Advent – the beginning of the Church’s year and therefore the time to make resolutions. One of mine is to get back into writing my weekly blog for the Launde Abbey website, which you will know, if you follow it, I have been an abject failure at doing for the last few weeks. Like most people, every now and again I get overtaken by the demands of my diary and certain jobs are put off. This is what has happened to the blog.

It shouldn’t be so – we all know this. None of us should be so over-committed in our work and, of course, very often what we are having to do in that work is not the creative, life-giving things but the dreary, life draining jobs. This is dangerous to us because it affects our sense of well-being, our contact with ourselves, with God and with others.

To the rescue like a knight in white armour, comes the wonderful season of Advent. It demands of us that we slow down, that we give the Spirit time to grow something new deep within us, that we watch and wait. Like a mother who does not feel the baby move within her womb until about 17 to 18 weeks, we may not sense the new life within immediately but if we watch and wait on God, if we give God time, space and attention, he will deliver.

The waiting is not a doing nothing but a conscious allowing of God to grow something in us. The expectant mother knows all the time that something is happening deep inside her. She lives both with a vital sense of the present moment, of all that is happening in her, and with anticipation of what is to come. The present and the future are held in tension. And she watches: watches for the signs of change and new life.

If you are not already preparing for the new life which is at the heart of the Advent season by giving yourself more time to watch and wait, might I suggest you put some of those dreary, life-draining jobs to one side and turn to the one thing necessary, attention to all that God wants to give in the present moment that will lead in due course to new life. Watch for it and wait.

I had the privilege last weekend to be alongside some ordinary lay Christians as they talked of their journey of faith and their understanding of Christianity. When I say “ordinary,” I mean that these were mature Christians but not people with degrees in theology. Watching and listening to them I understood afresh the meaning of the phrase “Spiritual treasure in clay pots.” (2 Corinthians 4: 7)

The treasure that shone out of them was Grace. Grace was at work in and through them and because they were offering something that they loved and which had great meaning for them their egos were not getting in the way. Despite their ordinariness, their earthiness so to speak, light was shining out of them. As it says in 2 Corinthians 4:5 “For it is not ourselves that we preach; we preach Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.”

What is this clay of which Paul writes? It is not only our outward appearance, which is in most cases unpromising of hidden greatness. Surely it is the fragility and weakness in which we carry this gift of grace and it’s potential. Everything can get in the way: our enormous need for affirmation from others, our competitiveness, our hunger for power, our vanity. The ego’s voracious appetite appears the very moment at which we do something good for God. And we all experience it. I believe it was John Bunyan who on being told how brilliant his sermon was, said, “Yes, the devil told me exactly the same thing as I came down from the pulpit!”

So even as we offer our best to the Lord we are aware of our weakness which is the temptation to trespass: to take that which does not belong to us. “Forgive us our trespasses,” we cry, trying to hold true to our calling, “And lead us not into temptation.” But at the same time this is God’s gift to us. As we give it away we are enriched, enlivened, know ourselves as gifted people.

This is the paradox of God’s grace. The more we give it away the more we have it. The more we die to ourselves, the more alive we feel. The more we struggle not to trespass and take what is not ours, the more we realise our inheritance. What an extraordinary experience this is, to be so weak and yet so strong because of a God who in his grace made himself small enough for us to hold him in our frail clay pots.

My husband and I have just returned from a great ‘city-break’ in Vienna and one of the things that struck me whilst we were there is that the Cult of Celebrity, so often bemoaned as a modern obsession is, in fact, not such a new thing.

