Tag Archives: delight

EMERGING

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The yearning for holiness remains alive today. We live with a sense that we can be more than we are. We feel the pull of the transcendent and live with a call to be the person God intended. The ammas [the 'Desert Mothers', Christian ascetics in the 4th and 5th centuries] understood that holiness was founded upon wholeness. They teach us that we must shed our false self and allow our true self to emerge.

Laura Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers, p 157

WHOLENESS. What constitutes our wholeness? This is the question that lies at the heart of all questions, at the heart of all relationships and right living, and the saints who trod the path of life before us were women and men who recognised that we’re all of us caught up in a process of emerging. The pursuit of holiness and wholeness cannot be a rushed exercise. It’s our lifetime’s task. We shouldn’t be too quick to arrive at answers, still less to “provide” answers for others!

Wholeness and holiness will emerge in human persons at different times, in different places, and at different rates. Quick fix “evangelism” can be misleading, even dangerous at times, and destructive. If any of us need “saving” from anything it’s from those who want to draft out the terms and conditions of our wholeness for us. Wholeness will involve being our deepest, truest selves … and will therefore involve us in being distinctive, unique – and necessarily different.

Live and let live

The world’s religious and philosophical traditions, and the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion that I love and seek to serve, have no choice but to continue to grapple with the life issues that some find it so hard to be reconciled with, issues that are largely to do with diversity. We really do need to learn to live and let live. We really do need to be reconciled to the processes of emerging.

“We live with a sense that we can be more than we are. We feel the pull of the transcendent.” We are emerging – and we’ll know we’ve arrived in the fullness of the reign of God, or, if religious language isn’t helpful, we’ll know we’ve arrived in the state of wholeness, when we’re genuinely and wholly able to revel and delight in our gloriously gifted diversity.

Meanwhile, to return again to the wisdom of Sonny Kapoor, the young hotel proprietor in the fabulous The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel -

Everything will be alright in the end, and if it’s not alright now then it cannot be the end …

RISE AND SHINE

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MY FATHER has a small square Instamatic photograph he made of me when I was a boy of 5 or 6, just waking up, in a white ridge tent, pitched on the side of Lake Bala in North Wales. I’d gone to sleep dreaming about my first angling success, having landed the tiniest tiddler you ever saw, the night before. Pride and delight was mixed, poignantly and paradoxically, by my sadness at the death of the little chap. So my patient Dad provided a small matchbox into which the little fish was reverently placed before I presided solemnly over my first burial.

I must have slept deeply and well. I remember now the slight chill, and the scent of canvas, a small camping stove, sausages, a boiling kettle. But even then I was never at my sharpest in the early mornings. Colours melded, waking encountered mist and a measure of reluctance. “Wake up, son. Rise and shine. It’s breakfast time.” And Dad’s photo captured the half-awake moment when the night became light and – through canvas and my own mind’s mist – boyish delight and colour glowed, stretching, reaching, like the spectrum in this painting.

RISEN!

THE SWORD OF MY YOUTH

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photo credit: The Nashdom Chronicles (please click photo)

ARCHBISHOP MICHAEL RAMSEY, sometime most venerable Archbishop of Canterbury, is said to have repeated many times during his late retirement years: (gleefully) “we are the early Christians!” And my abiding memory of encounters with him, a memory shared by countless others, is that of a godly priest who looked old and wise always and who, in his eighties, was also one of the most perpetually “young at heart” people I’ve ever known.

“We are the early Christians!” – the archbishop believed that the mission of Jesus – the proclamation of God’s love throughout the world for all the world – had barely got off the starting blocks! His faith kept him bubbling with youthfulness, a vitality that undergirded very great wisdom and sanctity. He loved mini-Mars bars and late-night conversation with young theological students. And it was easy for the delighted suppliers of said mini-Mars bars to love him.

Today at St Michael & All Angels Bramhall we celebrated our 101st Patronal Festival. We’re still young. Blessed under the patronage of angels and archangels we aspire to be “angelos” in our place and in our time. We look for inspiration both to the fathers and mothers – the abbas and the ammas of bygone days, Archbishop Ramsey among these – and to the wisdom of the youth in our midst to which Jesus pointed. Angels and archangels will be seen by Nathanael – and by you and me – “ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” – upon humankind. (John 1:43-51).

Humankind, all humankind, in company with Jesus of Nazareth (something good could, can, did, and does come out of Nazareth!) is to be actively involved in heaven’s opening … messengers of that continual opening in, and with, and for, and around us every day of our lives. We need to look for angels with the eyes of our youthfulness though. Churches – even full churches – where Christians have grown cynical and tired will miss what Archbishop Michael frequently called “The Glory of the Gospel”.

The youthful heart of a Michael Ramsey welcomes the light and the love of angels in the midst of our here and very ordinary now. Youthful hearts are open to tradition, and to newness, and to continual growing. Changing. “From glory to glory advancing”.

I preached today around verse 3 of the hymn When a knight won his spurs – the first hymn I ever sang at a primary school assembly – on my own first day at school, at five years old. And I was surprised by how much this little prayer for the restoration of our own soul’s youthfulness – for the freeing up of truthfulness – touched more than just a few:

Let faith be my shield
and let joy be my steed
‘gainst the dragons of anger,
the ogres of greed;
and let me set free,
with the sword of my youth,
from the castle of darkness,
the pow’r of the truth.

Angels on earth in company with angels and archangels in the fullness of the heavens, we’re all of us amongst the early Christians. There remains yet a lot of loving and a lot of learning to be done. That’s the challenge. And that’s the delight. 101 Patronal Festivals – and counting …