Remembrance 2009

Posted on 09/11/2009 by Rambling Rector

November and remembrance go together, unfortunately and sadly. Remember the stupidity of warfare. Remember how killing never achieves anything other than increased bitterness. Maybe what we really, really want is forgiveness. We need to forgive the wrongs of others. Let go of them, without retribution. Resentments in you and me don’t hurt the person that did us wrong—they hurt ourselves. They grow inside, a cancer of the mind, making us bitter and twisted. As surely as any malignancy, they destroy us. What’s the point in that? And we need to forgive ourselves for the daft things we’ve done. If the Divine Lord is a headmaster who insists on the punishment fitting the crime, then I’m give up this vicaring malarkey and become a pagan. I like Cardinal Hume’s image of God: someone into whose ear you can whisper all the things you’re afraid and ashamed to tell anyone else, and know that you will not be rejected. Like the gracious father of the two sons (one ‘prodigal’, the other mean). So whisper your shame and regrets, throw the past behind you and move on, resolved to withstand evil.

The poppies of Flanders fields appeared because the trenches and tanks of warfare churned up the ground and provoked dormant seeds to life. We can hope that the turmoil of confronting grief and resentments will allow dormant seeds to flower within us. Who knows what wonderful things might result? This is healing. It’s not about medical cure, but about accepting the truth of the situation we’re in and gathering strength to move on. This I know for certain: we can’t move on until we acknowledge the reality of where we start from, and identify what we really, really want. And that takes me back to the beginning of this month’s ramble. Jesus said what do you want me to do for you? Ask and you will receive.

Clarity

Posted on 09/09/2009 by Rambling Rector

My favourite weather is cold and sunny—Scandinavian weather I call it, however inaccurate that may be. I like cool breezes, the nip in the air. I like the clear skies where ‘you can see clearly now the rain has gone’. Well actually, the rain hasn’t gone, and I don’t even mind that. When you’ve grown up around Penrith, and got soaked most mornings walking the mile or so from King Street bus stop to the Grammar School, you get used to rain, and you realise pretty soon that once you’re wet through (after about 20 seconds, I recall), you don’t get any wetter, and before long you dry out. Anyway, back to the plot. Cold and sunny, good views, a nip in the air, a call to action if you want to keep warm. And at this time of year, lovely colourful leaves. I prefer this to the sweaty heat and hazy, lazy days of summer. I like being able to see into the distance. This could be a cue for writing trite rubbish about how life is like a journey, but you can see that for yourselves, so I won’t.

What’s all this got to do with the sort of stuff the Rector should write in the monthly magazine? I’ve no idea: it’s stream-of-consciousness garbage that comes into my head. Although, maybe it does have something to do with the need for having some idea of where we’re headed. This is a need for hope. Not that things will get better, but that things might get better, and that we can do stuff to try and help things get better. It involves differentiating between what we can change and what we can’t (I find this difficult, railing on about the intractable). The need to try to manage as best we can, and help those who can’t. I hear people say ‘they should do something about ….’ Why leave it to others? Perhaps we should, not they should.

It involves, too, the need to take responsibility for ourselves. If I curl up in a corner and say ‘woe is me for nobody cares’, then perhaps it’s something do with the fact that I curled up in a corner, so what else can I expect? On the way to a meeting in Ashbourne the other day I heard someone telling the airwaves that s/he had been ‘attacked’, and because s/he was very drunk indeed, s/he’d been unable to resist. S/he said ‘I’ve a right to get very drunk if I want.’ Well, if we’ve the right to get incapably drunk, we’ve a duty to accept the consequences—the possibility of attack, alcoholic liver disease, and so on. To take responsibility for our actions. We, church and community, have a duty to tend those we find who need tending. The question is … where do our responsibilities stop? Are we justified in interfering in the lives of someone else, or some other country, on the basis of our own personal standards. Is there a universal standard we can use as a guide. Well, given that I’m the Vicar, you know what I’ll say, so I won’t say it. And what was Jesus’ message? There were lots, and they certainly include taking responsibility for yourself. The most challenging, partly because it involves not feeling sorry for yourself, is that we should love our …. neighbour? Well yes, but all the faiths say that. What did Jesus say? He said ‘love your enemies.