On our first afternoon in the capital we came across the so-called ‘Sisi Museum’ in the Hofburg Palace. Sisi was the pet name of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was married at age sixteen to the Emperor, Franz Joseph, leaving her beloved childhood home and freedom in Bavaria. Sisi was, as the picture shows, very beautiful and people became obsessed with her. But in reality Sisi was deeply unhappy and became more and more reclusive and disengaged from the role she had had thrust upon her with her marriage. Upon her death from an assassin’s knife in 1898 her life took on a cult status. As I walked around her state apartments I kept being reminded of that icon of our own time, Princess Diana. In life both women were beautiful, gifted and unhappy, thrust whilst very young into the public domain and a life they were not prepared for. Both found ways of being independent; both died tragically and both became part of a cult of celebrity; more famous in death, if it were possible, than in life. It could be said they lived and died from too much attention.

Compare this then with another picture we saw in Vienna – Brueghel’s wonderful masterpiece, “Christ’s Way of the Cross.” At the centre of the huge canvas Christ carries his cross, surrounded by crowds, but no one takes any notice of him. The crowds are far too interested in having a good time, being entertained, trying the latest thing, the popular fashion, the newest cult; all, that is, except for one small group near the front of the painting. These people, obviously Christ’s family and dearest friends, are dressed in the traditional clothes of religious paintings. Everyone else in the painting is dressed in the clothes of Brueghel’s own day. It is as though Brueghel is indicting his own people for their superficiality and escapism. There in their midst, right under their very noses, something is happening that will revolutionize and transform human life, but they chose not to look, not to see. The Cult of Celebrity creates something substantial from something unreal and ephemeral for the sake of entertainment, whilst ignoring the life-giving and eternal because it is too demanding. As T.S. Eliot said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

This weekend I was told that I could choose three books out of nine to keep for my own. My two sisters would share the other six books. The books were all written by my great grandfather who in his time was a well known and popular author but with the passing of the years his books are really only read by students studying the minor Victorian novelists. I looked at the books. At first glance it was not easy to choose. There were none of the better and more famous novels amongst the group and none appeared to be of any financial value. And then I saw a handwritten inscription in one of the books that was repeated in two others. It said, “To my beloved son, Dudley, from Mother 1909.” Those were the books I chose and my heart was deeply touched.

Dudley was the grandfather I never knew; the father my father barely remembered. In 1914 Dudley, aged 21, signed up for the army. He died shortly after the end of the war as a result of wounds and TB from being in the trenches. 1909 was the year his father, my great grandfather died. I imagined my great grandmother giving the books to Dudley in the year of his father’s death as a remembrance, a keepsake – something of his father.

Thinking about my initial disappointment about none of the books being of any real cultural or material value later, I realised that I am much more pleased with this sense of being in touch with my never seen ancestors; literally in touch as I can run my finger over the signature of my great grandmother. Just as recollection in prayer at the end of the day often makes us wake up to something lovely in our day which we had not seen at the time, so this meditating on what was of value in these books makes me realise how much more special they are to me because they are, in their way, about relationship, the fundamental reason for being alive.

I come from a family of writers. The new books will go on the shelf alongside books by my mother and her mother and my father and his grandfather. These people are part of me and I am part of them and their simply being makes them of eternal value to me.

Suddenly they have gone – the Swallows and House Martins who have lived cheek by jowl with us all summer. Four weeks ago there was still a nest full of young birds right under the eaves in our courtyard. Delighted visitors drank their coffee and watched as the fearless parents flew in and out to feed their young. A week later they were fledged and went into heavy flying training. They were everywhere, swooping low on the ground, turning in the air, building and consolidating their strength and seeming to fill the Abbey grounds with their presence. It was as though the air was alive with a kind of wild but graceful energy and I thought to myself, heaven must be full of such delight.

And then they were gone; but not all at once. The majority left five days ago but it is only today that I have noticed they are nowhere to be seen. The Swallows have left for Cuba and South America and the House Martins will go to Africa and Asia – no one knows quite where, and we are left quieter and a bit bereft.

But they will return next year. These birds mate for life and are creatures of habit. So, hopefully, most of them will return if they do not die in their long and perilous journeys. In their lives we see the rhythm of the seasons. We see the mysterious, compelling and urgent need to leave their birthplace and travel far, far away to a distant land. But we also see continuity, intuition, faithfulness and perseverance undergirding everything, holding everything.

