At the beautiful end of campus, where the huge dark yews huddle around the entrance to an inviting walled garden, stands the gazebo. A small, two-floored, light-filled building, its floors still spattered with the coloured inks of its days as a print room, which is to be our Quiet Place. The place to which anyone on campus will soon be able to come to sit and meditate or worship their God in a tranquil oasis. It was therefore very appropriate that the chaplains were able to hold this year’s “Space for God”, a sort of retreat on campus, in this space. The gazebo was open all of week 5, with books on offer to help inspire prayer, and at lunch times short talks introduced ways of approaching God with people from the Gospels. In the evenings we were invited to approach God by some more surprising but sometimes more accessible means — the music of Messiaen, the haiku of Basho, and the revelations of Julian of Norwich were the sessions I attended — each followed by a picnic. It was a wonderful encouragement just to take time out and step closer to God, but it was also an opportunity to find new ways of doing that stepping closer, and of looking at our faith or our world, that I really appreciated. Here are just a few of the thoughts that the week set tumbling in my head:

“With the woman at the well” (led by Graham Jones) — a Samaritan woman living with a man to whom she was not married, to be thrice rejected by Jewish men. Yet it is with her that Christ is found in the heat of noon. This is why Liberation Theologians look to find God among the poorest of us all, because it is this woman who is one of the few to recognise the Messiah for who he is. She then goes to tell her people about him, and many believe simply because of her words — a good Biblical precedent for women preachers! But what most caught my attention was that she believed because Christ told her everything she had ever done, because he knew her story and told it. Without our story it is impossible to know who we are. Those who attended the evening session on the Emmaus walk were encouraged to tell each other their stories, just as Jesus had told his after the resurrection, showing how his life fitted into the much older stories of scriptures. In church services before communion we tell Christ’s story in order to fit our own participation into his story; in order to know who we are in this context. These stories are immensely valuable, yet they are also very vulnerable — to retell stories with a different slant, to reshape stories, is to risk changing the meaning of the present.

“In the haiku of Basho” (led by Mark Smith) — approaching God through the poetry of a seventeenth-century Japanese Taoist philosopher who took his name from a banana tree — are serious? Quite. The sense of the divine in his exquisite 17 syllable verses is such that, in spite of Basho's non-theistic religion, his English translator found the only way to convey one of his haiku was:

How I long to see
among dawn flowers
the face of God.

The message I focussed on most from Basho, as I sat among the yews afterwards, was the need to sit very still, open oneself up, and wait. This waiting could be a long process — he likened himself to bleached bones on the hillside on one occasion — but just in the space we had, there was time for the sudden movement of a robin to appear in incredible beauty, to begin to sense the immanence of the Creator. Trying to capture these moments in haiku did make them more real, but I'll not offer you any of my attempts, leaving you instead with Mark's favourite from Basho:

Come see
real flowers
of this painful world.

Joanna Chamberlayne