, play and living together in community and fellowship; of choosing what is meaningful, freely and for freely chosen obedience in life.
And so it is, that we are given this story of Jesus as so palpably ordinary and understandable and also so tantalizing in its moment, poised in the midst of a festival and holiday, when the priorities of ordinary life and family dimmed, as he found light, and followed it: the slightly incredulous response to anxious parents rings so true for those of us who have wondered where our children are, and had those times of heart stoppingly anxious search which end in anger and accusation, countered by equally innocent incredulity which belies the new found state of being. “Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” And of course anxious, angry, relieved and loving parents cannot hear such an answer or understand what this means, the press of everyday life taking over again, outside of the festival times.
Yes, and even for Jesus the ordinary returns too. The rebuke settles, the obedience to his parents grows, the ways of working the spiritual and the learning of the festival time into the grain of everyday life back home in Nazareth. For faith to be faith it has to be lived and to thrive in the ordinary as well as in the extra-ordinary times of life. And when it does, and is witnessed it is indeed a thing to be ‘treasured in the heart’.