After my daughter Esther came back from Glastonbury last year, we went for a drink and she told me about her weekend.
But because Esther is supernaturally organized, this did not mean stumbling through hazy recollections of half-remembered acts, but rather a list, compiled in real time, of everything she and her friends had seen, from Lizzo to Kylie to David Attenborough to Mahalia, as she explained the central importance not of the performers themselves but of the joyous, shared experience of hearing them together.
Now, I had the privilege of introducing Mahalia at another festival, Greenbelt, in 2016, when, halfway through her gig, Northamptonshire was visited by a storm of such apocalyptic ferocity that every stage had to be closed down.
Rather than just cowering inside the cavernous big top, though, Mahalia offered to play an acoustic set, on the grass in the middle of the tent.
To see her generosity in embracing that crowd and theirs in embracing her in the midst of that epic storm, was to witness an act of grace, the gift of a shared experience to bond and bind those who were present for as long as they remember it.
It was an act and gift of community.
Jesus taught about something he called ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’; not a place, with borders and infrastructure, but a community defined by a shared experience – the experience of the love of God and the power of the Holy Spirit.
One of the ways Christians express this is ‘church’.
‘Church’ is not a building. In recent months, while ‘church’ has been closed, churches have continued to build community, working with food and hygiene banks, providing for the homeless, caring for the vulnerable and for each other in a thousand ways born of the shared experience of God’s love.
When we do eventually return to worship together physically, then, there will be so much more to celebrate than just the reopening of our buildings.
And if church is more than a building, then Glastonbury is more than a gig.
It is, as Esther discovered, the physical manifestation of something much more substantial, to do with friendship and community and sheer joy.
So, although 2020 may necessarily be fallow, just imagine the celebrations at Glastonbury 2021.
I’m posting this in early September 2020, on the day I went back to St Olave’s Hart Street to participate in public worship for the first time since March. That’s St Olave’s in the picture.