CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: Will you fill the empty place at the table of God?
Two pictures tugged at my heart during our recent holiday in Northumberland. Someone has reproduced a Banksy image on the rear of the Harbour Lighthouse at Seahouses.
A child stretches towards a heart-shaped red balloon just above her head. Does this, I wondered, symbolise our search for the meaning which a secular, materialistic culture fails to deliver? Might it also symbolise our longing for God and the felt experience of God which often eludes us?
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We visited several places associated with the early Christian history of the area, including Holy Island (Lindisfarne) where St Aidan built the original monastery in 634, and Bamburgh, where he founded a church the following year
Interesting as those sites were, none of them breathed joy, or God into my heart. I felt like that child on tiptoe, reaching up to a tantalising brightness above: so near; so distant.
We had coffee and scones outside a coffee shop on Lindisfarne. Sparrows, tamed by generations of pilgrims, padded fearlessly across the table eyeing the crumbs. And I sensed in their coming a deep-down connection, a joy which the old stones and the old stories did not give.
The other memorable image was the copy of a 15th-century Russian icon on an easel at St Mary’s Church on Lindisfarne. Three figures round a table – the three angels Abraham served with food in the Old Testament story, But the artist intends us to see beyond this meaning.
His icon reflects the ‘threeness’ of God, the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, mutually giving and receiving in utter unity. And there’s more. There seems to be a space at our side of the table. We are invited to sit, and eat, to be drawn into the one-ness of God.
We strive for joy, or meaning, but all the time the sparrow hops across the table bearing God’s invitation, surprising us in our longing. Eyes dimmed by secularism are opened to see as St Aidan saw.
We were back home by Pentecost Sunday, when Christians celebrate God’s gift of the Holy Spirit. Again I heard that invitation in the old prayer which both awakened me and gave me words of response: it begins ‘breathe in me, O Holy Spirit, that my thoughts may be holy. Act in me, O Holy Spirit that my work too may be holy’.
There’s another interpretation of the Banksy image - this sees the child releasing the red balloon, radiating the joy she has discovered. And as we share our experiences of wavering faith and sparrows on tables, so others hear the summons. For each of us there is an invitation, an empty place at the table of God.
