Tag Archives: children

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

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 …

BLESS MY CHILD

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A woman and her malnourished child in Banadir hospital in Mogadishu. Photo Reuters

ARCHBISHOP ROWAN spoke to the recent General Synod of the Church of England of his experiences in Eastern Congo:

Two weeks ago in Eastern Congo, listening to the experiences of young men and women who had been forced into service with the militias in the civil wars, forced therefore into atrocities done and suffered that don’t bear thinking about, I discovered all over again why the Church mattered. One after another, they kept saying, ‘The Church didn’t abandon us.’

The Archbishop is a shining example of a pastor continually willing to “discover all over again”. God knows how much we all need to. In common with many a clerical household, I guess, Church Times is usually to be found on or near the kitchen table in this vicarage. Mealtimes this week have therefore been especially chastened experiences. What, I’ve wondered, is this young mother praying for herself and her (beautiful) hungry little one?

And the hand of blessing laid with love upon the heads of beautiful, well cared for, well fed little ones in Bramhall Parish Church this morning was warm with desire to bless the mother and her child in this photograph – and the countless mothers, fathers and children who share their desperate plight, praying for the impossible, whilst laying-on their own tender hands of blessing. God help us: I’ve thought a thousand times this week that this madonna and her child in Mogadishu were praying together once in Bethlehem.

And the weeping for the children in Norway today is heard all around the world. Christopher Burkett has written, too, in that tragic context, about why the Church matters. God help us to widen our vision: to sing fewer songs of rejoicing in our own perceptions of personal salvation until we’re a bit surer in our hearts and minds that salvation has to be extended to each and all – or it is no salvation. Whilst I thank God for “looking after” me I must heed the Divine call to play my own part in “looking after” others. For each and every child of God is intended to be provided with a Bethlehem home, a House of Bread.

I pray for the day when, for God’s sake, sectarian divisions and some of the more nuanced religious certainties – of whatsoever religious tradition (or none) – may be set aside in favour of the one really important certainty, the one really important bit of “gospel” that Jesus alluded and alludes to again and again and again – that in the heart of God, at the heart of Life, the mother and her child in this photograph, and the hurting and grieving souls in Norway, and in every other nation under the sun, are of absolutely equal importance. With Archbishop Rowan I “discovered again” this morning why the Church matters, and why all men and women of goodwill, all over the world, matter: Christian Aid emergency envelopes “sold” like hotcakes, thank God, and we sang “We have a dream” with vigour. Dear God in heaven, help us to dream big … and to plant mustard seeds of faith and hope and real practical love wherever and whensoever we can.

WHAT THEN WILL THIS CHILD BECOME? (+video)

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THE NEIGHBOURS WERE BEWILDERED. Luke says that fear came upon them as Zechariah broke with tradition, asked for a writing tablet and wrote, “His name is John” … (variously, “the Lord has favoured”, “gift from God”, or “God is good”) … Something was afoot, a ripple of fear in the hill country, “for, indeed, the hand of the Lord was with him”. What then will this child become?

Godspell, if not faithful Bible reading, taught me what became of him. John the Baptist and the hauntingly beautiful “Prepare ye the way of the Lord” come to my mind simultaneously. Fear asks: “what is to become of him?” and “Prepare ye the way of the Lord” is the reply.

John was said to have been graced before his birth (hence the Feast of the Birth of …) And the grace within him was leaping about already in his mother’s womb. The Life in him bursting before his birth to say: “stop, look, listen”. Repent. Turn around a minute. Wake up and smell the coffee. Splash some cold water on your face. Be baptised … become (again) a member of the human race, graced before birth with LIFE and therefore someone who cannot doubt the endless possibilities of Life’s (Divine) for-given-ness and hopefulness.

But you have to tidy the bedroom so you can lay out the train set. You have to clear the way. Fear, wealth, overwork, underwork, lack of charity, too great a love of money, blind allegiance to tradition on the one hand or the new-fangled on the other fills your Eden with weeds. Get a grip. Clear the clutter. The way can be made straight, burdens made light. The Life in you came from and is destined for Jerusalem … a new Jerusalem … a resting place, a home, where you will live in peace.

Living in the past haunts you. The oversized mortgage is killing you. Being always at work makes you believe that nobody loves you. Repent. Turn around. Look at life in a new way. The original way. Ask yourself: “what will become of him?”. Ask yourself: “what’s will become of me?”. And then Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Clear the ground. Keep what’s important. Burn the weeds.

“No-one has been born who is greater than John the Baptist”, said Jesus. “yet the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he.” Wake up. “Be baptised”. Splash some water. Believe the good news … clear the clutter. Give yourself a chance. Dump the tired propaganda. Eternal Life (graced before you were born) begins now.