Category Archives: archbishop

SWIMMING IN MYSTERY

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Swimming in the Mystery of God – please click photos to enlarge

TODAY WE CELEBRATED our Church’s Dedication Sunday. Wonderfully talented people have decorated the parish church on this day for 102 years – with flowers hand-picked from their own gardens. This year, having hosted Angels in 2010 and Windsails in 2011 (see Lumière below) our Lantern Tower is graced by the gently swimming presence of some of the most magnificent fish I’ve ever seen.

“We swim in the Mystery of God as fish swim in the sea”, said theologian Karl Rahner SJ – in an attempt to communicate the profound faith statement that human beings need no more consider themselves separate from God than we could consider ourselves separate from the air that we breathe. We’re all in this together: God, and everything created by God.

I often share Rahner’s little tale of the elderly, statesmanlike fish gliding past two tiddlers one morning. “Morning boys!” he greeted them. “How’s the water?” The tiddlers ignored him and – flicking their little tails – swam on. A little time later one looked at the other and asked “what’s water?”

Oliver John joined in the swimming with smiling enthusiasm as he was baptised this morning beneath and surrounded by the meanderings of many colourful creatures. And all present dedicated themselves anew to the works of Love in the coming year.

Meanwhile, General Synod prepares for major debate upon the morrow in York. Bishop Nick Baines of Bradford writes of Frustration and Joy here – pointing us (for which, hearty thanks) to an audio link to Archbishop Rowan’s fabulous sermon at the Synod Eucharist this morning. How glad I am, for him, that the good Archbishop will swim ere long in the quieter waters of Cambridge. How certain I am, however, that we’ll miss his gentle touch more than any of us have been able hitherto to imagine.

Still, he encourages us to swim on …

MANIFESTO FOR A NEW SOCIETY?

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HOW MANY HUMAN PERSONS find themselves imprisoned and bound by other people’s stories, other people’s temples, other people’s “safe houses”, other people’s notions of right or wrong or truth?

The Church endeavours perfectly properly to follow the pattern of Jesus in seeking after truth. But where does truth reside? Is truth vested in one story, one faith, one man, one experience of God? Is truth a pre-packaged product, something fabricated in what Archbishop Rowan described last Sunday in Rome as a ‘religion factory‘. Or does Jesus’ Manifesto For A New Society (a lovely sub-title in Alison Morgan’s The Wild Gospel) point to different facets of truth in different individuals? Alison Morgan writes:

[Jesus] was not found standing on soapboxes in Tiberias and Sepphoris, or demanding audiences in the palaces of Jerusalem and Caesarea, or seeking election to the Council of the Sanhedrin. Rather he was found speaking to individuals whenever and wherever he encountered them – in their homes, on their sickbeds, at their tables, in the street, in the fields, in the synagogue; out on the lake as they fished, and by the well as they drew water.

Of what then did he speak to these individuals? The astonishing answer is that to each one he spoke the truth. And that for each one, the truth was different, because it penetrated differently into the untruth by which they were bound.

I suggest that Jesus assaulted the norms of his culture not as an end in itself, but in order to reach out to individuals within the culture, to shake the faulty foundations on which they were building their lives, and to issue a new challenge for thinking and living. He ministered into the culture, but for the individual – ibid page 83

Other people’s stories, temples, manifestos and laws are intended as good and necessary frameworks in which individuals can learn to live in community. But we do well to remember that whilst Jesus frequently criticised culture he offered only love and encouragement to individuals – he recognised brokenness in all human persons and consistently called forth acceptance, compassion, healing and restoration in them and in all creation.

SET FREE the distinctive giftedness and grace in the glorious multiplicity and diversity of human persons individually – male and female, of every creed and race – and you release the highest and the best raw materials for building up community. That, indeed, in this 21st century, is a Manifesto For A New Society.

GOD’S FUTURE

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ONE THING LEADS to another. The creation of one world leads to another. Questions and answers lead to more answers and questions. And so we grow towards the future. God’s future. Our future.

And I’ve returned again and again since yesterday’s Enough Nattering to Archbishop Rowan’s “question and answer” in a homily addressed to the General Synod on Wednesday morning – (text and video here)

What does God’s future look like? Well, one thing we can say is that it looks like Jesus.