We are not so different. Watching our sons grow up and leave home, my husband and I are now aware of them turning to home again; not to re-turn to where they once were –life is still full of exploration ‘out there’, but to take their place in the pattern and rhythm of life alongside us, the older generation. Every young person must journey away from the place of birth in order to become his or herself – sometimes right away to a very distant land (as Jesus’ story of The Prodigal Son so keenly illustrates.) This time can be very hard on parents. Where has the child gone, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually as well? Sometimes it all goes “pear shaped” but generally speaking most of us respond to life’s inherent pattern of childhood dependency, journey outwards, journey home whilst still exploring and then the final discovery of the latter part of life that not only is “home where you start from” but that “the end of all our exploration is to arrive where we started and to know it for the first time.” We look forward to welcoming back our Swallows and House Martins in the Spring.

“The day lies open before us”

“The day lies open before us.” Every day these words are spoken by thousands of clergy and lay people who say Morning Prayer throughout the world.

“The day lies open before us”

There is such a beautiful invitation in those words. It is like looking at a canvas just before you put on the first stroke of paint, or those moments at school when you were given a new exercise book and you opened it at the first page: how neatly you tried to write! It is like waking up and knowing it is the holidays and you don’t have an agenda you have to fulfil or being up early in the morning when even the birds have not woken. “The day lies open before us,” full of potential, full of promise, full of hope.

Yet, how often do we get to the end of the day, or even the middle of the day, and find ourselves feeling grey, exhausted and trapped. Then the lines that come to mind are more likely to be

“Shades of the prison house begin to close

Upon the growing boy” Wordsworth

Why is life like this? Why are the good intentions of the morning to be open to all that God wants to give us in our day, so quickly undermined by what that same day throws at us?

It is, of course, not what comes at us but how we respond to it that changes our perception of our day and there are all sorts of self-help books that are aimed at empowering us and giving us a sense of control over our lives, and some of them are useful. But where most of them fall down for me is that they leave God out of the picture altogether. They are quick fix techniques aimed at problem solving. They leave out the big questions that underlie so much of our dismay but are also there for our growth, healing and understanding if only we could see it.

The bible is very clear:

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” Proverbs 9:10

We need the God dimension to makes sense of ourselves and our world. Human wisdom is not enough. We will always have good days and bad days. Things will get on top of us; we will feel stressed, angry, overwhelmed and resentful at times; but as we come daily to the source of wisdom, God, insight will grow, we will become like deeply rooted trees, full of life and movement but not tossed about by every passing wind. And we will find there are more days than not that we feel hope and anticipation as we say, “The day lies open before us.”

Learning by heart

 

It was a beautiful autumnal morning as I walked across to chapel first thing.  A mist hung over the fields with a hazy sun shining through low on the horizon.  The apple trees stood in the orchard loaded with their fruit.  The wood pigeons cooed, some far away, some near, and after the extraordinarily busy day yesterday (the Launde Abbey “Fun Day”) when the world and his wife seemed to be visiting, the whole world seemed today to be wrapped in peace, softness and quietness.

 

As I walked the words of the first poem I ever had to learn in secondary school came into my head, John Keat’s, “To Autumn.”

 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

 

And as I said the words over I was glad, as I always am to find in them a response to what I was seeing and feeling.  I thought of one or two other poems I had been made to learn at school or come to though my father (a great lover of poetry) and how through the years I had come appreciate the way that words, like music, come back to us and enrich us because we have learnt them “by heart.”

 

It is an interesting phrase, “learning by heart.”  We don’t, of course, really learn by heart.  We learn by rote, by repeating something over and over again until our memory stores it.  But in the process some words call out to us and delight us and become etched into our feelings.  The pulling of these words out of our store of memories at opportune moments enriches our experience and widens and deepens our hearts’ response.  We greet the words as old friends we have not seen for some time.

