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As I sit down to write this report and think of the challenge and joy this past year has brought to us, I am reminded of the Mary Oliver poem called Wild Geese, which we shared at coffee hour one week:

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

There has been deep loneliness and uncertainty this year.  We have been disrupted from regular patterns and have missed being together on so many of the important feasts and occasions of our church year. We have lamented the diminished connections to each other that offer us hugs and shared meals and voices lifted up in song. We have been parted from family members and have mourned the passing of loved ones without the shared rituals of grief and remembrance.

Meanwhile, the poet reminds us: the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination...

While we have been scattered we have also been offered a chance to draw closer to God and to each other. While we have been isolated we have also been invited to expand our imagination and to find our place in the wider weave of creation - to look up at the stars and see ourselves as just one small part of this amazing tapestry. 

While we have been living with deep uncertainty we have also been held by the steady presence of God walking with us. I was aware of some of this steady stream of presence as I looked back on how we began the year. Early 2020 started with a Chapel Gallery show on pilgrimage, we walked the advent spiral and we will end this vestry period with another show on pilgrimage. We began our year with a call to watershed discipleship where five neighbouring parishes and ministries joined together to reflect on our own watershed and from God’s Spirit in these lands and this Lent we will return to a focus on Spirit and place through our book study. Pilgrimage and place have been touchstones on this rocky ride of a year and this seems very fitting for what I have witnessed. We have been pilgrims in a strange and often dry wilderness. The usual markers of our lives and future have become unfamiliar and yet, in some ways, we have been recalled to who we are, where we are, and whose we are.  

A few weeks after our buildings closed I wrote in our newsletter:

I have been thinking that we have read and talked and heard sermons about the wilderness for so long and finally we get a taste of that experience. Our usual touchstones of buildings and people and worship have been disrupted. We wander through unfamiliar territory. Our longing for the Promised Land grows as we anticipate the time when we will return to the home and family that is the body of Christ re-membered, reunited once more around the table of thanksgiving. Yet in this time God is with us and never leaves us to face our perils alone. God is forming us as a people reliant on God’s provision and Word –a people made in God’s own image and filled with God's presence and hope.

I have seen this presence and hope in you even in very difficult times, and I have been inspired and so very thankful for the spiritual growth that I have witnessed in you this past year.

I am profoundly grateful for your care and support in my own times of exhaustion and struggle and for the ways you have shown me grace, patience and the love of God in this time.  I am so thankful for each of you and your incredible faithfulness during this time.

We are not home yet, we continue to walk together through uncharted territory but I know this pilgrimage to deepen our knowledge of God and each other is shaping us for the important work we will do in the years ahead.

I am so very honoured to have served with you this past year and look forward with hope and anticipation to our next year together!

Yours in the risen Christ

The Reverend Meagan Crosby-Shearer