So the fact that next Sunday’s epistle reading is to be from Colossians feels like a fairly substantial gift.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible – Colossians 1.15-20

We’re relatively more familiar with ‘things visible’ than with the ‘invisible’. And what we’re able to ‘see’ of Church, of God, of humankind, of future, can at times be rather depressing – or at the very least a bit slow and ponderous (“Like a mighty tortoise moves the Church of God; let’s preserve in aspic where the saints have trod”).

So I shall spend some time in the next few days remembering that there’s an entire universe of created order that lies quite beyond either my imagination or my sight. And that was in the beginning. And is still growing. We haven’t seen the End. So in the meantime we can cheerfully engage in being “changed from glory into glory” – confident that the author of the change is none other than the author of our life in the beginning, and that She looks and breathes life into adamah, mere dust like me. She looks and breathes life into the Body of Christ now on earth. Like Jesus.

I’m much taken with a line from a forthcoming film I’ll definitely be heading to the cinema to see; in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Trailer) the would-be perfect hotelier and host says

Everything will be alright in the end, so if everything is not alright now it’s not the end!

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ARCHIEPISCOPAL DUO

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LAST EVENING IN MANCHESTER with Archbishops Rowan & Sentamu was always going to be time well spent for me. Billed as Relations between Church and State Today – (Paul Deakin has posted The Big Society) – Archbishop Rowan delivered a tour-de-force on Citizenship – video of which will shortly be available at Manchester University.

Speaking of the need in any society for a polis – home of citizens and of citizenship, where no-one is a slave and everyone is afforded the status due to all human persons, each of them free – the Church, alongside the State is to be such a polis - adult and intelligent environment for argument about all that is best, about all that might be of God, with no desire to “force a vision on everyone else”, still less expecting to “told” by others to be what, in others’ eyes, archbishops – or Christians – are “supposed to be”, the ekklesia gathered around Jesus Christ can be a mature, faithful, trustworthy forum for debate about all that facilitates dignity for all humanity.

All good stuff. But I was particularly, literally, fascinated by the very high degree to which the archbishop’s own considered, considerate and cultured person illustrates the content of what he had to say. Archbishop Rowan is possessed of a most extra-ordinary charisma, one that helps me understand how tax collectors and fishermen 2000 years ago on the shores of Galilee could have been so easily persuaded to follow in “The Way”.

Were there 500 people gathered in the Whitworth Hall? – maybe more. But no more than a minute after taking a seat on the stage it seemed that the Archbishop had discreetly scanned the entire assembly, was comfortably aware of the crowd as individual persons open to learning something together, like he’d known them for years – and knew what they’d come for. There’s an instantly personable humility and a warm humanity about him. Standing at a lectern he leaned towards the large audience; the Archbishop of York, in the front row before him, acknowledged simply and warmly, without a hint of ecclesiastical pomposity, as “Your Grace”. Twinkling eyes, mobile eyebrows, gentle humour and smile, perfect diction, quietly spoken (yet heard by everyone) – definitely an archiepiscopal face.

Then Archbishops Rowan and Sentamu fielded questions. Graciously, and here again, and at the drinks reception afterwards, I noticed, perfectly at ease. Forum for learning, discussion, drinks and argument these teachers moved fluidly, and welcomed, IN a big society. I found myself warmed, somehow deeply touched, as was my URC/Methodist friend and colleague Geoffrey Clarke, to be in company with these two. It’s hard to imagine that the particular (Church of England department) of the polis that Archbishop Rowan spoke about could be in better hands than those of this – really inspirational – archiepiscopal duo.

GAFCON THE FUTURE …?

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Bishop Gene Robinson

RIAZAT BUTT writes in the Guardian today of Bishop Gene Robinson’s plan to retire “early” in January 2013. I imagine that January 2013 can hardly seem early enough for the good bishop. I continue to thank God for Bishop Gene and his family. And for his mission oriented Diocese of New Hampshire. Should he find time to visit England in “retirement” I would be delighted to welcome him here; delighted to thank him personally for being an exemplar – often a “wounded healer” – often a suffering exemplar – of the compassionate love held out to all of us by our Christ. I wish Bishop Gene continued energy and blessing for the coming years, and will pray that the grace of God will anoint and raise up a wise and compassionate new bishop to serve as his coadjutor.

But I hope you’ll forgive me for majoring for a moment on a comment said to have been made by Archbishop Peter Jensen of Sydney. Riazat Butt writes:

In a statement the archbishop of Sydney, the Rt Rev Peter Jensen, said: “It is true that his consecration was one of the flashpoints for a serious realignment of the whole Communion. But many things have happened since then. Gafcon is the future.”