Making new

Posted on 10/04/2009 by Rambling Rector

It’s good to get away. In America I was reminded that they see the world differently. It’s refreshing to realize that our obsessions are just that—our obsessions. They are not shared by other people or other nations, who have different concerns and different ways of looking at the world. It is always worth trying to see a situation through someone else’s lenses, and trying to imagine how circumstances must be affecting different people in different ways. It lifts us out of the trenches we dig for ourselves, the trenches that no matter how comfortable we make them bear little relationship to what we see if we look over the edges into the real world. However reluctant we might be to do so, we might be pleasantly surprised by the view. The winds of change can be quite bracing. Change is in the air economically. We may not like it, but we can’t avoid it. To live is to change, and not to change is to die. Let go of your certainties, and accept that you can’t predict the future and you can’t in any meaningful way control it. You can’t use your will to control what is going on in the cells of your body, and you never know when some bodily process will start something that changes you. This is a hard message for people who find change a challenge. But go easy on yourself and accept the glorious uncertainty of life.

There is a renewal in all this, and the key to it is to live in the present. Our Lord’s teaching again and again emphasizes that we need to do just this. Learn from the past certainly, but don’t live in it. Look to the future, but don’t waste time laying up treasures. Live now, in the moment. This, actually, is what eternal means. When we hear ‘everlasting life’ in church services, we often get the wrong idea, and it would be better, and more accurate a translation of the Greek, to use the word eternal rather than everlasting. As the last Bishop of Derby said, it’s not quantity or length of time that matters, but quality. Eternal, timeless, out of time, in the present, Divine. Thy kingdom come on earth, here and now. When you live with the Divine, in the present, he writes, ‘you see the world differently, it shapes your values, it determines what is important to you, it brings much joy, and you face mystery, suffering, tragedy in a different way.’ Trust the teaching of Jesus: live in the present moment, and do your best in that moment. We can do no more, and we need do no more. In one sense this is easy to do, and in another it’s extraordinarily difficult when we are surrounded by the petty irritations that life throws up day by day, when we see the injustice that surrounds us, and when we are governed, as we are, by faulty behaviour patterns bred into us by our upbringings and prejudices. But see all these for what they are, and trust and hope.

This is the Easter message: trust and hope. To trust is to have faith. ‘I believe in …’ would perhaps be better rendered (and, again, a better translation) as ‘I trust in …’. New life follows pain and betrayal and tragedy and death. We have eggs at Easter because eggs contain embryos—the seeds of the new life. In mammals like us, embryos grow in the uterus, and in a real sense the church at its best has been viewed for 2000 years as a uterus that nourishes and sustains new life. Too often the church is seen as somewhere that preserves the past, but such an attitude has nothing to do with Christian teaching. Be ready to grow, to change, to receive the Easter message and go forward in glorious uncertainty to meet whatever the world throws at you. Live eternally. Live in the present. Be joyful. Have fun, and enable others to do likewise.

Rant and remorse

Posted on 09/04/2009 by Rambling Rector

Last month I wrote about the apparent lack of humility in bankers and others, and the outrage caused by their taxpayer-funded bonuses. While I have no great wish to get a reputation for immoderate ranting that’s any greater than the one I already have, I have more to say. It was interesting when we were in San Antonio to listen to US news, and to talk to Texans, and hear of their anger about exactly the same issue. If anything, I think the desolation and outrage are even greater in the US than here, but there seems a greater willingness there for politicians to upbraid the bonus-takers in public and speak on behalf of those they represent. What can we do about this? Now I suppose I’ll have to put these remarks into some theological framework, so here goes. We all make mistakes. We all are greedy. We all want the advantages of investment dividends if we are lucky enough to have money invested, and our pension funds depend on them. In this regard, we are all complicit in the problems that afflict us, and our children and grandchildren will have to bear the burden of the mistakes our generation has made. I accept all that, and I can’t and don’t condemn anyone for faults that also afflict me. However, the arrogance and lack of remorse that we see in public life at the moment is something beyond all this. According to the Gospels, Jesus was censorious about very little, but always, always, always about hypocrisy and complacency. Even Josef Fritzl seems to have acknowledged, eventually, the enormity of his actions after being confronted by his daughter’s account of their effects on her and her children, holed up for 24 years in a damp and mouldy cellar. Even Fritzl.

