The sharp-eyed followers of this blog will notice that so far my 'sabbatical reflections' reached the end of Week 1 (of 12), and then stopped. The first week - on 'individual guided retreat' in silence at the Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield - was intense, and generously spacious, enough to generate seven substantial chunks of reflection here, and to effect that 'changing gear', and 'letting go', that I had hoped for.
The five weeks that followed were of quite a different character. I was back home, but not 'working' - while my wife Janey, and the two kids, continued their daily routines of work and school, and the living webs of relationship in our neighbourhood, in which I'm normally significantly entangled, carried on without me.
'Stuff happened' in that time: I wrote a journal article (on 'hosting' and 'commoning' - in the latest issue of Crucible: the Journal of Christian Social Ethics); we visited friends in Liverpool (for a weekend! including an actual Sunday!!); I delivered a day's training on community-building to church folk in Bristol; we welcomed some community-builders from Singapore to our neighbourhood for a couple of days; I joined some of my friends and neighbours on an overnight trip to see the fantastic community growing project that calls itself 'Incredible Edible Todmorden'; we had fab friends from the USA to stay for a few nights; we celebrated both the kids' birthdays (11 and 8); I went to a great friend's ordination to the priesthood and then preached at her first eucharist; I spent several days having conversations with various interesting people I rarely get to spend time with normally; I spent a day in Oxford at a gathering for missional theological educators (I was a bit of an interloper!); and thanks to wonderful in-laws, Janey and I even got a couple of nights away together, on an island in the middle of the Thames!
But believe it or not, the 'slowing of pace' that began in Mirfield was a feature of those five weeks. With just one or two exceptions, I was able to take the kids to school in the morning (the normal pattern in our household) and pick them up at the end of their day (much less common for me). And not having any evening meetings (bliss!), many of our evenings were spent playing games, and - especially with our 11 year-old - baking ever-more-ambitious cakes. And the day - the oh-so-short day! - between school drop-off and pick-up managed to fill itself easily with a bit of reading, a bit of cycling, and the day-to-day domestic necessities of keeping the house going (while in 'normal life' I do my very best to take a fair share of the domestics, I'm very aware that the reality is often somewhat less than a decent 50% - at least in this sabbatical time, the balance was able to shift substantially in the other direction).
And I really, really enjoyed it. Not just the noticeably lower stress levels of not having to do the usual juggling of 101 tasks, and the mental 'holding of stuff' that normally lasts all the way to sleep, and resurfaces in the first waking moments in the morning. But the positive living of a different kind of life - the revitalization of aspects of my vocation (the call to live the whole, particular, fully human life-in-relationship that is uniquely mine and not anyone else's) that had been at best marginalized, and at worst forgotten: the call to be dad, husband and home-maker, the call to play and to bake, the call to take time to read and to give time to listen to others well beyond the local, the call to tread lightly on the earth and to take time out to rest.
The tantalising challenge, of course, is how to give good time to these other aspects of vocation, when sabbatical is over and 'the day job' resumes?
But that was a question deferred, for the moment. Because after those five weeks of 'a different kind of normal', the next phase of the sabbatical adventure would take me to the other side of the world...
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