THE RESURRECTION LIFE - loving and living and dying and rising …
Happy Easter
SURREXIT
3
Tag Archives: Easter
FROM GOD-NESS
photo/howardgerrard
For Bramhall, March 2013
A HANDWRITTEN CARD found amongst the papers of the late poet Sally Purcell bears the following anonymous and unsourced quotation:
Y sobre todo tendras / los regalos de mi pecho, / las finezas de mi amor, la verdad de mi deseo …
a translation of which is
And above all you have / gifts from my breast, / the subtleties of my love, the truth of my desire
- the Epigraph in Sally Purcell’s Collected Poems
It’s possible, sometimes, to fall especially for anonymous poetry. The world’s sacred scriptures are full of it. Our ancient forebears believed that poetry (from the Greek for “to make”) carried the Word of the un-nameable maker, the breath, the creativity, the encouragement, the enthusiasm (the from-God-ness), the feeding, the fire, the grace, the glory, the hearing, the hope, the knowing, the order, the passion, the seeing, the voice, the will, the work and the yearning of the divine. So, for me, with this little anonymous Epigraph. And I wonder whether it is the very key to Sally Purcell’s life and poetry. And I wonder, too, whether I’m so attracted to it because it holds a key to what I want to be mine.
Writing for The Times of 19 November 2002, Libby Purves remembered her friend: “like Spender’s archetypal poet she was born of the sun, walked a short while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with her honour.” Ah! – notwithstanding my many frailties and failures I’d like to think that a beloved friend, some day remembering my life, might be able to say such a thing of mine. The home and the love we all long for will surely be the place where all the vivid air is signed with honour, God’s honour, your honour, and mine.
Here in this exquisite Epigraph is a hint of that Kingdom come, here, today, in us, on earth, in our breasts, in our souls, in our most intimate known and knowing depths – as it is in heaven. It’s an extra-ordinary sort of a love that tells someone that they have “gifts from my breast”. There’s warm and life-sustaining intimacy in the suggestion that another has some understanding of “the subtleties of my love”. An achingly beautiful reaching and being reached in “the truth of my desire”. I can imagine Jesus whispering these words to Mary Magdalene in Easter-morning Resurrection light. (Or perhaps they’d be her words whispered for him) …
And above all you have / gifts from my breast, / the subtleties of my love, the truth of my desire
… Yes, inwardly, perhaps more intimately than outwardly, poetic life creates resurrection-life in the same wonderfully incarnate, intimate and fully in-the-flesh way as did His. And you and I may smile and bask in Easter’s light. Warmed inside. The subtleties of love. The disciple’s delight.
May you soon celebrate just such a joy-filled Easter Feast!
FAST-HEADING FOR HOLY WEEK
FICKLE, THOSE CROWDS. Fickle. I can perfectly believe that a Palm Sunday event happened around Jesus of Nazareth in Jerusalem, even if the evangelists did later engage in a smidgeon of poetic licence. Easy enough to believe, because all that palm-waving and racket can be seen in towns and cities all across the world, most days, to this very day. Fickle crowds on the look-out for some poor soul who can be commissioned to sort life out for us. Some poor soul who’ll be clobbered – maybe crucified – if it turns out they’re not all they’re cracked up to be – a condition, an imminent state of affairs, for crowd-acclaimed messiahs, for scapegoats appointed by malcontents, that’s guaranteed certainty. Fickle crowds, religious capitals, fickle (some might say dim-witted) churches are not always very nice places to be. (To a new parish priest in this Diocese, a few years ago: “Well, be warned, you won’t be at all popular if you give a sermon. On Easter Sunday you’re supposed to read out the names of everyone who’s given a lily!”) …
Christmas – Holy Week – Easter, year-in, year-out, another round of Church busy. Bishops, priests, you and me, what are we all hoping to see? Will we cheer? Will we mean it when we “sing Hosanna” – and if so, what for? Will we welcome this odd-looking “King” one minute and then in the next bolt the door? Who’s being crucified this week? What’s our “Holy Week” going to be for? Will it turn out to have been a challenge to our own fickleness? Will we blush and protest too much that we waved no palm, we were never hoodwinked, carried away, never, ever, meant anyone, anywhere, any harm?
