And in the dark earth, a flower found itself again, and pushed out into the daylight at the mans feet.
He lay down and looked at this wonder. It held him in the spell of its delicate beauty.
He dreamed again of this new beginning. This new springtime.
Is it now father? Is now our time?
One of the most commonly downloaded resources offered by Proost in the past was Si Smith’s wonderful ’40’, which was made up of 40 deceptively simple and powerful images of Jesus in the desert. Later, I wrote a ‘script’ for using alongside these images, which then became a Proost book.
We had hoped to make this resource available again this lent, but it will now have to wait for next year. This post is a sneak preview.
It was this kind of connection and exchange that I valued most about Proost, and most wanted to revive as we began to think about a new version of Proost. Friendships formed around shared projects and the sense of finding people who are on similar paths.
’40’ will always be special to me. At the time, I was exploring an idea of wilderness spirituality in the Apophatic tradition – all those desert saints who sought emptyness to seek an encounter with the unknowable God. In this way, Jesus in ’40’ is a pilgrim too, wandering in search of connection, feeling this draw out into desert not through certainty but through an almost desperate longing for deeper, for more whole. Jesus in divine via humanity, not inspite of it.
Here is the last image in the series, along with the poetry that accompanied it in the book.
So, the journey continued—back into a world of men—
To all the homes and houses
And the broken-down old shacks
To the Priests and the soldiers
To the slaves and the fat cats
To the athlete and the cripple
To the beggar and the king
To the broken and the dying
And those who have no song to sing
To the place where children squabble
And the old folk gossip in the square
And the singing from the synagogue
Calls the town for prayer
To all this living and this loving
This fecundity of life…
Now is your time, my friends
And mine
