Tag Archives: Holy

MIRFIELD FOR ST MARK

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GLORIOUS SOLEMN MASS for St Mark’s Day in the newly refurbished Church of the Resurrection at Mirfield today. Wonderful, wonderful singing, with a setting to the Lord’s Prayer that must have been composed in Heaven. Perfect harmony, all wonderfully understated and not a hint of musical me, me, me anywhere.

One of our ordinands, Paul Deakin (above right), is in training for the priesthood at the College of the Resurrection. Churchwardens Sue Taylor, Ralph Luxon, and Administrator Janet Ketteringham joined me on an encouragement visit. We were encouraged. Paul – and Mirfield – were the typically hospitable encouragers. Fabulous lunch … thanks to Sandra and the team.

Decluttering. I’m known for it in the parishes I’ve served. There’s quite simply nothing quite so useful as beautiful open space for facilitating beautiful open worship. The newly refurbished Lower and Upper Churches at Mirfield are models of spacious openness. There’s absolutely no mistaking what the Church was built for, no mistaking what the Community is about.

Praise my soul the King of Heaven in incense-laden atmosphere, heavy with prayer and the call to pay attention to the life and work of Evangelists, defies description. And I hope to hear the closing Organ Voluntary some day in Heaven where I imagine it will sound no less profound a note of celebration as it did today. An echoing silence enveloped the House after the closing chords and many simply sat in silence, in a renewed space, in a holy place. And then the aforementioned lunch! A proper Feast Day. My old and very spacious home church, St Mark’s Claughton, would have been proud.

click on photos to enlarge

LIGHT’S GRADATION

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EVER CHANGING LIGHT at Ullswater is among the many reasons that the lake, its surrounding fells, the sky above and the depth beneath speak to me of life itself: beautiful, natural, glorious, sometimes choppy and precarious, sometimes bright and blue, sometimes grey and dull. Enormous, and thereby quietening. And quietened brought to further experience of peace in the depths of me. Beyond me and yet within me. Whole and a glimpse of the holy. Life. Health. Peace.

BREATHING SPACE

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MY CHURCHWARDENS and I had an astonishingly creative encounter with artist Stephen Raw today – and I’m still buzzing from it. It’s a real delight that the new Arts and Faith Network in the Diocese of Chester exists to foster the (to me so very obvious) links between theology and art, between theology and the arts.

Four people encountered each other today in a literally “sparking” sort of a way. Ideas and colours, and prose and poetry, and heart speaking to heart, and light and dark, and liminal space (what pyschologists call ”a place where boundaries dissolve a little and we stand there, on the threshold, getting ourselves ready to move across the limits of what we were into what we are to be”) – made for a scintillating, life-enhancing, praise-full morning. This, for me, is giving God “worth”; proper, Christ-like, celebration of “life in all its fullness”. Worship. Richness. The beauty of holiness … in “the ordinary” that wouldn’t necessarily recognise itself as holy. Such encounters (and you can make any encounter such) afford us Breathing Space, which is to say: they are Life. And I do worship.

HERE BEFORE OUR ARRIVAL

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our Bramhall Oak this afternoon - here before our arrival

THE ARCHETYPAL ENGLISHMAN, wilting in the heat of this extraordinary afternoon, I watched the “Vicarage Oak” standing unperturbed in majesty just soaking it all up. And I was filled with admiration for the great tree’s stature, strength, roots, trunk and many branches, and meditated for a space on “our” oak’s having been here for a long, long time before our arrival. All of which brought Fr Bede Griffiths to mind again, and sent me back to the front-of-house cool of my study in search of Max Warren (1904-1977) – one-time General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society who wrote, out of his own oak-like stability, roots, trunk, branches and deep wisdom:

When we approach the man of another faith than our own it will be in a spirit of expectancy to find how God has been speaking to him and what new understandings of the grace and love of God we may ourselves discover in this encounter. Our first task in approaching another people, another culture, another religion, is to take off our shoes, for the place we are approaching is holy. Else we may find ourselves treading on men’s dreams. More serious still, we may forget that God was here before our arrival.

Amen! Though I want to note that I’m sure that Max Warren would use gender-free language today, for new understandings of the grace and love of God are discovered in encounters with oak trees, and – as Fr Bede would have it – with atheists, and with all women and men. And all this discovering, and all of life’s multifarious, marvellous and extraordinary encounters began long before the Vicarage Oak had taken the shape of an acorn, and aeons before I was a twinkle in my parents’ eye …

SAINTS AND FATHEADS

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Ann Hyde prepares to be ordained Deacon

I DROVE MY NEW COLLEAGUE over to Bishop’s House this morning, and drove home with a full heart, praying a bit, and hoping a lot, for Ann and for all who are preparing to be ordained this weekend. I pray they’ll have a good retreat, one and all. Whatever they hear there will live on in their hearts for the rest of their lives; along with Sunday’s episcopal bidding, already well rehearsed:

In the name of our Lord, we bid you remember the greatness of the trust in which you are now to share: the ministry of Christ himself, who for our sake took the form of a servant. Remember always with thanksgiving that the people among whom you will minister are made in God’s image and likeness. In serving them you are serving Christ himself, before whom you will be called to account. You cannot bear the weight of this calling in your own strength, but only by the grace and power of God. Pray therefore that your heart may daily be enlarged and your understanding of the Scriptures enlightened. Pray earnestly for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Elation, I remember,  at my Deacon’s Retreat in 1982, alongside a gnawing terror that came upon me suddenly. Neither the years of training, nor the cathedral rehearsal, prepare you for the day: “we bid you remember the greatness of the trust”. Glory be! This is serious, serious stuff. About as serious as serious gets. And seriousness has remained. But so too elation.

Amongst the joys and the sorrows, trials and tribulations, great faith and lost faith, hectic round and R S Thomas’ absence of clamour, a theological twinkle has remained a constant companion:  Geoffrey Paul, on the occasion of his Enthronement as  sixth Bishop of Bradford, in 1981, said

I don’t find faith any easier than any of you, and must echo the words of the epileptic boy’s father in a modern translation: ‘Lord, I believe but not enough.’ I shall want to do everything I can to help you to believe in practice what you say you believe, and I shall rely greatly on your faith and love and prayers to help me in my unbelief, so that by enlarging the area of believing, we may give God room to demonstrate his strange Christalmightiness in our midst.

And then, being a Christian is a matter of belonging to Christ with those who are his, and of course there is no way of belonging to Christ except by belonging, gladly and irrevocably, to all that marvellous and extraordinary ragbag of saints and fatheads who make up the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

The Enthronement Sermon, in The Pattern of Faith, an exposition of Christian doctrine by Geoffrey Paul, Churchman Publishing, 1986, page 135

And all who heard him knew that he was a holy bishop, and serious, and humane, and Christ-like and absolutely-hit-the-nail-on-the-head-dead-right. Encouragement there for retreatants tonight. Elated and serious, “remember the greatness” … gladly and irrevocably you’re to be marvellous and extraordinary, in company with all God’s people, both a saint and a fathead. Thank God,  and sing alleluia!