GAFCON – (“Global Anglican Future Conference”) is the future? Then, Kyrie eleison, God help me, I must have misunderstood – for nearly thirty years – what my vocation as a Christian priest is really all about. You know, I have to raise my hand. I have to tell you that for all this time I’ve been preaching and teaching about, and believing and praying for, the day when THE KINGDOM OF GOD is the future.

And there’s more. I’m going to keep right on preaching that the Kingdom of God, the “New Jerusalem”, is the future. I don’t want to get caught up in playing the game of semantics with the archbishop, however. Nor do I intend to afford him any disrespect. So I’m going to dare to hope that he and I are really aspiring to the same thing. Not GAFCON as the future, but rather the fulfilment of God’s Kingdom of Peace: a kingdom where there is neither male nor female; a kingdom in which there are no debates about “whose wife (out of seven possible options) is she?”(see today’s Gospel: Luke 20.27-38) ; a kingdom in which there is neither pain, nor crying, nor dying anymore.  If GAFCON really were “the future” then I’d have to join Bishop Gene in announcing early retirement plans.

Meantime, I thank God that the future is much, much, much bigger than that. And neither plummeting attendance figures, (“only” about 500 people through the doors here this morning, and five newly baptised), nor plummeting diocesan or parochial finances, nor anything else upon earth can change that fact.

Blest are the pure in heart,
for they shall see our God,
the secret of the Lord is theirs,
their soul is Christ’s abode …

Please see also: Lesley’s Blog and Changing Attitude

FLAK FROM ALL SIDES

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MAGGI DAWN’S QUESTIONS unerringly get to the  heart of the matter faster than most people’s answers:

The Archbishop is worried.

A new bishop has been elected (though not yet confirmed) in Los Angeles, and she’s “married” to another woman. This will undoubtedly cause another round of bitter rows in the Anglican communion, and there is no solution to the endless disagreement. Andrew Brown says that “Rowan Williams has been forced into an impossible corner by his own diplomacy”; while Ekklesia suggests that the Archbishop making comments that the election of Mary Glasspool is problematic, while refusing to condemn the extreme measures of the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, makes it seem that he is taking sides.

I think he can’t win whatever he says, and in a problem without a solution he has become the symbolic person that takes the flak from all sides. I don’t know what the answer is either. Do you? (my emphasis)

via lesbian bishop – Maggi Dawn.

No, Maggi. I’m sure I don’t know the answer. But as every day goes by I’m thinking that the quicker we move away from religious propositions that front “a symbolic person taking the flak” the better. And René Girard, for example, stands in company with many faithful Christians whose faith does not require that GOD intended for “His only Son” to be scapegoat for the “sin” represented by all that appears wrong, or at least unsolvable, in this world. Those of homosexual orientation are no more to blame for all the ills of Africa than Archbishop Rowan can be blamed for the ills of the Anglican Communion. Outdated theologies of scapegoating – symbolic persons taking the flak from all sides – are at the heart of the matter.

In future, all violence will reveal what Christ’s Passion revealed, the foolish genesis of bloodstained idols and the false gods of religion, politics, and ideologies. The murderers remain convinced of the worthiness of their sacrifices. They, too, know not what they do and we must forgive them. The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer there will not be time enough. – The Scapegoat, René Girard, John Hopkins University Press, 1986, p 212

May angels of God be on hand to comfort and sustain Archbishop Rowan. And may “the thoughts and meditations of all our hearts and minds” together with our prayer, moderation and non-violence, physical or verbal, establish peace.

WE’RE THE EARLY CHRISTIANS!

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Archangel?

Archangel?

MAGGI DAWN’S DYING FROM POLITENESS - as so often with Maggi’s posts – speaks so succinctly for me of precisely the predicament I find myself in, in company with countless women and men of goodwill I encounter in a really very ordinary pastoral ministry.  For so many of us it’s just such a complete no-brainer that the Church must open its doors wider for ALL of God’s people – all of whom fall short of one person’s “ideal” or another. Moats and planks-in-the-eye come to mind when I witness prurient obsession with the perceived failings of others.

But at the same time I’m really not insensible of the complexities of the current situation. On the one hand Jane Shaw’s observation that TEC “is not going grey in the pews” is one we’ve got to take seriously – “inclusion” is really not an “issue” for most young people, here or in the US, it’s just a given – and one I thank God for. And I’m with MadPriest’s “accept diversity and leave the hard work to the Spirit”. And Kathryn at Good in Parts is certainly not alone in believing that “catholicism and inclusion should be synonyms”. But the weight of opposition – in some even to the word “inclusion” – does bring wearied ones to their knees.

