I wrote my first blog for Journey of Hope about Corrymeela; how it had been part of my understanding of reconciliation and how the writing and thinking emerging from that community had formed part of my own theology of community.  The trip to Corrymeela, the opportunity to spend a few days with the community as well as with the Journey of Hope community was something that I had looked forward to from the very first.  I had been extremely clever, so I thought, and worked hard to combine a number of goals in a complicated but eminently workable plan.  As the first anniversary of my mother’s death approached, I wanted to spend some time with my father who, although full of cancer, was still striving to live fruitfully and hopefully despite  desperately missing his wife of 65 years.  I also wanted to spend time walking the wonderful Giants Causeway Coastline, getting my head in the right place for a new and undoubtedly stressful work role.  So we would journey together, my father and I.  I would stay at an Air BnB with him during the course, and then walk the coastline while he followed in his camper van.  Excellent plan!

We arrived in Dublin on Wednesday evening.  On Thursday morning we tested positive for Covid.  All my plans crashed about my ears.  Fearful of being too far from my father’s oncologist, we turned tail and headed back to England.

Instead of time spent with a group of people I was really hoping to get to know better, I have spent a week with my father.  Instead of a community in Corrymeela, a cottage in Woodstock.  Instead of a wild walk along the coast, gentle strolls by the Oxford Canal.

Have I, in consequence of the events of the last week, changed my vision for becoming a healthy, resilient, courageous reconciling peacemaker?  I have learnt a lot from my father, whose courage and determined optimism is an example to all who meet him.  I have tried to learn patience, and I have appreciated the smaller things of life to a new degree. I had been expecting an energising time, when my assumptions would be challenged and I would learn unexpected things about myself.  It has instead been a fallow time, when my brain, fogged by Covid, has been strangely calm.  I have spent hours helping my father with his model railway, creating tiny scenes – castles, funfairs, farms, canals.  And in doing this, I have gained a peace which has been long sought but rarely achieved.  I would not have believed that gluing tiny people to park benches would prepare me for moving house, changing jobs, entering a whole new role, but somehow, I think it has.