Weekly Reflection – Starting Again

24 January 2025

Perhaps I should introduce myself. I am Erik Peeters, the new Residentiary Canon at the cathedral and Lay Training Officer with the Diocese. As I write this, I find I am in an odd place – both excited and a little terrified by the fact that my family and I are making a new start, again. When I was younger, I felt more adventurous. If you ask my wife, she would point out, with a bit of a sigh, that I was usually the one who felt compelled to climb the next hill just to see what’s on the other side. But as I’ve grown older, and have experienced that on the other side of the hill is mostly just more hills, and sometimes a bog, I have become more wary of change.

I think my reticence about change grew during COVID, when suddenly the new was not at all adventurous or interesting. It seems to me that our society, particularly here in the UK and the USA, is still reeling from being confronted with how uncertain and fragile our lives can be. Perhaps because for a long time, our lives had been very predictable. And many of us, I think, are reaching for simpler answers to our fear, answers that might help us feel safe again.

It seems to me that our faith offers a different answer to uncertainty – not one based on making ourselves safe but one based on the faithfulness of the One who made us and loves us. And who has walked and continues to walk our path with us, through all the worst that a human life can involve. In and through Jesus, God bore our suffering with us, and Jesus experienced for us God’s answer to uncertainty – God’s making new of all things, that after our end comes our resurrection. May the light of the new life Christ won for us illuminate you and all those whom you love, now and for the year to come.

Canon Erik

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