Category Archives: Life

REFLECTION

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A CLERGY QUIET DAY with Bishop Robert Atwell today. Time for reflection and contemplation. The “quiet waters” of the canal near Dunham Massey bridge were just the place to be … and the passing narrow boats spoke to me, not for the first time, of the rightness I recognise in “making progress slowly”; of Kosuke Koyama’s “Three Mile An Hour God”.

No-one was rushing around our local Hospice this evening either. Quiet waters fit the bill there, too. Everyone speaks of being able to hear the birdsong, clearly, indoors. Perhaps it’s the slowing of the pace of life there that causes most everyone I know to speak of it as a place of beauty, peace, and sometimes even joy in the very midst of sadness. And staffed, of course, everyone says, by “Angels” – messengers.

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?

INEFFABLE

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[Silence can] say what words cannot. It can express intimacy so deep that speech becomes superfluous. It can portray a love so close that voices become obsolete. That silence is not emptiness. It is filled with the ineffable. Some words are only placeholders for things too divine to explain.

via Words/Love.

FOR MONTHS I’ve noticed that the most often visited post on this blog is Silence and that email correspondence ex-blog is, more often than not, silence / retreat / prayer or meditation-related. And a feature in our parish life that binds people at every stage in life, from children to the very elderly, is our shared times of silence. Monthly Monday Meditation (half an hour’s shared silence for meditation with one simple spoken prayer for blessing before departure in silence) has been one of our biggest and most consistent growth points for more than 12 months in a row. Many, many people – writing from every corner of the globe – tell me of their desire to seek out ways of being more fully inclusive, to break down “walls that divide”, to find (or better to celebrate having found) a deeper communion. There’s an appetite, a hunger, all over the world, for silence. I love this photograph (Vega, Fuerteventura, Islas Canarias) because, years after making the image, I can “hear” the silence I encountered at the time. The only sound around in those mountains was the high-song of a tiny shrike.

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Why is the world searching for silence? My blogging friend, Francesca Zelnick, Words/Love, with her tremendous gift for finding the right word even when her subject is no words, seems to me to have struck gold: [Silence] “is filled with the ineffable. Some words are only placeholders for things too divine to explain.”

Meditatio Podcast here | The World Community for Christian Meditation here

not ready for silence just now? Try Flying – “close your eyes” by Mira Shvangiradze

Silence in the City video here

PLANNING WORSHIP WELL

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Worship is addressed to …

MY FRIEND David Herbert has “a bee in [his] bonnet” about learning leadership from nature. I have a bee in mine about planning worship well, paying particularly close attention to the words we ask ourselves and others to use / pray / celebrate; paying particular attention too to the fact that Christian Worship offered by human persons is addressed to God, and not just to tickling the fancies of individual members of the Body of Christ. (Though people could, on many occasions, be forgiven for being persuaded otherwise!)

God’s trying to attract our attention

Word and words in worship will sometimes challenge and stretch me – because it’s a two-way exercise. Worship isn’t just our addressing God, it’s intended to be space for God’s fullness, holiness, liveliness, healing and wholeness to address us. The buzzing of the bee in our bonnet might well be God’s trying to attract our attention, trying to encourage us to “sit down and shut up” for a minute so that we hear a Word that doesn’t come out of our own oh so talkative mouths or imagination!

Matter matters

Words matter, so, so much, because The Word matters. And the Word’s word to the world was and is that matter matters, which is to say that God is incarnate, present in all things and in all people. So liturgical practice that excludes anyone is a non-starter.

Worship “gives worth”

Worship that excludes – by teaching, by pomposity, by sloppiness, by bad theology, overbearing self-righteousness, or by other poor example – does not follow in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth. Worship that withholds compassion, forgiveness, healing and wholeness is unworthy of the name. In “giving worth to” others, to all others, especially those we particularly think of as “other”, we offer the best worship to God. “What you have done for even the least of these my brethren you have done also for me.”

Worship calls … and unites …

Worship opens doors. And if it’s true that it opens doors onto “the reign of God” in our midst (the perpetual “second coming (parousia) of Christ” - in, and through, and with, and for, and all around us, or the eternal dance (perichoresis) of God in Creation if you like) – then it is correspondingly true that worship calls for an opening of our own hearts and lives. The doors of our churches ought never, ever to be closed against any child of God. And the children of God come possessed of many different creeds (“I believes”), in many different colours, from many different backgrounds and cultures, in immeasurably different shapes and sizes – all alive and kicking, by God’s good grace and patience, all imbued with some, though in this world not all, Christ-likeness, so each and every one of them a sister or a brother to us. When we address one another we address something of the Spirit of God. When we embrace one another we embrace God. When we seek communion with one another we come to know communion with God. Our missio. The mission, the hospitality of God - the Mass!

Well planned worship invites us to make sense …

So I’m inordinately blessed here that others have bonnets with similarly buzzing bees in them, and tonight’s Worship Planning meeting was not just about flicking through hymn books and heading for our favourite tunes. Tonight we were doing some theology together. God present – in, and through, and with, and for, and all around us – was stretching us, reaching to us, bending us, reshaping us, calling us to deeper generosity, to wider, broader, higher, deeper vision; calling us to make sense of ourselves, of our neighbours, of the nations, of our world, of our Universe; calling us to make sense of God. And so to do Real Worship, in the Real Presence of God.

