Endings and beginnings

Somewhere on the far side of the planet (Taupo, New Zealand to be precise) a friend is dying.

Nearly 60 years ago we were part of one of those vibrant, life-changing groups of young adults: in our case Main Street Methodist Church Young Peoples Club. Where? Bulawayo, in what was then Southern Rhodesia: while apartheid still reigned; before Harold Macmillan’s ‘winds of change speech’; even before Dr. Hastings Banda had begun the transition from Nyasaland to Malawi. Those were the dying days of the British Empire, just after the end of World War 2. Endings.

But for me a beginning: an ecstatic experience of conversion which transformed my life. I still have the Bible concordance the club members gave me when I returned to the UK to train for the Anglican ministry. Later those young people were scattered by the winds of change and I lost touch with them. Campbell, who had been instrumental in my conversion, turned up in Canada and we are now back in touch. Dorille, who is dying, looked me up here in London a couple of years ago on a visit from NZ. Another ending. Together, via e-mail, we return to those formative days in Bulawayo: those beginnings.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploration
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

The essence of that Bulawayo experience remains valid even though the words I now use to describe it (in this blog for example) could not possibly have been guessed at then.

“Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion.
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.”

For Dorille it is a final ending. For us all it is, as always, also a beginning.

“Quick now, here, now, always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”

(All the quotations are from T S Eliot's The Four Quartets)