I’m more than a little interested in these questions because I both love and – at times – hate the Church with great passion. Even after a lifetime’s close involvement I’ve been shocked and sickened by some of the responses to the truly Christ-like Archbishop Rowan’s appointment to what must surely be a dream job for him. Soon it’ll be someone else’s turn to sit in Augustine’s Chair:
Next time, could we please have an Archbishop of Canterbury who believes and articulates both privately and publicly, confessional Anglican faith and morals? …
wrote one correspondent to the Church Times of 23rd March – inducing stomach-ache in me from that day to this. May the Lord God come to the aid of Rowan’s successor, and that right early, but I give notice that I think my heart might break if such a person starts glibly bleating about “Bible-believing Christians” because they’d almost certainly count me – a “let’s take the Bible seriously” kind of a Christian – out of their respectable “Bible-believing” society – and many thousands more of us would be all lined-up to see another enormous exodus out of the pews, to heaven knows where, anywhere would do, “just so long as it’s not a church”. Goodness there’d be a lot of palm-waving on enthronement day though, and plenty of Make way, make way …
More than a little interested in what Holy Week’s going to be for, because, being a parish priest, there’s no avoiding the dark side of Christian communities, my own included. One of the sadder aspects of the life of a vicar concerns the number of awful stories – all clerical ears must quickly get used to hearing – about the disloyalty, cruelty and vain-glorious fantasy engaged in by some who would count themselves “pillars” and numbered amongst “the great and the good”. One of our ‘treasures’ recently announced, spittingly, “I hate baptisms!”. One of the guests at said Baptism asked me “aren’t Christians supposed to model The Good Life – life in all its abundance? God help me. If that guy’s the model I’ll stick to the golf course, but thanks very much anyway. Even I can see that you’re really trying. Such a shame that a few half-wits spoil the whole.”
Holy Week will have rendered Christ’s Church very great service indeed if, come Easter Sunday, the “half-wits” among us, myself included amongst these, had spent a little time examining our dim-wittedness, examining the words we sing and say and pray, blushing a little at the ridiculousness of our fickle palm-waving and bureaucratic busy-bodied-ness, and asking what Jesus of Nazareth could possibly have been modelling, could possibly have been getting at if it turned out to be true that he said “you will do greater works than these” and “I am the Way”.
Church Times preview in my email Inbox promises an interview in tomorrow’s paper with ‘after-religionist’ Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh. Thank God and hooray. That’s the first piece I’ll turn to. The title alone of his Doubts and Loves tells me that this man, at least, knows something about the road to Calvary, and quite a bit about Resurrection – along the pathways of “a more excellent way”.
**
ALIMENTOS GRATIS
The videos in this blog are great FULL SCREEN. Click the four arrows button before you click PLAY …
TIME TO GET OUT THE FACULTY APPLICATION FORMS AGAIN! – we don’t have pews in my parish church, but (what do you think?) I reckon we’ll have to dispose of the chairs! Our Growth Action Planning is bringing me to my knees every day. And on every occasion I implore “what are we here for?” – a question addressed first and foremost to the Fount and Source of my life (and of ALL life) – and then echoed dozens of times in my daily encounters with other human beings – some of them churchpeople, many of them not. Some of them women, some men, some teenagers and young children. Some gay, some straight. Some “rich” and “powerful”, some “poor” and “without hope”.
Each and every day I encounter what Richard Holloway calls simply DOUBTS AND LOVES. Each and every day I encounter people who can make neither head nor tail of a Church in / of England that preaches “All are welcome” in the same space and with the same breath put to use in keeping huge tranches of the population either out or “in their proper place”. (Maggi Dawn, among others, has posted observations about the two clerical gentlemen who have recently been in the headlines for their enthusiam for the Scriptural text “Women submit to your husbands” – that have been described variously as “hilarious” and “tragic”. I’m hard pressed to see the “hilarious” myself.)
Every day I encounter fellow Christians who are staggering along the road beneath the weight of the millstones around their necks. “I don’t believe in closing churches” I hear a church leader cry. Lucky old you I shout back. I DO believe in closing dead ones. I DO believe in a gospel that shouts from the rooftops “stop living the lie”. 500 seater mausoleums are choking the life blood out of the dozen people who sit in so many of them for a not altogether very inviting hour a week, the people who are pouring their ever decreasing resources straight down the drain of the temple’s voracious appetite … with not a soul willing to challenge the idolatry involved … and a “gospel” that’s so much more to do with who needs to be kept out than with those who ought to be encouraged to “get in”.
I’m haunted, still, by the cruel irony of the sight and sound of the Lambeth Bishops assembled in our beloved Mother Church in England, heartily singing “All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place” – either not knowing, or having “just forgotten for a moment”, or (surely not) having chosen to ignore, the plain truth of that day: that some were not welcome, some were not welcome, some were not welcome in that place.
God help me! I’d love to see every church building in the land packed to capacity, filled with a thankful people, of every race and creed and colour and gender, gathered to give praise to our life-giving, life-enhancing, compassionate, forgiving, welcoming Creator. And that kind of growth doesn’t arise out of box ticking exercises. That kind of growth doesn’t start with an interest in numbers. That kind of growth doesn’t arise out of “evangelical” proclamations of a “good news” that’s actually bad news for many people, and that in plain sight. That kind of growth doesn’t arise out of the kind of barking preaching that insists that people must “opt in”.
