Category Archives: Christian discipleship

MARY’S DRESS

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BANK HOLIDAY weekend affords a happy extension to “left brain time.” There are always more books I want to read, more paintings I want to paint, more photographs I want to make, more writing to be done, more poems to unfold, more prayer to be celebrated, more people to share some time and stories with, more songs to be sung, more colours to be marvelled at, more silence to be revelled in – than time ordinarily allows. And that very fact is cause for thanksgiving! Life is indeed a rich tapestry. The signs of the reign, the joy of God, are all around me. And I’m immensely thankful for the connections that blogging makes possible with people all around the world.

Today’s artwork is inspired, in Eastertide, by Mary Magdalene, beloved apostle of Jesus, first witness to new life in the Resurrection, loyal provider of intimate and loving support and sustenance, someone generous, open-hearted and giving, someone who just “knew” instinctively, what Jesus’ mission on earth was about, someone released, by God’s goodness, from the kind of prison every one of us finds ourselves in from time to time.

All human persons are “bedevilled” by “Legion” the perpetually underlying and taunting belief that somehow we’re failing to make the grade, we’re unlovable, bigger and better “failures” than anyone else, destined to be “alone”, faithless, heartbroken, misunderstood, wretched. All human persons yearn for the kind of release that Jesus’ love and acceptance brought about in Mary’s life; for the kind of release that she brought about in his.

Mary Magdalene: someone cruelly maligned and abused by religious patriarchy and misogyny across the centuries, but all the while someone I’ve admired and looked to as an icon of life’s richness and fullness, of life’s goodness and generosity, of life’s being – under the vivifying reign of God – a beautifully, colourfully, gorgeously dressed dance with our Creator.

Sydney Carter described Jesus as The Lord of the Dance. In my heart I think of Mary of Magdala as Jesus’ dance-partner and she is clothed, dressed, like the environment all around and about her, in colour and glory. And theirs is a partnership, theirs is a dance that, far from being exclusive and excluding, invites you and I to join. “Shall we dance?”, Mary asks. “And shall we sing?”, asks the Lord of the Dance. And sometimes the colours blur a little in the swirling. And sometimes they’re blended by our tears …

Have you seen the wonder of it? Have you seen Mary’s dress?

BLESSED ON HER WAY

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photo/andybrown

ANDY BROWN captured the moment when my priest colleague of the past three and a half years was “blessed on her way with gifts of love” today. Ann Hyde is to be licensed as Assistant Curate of her home parish, St Martin Low Marple, in May. We pray God’s blessing upon Ann’s continuing ministry, for the people of the parish of Low Marple, and for Fr Ed McKenna, the parish priest.

WHAT’S GOOD NEWS?

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I’M OFF TO A DAY CONFERENCE on “Catholic Evangelism” tomorrow. I’m not wholly sure whether it’s going to be about Catholic Evangelism (capital C, capital E) or catholic evangelism (small c, small e), and I’m rather hoping for the latter … hoping, that is to say, for a catholic evangelism that really is about good news (evangelism) universally applied (catholic), ie, for everybody – no matter their “faith tradition” or lack thereof – everywhere.

I’ve spent a very great deal of my life passionately pondering what exactly constitutes good news, and in particular why having some sort of acknowledged relationship to / with the Source of our lives might matter – to individuals, to communities, to nations, to our world, to the whole created order – some of these whole and healthy, some desperately broken, hurting, and in need of that Divine touch that brings healing. And I’m consistently finding that old definitions of what it means to be Catholic, or Protestant, or Christian, or shades in between all of these, don’t fit all sizes any more, if they ever did.

Christ everywhere …

What constitutes Good News in a ‘catholic’, pluralistic world? Where is an / our anointed Christ to be found? (as I’m sure such a Christ is indeed to be found, anywhere in the world, and across the world’s faith traditions). And the questions are so important to me because as a Christian priest, seeking always to live and learn – to be a disciple – after the pattern of Jesus of Nazareth, I have observed that some kinds of Catholic, some kinds of Protestant, and some kinds of “Christian” plainly do not represent very good news for many people at all. So catholic evangelism must be something quite different, something much more open, something prepared always to be held to account as to the reach of what it purports to be good news. Catholic evangelism will not, I think, be too prescriptive.

