Zoom Lent Series 2023: Wildness

Thursday Evenings from 23rd Feb to 30th March. On Zoom

During Lent, we recall the time that Jesus spent in the wild, the wilderness. A focus on wildness might be an opportunity to explore what our faith and practice means, not as a series of decisions to be taken and plans to be developed (as perhaps we usually do) but instead as a place and a context for appreciating, acknowledging and responding to so much which is not under our control.

We’ve agreed to take climate justice as our theme for the year. But that will be difficult, without positively starting with and building on a sense of what is beautiful, wonder-ful, intricate, connected, playful, purposeful, natural, and beyond our control… Which we might do through pictures, poems, silences, music.

We might also note the wildness of laughter, and pleasure, which have long been opposed by the most controlling and ‘civilising’ of religious influences. If we imagine God as a controlling being, then commandments become a matter of obedience and control. But that doesn’t describe the religious life of Jesus.

So, we are using this Lent series as a space to appreciate, acknowledge and respond to wildness, taking a different focus each week. It might include some of the following (some brief possibilities here, but the leader of each session is entirely free to ignore both the titles and the notes. Such is the spirit of the series…)

  • wild places – looking at our experience of being in places where we are not in control, feeling perhaps daunted, appreciative, overwhelmed, lost.
  • wild church – meditating on our experiences and sense of possibilities of church not as performance but as a place of becoming, of growing, of connecting. 
  • wild traditions – looking back, or into the traditions which we have inherited, or lost, particularly where those traditions speak to a less domesticated faith in practice
  • wild followers – looking back at people and groups of followers of Jesus who have understood and practiced a faith with is not daunted by a lack of control, but which has been open to new connections, new ideas, challenging what was taken for granted
  •  wild nature – looking at what is happening around us, without our intervention or control, in spite of our perception that we manage our environment.
  •  wild Jesus – looking at Jesus as a person without the need for control in an institutional sense, who associated freely with people and appeared to live with a freedom, born out of a deep relationship with God, with that which is beyond, underneath, around..

Practical details: We will gather quietly on Zoom from 7.25pm. Each session runs from 7.30 till 8.00pm, and will be largely mediative, include Bible reading(s), music and a minimum of comment. Each session will end without further discussion or comment. We are all invited to spend some further minutes in contemplation wherever we are. The approach to the content of each session (choice of Bible readings, other readings/poems, images/videos, any comments and their length) is all be in the hands and the responsibility of the leader.

date

working title

who is leading

Thursday 23rd Feb

wild places

Andy

Thursday 2nd March

wild followers

Gwyneth

Thursday 9th March

wild followers

Geoff

Thursday 16th March

wild traditions

Alison

Thursday 23rd March

wild but unnoticed

Steve

Thursday 30th March

wild Jesus

Alan