We've just finished the text for the Spring Harvest 2011...

We've just finished the text for the Spring Harvest 2011 Learning Guide, exploring the Bible as Sonnet, Symphony, Screenplay and Streetmap. Researching for the project has been really stimulating, reminding me that every age and culture visits for itself the possibility of God's story coming alive in our context. Gaugin's wonderful picture 'Vision After the Sermon' is probably history's best capturing of this context. The peasant Bretonne women who occupy one half of the canvas are on their way home from church. The sermon they have heard, on Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, has been so vidid, so stirring, that it is as if, across the wall from them, the event is happening in their own local field. In one image an ancient text comes to live in a specific time and place, and brings with it a small part of God's story. And though a skeptic himself, Gaugin was in awe of the simple faith these women demonstrate. In Brittany and later in Tahiti, he felt and painted the deep sense of loss in a modern culture cut off from the moorings of ancient faith. His paintings ask us time and time again - can these stories live again for us?

Where do you see, around you, the story of God moving into your neighbourhood?