Just going outside & may be some time...

...as the man said.
But only, in fact, DV until Saturday.

I’m off for the inside of a week’s retreat at the Benedictine house of Saint-Wandrille near Rouen. I go there every year, to reset the liturgical clocks, get back in touch with reality, and spend some time (as the Salesians at Cold Ash used to say) on my tod with God. I used to take a pile of books, but these days I don’t bother, as you get a Bible and a Rule of Benedict on the house. You just pray along with it and see where it goes.

The Saint Wandrille Community is the best place in the world to do this kind of thing. It all fits me like an old glove, and the community’s been going on the site since 649 AD, so it does actually work. You can find out all about the monastery here. I will take the camera. To blog or not to blog? Actually, I'm not as good at journalling as I could be, but I suspect these few days would be best spent without muckin’ about on the internet. I may post some reflections when it’s all over.

Real Biblical Christianity

Helpful sermon from Rosie the Vicar in Church yesterday morning for anyone trying to grow as a disciple, or wrestling with their neighbours’ annoying behavioural proclivities, or trying to stay sane in the Anglican playground. It was about the parable of the pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18:

We have these two main themes. A person who knows themselves to be loved and accepted by God will have no need to make a fool of themselves by pretending to be better than others and judging them. And prayer is nothing without integrity... There’s a fantastic, liberating final sentence “If you’re content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself”...

Simple message this morning. Grace and Integrity. A very potent mix. A mixture which grows Christian men and women of real stature, men and women who go on to make a real difference in the world.

Thinks: Aha! She’s been at The Message — the Bible in contemporary language that is, not the 1982 hip hop song by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. It’s rendering of Luke 18:14 reminds me of a certain picture downstairs. It puts me in mind of something else I've recently read. Barna Group (US Evangelical research foundation) has been researching what a new generation really thinks about Christianity and why it matters. Of everything I've read this month, this book the one where I've made the most mental underlinings and margin notes, so, as the witch used to say in Narnia, “We will hear more of this hereafter.”

In one of the reaction pieces to the fifth research finding of the study (“judgmental”) Jud Wilhite, pastor of Central Christian Church in “Sin City — Las Vegas, a city built on exhibitionism and excess,” says he has recently read a paragraph by C. S Lewis that blew his mind: (Where did he find it?)

There is someone I love, even though I don’t approve of what he does. There is someone I accept, even though some of his actions and thoughts revolt me. There is someone I forgive, though he hurts the people I love. That person is me. There are plenty of things I do that I don’t like, but if I can love myself without approving of all that I do, I can also love others without approving of all they do...

Jesus and the Old Testament alike call us to “love our neighbour as ourselves” (actually this command comes directly in Leviticus, Matthew/Mark, Romans, Galatians and James!). If we want to be “Biblical” in our faith, here’s another way to do it, rather than picking obscure techie nuggets out of the bible and using them as gravel to stone other people whose lifestyles disgust us. Missionally speaking, it’s a no-brainer, too.

Summoned by Bells to Olney

Saturday night out with Lucy at Olney, home of the pancake race, John Newton, Amazing Grace, and William Cowper, to help launch their bells appeal. Olney has a glorious medieval Church, with one of the most spectacular spires in Buckinghamshire — 185 feet in the old money.

Olney must have been special for generations of US migrants, because there’s only one in England, but no fewer than twelve in the US — townships in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Pennsylvania, and a school in Ohio. That list, in itself, is pretty much a canned history of the US!

Olney’s bells, the oldest of which has been ringing since 1599, have got into a bit of a state. Lucy’s a ringer, and had a go. She tells me they’re ringable, but only just — bearings wearing out, oak frame rotting and twisting out of true, bird mess everywhere. Ringing had fallen on hard times late in the last century, but under the leadership of Charles Knight (Tower Captain) and David Phillipson (ringing master) there’s a recently recruited band of ringers in the town of all ages, and the tower is coming alive again.