Sincerity is patently observable in the rank and file of all sides of the argument. But argument it nonetheless remains, and ordinary democratic process just doesn’t cut the mustard here. Is the majority view to prevail or is the minority to be presumed right because of a noisier show of faith-full-ness? How are we to arrive at a place where the Anglican Communion can truly and peacefully say “it seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us”. We’ve prayed often enough that the Spirit of God might “disturb our false peace”. Maybe the prayers are in the throes of being answered in ways we didn’t expect – or pray for! Certainly we should be waiting more keenly upon the guidance of the Holy Spirit than upon the reflections of an always beleaguered, whichever way he turns, Archbishop of Canterbury. How we love to find someone to “wait for”. Someone to blame for failing to do or to be what we told him to be or to do. René Girard’s Scapegoat comes too readily to mind.

“God will send an angel into this”, said a wise and faithful (Roman Catholic) priest to whom I once poured out my troubled soul over some (now forgotten) situation. “I don’t know how or whom but I know that God will send an angel into this.”

Many, of course, believed that Archbishop Rowan’s appointment signalled the arrival of a modern-day Archangel Gabriel. Someone who’d do all our growing up for us, keeping the always-expected sibling rivalries at least at bay if not entirely subdued. Rowan the Brave. Waver of the magic wand. But that assumption and that hope was neither fair, nor realistic, nor Christian, nor, actually, the vocation of an angel. Angels are messengers, neither politician nor diplomat, and they don’t carry magic wands.

Archbishop Rowan’s task, like Gabriel’s, has been that of the messenger, the bearer, in many and divers times and places, of the good news that “shepherds on the hillsides” are no longer to be afraid. “Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, for to you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord”. A Saviour who conquered the world by means of a vulnerable love and not by the introduction of a whole new menu of fears. And he has said (in this St Oswald’s Day Gospel) “take courage: I have conquered the world” – John 16.33. No breather of threats, this Saviour, but a baby (someone whose destiny is to “grow up”). One in need of a loving relationship. Urgently. No-one ever put this more beautifully for me than Austin Farrer, in a sermon entitled “A Grasp of the Hand” …

we will not lift our hands to pull the love of God down to us, but he lifts his hands to pull human compassion down upon his cradle. So the weakness of God proves wiser than men, and the folly of God proves wiser than men. Love is the strongest instrument of omnipotence, for accomplishing those tasks he cares most dearly to perform; and this is how he brings his love to bear on human pride; by weakness not by strength, by need and not by bounty

We’re called, every man, woman and child of us to grow up ourselves. Called to recognise that a gracious God “brings love to bear on human pride” – and sets us an example to follow thereby. And we’ve done quite a bit of growing up in the Church, even in my (50 year) lifetime. I remember being told (and being at times persuaded by the notion) that the life and mission of the Church would be irreversibly, irreparably damaged were it ever to be the case that new liturgies superseded the English Book of Common Prayer on anything more than a very occasional basis. And God alone knew how dire would be the consequences were women ever to be ordained. And it would be no less than mortal sin were I not to be daily concerned with “the blessed unity for which Christ prayed” (but it had better be Rome-wards).

God wrote the prayer book. God called men and he didn’t call women. God called Peter and Peter built the Church for him. And Peter was a Catholic, a Roman Catholic. We know what God wants. The same as he always wanted, now wants, and always will want. All we need to do is do it. ‘Cept we can’t stop fighting each other whilst we try to decide what the kernel of the “it” is.

But then Archbishop Michael Ramsey gleefully reminded us, mobile eyebrows pointing heavenwards, that “We’re the early Christians!” – and I found and I find that I do not know the mind of God. I find that neither Scripture, Tradition nor Reason – all of which give me a great deal to work with, all of which are firm foundations for Christian faith, give me anything like the confidence I’d need to be able to say that I KNOW, definitively, what God WANTS. I believe that there are Christian people, and women and men of good faith and goodwill, all over the world, who are growing up. A lot. And the up and coming generation are helping us to grow up some more, even as they are. And in the growing I think of God as ever greater, not in any way diminished, more widely valued, worshipped and adored. Lord and God. Creator of everything that is. Seen and unseen. I believe that I can and do know that God is love. And that his love is intended to cast out fear.