Children, childlikeness, Christmas

Posted on 09/12/2008 by Rambling Rector

There’s an awful lot of awful news. The most awful of it all concerns the awful things that people do to children. What is it about our human nature that likes being cruel to other humans? In the rest of the animal kingdom—and look no further than the fields and the skies around us—we see creatures fighting and eating different species, but cruelty to members of the same species seems to be a particularly human characteristic. Some people say that this is what happens when there are too many of us cooped up in one place. If we’re honest, there are seeds of this behaviour in all of us, even if it manifests itself no more strongly than playing Scrabble as if it was a world war. Actually, I know someone whose aggression in Scrabble knows no bounds, evil eyes glinting in triumph as ‘X’ is edged on to a triple letter score. The Bible is full of stories about the good and bad in our nature, some of them very exciting and fantastic stories that influenced Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings—which is all about the battles that go inside every one of us: virtue versus sin, if you like.

The Bible also tells a story that is relevant at this time of year: the Christmas story. The story of how Mary allows the Divine spirit to grow within her to give birth to the perfect human nature is a model for what we can allow to happen in us. The story of how ordinary people knelt at the crib to honour a child is a model for how we might all try to honour the childlike characteristics that life on this planet tends to knock out of us: wonder, trustfulness, eagerness, willingness to explore and try new things, and a lack of guile. It is one of the privileges of being in this job to see these characteristics in the children of the four schools I regularly visit. How do we adults recover this childlikeness—which is entirely different from childishness? (I see lots of childishness in people who should know better, including myself.) The story of kings from far off lands kneeling by the crib tells the world that the Christian message is for everybody, not just the select few who were there at the time. The church celebrates this event on the first Sunday in January: the Feast of the Epiphany, a Greek word that means ‘showing to all’. Wise men gave gifts to the Christ-child, and that’s why we give gifts to each other at this time of year: every gift given and received is a recollection of the gifts given and received by the crib in Bethlehem.

The best gift that I can give, as it says in the last line of the carol ‘In the bleak midwinter’ is my heart— myself. If I aim to recover the childlikeness that cynicism and world-weariness have brought up on me, if I try and see how best to work for the common good, laying aside my own likes and dislikes, then I will be well on the road to ‘loss of self’. If I give my ‘self’ to the Lord, it no longer burdens me. This renunciation is something that all the major religions aim for, and something that’s at the core of Buddhism. This should come as no surprise: the Dalai Lama’s reverence for Jesus’ teaching is well known. There’s a school of thought that the kings from the east who brought gold, frankincense and myrrh (nowhere in the Bible does it say there were three of them) might have been Zoroastrians or even Hindus (Hinduism then was about as old as Christianity is now). Let’s resolve to try and build on the childlikeness that is within us all and be less self-obsessed, more open, more trusting, more willing to leave the rut we’re in and make the most of what we’ve got—all for the sake of the common good. As the economic situation gets worse there might be all sorts of unimagined benefits.

My theme is memory

Posted on 09/11/2008 by Rambling Rector

It would be easy to start this piece with a rant about the economy. But I am so incandescent with anger at the greed, pride and evil that has brought us to where we are, and in which we are all complicit, that maybe it should wait until I’ve cooled down. All I will say is that it’s the job of the church to seek out those who are hungry, homeless and ill. Point me to them, or them to me.

On 18 October, I went to a posh hotel in Nottingham to speak at the 25-year reunion of doctors I taught back in 1978-9. It was a lovely evening, and they received me with graciousness, generosity, and more affection and respect than I think I deserve. It brought back to me many memories of them, of our exploits when I was younger and less careworn, and of aspects of my own personal journey that brings me here. It was not altogether comfortable. Memory rarely is.

On All Saints (or All Hallows) Day at the beginning of the month, the church remembers those who have inspired us throughout the centuries—and continue to do so. There’s a mistaken notion that saints never put a foot wrong, but the truth is otherwise: ‘they wrestled hard, as we do now, with sins and doubts and fears’. St Paul says that instead of the good things he wants to do, he ends up doing the bad things he doesn’t want to do. That’s true of me too—of all of us I suspect. They did daft things, silly things, glorious things, inspiring things. Like us all. What kept them going was a vision of how things might be better, an image of beauty and perfection in Christ the King. I wrote last month of the heroes we see around us every day: maybe these people should be made saints. I rather think they should. It’s a pity that the Church of England does not have the mechanism to make new saints. It’s good to remember that the saints lived life to the full, with passion and verve, and were not the dried up, pious and ‘churchy’ objects that some imagine. They were bold, daring, and courageous in the cause of the common good. They took risks. They were not comfortable people to have around. They were disturbing. Be disturbing.

