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.

We’d quite like to apologise

Posted on 09/03/2009 by Rambling Rector

Picture the scene: as you approach St Pancras, there’s a prerecorded announcement apologising for the late arrival of the train. Or perhaps when you, in the phone queue for 20 minutes and ready to slit your throat, hear ‘all our customer consultants [ugh!] are busy; we apologise for the delay.’ The obvious insincerity of it all. How can a prerecorded message apologise for anything? Why do they apologise when they don’t do anything about it? Apology is devalued.

Now we have the bank bosses apologising one day for being substantially responsible for the mess we’re in, and the next announcing their obscene bonuses—in large part now funded, boys and girls, from your taxes and mine. And even if they forgo them this year, poor darlings, is it back to ‘normal’ next? Then we hear that the man who warned them years ago that their ways were likely to bring disaster was gagged as a troublesome whistleblower. What do they think an apology is? Just words to get them off the hook? Apology is more than devalued. It’s no wonder that Monty Don is said to be incandescent with rage. So am I. These people have disgraced themselves—not for what they did (we all do foolish things), but for trying to wriggle out of it and carry on as before. Japanese businessmen in such a position have been known to take their own lives. Apologies are pointless, indeed inappropriate, unless they’re part of a change of heart and behaviour.

There is too much in our daily lives that may be legal, but feels plain wrong. It’s worryingly likely to drive people into the arms of extremist groups. Who listens to us? Do you remember what Gandhi did in order to hasten the end of the British Raj in India? He called for a nationwide day of prayer and fasting, and the country came to a halt. I wonder …

There is another way. I’m talking about repentance, or penitence. It has nothing to do with grovelling, but everything to do with changing direction, and making the effort to do so. Not for the sake of any reward we might or might not get in the future, but because we’re more likely to feel at peace with ourselves here and now. This year, March falls entirely in Lent, and Lent is traditionally about just this. Lent: lengthening days, getting brighter, a time when we take stock and make plans for the coming months. New growth—and growth is change. Biology is doing it as seeds sprout and animals are born.

Some people think it’s necessary, or desirable, to give up treats for Lent. Let them at it, I say. Pretty pointless. If folk want to wear a hair shirt, they’re welcome. My suggestion for Lent is to get rid of stuff you don’t need any more. If you’ve not used it for the last 10 years, you’re not going to need it in the next 10. And when you’ve let it go, start letting go of prejudices and attitudes that restrict your view of the world. This is giving up something for Lent that is worthwhile. It has nothing to do with making yourself miserable, but everything to do with freeing yourself up for delights you never knew were out there. It’s about losing yourself, being transformed, so that the real you shines out, free of the mask of expectation, or the cloak of ‘tribe’ membership, or the facade of pretending to be what you’re not. Let go.

Sacred space

Posted on 09/02/2009 by Rambling Rector

As the minister of the established church (church and state loosely linked together), I have a legal duty to perform the baptism, wedding and funeral of any parish resident. I may not say ‘no’. I’m always honoured to be a part of these events, and welcome people without reservation. Many of the weddings and baptisms are for people who don’t live in the parishes. Some have family connexions, but some choose these churches simply because there’s something about them that attracts. Why do people who’ve no tradition of church attendance, and intend to have none, still want to come to church for these events? The cynic might say that it’s simply that churches make attractive settings for photographs, as is indeed the case. But I think there’s more to it than that.

There’s something about the need for a solemn marking of rites of passage. Something about the need to take yourself away to a special place on a special day; something about using words and rituals that are unlike those used everyday. A setting apart. The words used in church language for this are sacred and consecrate, and the words consecrate is related to secret—secret not in the sense not hidden, but of special.

There’s something deeply human about all this: a setting apart in deed and word of important events. It reaches back to the origins of our evolution. Look at animal behaviour—and we are animals. Look at brain biology: such events become set apart in our memories, carefully tidied away in a part of the brain that is peculiarly resistant to the diseases of memory that afflict many of us as we get older. Memories secreted away.

The wish to have special events marked by sacred rituals in sacred spaces means that some wedding couples are prepared to attend services regularly for at least 6 months in order to fulfil the legal requirements if they have no other connexion to the parish. This is quite a commitment. Some of them must like what they find, because they come again, and sometimes again and again. In our regular church services we do things that are set apart from ordinary life. We move in certain ways, we wear symbolic clothes, we use symbolic gestures and language, we light candles, we make the place smell good (flowers, incense). We aim for beauty and a sense of otherness. Many of us want the things we do in church to be different from what we encounter day by day in order to remind ourselves that there is more to human experience than just what meets the eye. There is ‘what we feel’ as well as ‘what we do’. We are human beings. Many people have a longing for something ‘other’, as shown by the interest in spirits, ghosts and ghoulies.

The availability of the church to all that live in the parish, or have connexions with it, is part of the gracious ministry of the Church. I’m delighted to help people recognise this by providing sacred experiences in sacred spaces for sacred events. I’m delighted to help point people to the divine otherness that envelops us and penetrates us.

Waiting for Christmas

Posted on 10/12/2008 by Rambling Rector

In 2006 and 2007 Susan and I took a five-day break in late November to Germany. Some of the attractions of Germany at this time of year are the Christmas markets, with fairs and stalls laid out in the town square, often in the shadow of a great church. Christmas lights twinkle, and traditional music mingles with the aroma of wine being mulled and meat being grilled as we, sustained by delicious German sausages, wander increasingly waywardly (mulled wine) amongst the stalls displaying handiwork from Central and Eastern Europe. It reminds me just how many of ‘our’ Christmas traditions are, in fact, Central European in origin. One of the customs that we’ve lost is that of waiting until Boxing Day to open our presents. I’m one of the world’s most impatient people, so I say this not as a killjoy, but rather because a bit of waiting, however painful, increases the joy. And it’s waiting that the four weeks before Christmas are all about: the season of Advent, Latin ad venire meaning ‘coming towards’, the period we wait for Christ’s coming to us. We are waiting for a guest, an eagerly expected visitor. Unfortunately, this sense of waiting with mounting excitement has been all but lost to us in what the media call the ‘run up to Christmas’ – planning presents, trees, food, booze, frenetic activity, much of it fuelled by the children’s media. Even the church in so many places is caught up in this as Carol Services are held well before Christmas, as if to get them out of the way. Advent is obliterated.

I encourage you, if possible, to take some time out in December, maybe just a minute or two here and there, for stocktaking and refreshment. For waiting, in fact. For relaxing. At Christmas we celebrate having been shown the way to live as the Divine comes to us: ‘God became what we are, in order that we may become what God is.’ The glory of God is a human life lived to the full, when our deep joy meets the world’s deep need. If, like me, you long for a bit of peace and quiet before Christmas, don’t feel bad about taking time out.

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.