This week, I read about beautiful things happening in Birmingham Cathedral. As part of the 300th anniversary celebrations, the cathedral community commissioned artist Jake Lever to create a community art installation. So throughout the year, he worked in schools, churches, hospital, retirement homes and community centres as well as at local arts festivals, inviting people from every nook and cranny of the community to make boats.
Now, there are two thousand small, hand-crafted golden boats suspended in the nave at the Cathedral, each containing personal words and images that the makers wanted to offer as part of their craft.
‘The depth of engagement by participants of all ages in making their boats was incredible. Some for example made boats in memory of loved ones who’d died, some ranted about their difficulty in finding work and others celebrated the high points of long lives lived well. These moving reflections are on the inside of the boats, hidden from public view.’
In the image of these simple boats, we catch sight of a metaphor for how our lives and our prayers might be shared in public, yet utterly known by God alone.
The pilgrim in me loves that Lever chose the image of the boat. It is, of course, a journeying image, but it also persuades us to consider how our journeys are more than the result of our own effort. We are carried. Propelled. Guided. Sometimes stilled. We don’t have to walk on our own.
I also love the temporary nature of this installation. The sheer physicality of our church buildings is a strong witness to the continuing presence of God at work in our world. But our seasonal and temporary decorations remind us that God is also at play. Light shifts, seasons change, children grow and God delights in these things, too. And so do we. It is lovely to enter our familiar churches, these sacred spaces where we come home to God, and be surprised. Lever’s flotilla catches the light and changes with the breeze, like our own changing lives held up in thanksgiving before God’s love.
And yet there is something eternal in that shifting light, too. Something of the cloud of witnesses to that glittering flotilla in Birmingham. It makes me think of all the prayers offered in any church in any week, in each and every year. If God is beyond time, then all these prayers belong to one moment, all held, all heard together. Prayers past, present and future all carried on the same waves and the same tides. There is a comfort there, too, isn’t there? To think that the prayers we offer this week are linked with those of our mothers and fathers and of our children, too. I don’t think this is sentimental. It is good to be anchored. It is good to know that, despite all the waves and the wind, we are held.
