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Available for over a year

Good morning. Let me start with a confession - I’ve caught myself “double Zooming”. To “double Zoom” - and other virtual conferencing platforms are available - is the act of being logged in at two simultaneous on line meetings. It’s an easy temptation to suffer. Both meetings contain some part of the agenda with which I really want to engage, yet together they present an intractable diary conflict. Before lockdown, I would have made the hard choice of which to attend; and maybe, with next week’s lifting of restrictions, I can look forward to that again soon. But for now, sitting in my study, surrounded by multiple screens and diverse devices, it’s all too easy to try to be present at both. I thought I was handling this well until recently, a colleague conducting an appraisal of my work, pointed out that when I’m flitting back and forth, from meeting to meeting, I’m not properly present. She was right. Whilst it’s only a matter seconds to press the keys needed to move between meetings, the psychological time required, to leave one group of people and their concerns, and be fully immersed in another, is nowhere near so short. I’ve been thinking about presence and absence because, in the western Christian calendar, today is Ascension Day. It marks the moment when Jesus, who, for forty days since his resurrection from the dead at Easter had been appearing in the flesh to his followers, takes his leave of them, disappearing upwards, heading for heaven. It’s probably the most famous theatrical direction in history, beating even Shakespeare’s immortal, “Exit, pursued by a bear”. Yet it removes the physical body of Jesus from the stage, not to end his presence in the play, but - as Christians believe - to allow him to engage in a new and different way. No longer confined to one particular place, with one group of people, at any one time, his disciples begin to discover that Jesus has become universally available. In my late teens, when my own Christian faith burst into life, I quickly realised that the Jesus I was meeting in my prayers, giving me the full thrust of his attention, was at that self-same moment equally present to countless other Christians across the world. My friend’s recent helpful rebuke has served to remind me that I’m not blessed with that same divine capacity. I can’t be fully present, simultaneously, in multiple meetings. Rather, my task is to be as fully present as I can, to the people I am with, at each given moment. To treat them with the same respect that God gives me. To minimise distractions, however tempting. And definitely not to double Zoom.