May

There was a news report, a few years ago, that the Queen had been given an ‘iPod’. A fine cartoon had her renaming it a ‘we-pod’. The amazing popularity of ‘iPods’, and now smart phones, is due to a number of factors: the sheer amount of space available for music; the opportunity to make your own particular selection of tracks and its easy mobility. It can be playing your favourite music while you are running, walking, shopping, waiting for a bus, or chilling out at home. You can get absorbed in it and abandon yourself.

The idea of ‘abandoning yourself’ can be extended into ‘losing yourself completely’ in something. As you are about to sleep, there comes a moment when you just give yourself up to it, preferably at home rather than in public. In learning to swim, at a key moment you have to abandon yourself to the water and lift your feet off the bottom of the pool or sea. In learning to hang glide, or parachute, you give yourself completely to the air. In having a baby, a woman has to let her body take control of the process and there is an abandonment involved there too.

In all these, trust is important. It is not healthy to abandon yourself to something without trust. I remember finding a cove on an island and noticing the deep water near a diving point. Before going in, I made sure that it was deep enough and even then jumped in feet first. Then came the real moment of abandonment: I dived in head first.

Our ultimate fulfillment in life, I believe, comes from trust in God and abandoning ourselves to him. Again, there is no abandoning without trust. Jesus was, and is, both the perfect image of God, showing us what he is like, and also the model for our response, inviting us to follow him in his trust and abandonment to his father.

This month we celebrate the feast of Pentecost, 50 days after Easter, and remember the early Church, abandoning herself to God, and being inundated by the Holy Spirit. The following is the final verse of a poem I wrote, ‘Image of her Father’, which meditates on Pentecost and the birth of a daughter.

The fiftieth day, with tongues of flame,
She breathes the Spirit, cries the word:
Conceived, inspired with Christ, she grows,
The heir of all, the child of God.

+Graham Sherborne