Lent & Easter Readings from Iona

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• Publisher: Wild Goose Publications
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9781901557626
• eBook ISBN: 9781849521338
• Topic: Theologie & Religion

Lent offers an opportunity to see the world afresh. This book of readings from members and staff of the Iona Community aims to help us reappraise our lives during the period leading up to Easter.

Easter Sunday

Readings:

Psalm 30:10–12; John 20:1–18

A sermon

It took a long time for Mark to find a church he could dance in. During hymns, through songs of praise. During sermons, sometimes – rocking and turning and spinning in his wheelchair. It took him a long time but finally he found one. ‘It disturbs the congregation,’ they’d told him. ‘Makes people uncomfortable in church.’

‘People are afraid I guess,’ he told me. ‘Afraid of joy.’

When Mark first started learning he danced in tight circles. God told him how it meant that God’s disabled people are afraid, timid. Not loose. Not free. But then slowly, gradually he wheeled and danced and the circles grew bigger. It’s not for himself that he dances, Mark says. It’s for God – to dance in front of God, to express his gratitude and thankfulness, and how he’s chosen joy finally, and wants others to choose joy too. To dance.

‘People just sit in the pews, and benches along the back. And when they stand up to sing finally they hardly sway or close their eyes. Like they’re crippled and broken.’ Dance and help free the disabled, God told Mark.

We’re sitting together making decorations for his wheelchair – tissue paper streamers, yellow and gold – for the dance tonight. Mark tells me about how he spent six months in hospital with double pneumonia, and pressure sores from lying that cut to the bone. Just to move was painful. Getting turned like lying on knives. He cried whole days. Asked God, Why? Felt like Job. Like Job did. When can I get up again, he cried, like in some psalm and God said: When you learn finally, really learn. He wanted to die, just wanted to die. It was too much pain all the time – at one point with his circulation they were afraid gangrene could set in in his foot and they’d have to amputate. But God said: No, you can’t die, I’m not finished with you. You have inner healing to do. Then you can get up. You have work to do but you still won’t listen.

‘Lying there,’ said Mark, ‘there’s not much to do but think. Think and talk to God. There’s no way to get away. You try to, watch the TV and that, but you can’t really anyway.’

Mark told me how, lying propped and positioned between locked bed rails, he was forced to really work through his feelings from his past: His separation from a woman born with a disability also.Their broken relationship, his hurt. His drinking. Above and below all, his broken relationship

with God. His anger at God for who God had made him, put him through to suffer.

Then – after six months lying broken in sorrow, with ulcers and sores eating him – Mark resurrected healed and whole and God said dance. OK, so dance. Stop abusing yourself, stop punishing yourself and others. Stop sitting with words. Dance resurrection. Dance joy. The good news. Dance for all God’s disabled people and for their liberation. Mark doesn’t care what people think, he has to dance. It’s his purpose, his mission. There’s a service tonight, a celebration, and we’re blowing up and tying on coloured balloons.

Lately he’s been dancing figure eights, Mark says. In the crossing – big, free figures. Flowing, spinning, gliding. ‘For a while I was trying to figure out why exactly. And didn’t know, so then stopped thinking about it and just danced. Feeling the flowing freedom of it. But then it came to me: If you put a figure eight on its side, you know what it’s the sign of? … Infinity. It’s infinity. It’s dancing infinity.’

I smile and we sit in silence. Finishing up, Mark says to me: ‘I wish my mother was alive.’ ‘Gets lonely?’ I say. ‘Yeah, sometimes. And the doctors all told my mother, told mom when I was a child that I’d never walk. That I’d

always need a wheelchair …’ Mark smiles. ‘But they never said I’d never dance. Never said that … Maybe she can see me. Dancing. Dancing now. I like to think of her like that … There, finished, nice huh? Well, I guess that’s it. Thanks for the help. So, you dancin’ tonight too?’

We find it so difficult to dance in this life:

Carrying the burden of responsibilities

the pressures of every day

the memory of past partners

the weight of the world, it seems like, sometimes

Afraid of what people might think

afraid of people judging us

(of God judging us)

afraid of looking foolish out there on the floor

Afraid we won’t get the rhythm right

afraid dancing is for the chosen few

Feeling so weighed down with guilt and sin

we can’t move with grace

There have been some amazing, beautiful and brave people who have taught me to dance. Taught me steps I keep on forgetting and have to relearn:

There was Mark …

There was Andrew:

I met Andrew in a nursing home where I was volunteer visiting. Andrew was 93 years old but looked about 65 (dancing had kept him young). He lived in the home with his wife, Olive, who had some form of advanced dementia.

Andrew spent his days helping the nurses care for his wife – helping to clean and change and feed her. In his spare time he talked into the tape recorder by his bed; talked gently to Olive who didn’t answer any more; talked to God in the little stained-glass chapel.

We would sit together out on the patio and he’d tell me his story: About fighting in the First World War as a ‘Jack tar’, leaving from Scapa Flow when he was fifteen and a half. About fighting in Gallipoli. About another time, out in the foggy, cold Atlantic, arriving too late to save friends blown to bits by a U-boat; fishing for arms and legs, feeling sick with grief and the horror of war.

About his merchant marine days and going on shore leave in Singapore. Strolling into a brothel there that he didn’t realise was a brothel – he was only looking for a beer – and suddenly getting caught up in a brawl and getting thrown out of a window; falling three storeys into a cushioning heap of sewage and rubbish and then having to go back and report to his commanding officer. About driving a school bus for years. About getting gangrene somehow and losing his legs. About coming home from hospital.

We’d talk a while, and then he’d put some music on his phonograph and start dancing. Balanced, as graceful as any dancer, on his bed, his shorts rolled up, free leg stubs swinging gaily to and fro to a recording of Scottish Highland music. I’d watch him dancing and he was like light to me. Amazing – how someone can go through so much in their life and still dance: lose their wife, lose friends, lose their legs, and still dance.

‘Any regrets?’ I asked him, up over the spirited music.

‘I saw the world,’ he said, ‘and had a warm, wee house … I’m thankful,’ he sang.

There was Elizabeth:

I met Elizabeth working in a psychiatric hospital. (It was a place where few of the patients kept track of the days. Either they were unable to – lost in a fog of heavy drugs – or, because the days were all the same, they didn’t bother.)

Elizabeth had an amazing and inexhaustible wardrobe and made a point of dressing up extravagantly. She sometimes changed as often as four times a day! And standing, smiling, in a long, flowing, golden gown, a floppy hat – bot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Invocation for Lent
• Ash Wednesday
• First Sunday in Lent
• Second Sunday in Lent
• Third Sunday in Lent
• Fourth Sunday in Lent
• Fifth Sunday in Lent
• Palm Sunday
• Holy Week Monday
• Holy Week Tuesday
• Holy Week Wednesday
• Maundy Thursday
• Good Friday
• Holy Week Saturday
• Easter Sunday
• Beyond Easter
• The Ascension
• Loving Kindness and God’s Grace
• Prayer for the Iona Community
• Sources
• Contributors