 

Faith is all about learning by heart.  What we first learn as story becomes carved into our very being – and if we do not learn “by heart” as well as “by head” ours will be an empty experience.  Faith, too, has words we learn by heart: words that bring strength and comfort to difficult times and express love and praise when our hearts are so full we want to sing out loud.  When I was fifteen and lost my mother I was greatly comforted by Christ’s promise in the last verse of Matthew’s gospel,

 

And remember I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

 

I would repeat it to myself often as I waited for sleep at night.

 

The special power of words engraved into the memory is that the heart and mind over time have time to ponder and meditate over them.  Particularly with words of scripture as the mind turns them over the heart leaps to understanding so that old, well known passages bring out of their store new, life-giving things.  Learnt by heart words long known continue to have power, not least to surprise us.

  Re-naming Sin

The word “sin” was a no-no with the last Confirmation group I led. Within the group were five people who had been brought up in Roman Catholics families, one of whom was from an Eastern European background and two from Irish. As soon as I used the word “sin” they almost visibly withdrew into a rather defensive and angry position. When I asked why the answer came that they had been loaded down with a sense of “sin” during their upbringing and if the Anglican Church was going to do the same, they wanted none of it. We had to find other ways of naming “sin.”

This week I talked to a woman, once a committed churchgoer, who had also rejected the Church because of its language about various things. Its emphasis on “sin” was one of them. Yet as she shared her vision about who God is in language she felt comfortable with, there was absolutely nothing that I couldn’t accept as orthodox Christian belief, but put in a rather refreshing way.

As I prepared to say the Confession in the Eucharist today, I thought of these people and all the ways I had “sinned” in my understanding of that word, this week. During this last week I have on occasions quite consciously turned away from God, been resistant to him, been half-hearted in what I have done on his behalf, fallen short (and sometimes more than short) in thought, word and deed in my dealings with other people. But I was rescued a long time ago from the heavy, heavy burden that so many people seem to carry because of this word “sin” and I think I was rescued because that word and lots of other theological words, were explained well to me along with the loving, forgiving nature of God. Sin was explained like this.

Imagine you have a bow and arrow and you are shooting at a target. You aim towards the bull’s eye, but if your aim is just an iota off by the time it reaches the target it will be way off the bull’s eye and might even miss the target altogether. This “missing the mark” is what sin is. Once I understood this I also comprehended how temptation to do something which is not in the end good for us, so often comes wrapped up in what seems acceptable. We can think we are travelling in the right direction but something pulls us off course.

The conversation with the lady this week reminded me that there are many serious seekers out there who are prevented from penetrating deeply into the gospel by religious language. It made clear to me yet again that I have to learn to listen much better to their language about God and their longing for him rather than insist on using my own. Perhaps we all need to realise that some of the religious language we habitually use doesn’t mean the same to others as to us. Some of it carries such loaded cultural history that it wounds people rather than rescues them and portrays an image of God that is not loving but condemning. No wonder they run a mile.

Trusting in a Promise

In the television programme, “The ‘A’ Team,” one of the characters, John “Hannibal” Smith had a catch-phrase, “I love it when a plan comes together.” Every now and then I have the same feeling when everything in a service comes together, or even a whole day.

We had such a day at Launde Abbey yesterday with two joyful celebrations. In the morning Eucharist we thanked God for the Golden Wedding anniversary of a couple who were staying with us. In the afternoon we baptised a baby. What kicked the whole day into gear for me were the Sunday readings which were about God’s promise to Abram (Abraham) and Abram’s response of faith and trust, which was then reflected upon by the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews. As I researched and reflected on the readings I realised how a promise changes the future.

When two people stand up in front of their family and friends and say “I will” in response to the invitation to love and cherish each other and to remain faithful to that vow or promise through thick and thin until death, they are changing the future not just by their intention for the future but by the very act in the present. All is changed by the love, hope and faithfulness that is expressed in that public declaration. Courage, confidence and freedom are the gifts that the union brings when a person is prepared to say to another, “Out of all the people in the world who I could chose to love and spend my life with, I chose you.” How impressive is that when you think about it!