Olney PCC has decided that the best form of defence is attack, and they're going to sort everything out properly, rehang the bells on a new frame, tune everything up, and raise the tower to a ring of ten. When finished it will be one of the finest heavy rings of bells in the country, ideal for training beginners, as well as doing what it’s done for hundreds of years — marking out the shape of life in the town, ringing out joys and sorrows, calling people to worship, and reminding them of God’s love and faithfulness. There’s an interesting appeal website where you can find out the difference between a passing bell and a pancake bell, as well as donate.

I sometimes feel a twinge of puritanism about projects that require big fundraising for the fabric of medieval Churches. I find, however, that Parishes who steward their world class buildings competently are usually as committed and competent about their bigger responsibilities. No surprise then, that Brian Lintern, former churchwarden, was just back from Africa participating in a world development project, Olney’s eight year link with Newton, Sierra Leone. It’s both/ and, not either/ or, I find. Judas played Puritan games when a poor woman wasted oil on Jesus — partly because Judas was someone who took himself very seriously indeed but mainly, we are told, because he was a thief.

The appeal kicked off with a poetry evening, with Lance Pierson, a professional actor, introducing and performing poems by John Betjeman, most popular British poet of the last century. Not only do church bells form a surprisingly persistent theme in Betjeman’s poetry, but he saw himself as being the kind of hack for popular verses William Cowper of Olney was. Lance’s presentation was, frankly, brilliant and eye opening not only about Church, but also about faith and doubt in Betjeman’s poetry.

To bring it all home, Lance included Betjeman’s poem about Olney, a gentle parody of the style of the original 18th century Olney hymns. It captures precisely a spirit of grace in ordinary life that you can hardly avoid in this buzzing market town on the crook of the river Ouse:

Olney Hymns

Oh God the Olney Hymns abound
With words of Grace which Thou didst choose,
And wet the elm above the hedge
Reflected in the winding Ouse.

Pour in my soul unemptied floods
That stand between the slopes of clay,
Till deep beyond a deeper depth
This Olney day is any day.

It’s pronounced Frunken-steen

Forty years today, since the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act . Do we celebrate? The act put a stop to the old back street abortions of the 50’s, but its original framer, David Steel, is concerned about numbers way beyond what was intended. The context, sociologically and obstetrically, is radically different from 1967. There's a weird number crunch about how many desperate infertile couples there are in the UK and how many aborted foetuses. Given all the other options available, are people really using abortion as a form of contraception, or even to avoid babies with cosmetic imperfections?

Polly Toynbee’s Guardian rant gushes superficially like an Austin Powers movie about choice as the ultimate right. OK, but back on planet earth, why do you have to be alone when you choose, what are you really choosing, what’s the personal cost, and how do you choose? In defence of the present law, Rowan Pelling’s heartfelt words in the Telegraph are compassionate, personal and much more real. The kind of hard cases she mentions have moral significance, and she understands how questionable any trend towards aborting babies for cosmetic reasons is, if that’s happening.

As a pastor I've met some very caring, honest and courageous women, deeply conflicted, trying to work their choices out in their own circumstances, with different end results, sometimes years afterwards. It wasn’t easy for them. Surely ‘Good Samaritan’ calling is to be there for and with people, not to go in hard and judge them. Sadly the lesser of two evils doesn't stop being evil. But, and Pelagians forget this, in Christianity Grace comes first.

Surely it matters desperately that society affirms the value of life. Personally, I'm haunted by the thought that I'm married to someone who, had she been born a generation later, would almost certainly have been aborted under the act. We never did know Lucy’s birth mother and don't want to generalise, but are grateful, every day, that in this instance, whatever it cost her, she went through with it and gave the gift of life. How can we not be?

