Notes from a Sojourn
April 6, 2020
Following
A number of years ago I received a telephone call from my sister, Kristen. She had just attended a concert featuring a choir and orchestra in Vancouver where she lives and where we both completed our undergraduate degrees (hers in education and mine in music). As it turned out, my university violin teacher was playing in the orchestra at that performance and, with a sense of delight, my sister marvelled at how, though she had never seen or heard my violin teacher play the violin before, watching her play was like watching me play! Or was it the other way around?
It turns out that after four years of following my teacher’s way of being a violinist, my way of being a violinist looked and sounded awfully similar (and I’m eternally grateful to my teacher for that). My posture, gestures, and the affective qualities of my violin playing have been unmistakably shaped most by the person I followed most.
Who and what we follow shapes us.
How has following Jesus changed your life? Do the affective qualities of our lives bear the marks of the one we follow most? Or, put another way: if your neighbour met Jesus in a Galilean suburb or in a Samaritan café, would s/he say that watching him was a lot like watching you?
As we follow Jesus this Holy Week “from the glory of the palms to the glory of the resurrection by way of the dark road of suffering and death,” how might that affect the "posture, gestures, and the affective" qualities of our lives? Does the way we play our part (so to speak) in this global moment of apprehension, suffering, and death, articulate the faith, hope, and love of Jesus Christ?
Colin+