A promise is not material. Just as Abram could not count the stars in the sky which God invited him to look at, promising him that his descendents would be more than them, so any promise or vow has elements of the unknown. I may promise to love you in sickness and in health, but how that love may be called forth, what we may have to face together, no one can say. The point is that the promise is something we lean into: something that we make work day by day because we have faith in the one who made the promise to us.

Baptism is similar. We make statements of intent rather than promises but underneath all that we do is our belief in the love of God for the unique individual who is being presented for baptism. If parents and Godparents can receive the promise God has made, to be with the child “until the end of time,” if they can lean into that promise of future care for the child, taking seriously their commitment to bring them up to know their loving Father, then the child in turn may have the opportunity to understand the commitment He has made to them. They will grow in confidence, courage and freedom because they know God loves them.

Promises change the future in a tangible way. They change not just the people who make them but the community in which those people live. Promises can, of course, be bad as well as good; they can lead to damaging, hurtful actions where the intention is corrupt. Promises can also, with the best of intentions, go wrong. But whatever mess we might make of our lives, God’s promise to love and care for us is unchangeable. He does not promise that we will never suffer but he promises he will be there in sickness and in health, in riches and in poverty. If we live this promise into the future we find it is true.

Outrageous Hospitality

 

I thought I knew, at least technically, what hospitality was before I came to Launde Abbey but a few months here has taught me that I have a great deal to learn.  Hospitality is not just about offering a welcome, good food, kindness and a lovely bedroom in which to stay the night.  Hospitality is first and foremost about an interior attitude, a generosity of spirit that has real intentionality about it.

 

At Launde Abbey we welcome different individuals and different groups almost daily.  Every guest is unique.  Every group has its own set of unique needs.  The differences inevitably set up tensions inside us but I believe these tensions are there for us to work with creatively and in doing so to begin to understand the outrageous hospitality that is the essence of the gospel.

 

What I noticed was happening inside me after I had lived here for a few months was that I was taking on ownership of Launde Abbey in an emotional way.  This was hardly surprising.  I live here, this is my home.  It is also a space made sacred by our visitors’ desires, needs, attitudes and actions.  It is a place that needs to be safeguarded and as such I felt it should be treated in such and such a way.  But this is where I realised I needed to be careful.  I was becoming possessive of the place and in my attitude I was in danger of becoming the church “police.”   I didn’t realise it but I was closing down inside myself to some of the people who come.  I was not being outrageously hospitable.

 

Some groups are Christian in a way that I recognise and feel at home with.  Others are travelling in a way that I don’t always understand.  Some people love silence.  Others long for communication.  Some people come to Launde avowedly  “non-Christian”, “non-spiritual,”  or “non-religious.”  They simply want to use the facilities which they appreciate usually very much.  Others simply don’t appear to want or value what I value.  This I recognised can hurt.  It can feel like a rejection of myself. 

 

But I am now recognising that the invitation Christ offers in his gospel is to look beyond the superficial understanding of hospitality which I spoke of in the opening paragraph.  In his life Jesus opened his arms wide to all those who didn’t play the religious game as those who ran the organisation thought they should.  He healed on the Sabbath.  He allowed his disciples to pick ears of corn on the Sabbath and eat them, to eat with unwashed hands.  Jesus touched lepers, ate with those who most certainly would have made us feel very uncomfortable had we lived then, and washed dirty sweaty feet.  He absolutely and consciously broke the accepted social rules of hospitality and in his teaching and behaviour went straight to the heart of the matter.  True hospitality lives in the place where we put ourselves out – out of our comfort zones and into a place of vulnerability.  True hospitality is putting myself in another person’s skin: seeing the world though their eyes.  True hospitality is in the heart.  It is the conscious and intentional opening of ourselves to the other and making the stranger the friend.