Dear Parishioner,

    In the cold weather it’s easy to see right to the bottom of the pond and I can count 19 carp, still plump at the end of their midwinter fast. They have lived all their lives in the pond. They are part of it one might say; they or their parents were here before I came to Ealing, and I rather hope they will be around to pay no attention at all to my being carried past on the way to our graveyard. The pond would not be complete without them, and they would, I assume, be rather out of sorts without the pond.

Just like the first reading last Sunday, about Adam and Eve in the garden. They have lived there, how long? It’s all they have known, it’s where they belong, until they decided to be different, to not belong, and find themselves Outside, where they might have prayed in the rather lovely words I came across this week. Stuck outside, estranged, exiled, Adam and Eve pray asking that the plants in the Garden remember them: by the music of your rustlings beseech the Creator of all to open to us the gates which our sins have closed. Adam, who, after all is a creature of the earth, believes that the vegetation that nourished him, that he named, would somehow miss him, that the Garden would not be the same without him.

         And where is that Garden now? Adam and Eve, after all, are not ancestors from long ago; they are you and me now; lost, confused, somehow not in the right place, and when Adam prays he is asking for help for all the displaced, from house or home or hope. So, we listen to this this Sunday’s gospel and its story of glory; could that be for us too, we might think, to rescue us from our exile? Yet after the climb up the mountain away from the world, the transfiguring light, the bright cloud, the voice, the Law and the Prophets, the glory of it all; after all of that , only Jesus remains, talking of what will happen to him. Jesus in our world, living our life, here with us. Perhaps the plants heard Adam’s prayer after all. The Garden has come looking for us, and has found us.

Happy Lent

Abbot Martin Shipperlee OSB