water and sand do go together sometimes

Hiraeth is an almost untranslatable Welsh word. It means something like a longing, aching or a homesickness for something that cannot be reached or is lost.

It is a week since I stood in Grenoside Crematorium in Sheffield and officiated at the funeral of Joyce Christine Ellis, my mum.

I have so many conflicting and conflicted emotions. I have been back to Sheffield over the last four weeks perhaps more often than in a while. I trust I will go back much to see my brother and sister in the years that lie ahead.

However, what has struck me over this time is that when I arrive in the steel city, I am not back in the place where I thought I was going to. Much has changed in the 30 years since I left. People have moved on. People have died. The landscape of the estate on which I grew up and was formed has changed. In many ways the place in which I grew up is no longer my home. It has changed, and, for better or for worse, so have I. At present there is therefore a rootlessness for me. I cannot pretend otherwise.

Hiraeth is though, according to a friend, not just to be placed in the past tense. It can continue to be a lived experience. Maybe the Jewish community experience something like this when celebrating Passover, and Christians in the East do when sharing in the Lord’s Supper (Eucharist, Mass, Divine Liturgy, Cosmic Feast). In the West, time is too linear, there is no place for past, present and future to intermingle, or as J K Rowling might put it to think “Diagon Alley”.

Lent, it seems to me, is a place where rootlessness abounds. It cultivates wandering of the spirit. This wandering allows what is rootless to become rooted in the moment. It does not deny hiraeth, an aching and a longing to be different as Martyn Joseph once put it, but also acknowledges with Bono that we still have not found what we are looking for.

Happy wanderings during Lent…