Holyland

Tonight I met a friend in a café in Belfast. It’s the coolest café I know and it’s situated in the area known as the Holyland; a network of streets behind Queen’s University with names like Damascus Street and Jerusalem Street. A devout Christian architect developed the area in the late 19th century and named the streets after the places in the Middle East he had visited. Common Grounds Café serves the best carrot cake as well as fairly traded teas and coffees. All its proceeds go to various causes all around the developing world. There was a big poster up on the noticeboard from a community in Malawi saying thank you for the contribution the café had made which went towards building better wells for cleaner water. People from City Church around the corner opened the café a few years ago, using volunteers, including some asylum seekers without work permits, to run it day to day. This is the church that recently hit the headlines when it sheltered some Romany families who had been intimidated out of their homes and then was vandalised the following week, presumably by the same people who were doing the bullying!

But that’s not what I wanted to write about. That’s just setting the scene, so to speak. Gary has been a friend for the last few years since we met through the arts/faith/culture initiative, Dreamers of the Day. He’s a journeyman musician, doctor of psychology, music teacher and researcher as well as a husband and father. We’re working together at the moment on a Dreamers worship contribution for the Greenbelt arts festival in England at the end of August – something that is way out of my comfort zone and that has been giving me no end of anxiety.

Tonight we talked about prayer. I was sharing my concerns over our Greenbelt contribution and how I’ve been finding it difficult to pray about it recently. Gary talked about his own changing prayer life. He has moved from the self-conscious shopping list of need presented to a distant but benign deity, to a conscious, daily walking and sharing with Jesus Christ in the way of the ancient Celtic Christians. They did not give much truck to the divide between the sacred and the secular. God was in all things. There were ‘thin places’ along the spiritual journey where the sacred became more tangible at times, but God was present as a companion and friend of the soul and could be experienced in the many daily mundanities as well as in the holy offices. It resonated with me and I felt like I had been given a key to prayer with more depth and meaning. Simply being in the thick of life and consciously acknowledging God as part of it already was a form of prayer; a communion with the Divine.

It’s hard to say what exactly Dreamers of the Day is. And whether our contribution to the worship at Greenbelt will be representative of the network as it presently exists. We seem to be united by a common desire for God expressed in our various creativities, we live all over the world and have lives that are full and restless, sometimes pushing our spirituality and our creativity to the fringes.

But tonight we were two and three gathered in the holy land with coffee and carrot cake, in the promised presence of Christ. It gave me strength and courage for the journey and lifted my heart in worship.

Melanie Clark Pullen is part of an online community of spiritual creatives who follow the way of Christ. You can find it at www.dreamtoday.org

Comments

[Madison Richards]

Melanie,

I love Gary's description of a life that is both thick and thin but always in His presence. I too resonate with those thoughts and that kind of a prayer life. Good luck at Greenbelt and just let Him lead!

Madison