FUNCTIONAL ATHEISM?

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MY FORMER COLLEAGUE Esther Foss and I were forever exchanging notes about books when we were working together, and it was and still is surprising that we often found ourselves, quite independently, “singing from the same hymn sheet”. The other day I wrote about the sense I have that churches need to “loosen their grip” a bit more, to “let go and let God” …

The fullness of the Life of God has been engaging with growth action planning since before Adam was a lad – and without a great deal of help from us whole new worlds are constantly springing into being. We’re caught up in the act of co-creating with God, of course, but we do well to remember that it takes us a while to catch up with the sheer energy of God; it takes us a while to reckon with the fact that the Holy Spirit’s gift is patently intended for EVERYBODY – inside and outside churches and other religious bodies; it takes us a while to reckon with the Spirit’s gifts in people we think decidedly unqualified. And therein lies the Source of my greatest comfort and consolation as a Christian disciple and a parish priest. The universe is buzzing anyway. And I’m not controlling it.

Buzzing | Simon Marsh

Esther and I share a common regard for the wonderful Quaker writer and teacher Parker J Palmer. Now working in different parishes, in different dioceses, and not having seen each other for a while, it was great to read a note from Esther this morning:

When the church gets it right, when she is true to her identity as Christ’s body on earth, it is always down to the Spirit. And when she gets it wrong – as she often does – it is because we – clergy and people – have fallen into the trap of trying to go it alone.

The Quaker writer Parker J. Palmer calls this “functional atheism… the belief that if anything decent is going to happen, we are the ones who must make it happen.” (Let your life speak p.88)

Esther Foss

The creative, creating Spirit of God is still at work, changing people’s lives, calling them out of the places of darkness into hitherto undreamed of glory and joy and light and service and fulness. Esther’s very well aware of that fact, as I am, but goes on …

… So why are our churches so often half empty, you might ask. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, God is not restricted to the church! And neither should we be. If we look at that reading from Acts we see that the apostles got out of the upper room and into the market place. And when we get out and look about we see that his Spirit is everywhere too.

I feel myself freshly commissioned: to look for and to celebrate the signs of God’s Spirit at work in the Church … and everywhere else as well.

PUFFIN 2012

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PUFFIN THE KAYAK has been lifted from her perch in the garage rafters and safely delivered to her summer season on Ullswater, on what must surely have been one of the loveliest days of the year. Just enough of a gentle breeze to cool but not to throw off course; progress atop the blue, blue lake gentle, slow and quiet enough to be able to come within a few yards of protective Canada Geese watching their still very tiny and fluffy young paddling furiously to keep up with the grown ups. Lakeland children still in school today, of course, but if the weather stays like today’s there’ll be a much larger picnicking presence here tomorrow morning. I shall sleep like a baby tonight, every muscle and sinew having been reminded of the part it must play to navigate a small boat upon and across the queen of the Lakes.

REPOINTING

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THE LANTERN TOWER at Bramhall Parish Church was internally renovated in 2009 and is currently clad in scaffolding for external repointing. It’s a bold statement in our community. Added to a fifty year old parish church in 1960, the brick and concrete structure was immediately detested by some in the neighbourhood and loved with a passion by others.

Towering above our baptismal font, and acoustically the church’s sweet spot, fifty+ years on it now houses one of the church choirs. I enjoy the generous sense of space and light and glory it affords; it is the very opposite of cramped and mean, and I’m delighted too that the tower provides exhibition space for suspended artworks and painting. But, most of all, this tower gives me pause to contemplate the connected values of light and vision.

Bertie Barnby was the energetic and inspiring 3rd Vicar of Bramhall in 1960. Several hundreds attended Sunday worship and he was “on the case” of those who didn’t on Monday mornings – which I admit, being an introvert by comparison, would probably put me off forever!

Canon Bertie’s autocratic style wouldn’t win him much approval in 2012, indeed there were mutterings and grumblings back in 1960, but fifteen years after the end of the second world war his vision was bold, brave and efficacious. An accomplished church musician, Bertie insisted upon the Christian virtue of “giving thanks to the God who made us, in the Lord’s House, upon the Lord’s Day”. That was how the Church was built. That was how good and just society would be maintained. The Church was to be the lantern set upon a hill. And so the Vicar’s powerfully envisioned dream of a lantern tower prevailed.