The evening before All Saints (or All Hallows) day is Hallowe’en. Like many Christian festivals it took over a day in pre-Christian culture, this one marking the end of the harvest season when evil spirits responsible for a bad harvest needed to be kept at bay. Recent influences from America seem to have driven us back to these pre-Christian influences, so it’s as well to remember that the evil in the world comes not from the dead, but from the thoughts of the living—evil thoughts that grow into evil actions. Keeping in mind the saints and all who have inspired us is the beginning of the road to abolishing evil. All Souls Day comes after All Saints Day, and it’s the day when we pray and give thanks for those who have died. When we remember friends of years gone by, we are touched by a whole set of emotions. We may feel delighted at what we had. We may be saddened by what we have lost. Saying goodbye and grieving can be very difficult, taking years, decades even. It’s no good bottling up these feelings: we need to let them out, and different people have different ways of coping.

Autumn, Olympics and heroes

Posted on 09/10/2008 by Rambling Rector

Season and mists and mellow fruitfulness. Fruitfulness concerns us at this time of year, and we like it! Mists also feature, and maybe we like them less. Harvest— time is upon us, and in communities like ours, the point of harvest is pretty obvious. Some of us (I suppose I should say ‘some of you’, since I’ve never been a farmer) work very hard indeed to gather the harvest of the earth to give us our food, and food for the animals we depend on one way or another. Fruit of the earth also provide the essentials for much of the stuff we pour down our throats: tea, coffee, beer, lager, gin, whisk(e)y, … even ‘coke’ (don’t get me going on the Coca-Cola industry). So it’s understandable and proper to pause to be thankful for what the God-given earth, and God-given natural processes of the cosmos, do for us.

Imagine, though, for a moment what a city dweller who has never set foot outside the city thinks of Harvest. What about schoolchildren who think milk comes from bottles and are disgusted to find it comes from an animal’s breast? What about people who have no idea that there is a connexion between what they eat in McDonald’s and the stuff they tread in, or drops on them, when they go for walk in the fields, if they do? We can also use this time of year to celebrate the harvest of the hands, eyes, ears and brains. The skill of the craftsman who produces beautiful things; the creativity of the novelist, the painter, the musician; the brain-work of the scientist that improves our quality of life and helps us to know more about the world around us; the work of family providers who ‘harvest’ their families and enable them to make their way in the world. All this is Harvest as well—the harvest of the spirit and mind.

The Olympics have finished. Media gurus already bore us with the next ones in London that we will have to pay for. Olympic medal winners are hailed as heroes. As I go about my daily work in Barlow, Old Brampton, Cutthorpe, Holme Hall, and Linacre Woods, I see a different set of heroes. I see people who bear long-term illness. I see people who care for the long-term sick. I see people who care for family members significantly disabled since birth. I see people who look after churches, churchyards, village halls, community resources and so on—all for no material reward. I see so much generosity of spirit, and beauty of human nature, that I am ashamed at my own cynicism. I was in hospital last month with breathing difficulties, and I saw real heroes in neighbouring beds, much worse off than me, who bore truly and evidently life-threatening conditions with great dignity, calm and forbearance. All these folk are real heroes, folk who bear what has to be borne (that is the true meaning of ‘suffer’), and who’ve not had vast resources lavished on them to help them to be heroes. These real heroes light the way for others, and to these real heroes who display the divine light that is within every one of us, I say thank you.

Healing

Posted on 11/08/2008 by Rambling Rector

What is health?

Is it realistic or reasonable to expect that we’ll always feel on top form? Why should we expect the state to look after us when our own deliberate actions have brought illness upon us?

These are difficult questions that society has to grapple with. They are also relevant to Christianity, and by healing I don’t mean medical cure (anyway, cure of what? cure of being human? cure of being alive? we’re all going to die), but salving, relieving, coming to terms with, accepting, feeling at peace, being liberated from guilt, living in the moment. This, surely, is healing—being made whole.

All Christian teaching is, or should be, about healing. Every Christian encounter should be a healing encounter. We’ve lost sight of this, I think, partly because many Christian encounters in the past have been finger-wagging thou-shalt-nots, and so healing was often seen as dependent on obeying man-made rules.

Not so. We can all be channels of God’s healing grace, freely given. The response required from us who are sick is merely to say ‘yes, I accept’. As far as I can see from the Gospels, Jesus’ healings were always and only at the request of the afflicted.

How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the bulb has to want to change.

Rambling Rector Retired

Category Archives: Theology