Feast of life for all

Catholic evangelism will offer the “feast of life” to people in the “highways and byways” won’t it? Catholic evangelists, personal and corporate, will have dismantled their drawbridges. Catholic evangelism will be less concerned (although not wholly unconcerned) with the Faith of our Fathers and hugely more concerned with Faith Being Received Today. When I’ve asked adults over the past thirty years whether they’d like to come to confirmation classes, so that they can be presented to the bishop, confirmed, and thereafter receive Holy Communion many have politely declined. When I’ve offered the Sacrament of Holy Communion “no questions asked” it has been the case, more frequently than I can count, that the recipient has ended up doing the asking, seeking to confirm a present and acknowledged reality – satisfied hunger – in their lives.

Let’s explore!

And I remember that Jesus was ever ready to go the extra mile for children, too. “Do not try to stop them for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these”. Catholic evangelists will work hard at becoming more, well … catholic – so that they’re more plainly seen to be, well … “Christian” or “Anointed”. Catholic evangelists will be interested in marginalised multi-tasking-capable women, tax collectors, prodigal sons, unimaginative but very opinionated men, quieter and more imaginative men, too, and in lost sheep. Catholic evangelism won’t chastise the lost sheep for having left the fold in order to “explore”, still less tell the poor creature that God forbids it. Instead truly catholic evangelists (like Jesus of Nazareth) will make the fold larger so that there’s the space for MORE sheep to engage in the business of exploration, to engage, that is to say, in their God-given Life!

The Sound of Silence

One of the biggest growth areas in our parish (liberal Catholic with blurry edges – a bit like my paintings!) – has been a call to shared and silent meditation in the parish church – arriving and departing in companionable silence. No coffee or handing out electoral roll forms afterwards. And numbers in excess of many a church’s entire Sunday congregation have responded to a call – we believe a Divine call – to dwell for a space, together in the “house for the Church”, to wait upon the Word that touches life in silence. (The Word – not words. There’s not “even” a Bible reading). It’s life-changing, say many participants. It’s the only occasion in my month when I’m really and deeply aware of the heartbeat of God, the pulse of life, say others. This silence, this “that’s not very Catholic” but absolutely catholic encounter is breathing into our common life new elements of what it means to bear good news in our lives today, what it means, first and foremost to BE the Body of Christ now on earth, what it means to be religious in the original sense of the word (religare) – reconnected, re-membered. Restored to what we’ve forgotten.

Old assumptions yield

So whether tomorrow proves to be slanted more to Catholic Evangelism, or to catholic evangelism, I hope we’ll be asking the same question – What is Good News? – at least sometimes. Because, remembering Louis MacNeice’s Mutations again:

… old assumptions yield to new sensations.
The Stranger in the Wings is waiting for his cue.
The fuse is always laid to some annunciation …

UP, UP & AWAY!

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Tracy – photo/emmaward

REALLY GREAT first sermon from Tracy Ward here today. We’ve had some inspirational first sermons here in the last year or two and I’m thrilled to bits that we’ve currently 3 aspiring priests at Bramhall Parish Church, and we’re also sponsoring the theological training of an ordinand for the Diocese of Newala, Tanzania.

God’s Spirit calls hearts and souls and minds and bodies today, as ever. Tracy voiced the Word of God’s Spirit with an encouragement to Live Your Life – being exemplars of the kind of in-love-with-life-and-Love-service that can truly be described as a more excellent way. Great sermon. Great eucharistic worship. Great Spirit of God right here in the midst of us. We hear the commission. We’ll act upon the call: the uniting, embracing Body of Christ.

