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One of the most inspiring gatherings I’m a part of is a fortnightly meeting of people who come together to chat about stuff that is real.

There is a lot of robust laughter, healthy banter and growing friendship when we meet and it is clear to me that God has brought us together.

I’m probably the only one who is formally a part of a formal church community and this diversity is a gift and in no way a hindrance to our good honest faith-filled and faith-fuelled conversation.

I’m simply a participant in the group and in no sense an initiator or leader. The one who had the idea for our gathering two years ago sends a substantial podcast which we all commit to listening to and reflecting on before each meeting, then we gather and chat for a couple of hours over food and drink.

In recent months our podcast starter titles have included: the problem of secularism, why believe, feminine in hierarchy and love, against ambition, God and animals, God’s image, virtue and vice, the Nicene Creed, God and gender.

I’m still delighting in last Thursday’s gathering when our conversation turned to freedom highlighting the common contemporary misunderstanding of freedom as me doing whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it.

Instead one of our team suggested that freedom is really having the space, encouragement and desire to be whoever God created me to be.

Then he went on to share a poem which communicates his point powerfully.

The Swan by Rainer Maria Rilke has stayed with me for the week since and even made it to my homilies on Sunday in Darfield and Rolleston and on Wednesday at Nazareth House.

The Swan
Rainer Maria Rilke
Read below or listen at this link.

This labouring of ours with all that remains undone,
as if still bound to it,
is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying—releasing ourselves
from the very ground on which we stood—
is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself

into the water. It gently receives him,
and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him,
as wave follows wave,
while he, now wholly serene and sure,
with regal composure,
allows himself to glide.