A discussion, "Leading into Trinity", with Rev. Bridgette Siepker on Sunday, 27 July 2025

by John-Peter Gernaat

The first part of the year is dominated by major festivals: Christmas, Epiphany, Passiontide, Easter, Ascension and Whitsun. In The Christian Community we have made a major festival of the time of St John. Then we arrive at a ten-week period between St John’s-tide and Michaelmas. This is not a period of rest. St John places us on a path; a path of change, change of heart and mind.

The Gospel Reading for the first Sunday of this Trinity Period includes Jesus asking the disciples who people say he is and who they say he is. The recognition of who Christ is places us on a path, a Christian path.

The interactive discussion led by Rev. Bridgette Siepker on Sunday 27 July allowed us to consider what it means to engage with a path and with the entrance to a path. We were presented with an image of either a path or a gate, in smaller groups. We looked at the image and developed a sense of what the picture said to us. Then we considered what the gesture was that the path or gate suggested. Thereafter we had to ask ourselves what this path or gate would demand of us. We formed a sentence of these three aspects: what we saw, what gesture was expressed and what the demand was on us.

Bridgette then placed the words of Christ in His sermon on the mount as presented by Matthew in chapter 7 verses 13 and 14 before us to consider in relation to the experience we had developed within ourselves of a gate and a path.

We are all on a path of life, it is individual, but we all walk it together. When we walk this path unconsciously it becomes the broad and easy path. It is when we take on the path consciously that we recognise its individual nature that it becomes the narrow path. It is my path and I bear the challenges that are particular to me. Not everyone finds the narrow path because it requires one to become conscious and accept responsibility for one’s individual path. This also makes it a lonely path. It is no longer the broad way where everyone walks together enjoying the companionship, unconscious of their individual responsibilities.