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The cove

Each step a hesitation.

Then

a wonder would lie before us,

always sunlit

always still

as the cove waited to receive us.

It was the first place

where I jumped in from the rocks,

swam out of my depth

and stroked her hair.

A thrilling place,

Always sunlit,

always still

as the cove embraced us.

A place of learning, of growing, of changing;

but above all

a place for gathering.

A gathering place for the people

who tread the track

to arrive

always at the same place,

always at the same time.

Rocks would serve as pews

and the cove became a chapel.

And songs would be the lapping of waves on the rising tide,

and prayer the whisper of the breeze

and the sermon would be silence,

resting in stories remembered without the telling.

John Rackley

I had this wonderful poem sent to me recently by a Scottish friend. For me it is so evocative about family holidays to the seaside and often to same place. I used to holiday every year with my Godparents and their large family. Often there would be seventeen of us in the same rather basic house in Morfa Nefyn. It was a great outdoor holidays always in sunlight and often in the water, whether in the boat, sailing or swimming. This poem reminds me so much of those halcyon days!

We certainly met up with the same people year in and year out and Uncle Laurie would cook lunch for seventeen on his primus stove and the people on the beach would ask if they could buy a sausage sandwich! The loo was only flushed by a bucket of water and there was just one for seventeen of us! Equally, we all went to church, the local Baptist chapel, where except for our coming they only spoke Welsh and the services were oh sooooo long! I remember vividly Auntie Marion falling through the new lino they proudly showed us into the baptistry below. I am sure you must have memories funny or otherwise if you revisited the same place each year. My Godmother who was Welsh, used to park her car outside "Dim parcio, stores" and helpfully tell the greengrocer that was where the car was too!

So from The Cove we are invited into memories of our past along with the poet's. We are also reminded in the laughter and fun of the holiday place there is also the sense that we gather again, as we have done previously and will continue to do so. That this almost sacred place, indeed sacred becomes our spiritual base, our pilgrimage destination, our place of worship through the natural things about us. The sense that God is in all past, present and future.

This set me off thinking that this is where we are, immersed in the familiar saturated by the past and enabled for the future. Speaking today with one lady who worships at St Tathan's who told me she will not come back to church yet, as for her her faith doesn't tie her down to book a place for worship and she wants the spontaneity of responding to God where she is at. Now we are all very different and the act of booking a space will not bother many people but for others it does stop them. For many the old familiar is just what they want but for others worship outside amongst nature is so powerful. I remember one lady whose faith was simple, yet so devout, just wanted to be on a walk through the village fields to experience and be nurtured by God who is involved in her very existence. For me I need solitude, some silence, a church and the Sacrament of Holy Eucharist. Where is your place? Where do you best commune with God in Christ? Where is the place of your formative Christian journeys?