THE HEART OF YOU

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YOU WERE good at it
No doubt about it
The things you did and were
The things you wrote and said
They came, then, right out of the
Heart of you
Ah
They said
Who’d have thought it
Eh?
A gentle, gracious, humane
Overseer

And you could be good at it again
No doubt about it
If the things you do and are
The things you write and say
Come right out of the
Heart of you
Ah
They’d say
Who’d have thought it
Eh?
A gentle, gracious, humane
Seer overseer
Here, today

simonmarsh, 5/12

audio file here

AFTER THE STORM

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Glad that I live am I;
that the sky is blue;
glad for the country lanes,
and the fall of dew.

After the sun, the rain,
after the rain, the sun;
this is the way of life,
till the work be done.

Lizette W Reese

STORM AND TEMPEST rocked yesterday’s glory, and it was fiercely cold, so this morning’s birdsong and the illuminated oak in the vicarage garden are all the more welcome, and I can “hear” assembly at my primary school, 45 years ago, belting out “Glad that I live am I” …

GLORY

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WATCHING GLORY unfold in every facet of life and death is the blessed occupation of all human beings. The opportunities I’ve been given for just such a seeing in 30 years as a priest have brought me incalculable blessing. Glory unfolds everywhere. And as though the glory unfolding in our own lives were not blessing enough, we get to see it unfolding all around us as well. If we have eyes to see. If we have ears to hear.

Today I’ve greeted and laughed and prayed and baptised and celebrated Eucharist and cried with a couple of hundred people. Our wonderful Youth Group provided a cooked breakfast mid-morning. A sausage and bacon bap at any time is good news for me, but served this morning by marvellously giving and lovely young people, in parish rooms literally buzzing with life and laughter, though the winds were howling and the rains were drenching, it was glory writ large. “Never been here before” said a young Dad at the Baptism. “But it’s like coming home.” A bit like some of Jan Dean’s poetry that, “like coming home”.

In an hour and a half in our local Hospice this afternoon I met Glory that’s touchable. Many years ago I met Dame Cicely Saunders, the Mother Founder of the modern Hospice movement. I thought her a Christ-figure par excellence. And I felt her Spirit present this afternoon, and in the midst of laughter and tears and lovingly proffered chocolate closed my eyes, in the quiet company of the smallest of assemblies, and simply breathed peace. “In life, in death …” Glory in the air. Glory in the living and in the sick and in the dying and in the young volunteers whose smiles lit up the room – and the faces of the people to whom they lovingly ministered.

Prayer. No words necessary. Just prayer in the air. Thank God for Dame Cicely. Thank God for Hospices. Thank God for giving young people. Thank God for our churchwarden Sue, for many years the Manager of said Hospice, and now, in company with a huge team, bringing something of the hospitality of Hospice right into the Heart of our parish church. Old and young. Old apostles and the newly baptised. Light. Song. Silence. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, giggles and nodding off to sleep in between. Glory.

And then a couple of hours in the cinema – Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Should you find yourself there (and I hope you do) you may remember, in many a scene, that I suggested to you tonight that right there you’ll see example after example of … Glory. Unfolding everywhere, right in the midst of life’s mysteries and vicissitudes, joy, pain, growing, coming and going. Swimming upstream. Salmon leap. And it makes our hearts swell, and we glimpse a day when “All shall be well, yea, and all manner of things shall be well” …

PROCESS

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… as in that beginning, in every age the same, creation’s Re-creator is keeping hope aflame. From Eden to the desert, the manger to the tomb, each fall becomes a rising, and every grave a womb.

From verse 2: The universe is waiting 
Michael Forster, (born 1946), © 1999 Kevin Mayhew Ltd

REBECCA KOO writes about process. Good religion does too – about becoming. And it takes a lifetime. And falling and rising. Sometimes, even, a feeling like “crawling upon your belly”, wondering, painfully, “what did I do wrong?”. Sometimes knowing exactly, and taking care to learn from the knowing. Sometimes feeling naked. (… so I hid myself). But it’s important we rememember that we’re talking about a “Universe-person” here, about a wholly “catholic” long-haul enterprise, and about every life’s being a necessary part of the Universe’s song. Neither Rome, as they say, nor Universe were built in a day, and process, as Rebecca suggests, comes right across a lifetime, not overnight. “Creation’s Re-creator is keeping hope aflame.”

Religion. From religare. To draw together as one. This is the work of nothing less than Life itself/herself/himself – and our whole lives at (and within) that. So any religious or philosophical assurances about our having no further need to explore, or implore, or pray, or go, or grow, need to be shown the door. Process. That’s the thing. Sometimes painful, sometimes joyful, and every shade in between. “Each fall becomes a rising, and every grave a womb”.

Son, behold thy mother. The procession of life swirls onwards …