A TENDER RECOGNITION

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Mary stayed outside near the tomb, weeping. Then, still weeping, she stooped to look inside, and saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head, the other at the feet. They said, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ ‘They have taken my Lord away’ she replied ‘and I don’t know where they have put him.’ As she said this she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, though she did not recognise him. Jesus said, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you looking for?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said, ‘Sir, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and remove him.’ Jesus said, ‘Mary!’ She knew him then and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbuni!’ – which means Master. Jesus said to her, ‘Do not cling to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go and find the brothers, and tell them: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ So Mary of Magdala went and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord and that he had said these things to her. John 20.11-18

THE MARY MAGDALENE of my own imagination doesn’t look at all like some of those depressing religious pictures. Not a haloed saint, not miserably gazing upon a skull set down in the middle of her dressing table, not wanton, bare-breasted, or mournfully reflecting upon her dreadfulness and that of others “of her kind”. No, my Mary Magdalene, first apostle, is an ordinarily beautiful, fully alive, self-aware, tactile, tender, practical, imaginative and lovely young woman. Human and humane. Someone possessed of an extraordinary ability to empathise, a bit of a loner perhaps, someone who “gets it” when Jesus speaks, someone who, just because she’s lovely – inside and out – is great to be around. And Jesus loves her.

I don’t know who made the gorgeous image above – (I’d love to know – and would gladly credit it) – but here’s the girl in my heart, using her own imagination to tell Jesus that she understands more than perhaps even he thinks she does; that she loves him; that loving him heals her and makes her whole; that her love might bring something of healing to him.

Here’s the Mary I imagine went on from this Prologue – this genesis, this in-the-flesh close-breathing, this out-of-the-ordinary, tearful, beyond-the-Law touching of the Word-before-time, this “costly” anointing, this first moment of tender intimacy, and wholly mutual acceptance – to have a thousand little conversations with Jesus, long before the ultimate events of what we’ve come to call Holy Week (“it’s no wonder they call you the Master, love. None of us have ever met or dreamed about someone quite like you”). A thousand little conversations about what was to be in the future, their future, everybody’s future (the future of R S Thomas’ “mirrors in which the blind look at themselves and Love looks at them back”) – after the “return” to “my father and your father”, to Where we came from.

Mary, imagine …, Mary, turn around …, Mary, can you feel it? …, Mary, the colours …, Mary, the joy of it …

Yes, I can imagine. I want to imagine. We all do. But if you died first, Jesus, God knows what I’ll do. You must be careful. We need you. Don’t strain so. O God. I know you’ll have to go. And I shall want you to, of course. Yes, we’ve talked about it often enough. But will you really come back to me? From the inside out? Jesus, I believe. Help me when my heart breaks. Help me in my unbelief …

Mary, Mary, Mary. I will. I will. I truly believe we’ll find each other on the inside …

If fully human Jesus was Everyman then Mary of Magdala is Everywoman. To prostitute her memory is wicked calumny – (how many unseeing men, half-dead, dull-in-heart-and-mind-and-head, have done that through the centuries?) – calumny of a kind that has led, and still leads, to immeasurable sickness of head and heart and soul and mind and body. Masculine and feminine, each needs the other. ( Both traits found in both women and in men, heterosexual or homosexual – it’s an “other” that’s the key requirement here). Thank God that the crisis wrought by precisely that sickness, and agonisingly recognised as the “hole in the heart” not just of the Church but of humankind generally today, can hardly help now but to point humankind everywhere on earth towards the light of a “more excellent”, a wholly more natural, and healthier, God-given way.

Human relationships, as much as for any of the ways we relate to the Divine, are not to be patronising, patriarchal, law-bound, or shame-laden. Human relationships will thrive, and the reign of God come to be felt among us, when they instinctively include, and resist exclusion. Love is not to be imprisoned or entombed. And, post-crisis, then and now, a wider-reaching Love is here to stay. Though patience is still required, though sin and death appear yet, in places, still to prevail, a new way of loving is here to stay. A new Way, a new Truth, a new Life.

