Archive, Conversation with
Conversation with Paula Gooder
I wrote my book Healing Wounds in response to an invitation from my London publishers, Bloomsbury, which each year brings out a Lent Book intended as a help to prepare for Easter. I recently had occasion to discuss my work with Dr Paula Gooder, Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. You can listen to our conversation here.
From Healing Wounds:
Our wounds will finally heal when they have become so one with Christ’s, so fully surrendered, that we no longer know where his passion ends and ours begins. We are caught up, then, in the inexorable victory of his life over our death, of his light over our darkness, of his wholeness over our fragmentation. United with him in death, we are drawn into his life, over which human mortality and sickness have no power. The process takes time. The anguish is real before the prospect of broadness opens. But sooner or later we no longer look into the darkness of the cleft in which the dove hides, but out of it. We see, then, a world infinitely loved, transfigured, worthy to be loved. Peering out from the dove’s nest, we perceive that the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. We hear the Beloved call to us: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.’ We who sow at times with weeping, at a loss, shall return home with shouts of joy, bearing fragrant golden sheaves.
View from the west-end gallery of the Roman basilica of San Clemente onto the apse mosaic, which plays an important part in the book.