That kind of growth arises when women and children and men have been helped (by countless gifts and means – churchy and unchurchy) to understand that GOD has “opted in” FOR THEM. God has breathed life into the very dust out of which every atom in the Universe comes into being. And still breathes it. That kind of growth arises of out “two or three (or maybe – “in Christ” an apostolic 12) gathered together in my name” … knowing that they’ve one heck of a lot in their numbers-saturated lives to be thankful for.
Now I guess I’ve no choice but to submit a faculty application for getting shut of our (perhaps 500 and frequently sat-upon) chairs. And I wouldn’t be overly hopeful of having one granted. But I can at least ask “please stop asking me to manage my church” … though I’m NOT completely thick, and I believe that with customary clarity Nick Baines makes the point about false dichotomies very well indeed …
There are some in the church who wish to divide the words ‘pastoral’ and ‘managerial’. Apparently, Tom Butler is a managerial bishop – and some have accused me of being the same. Well, I see it as a compliment in one sense. Why? Because the dichotomy between ‘pastoral’ and ‘managerial’ is a false one – and a dangerous one. What some people mean by ‘pastoral’ (when asking for it in a bishop) is someone who won’t challenge, who is malleable and won’t interfere too much. But pastoral care begins with getting the administration, communication and ‘business’ right: how do you respect someone who says they care for you pastorally when they then double-book you, fail to reply to letters or emails and don’t do what they promise to do?
A bishop is called to be an accountable steward of the resources of people and stuff/things. He is not called primarily to be ‘nice’ or popular. If niceness and popularity follow, then that is fine; but episcopal leadership and ministry are not good for people who want to be everybody’s friend. The alternative to good management of the resources God gives us is, presumably, bad management. Can anybody show me how bad management equates to good pastoral care?
via Nick Baines’s Blog.
… but really: I feel less called to manage “my” church and more to love her. That’s why I owe a profound debt of gratitude to Fr Roger Clarke, one of the finest parish priests in our diocese, who sent me a link to these stunning videos from St Gregory’s in San Francisco. Perhaps you’ll notice the lack of chairs in the worship space. Perhaps you’ll understand the lack of them, and hopefully sense EUCHARIST going on. Holy Communion. Church growth, with action, and planning.
My wife and I are of one mind: tonight we just sang “Are you going to San Francisco?”. As soon as possible became our shared refrain. As soon as possible. And by the way, we understand now why San Francisco’s Cathedral is called simply and prophetically “Grace”. With all my heart: thanks for the lifeline, brother.
The videos in this blog are great FULL SCREEN. Click the four arrows button before you click PLAY …
:
HAPPY EASTER
HAPPY EASTER! THIS SPRING DAY is a time to celebrate new life if ever there was one, and I hope that you have time to spend with family and friends and with anyone or anything that you care about.
Who or what are you passionate about? Take a moment or two to think about that today. I’m always asking that question of people because it’s our passions that really bring us to Life.
I was talking recently to a guy who burns with a passion for new hope and new Life for inner city London. He literally breathes life and response into and out of those he engages with. A whirlwind of life-giving energy.
Then there’s the granny I know who’s been seriously ill for years but suddenly sprang back into life with the arrival of her first grand-child. She’s passionate about the little fellow. He breathes life into her. Granny breathes life into him.
And I’ve just been back to lead the Sunday worship in St Barnabas’ Hattersley where I began my ministry nearly thirty years ago. Great to meet up again with a bunch of born leaders, still burning with the same passion and enthusiasm for their neighbourhood as they were when I first met them more than a quarter of a century ago. No wonder the sun was shining!
Same applies to the Church in Cheadle where I preached in the evening. People who’d been present for the laying of the foundation stone back in 1963 were still living and loving in that Church. And they breathed Life into me.
And again, during a visit to Bramhall High School, I bumped into passion and enthusiasm for life – amongst staff and students alike. The wind of God’s Spirit is still creating, still raising up new Life.
I’m one of the luckiest blokes alive. Every day I encounter people who are the salt of the earth. People like these make the world go round and I never tire of celebrating the stories of the people who breathe Life into being.
Passionate people reflect God. Jesus Christ lived and breathed the fount and source of all Life and so it came to be that even death itself was transfigured. Even death signalled a new and bright beginning. For God is the Ultimate when it comes to passion. And before you head back to your bed tonight the source of all Life will have breathed new passion into YOU. That’s resurrection; that’s the Good Life; and that makes for a happy Easter.
PURE FM 107.8 -Thought for the Day – Sunday 12 April 2009