Lantern’s light source

What value has this huge and powerful “statement” of a tower for me and my fellow disciples today? Does it speak of vision in 2012? Yes it does. I want to pause to consider the source of this lantern’s light. And I want to do so in the wake of a friend’s describing a recent sermon he’d heard in which the preacher implied that life inside the Church is full of light and “out there” is full of darkness, for I beg to differ. Bramhall’s tower opens my eyes. At night, when electric light glows inside the Church, there’s a relatively low wattage presence in the road outside, from inside out. But much more powerful, and every single day of the year, too, our lantern tower is illuminated from the outside in. “Out there” is where the Light is, and “out there” is what lights up “in here”. No doubt there’s need for a great deal of healing and regeneration in the world “out there”. No doubt there’s need for a great deal of healing and regeneration in the world “in here”, too. But we’re – each and every one of us – caught up in a life-long process of being healed and vivified by the Light that comes into our lives (and into our tower space) from “out there”. The Church that recognises no need for healing and light from without its walls will crumble and fall. Churches (and individuals) that think they’re the only bearers of light are – in the long run – of no earthly use at all.

Bertie Barnby wasn’t daft. When he called people to offer thanks to God in the Lord’s House – this parable built of stone on Robins Lane – he was consistently inviting his parishioners to encounter God chiefly in the Lord’s House not built by human hands, the “temple within”. Human hearts and souls are built to be “lantern towers” – and in the quiet and contemplative moments of our daily thanksgiving we find that the life of the world is not an enemy, but the Source of the light with which we’re illuminated, from the outside in, so that we’re able to shine from the inside out. Our job is to love well, to reflect the light. The world is “changed from glory into glory” not in the first instance by churchy institutions but by the God, by the Life “in whom there is no darkness at all”.

That’s maybe why there’s such a sense of Presence at evening prayer in Bramhall Parish Church, when late afternoon sunlight glows in the tower space … of the parish church, and of our hearts.

“Bertie’s tower” is about repointing. God grant us grace and vision not to lose heart and to aspire – as extravagantly as God does – to ever more beautiful, ever more salvific and “towering” art.

ESSENCE OF NATURE

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JIM’S FUNERAL today was a really wonderful occasion. The weather lifted spirits and the tribute from his grand-daughter was both apposite and touching. Jim was loved dearly by his family, but also by a huge assembly of valued friends who, in their turn, thought the world of him. I thought of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray (1) and Anaïs Nin (2), both quoted in Michael Paul Gallagher’s The Human Poetry of Faith

1 From Reason and Emotion: I am prepared to bank upon the faith that the essence of nature – human and divine – is love. The personal life is essentially a life of relations between people; to be ourselves at all we need other people. Religion grows out of our relation to persons.

2 Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.

We need each other, and I find few things more reassuring than a gathering of family and friends (in person or “in spirit”) who walk the whole way with someone they’ve loved well, all the way to the gates of Paradise.

BUZZING

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When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability Acts 2

MY COLLEAGUE David Stoter and I chatted for ten minutes after yesterday’s three consecutive celebrations of the Eucharist here. “The whole place is buzzing” today, David said. And it was. Bramhall Parish Church is never exactly a sleepy-sort-of-a-church but yesterday, indeed throughout the weekend, the place was “buzzing”.

A lot of good things have been happening and more are converging. David and I both articulated that we “don’t quite really know why”. And I’ve been pondering that thought since, delighted about the “not knowing” … and in the early hours of this morning something “clicked”. It’s Pentecost next Sunday, I thought, half asleep, and was jolted awake. It’s Pentecost next week … and we’re not in control. The outpouring of the very life and breath of God is what’s continually changing us here, “from glory into glory, till in Heaven we take our place”.