Imagine a new world in which people of faith were less sure of the detail of their religious faith but more sure of God’s love for them and for all humankind. Imagine.

Who, then, might be the angel for our time, who the angel that Canon Chris Dwyer was sure would come, when I spoke to him years ago. Are even the angels dying from politeness? Could it be that the messengers are actually meant to be you and me? “God will send an angel into this”. Maybe the angel for today is the ordinary woman, man and the child in the street, people just like thee and me.  The hitherto shy souls, the none-too-sure-of-themselves souls, the “light on their wings” ones who hear and proclaim a new song. Maybe the angels for today are the people who’ve hitherto left “The Message” to the trained, the articulate, the highly educated, the sophisticated. “Let the little children come to me. Do not try to stop them.”

Maybe those of us who are inspired by some if not all of the prophetic voices we hear in The Episcopal Church in the US, maybe those of us who were quietly thrilling, hopeful, smiling and laughing as we watched video broadcast of Bishop Barbara Harris’ preaching at the Convention’s Integrity Eucharist, maybe those of us who admire the grace of Dean Jeffrey John, maybe those of us who warm to the simple goodness of Bishop Gene Robinson’s broad smile, maybe those of us who hear Archbishop Tutu’s message as a word for the world, maybe those of us who’d love opportunity to work with and alongside some of the brave new pioneers in the US – ought to SAY SO! It’s not warlike uprising I want to encourage. More a much broader, maybe even an angelic conversation. For …

…  “with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long. Beneath the angel strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong. And man at war with man hears not the love song which they bring. O hush the noise ye men of strife and hear the angels sing” – E H Sears

I’m a lucky man, for day by day and week by week I live with and look upon hundreds of godly people who gather to hush the noise. And, in a parish church, under the patronage of St Michael & All the Angels,  that really tries to hear what God’s messengers of peace have got to say, today.

There was grace aplenty to be seen in Archangel Gabriel, and grace aplenty too in Archbishop Michael Ramsey. And grace all abounding in Archbishop Rowan. May each of them stir in us the will again, to be the early Christians.

 

BISHOP KATHARINE ON LIVING UBUNTU

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I’M STILL READING THE HOST OF MATERIAL, and the responses to it, that have come out of The Episcopal Church in the United States’ General Convention. Though understood, received and responded to in as many different ways as there are human beings it’s certainly true, as the song has it, that “All over the world the Spirit is moving!”  I’ve read and re-read the Presiding Bishop’s closing address to Convention, some of the closing paragraphs of which are hereunder:

Jesus is prodding Simon Peter into that kind of tension when he asks him if he loves him more than these. Do you love me? Do you really love me? Can I trust that you love me? Then go out there and feed my sheep!

What are the lesser loves, what does Jesus mean when he asks if Peter loves him more than these? Does he mean the other disciples? The fish they’ve just had for breakfast? The vocation of fishing? Or maybe the whole package? Whatever it is, it has to move into the background if Peter is going to feed and tend the flock. Around here I think it has something to do with how right we think we are. What or who are we more in love with, than Jesus?

The job is to feed the sheep. Nothing else matters a whole lot. And Jesus is clear that it’s not just the flock right in front of us. There are other hungry sheep that we don’t see every day, which is one reason for many shepherds. We may all be sheep, but we all also share in the work of shepherds.

via PRESIDING BISHOP: SERMONS & ADDRESSES.

It’s of immeasurable assurance to me that one of our Anglican Primates is the present grace-filled and rock-steady Archbishop of Canterbury, and that another is the prophetic and pioneering Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori. The two don’t always agree with each other, and I don’t always pretend to understand the nuanced giftedness in either, but the Spirit illuminates Word and Sacrament through each of them. And I believe that spells hope and more encouraging tomorrows for us all. God grant us grace to pray daily for the shepherds.

(WHERE’S) THE ESSENTIAL JESUS?

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EssentialJesus_large

From Archbishop Peter Jensen’s weekly online series on The Essential Jesus …

STEP 1: READING

Read Luke chapter 13, verses 1-35.

STEP 2: REFLECTION

Understanding our time is vital. Jesus introduced the great turning point of history. He forced the issue of repentance: how do you stand with God? Would they trust and follow God’s King when he came amongst them and so receive forgiveness, or would they be stubborn? God is patiently looking for the fruit of repentance. But his patience will not last. How many are going to be saved? Make sure you find the narrow way and enter it! In the meantime Jesus is pressing on to Jerusalem, since that will where he will be killed, it being the nature of that city to kill its prophets. Where is the kingdom? It is here, as a seed is in the ground; in due course it will be like the tree. It is both here and yet to come and we live between those two points. Use the time well.

via Essential Jesus – Online Bible Study #24 Sydneyanglicans.net.