Mr Vernon Dursley to Harry Potter about a certain (Wise old? Dove-like?) owl:

‘If you can’t control that owl, it’ll have to go!’
Harry tried, yet again, to explain.
‘She’s bored,’ he said. ‘She’s used to flying around outside. If I could just let her out at night …’
‘Do I look stupid?’ snarled Uncle Vernon, a bit of fried egg dangling from his bushy moustache. ‘I know what’ll happen if that owl’s let out.’
He exchanged dark looks with his wife, Petunia.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J K Rowling

On Resurrection Day, “when it dawns on us”, in Mary and in Jesus, Wisdom is encountered entre deux. Wisdom’s used to flying around outside, she’s done so since the genesis of things, and before that, too; she carries messages home – for the inside, the God-side. Yes, there’s real intimacy here, a communicating communion sort of a business. But an early lesson in wisdom for all humankind is “do not cling”. Let him, let her, fly. Let the Spirit blow where She listeth. Something’s dawning. Look at the sky.

Ascension – returning – to the fullness of God lies yet ahead, though this very Resurrection morning it is an energising Hope. A hope that will ultimately change the course of the history of worlds. For there will be a returning, a tender returning, a deeply intimate, glorious, colourful, joyful, prayerful, fulsome returning for Everyone to the One who is both “my father and your father”. Don’t cling today beautiful Mary. But, believe me, lovely, knowing, wise and giving Mary, the day will dawn when we may cling, and we may laugh, and we may talk and pray and sing “We’re an Easter people! All of us! And alleluia is our song”.

And on that day I believe Jesus will be heard greeting his Mary of Madgdala as Rabbuni. Teacher. Master … She’s beautiful. Just like this painting. An ordinary, beautiful girl. Just sometimes a little bit wild. And she gets it, perhaps she is, Wisdom.

Jan Richardson and her husband Garrison Coles have made the
exquisitely beautiful The Hours of Mary Magdalene. Enjoy it here

 

YOU’LL FOLLOW ME LATER

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Simon Peter said, ‘Lord, where are you going?’ Jesus replied, ‘Where I am going you cannot follow me now; you will follow me later.’ Peter said to him, ‘Why can’t I follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.’ ‘Lay down your life for me?’ answered Jesus. ‘I tell you most solemnly, before the cock crows you will have disowned me three times.’ – John 13.38 JB

YOU WILL FOLLOW ME LATER. There’s the hope of the Gospel. Notwithstanding every human frailty that can be mustered, aware, even, that you will deny me, my beloved friend, you will follow me later. Denial will meet its match. Thank God.

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LOVINGLY, WITH INTENTION

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WHAT A COMFORT Richard Holloway is. There are those in this world who strive to be sure of themselves and each and every thing they believe. And those for whom being slightly less sure of themselves and their beliefs is not only a natural state of affairs but also a preferred way. These latter types warm to what Bishop Holloway has called a “doctrine of provisionality”. I count myself amongst these and I’m profoundly grateful for the continuing episcopal ministry (even if he wouldn’t quite want to call it that) of this deeply good and humane man.

Martin Wroe writes of Bishop Holloway in the Church Times piece I alluded to yesterday

He does not pray or say the office, but he walks the hills every day, and “I intercede for people. I remember them in my mind lovingly, with intention, and offer them the gift of my loving support.”

Who does that remind me of?

I’ve loaned out my copy of The Stranger in The Wings so many times across the years that it’s battered and dog-eared today, and all the more loved for that. In that book Richard Holloway quotes from Louis MacNeice’s Mutations

“For every static world that you or I impose upon the real one must crack at times, and new patterns from new disorders open like a rose, and old assumptions yield to new sensation; the stranger in the wings is waiting for his cue / the fuse is always laid to some annunciation.”

Martin Wroe, later in his Church Times piece: “A woman came up to him at his book-launch in Edinburgh to say that she longed to be part of some kind of community of faith, but could not be part of the Church today. Would he start something? No, he had laughed: he is no guru.”

