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Rector's Letter, April 2005 Dear Friends, Easter is such a wonderful time of the year. We celebrate that all the evil in the world cannot and does not have the last say. Life is indeed stronger than death, goodness stronger than evil. No matter how often we fall victim to pessimism, fatalism, any other ‘ism’ or just plain doubt, hope, as they say springs eternal. It often catches us by surprise when we’re at our most gloomy. As I sat to write this letter it wasn’t Easter; however, that was on my mind. It was a day a little after Easter this year, April Fools’ Day. I don’t actually know the origin of this particular day, but it had come into my mind when reading a book, an extremely good book, on people with dementia and their relationship with the local church. It was a quote at the beginning of one of the chapters. Speaking of the local church, Eileen Shamy says: ‘Dare I name it a fellowship of the foolish? For foolish we most certainly will appear in a society obsessed by the quantifiable, by the immediate, by productivity and profit, by individualism and loss of community, and where the bottom line really is the bottom line. In that world it is accounted madness to expend precious resources on those who in economic terms are useless. There is, however, another larger world represented by a foolish, passionately extravagant woman pouring her alabaster jar of costly, perfumed oil over the head and feet of a man named Jesus. This kind of costly, extravagant care bears within it a power to heal our own human woundedness. In our hearts we know it, but we need each other’s courage and a certain authentic and holy innocence for such foolishness.’ I warm to the notion of a church as a fellowship of the foolish. I have always cherished the idea of Jesus himself as the holy fool. Like a medieval court jester, fooling, but in the middle of the fooling showing a truth that no one else would dare reveal. From any worldly point of view Jesus was indeed a fool – offending the powerful, those with a vested interest in the status quo, befriending the marginalised: the poor, the sick, all those whom others disregarded. Let’s all try to be a little more ‘foolish’ this Easter time. Janice |