I remember smiling, twenty years or more ago, when I heard a friend speaking about her church family

“Oh! we do get ourselves in a pickle. We pray “Lord, renew us, set our hearts on fire” even whilst we’re anxiously trying to channel the Holy Spirit through the control centre – you know, the Church Council. And She will insist on listing where She wills! The Holy Spirit’s constantly dishing out gifts to every Tom, Dick and Harriet – and each in their own language! The Holy Spirit’s absolutely no better behaved than Jesus was when it comes to our rules …”

But churches come alive when we loosen our grip a bit. Green shoots are appearing all over the place in and around St Michael & All Angels Bramhall. The fullness of the Life of God has been engaging with growth action planning since before Adam was a lad – and without a great deal of help from us whole new worlds are constantly springing into being. We’re caught up in the act of co-creating with God, of course, but we do well to remember that it takes us a while to catch up with the sheer energy of God; it takes us a while to reckon with the fact that the Holy Spirit’s gift is patently intended for EVERYBODY – inside and outside churches and other religious bodies;  it takes us a while to reckon with the Spirit’s gifts in people we think decidedly unqualified. And therein lies the Source of my greatest comfort and consolation as a Christian disciple and a parish priest. The universe is buzzing anyway. And I’m not controlling it. As the late, great Welsh priest and poet R S Thomas put it so well in his Pilgrimages, God is

… such a fast
God, always before us and
leaving as we arrive.

We’d exhaust our little energies if we tried to keep running after God. And there’s no need. Pentecost illustrates for us that the gifts are generously dispersed anyway. God “keeps up with” us. So I can rest a little easier. I can encourage my fellow pilgrims to rest a little easier too. For all the evidence before my eyes is that the fire of God’s love draws no distinction between divers peoples. To each is given their own language and life “as the Spirit [gives] them ability”. The saving work has been done. It’s ours to celebrate that fact. All we need to do is open the doors of our hearts, homes and churches as widely as possible, eyes wide open to the beauty, grace and potential in human persons, making sure that everyone knows that all people are invited to the Feast of Life – in precisely those hearts, homes and churches, always.

From time to time, of course, we become irritated. Overwhelmed. Anxious to get a grip on the reigns again, to take control. I’m too easily irritated by those (especially so called “Christian”) people who are apparently quite certain that if only all humanity would follow their particular religious traditions then the world’s ills would disappear. But Pentecostal fire is ever intent on warming such irritations out of our systems. The more irritated we become the more persistent the “calling in the night” that suggests (have you noticed?) that we

enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them: for you Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him - Matthew 6, v 6-8

ASCENDING ALLELUIAS

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I OFTEN SPEAK about life’s being, for me, a colour-full affair. I’ve read on several occasions that some blind people can “see” in their dreams. This doesn’t surprise me.

Anger, anxiety,
adoration and awe,
celebration, communion,
confession, consolation,
consternation, contemplation,
dying, fear, joy,
lamentation, loneliness,
longing, love,
Magnificat, meditation, mediation,
passion, poetry, prayer and prose,
sadness, sleepiness, silence, song

- any and all forms of worship – often translate for me into vivid and fluid colour. The movement is gentle and healing. And thankfully, for a minimalist like me, the colour sometimes involves shades of plain and lovely uncluttered white. Neither the movement nor the colours are loud or aggressive or overwhelming. But they are bright. And each represents someone, some emotion, or some thing. A bit of time spent with “Alleluia” above may reveal some faces and one or two particular spaces …

In common with many artists, pray-ers and writers I think of our ultimate Heaven as fullness of life expressed in colours hitherto beyond our wildest seeing and dreams, but utterly reminiscent, too, of experiences we’ve known throughout our incarnate lives, here, in “this world”. Our hymn book contains a (much too long) version of the Ascensiontide “Hail the day that sees him rise”. Printed service orders (our Sunday usage) allow for discreet pruning. Not so when we use the hymn book, as we did on Thursday. So lots and lots of alleluias! For me though the words sometimes become the means of transport to a different level of seeing and / or hearing.

This “Alleluia” developed whilst humming “Hail the day” on and off over a period of about 48 hours. Sometimes these paintings start out with canvas or paper, paint and brush, and are photographed and digitally developed later. For this one the “medium” has been entirely my miracle iPad with BoxWave stylus. Have a great Sunday-after-Ascension. And may your Alleluias be colour-full and joyful.