There are still brambles on the bushes, apples ripe for picking on the tree. The yard is secluded, and the birds find space to sing. This is an industrial yard, a coal yard, but times have changed and its use has changed with them.
There is broadband so we can meet transatlantic friends and pray together. The physicality of hand skills is used to help people make sense of their surroundings and find confidence. Academics have travelled here to experience primitive firefighting techniques. Philosophy is pursued whilst cleaning mud from tent pegs.
We must not cling to the past, or buildings will become rocks that wreck the future. Even then, the memories, associations and loyalties people have bound up in a place will drag them down with it, swimming trying to keep the memorial afloat.
Which is a negative view! But what can or should be saved from the shipwreck? Why have generations abandoned ship and found fulfillment for their spiritual needs elsewhere? What spiritual assets are locked into victorian stone, and how can we help them sing? What pre-modern learning has been loaded into liturgy, and how can it be laid out as lore for a post modern community dislocated by the experience of global warfare, neo liberalism, and climate crisis?
How can we reconcile ourselves with the past, and meet with Jesus in the present, to empower our walk into the future?