Who does that remind me of?

But he’s already “started something” – years ago, back in the seminary at Kelham and in all the years that followed. Richard Holloway began and has never stopped searching for something – discipling – and if some who loved and have been loved by him wound up disappointed it’s also true that many others wound up deeply grateful for the vulnerability and good-hearted graciousness he’s long been willing to share.

The fuse is always laid to some annunciation. That’s kept me plodding along in discipleship for years. And now, ever grateful for his “doctrine of provisionality” there’s another lovely image that will haunt and delight me for years to come: he walks the hills every day, and “I intercede for people. I remember them in my mind lovingly, with intention, and offer them the gift of my loving support.”

What a perfectly wonderful, hopeful, faithing “stranger in the wings”. What a comfort.

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Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt | Richard Holloway, 2012

GOOD NEWS!

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ONE YOUNG ADULT, one dear member of our young church, and one babe in arms (fast asleep) were baptised in Bramhall this morning, a joyful occasion for all involved, and one of hundreds of such events taking place today all over the world. Church is changing today as she has changed and changed again across 2000 years since the advent on earth of Jesus of Nazareth but, come what may, still there are millions who answer the call to “shine as lights in the world”. I suspect that Jesus would be less inclined to call these people “Christians” and more inclined to celebrate their being “fully human”. And that flags up an invitation to all of us – to celebrate light shining in the world wherever it is found, in “fully human” persons of whatever gender, nationality, religious persuasion or lack thereof. Such celebrations are invariably Really Good News.

HOW SHALL I SING?

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Coe Fen from Salisbury

ONE OF OUR ORDINANDS has been longing to get up to Durham for Evensong in the Cathedral there for weeks. Rachael Elizabeth has described the experience (happily on St Cuthbert’s Day) as “cloaked in a golden embrace” – and was thrilled then, and will be again, by a hymn we’ll sing here on Sunday – John Mason’s How Shall I Sing That Majesty? sung to Ken Naylor’s Coe Fen. Huddersfield Choral Society have recorded the hymn and an mp3 is here. I play Winchester Cathedral’s version from Hymns and Psalms Volume 2 constantly. It’s available here.

It’s a question that’s on this parish priest’s heart every day. How shall we sing? How shall the Body of Christ in the 21st century be blessed with resources in hymnody that speak the Word of God for our day? Our theology is a living thing and God speaks “New every morning … our waking and uprising prove”. I’ve written before about some of the hackneyed old stuff – stuffed full of outdated theology – that I believe is positively dangerous in today’s searching and pluralistic society; I’ve written before too of the divisive repetition of carefully selected chunks of Scripture that are then misused to patronise, chastise and exclude. These things will only be replaced, though, when hearts are captured by something that better describes where the people of this contemporary world have got to in their journeying with God and with those many and diverse “others” who make up the one humankind.

The Church of God, like humanity herself, is in the hands of God and will therefore end only if and when God wills it. That’s wholly better news to my eyes and ears than the fulminating “evangelicalism” that bleats on and on about the certain destruction of a Church led by “non-Bible believing liberals”. Dear God help us! They’re not talking good news. There’s nothing truly evangelical  about their perpetually prophesying destruction – and wilfully abrogating the responsibility of all human beings for “salvation” by turns either to Jesus of Nazareth or Rowan of Canterbury. The Primate of All Nigeria, in a statement about Archbishop Rowan’s new appointment says

For us, the announcement does not present any opportunity for excitement. It is not good news here, until whoever comes as the next leader pulls back the Communion from the edge of total destruction. To this end, we commit our Church, the Church of Nigeria, (Anglican Communion) to serious fasting and prayers that God will do “a new thing”, in the Communion.