BUT HOW DO YOU KNOW I want to ask of the Archbishop, that God’s “patience will not last.” ? You see it looks to me as though God’s patience HAS lasted – for billions of years. It looks to me as though that temperate and ordered creative patience, beyond the spheres of time, IS God’s Kingdom, the arena in which the universe is ever made new, and you and me too. That’s the ground of my faith, and my hope for our world.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori in an opening address to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Anaheim has spoken of

the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention. Ubuntu. That word doesn’t have any “I”s in it. The I only emerges as we connect – and that is really what the word means: I am because we are, and I can only become a whole person in relationship with others. There is no “I” without “you,” and in our context, you and I are known only as we reflect the image of the one who created us. Some of you will hear a resonance with Martin Buber’s I and Thou and recognize a harmony. You will not be wrong …

… Jesus’ critical decision to journey toward Jerusalem is about the city of God’s dream, Yerushalayim, the city of peace, the city of shalom, the city of God’s holy mountain, toward which the nations stream. We Christians often think the only important part of the Jerusalem story is Calvary, and, yes, suffering and killing in that place still seem to be the loudest news. But Calvary was a waypoint in the larger arc of God’s dream – it’s on the way to Jerusalem, it is not in Jerusalem. Jesus’ passion was and is for God’s dream of a reconciled creation. We’re meant to be partners in building that reality, throughout all of creation. This crisis is a decision point, one which may involve suffering, but it is our opportunity to choose which direction we’ll go and what we will build. We will fail if we choose business as usual.There will be cross-shaped decisions in our work, but if we look faithfully, there will be resurrection as well.Will the words we use in the coming days reflect the word of God incarnate in our midst? Will our words imitate God’s effective word, speaking shalom to creation? That’s our decision, individually and collectively – that is our opportunity to live Ubuntu. This is our moment of judgment, our crisis. We can make our decisions in hope, and we can speak the love of God to the world through this Church, and we can do it together.

via http://ecusa.anglican.org/documents/070709_PBopeningaddress.pdf

“Discover God’s story afresh in these pages”. Well, maybe, in part, between ANY pages. But I’m among those Anglicans who discover God’s story afresh in his (patently beloved) people. I meet Jesus in Bishop Katharine’s “larger arc of God’s dream”.

I met Jesus in the gospels (I’ve long loved and studied) today – but also in the ordinary people I’ve talked to who long, and love, and laugh, and hurt and sing and pray, and who are worrying about swine flu along the way. I believe I’ll meet the essential Jesus when, by many and divers routes, he’s led us safely “home”. And meanwhile I thank God that, long ago, a small and shambolic representation (like me) of our still learning humanity set their faces to walk to Jerusalem with him. And still do.

The Times, 17 July 2009

The Times, 17 July 2009

PRAYING WITH THE WATCHMAN

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ARCHBISHOP SENTAMU OF YORK has given up a planned holiday in Austria this week. The “Watchman for the North” will, instead, “camp out” in York Minster calling men and women of goodwill, everywhere, to join him in prayer and in fasting for peace …

“We have an opportunity to stand up and be counted with those in Israel, Lebanon and Palestine and all over the world who seek after Peace. This is what this week will be about, people coming together for one purpose alone – to pray for peace in our troubled world and to pray especially for the Middle East”.

Many will want to heed the Archbishop’s call – and bless his example. And I shall pray that York Minster will be only one amongst many centres of focused and purposeful gathering in the coming week. May temples, synagogues, mosques, churches, schools, workplaces and homes throughout the land be filled with peoples bound by common purpose. Filled with peoples united by their conscious longing for the peace that can only be granted to any of us – individuals or nations – by something or someone quite BEYOND ourselves and our limited horizons and aspirations.

And may that great and diverse gathering “for one purpose alone” renew in all of us a sense of our common brotherhood and sisterhood in the family of our humanity. May we remember that the Creator of the World hears the cry of the poor, of the little ones, of the bewildered and the dispossessed. May we remember that God bears no ill will or ill intent for ANY child of his making. May the Watchman for the North inspire each of us to be watchwomen and watchmen for the very food of our continued presence in this world: a united humanity. Peace. Peace. Peace.