Monthly Letter

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Dear Friends

Last autumn I planted some Picasso spinach seeds. I looked at the raised bed this week and saw some small, but strong and healthy shoots pushing up through the soil. I had been inspired by Joe Maiden at the Harrogate Show. There was something really good about these signs of new life that made me excited and glad to be alive. Do you remember ‘The Good Life’ on television, Tom and Barbara Good turning their house and back garden into a small holding, with next door neighbours Barbara and Jerry looking on in amazement?

I wonder what it might mean to live a good life today? With a back drop of financial uncertainty; fluctuating jobs market; ever-rising cost of utilities and food; the reworking of governments among the Arab nations; celebrations for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the 2012 Olympics. Overall people are talking about how to live and manage in a time of austerity. Might this be a more basic simple lifestyle and less frills, with fewer certainties, a more challenging way of life than we’ve seen in recent years. God’s ancient people knew something of this experience.

God rescued them from slavery in Egypt, but before entering the new land they had been promised, they spent the equivalent of a lifetime for some journeying through a wilderness. It must have been a most demanding time in such inhospitable surroundings, bereft of all that had been, and yet not in possession of a more secure future. During this time God gave to his people a legal covenant to live by, with stipulations we call the Ten Commandments: ten demands towards living well, simple to understand but challenging to fulfil, providing a common boundary for everyone.

Rules and laws may seem exciting to some, a nuisance for others or a goad to kick against. It can be difficult to get behind them and discover that actually they are about relationships. The Ten Commandments are about loving God, loving other people and in keeping them, finding oneself loved in return.

Lent will soon be upon us, a time when we remember that Jesus was led into the wilderness, a time of reflection and challenge about how he was to live. Maybe we could usefully spend some time thinking about the demands we live our lives by. What drives our behaviour? Is it shaped by love and does it lead to love and so to the kind of life that God desires for us. Richard Rohr says that anyone who desires to love deeply is committing themselves to eventual suffering. Those who suffer often become the greatest lovers.

Maybe the Ten Commandments have got something to offer today; a really worthwhile challenge to love more deeply. That would be a truly hopeful outcome of a wilderness time of austerity, a movement away from autonomy, independence and self- sufficiency towards interdependence and a greater emphasis on community. There is a lot we can build on in Menston.

Hopefully my spinach seeds will quietly continue to thrive and who knows I may even have some to share!

With love

Ruth Yeoman

Vicar