For 2000 years no single person has shown themselves capable of pulling back an entire communion from anything at all. For pity’s sake let’s not burden Rowan’s hapless-even-before-named successor with this pretence of an expectation – only to knock them down when they don’t meet the mark either. Can’t we stretch our imaginations a bit further? Could we stop looking for unique messiahs and archbishops “possessed of unique qualities”?  Could we stop insisting that our version of messiah – already come or still awaited – is the one and only – the unique possibility? Couldn’t we “apply our minds to Wisdom”? – recognising from henceforth that Divine Sophia is to be found in every atom and fibre of every created thing? “Consider the lilies of the field …”

Could we rewrite the myth (as it has been rewritten so many times before) so that instead of making scapegoats we shared responsibility, under God, every child, woman and man alive, for the “salvation” of our supremely beautiful but tired and aching world and her humankind?

Jesus has never given me the impression that he was or is chiefly interested in our recognising his personal “uniqueness” (apparently keener on being thought of as “son of man” – one of us – than as “Son of God”) ; never implied that (long after his lifetime) “Bible Believing Christians” and their myths and theologies should take precedence over the primacy of experience in the Life and Love of koinonia. The arms wide-open embrace of Jesus of Nazareth was surely an invitation to all humankind to offer similar self-emptying healing and hospitality – and especially, if an “especially” there was ever to be, for those hitherto consigned to the anguish of life’s margins.

So tonight’s music choosing meeting here in little Bramhall was heartening. 5 people engaged in some depth with a shedload of hymnbooks and tunes. We grappled with what the hymns were trying to say alongside what we believed needed to be said to elucidate the Lectionary and to inspire hearts and souls at worship in the next eight weeks. It’s a tough collaborative exercise. It takes time, effort and forbearance – even  choosing how to celebrate Resurrection relevantly, worshipfully and well – but there’s no avoiding the question – Christian people who are liberal and inclusive in heart, soul, mind, body and intention must continue to ask How Shall I Sing? For

Thou art a sea without a shore,
a sun without a sphere;
thy time is now and evermore,
thy place is everywhere.

40 YEARS AGO

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ON THE FEAST OF ST PATRICK, forty years ago today, I was presented by my parish priest, Warwick Ariel Jones, for Confirmation by Gerald Alexander Ellison, Lord Bishop of Chester, at St Mark, Claughton. I remember the occasion clearly, can recall fellow candidates, Sunday School lessons, training as an altar server, chorister and lector, and some of the Confirmation preparation sessions – if not quite all of the content!

I remember the encouragement from my parents, grandparents, godparents, uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins, headmaster and school-teachers – on “your special day”. I remember the little party afterwards and the wonderful scent of the brand new, boxed, black leather-bound copy of The New English Bible that was the gift of my parents.  And I realise, forty years on, plain as a pike-staff, that the debt we owe to those who have mothered us in the faith is quite simply incalculable.

My then bishop and his successor, my parish priest and many of the fellow pilgrims of my youth, are now in the nearer and deeper presence of the Fount and Source of all of our lives. Little did I know on St Patrick’s Day in 1972 that eucharistic worship ever after would bring me into conscious awareness of the continuing presence in my life of all such saints.

I’m not sure I fully understood in 1972 what Resurrection really means – and I know in 2012 that higher, deeper, broader and wider understanding is yet to be revealed. Nevertheless I’ve lived enough resurrection to know that our Easter celebration is precisely about all that I’ve been recalling.

Our approaching Easter celebration is about Life – that of Jesus of Nazareth, and that of each and every member of our humankind – your life and mine. Easter is about the reality of our being eternally drawn, every one of us who live – or who ever lived – in this world, home to the fullness of the Heart of Love from Whom we came, and in Whom we live now and forever.

Confirmation, by The Right Reverend Gerald Alexander Ellison, Lord Bishop of Chester
St Mark Claughton, St Patrick’s Day, Friday 17 March 1972
this photograph made on Sunday 19 March 1972 by Churchwarden Miss Joan Gray

LtoR back: Alan Morris, Phyllis Kell, Helen Whitehead, The Reverend Warwick Ariel Jones, Elaine Peers, Julie Barker, Paul Fryer, front: Simon Marsh, Paul Cooper & Peter Lloyd