Was there wisdom and psychological, if not biological, truth in the traditional view of “quickening” they held in the middle ages? Public law can only do so much. Perhaps what Christians can do is be there for people relationally in their particular circumstances, and support them as they work through the choices the law gives them conscientiously. Liberal ranting about choice is as destructive for this process as “every sperm is sacred” stuff from the 1960’s. Some of the inflammatory and emotive showmanship on both sides is really cruel to human beings for whom this is a personal reality as well as a general issue. Perhaps on this issue all we can do, as Paul did in first century Corinth, is, refuse to use manipulative or underhanded means, and commend Christ to the conscience of all.

Sharing Jesus, Changing lives

A truly inspiring day as a guest at the dedication of CMS new mission centre in East Oxford. Strangely, the Church of England has never had an official institutional mission arm — just a network of voluntary societies driven by passion. CMS has been at the heart of mission for 210 years. We were reminded in today's service of the key role CMS’ early supporters like John Newton and William Wilberforce played in rolling back the slave trade and transforming society in those early days.

The centre includes a mission studies library and resource centre, named after Samuel Ajayi Crowther, former slave, translator of the Scriptures into Yoruba, and pioneer bishop in Nigeria. Last year CMS supported 704 people and 204 projects in mission all over the world, including the UK. Oxford’s increasingly a world city. There’s blessing for us locals in having close access to the heart of the CMS network in our diocese. It's a more than welcome development.

As well as serving the cutting edge of mission, CMS has been a hotbed of creative thinking for the whole Church, led by visionaries and big thinkers like Canon Max Warren and Bishop John V Taylor.

Max Warren said — “It takes a whole world to know Christ.” Go figure. Think of all those words mean and could mean in a rapidly globalising world that he foresaw sixty years ago, which is now our daily reality.

Today CMS is a key resource to the whole Church — a hotbed of praxis, prayer and reflection about discipleship across cultural frontiers. The early Church worked really well across frontiers, sharing Christ as he was reflected and refracted among disciples of different cultures in places like Corinth, Alexandria and Rome. Years of institutionalisation and control freakery have ossified this gospel process, but are now giving way, all over the world, to a vibrant sense of emerging kingdom. This, not institutional powergames rings a lot of bells for readers of the gospels, whatever their culture or background. Christianity is resuming its primal character as a way of life, a pilgrimage. In this kind of a world faith grows not by cultural or doctrinal imperialism, but virally. Because there really is a God who loves us, that’s OK. We can break our shackles, and transcend our Institutional silly B’s!
Two striking artistic expressions of such creativity caught my eye — paintings by Chinese theologian and painter in residence Dr He Qi, and an amazing sculpture out the front, “Light of the World” by Saga Arpino, a bronze with three kilometres of glass rods, hand cut into 10,000 sections.

Archbishop Rowan preached on the Light of the world. In 2 Corinthians 4, Saint Paul sees Light playing on and shining through the Christian Communityin a transcending way. It’s a transformational process from glory to glory “Until we have faces” (C. S. Lewis). Christ introduces us to ourselves, to each other, and to God. Then we can begin to glimpse what we all look like from God's point of view. God has a face, and to know him as he is enables us to wak in the light. It’s the route to true freedom, transformation and hope.

Postcard from Weymouth

Not from us — we're at home — but from Jane Goodwin, friend from a few years ago in Sandhurst now living in Weymouth, who saw the blog and emailed to say hello.

It's good to see Hayley (who used to be a toddler) auctioning a sign for Slum Survivor (a soul survivor thing) here on Youtube.

Hearing from Jane reminded me about how she came to real faith (Jane, please correct me if I'm remembering this wrong) during one holy week that she described as feeling rather like falling in love — which, in a way it was. And it all began with Hayley, as a toddler, being given a palm cross. Which is a message to all vicars everywhere to get those palm crosses out, with love and prayer.

At the time I was struggling a bit at work, slightly losing the plot. Jane's story really inspired me at the time, and reminded me what this is actually all about. It's so good to know she's doing OK. Well, more than OK.

All this, and apple pie too

Half way through half term, Christian singer Anita Renfroe tells it like it is. Thanks, Lynne for sharing this with Lucy, who somehow manages to combine all this with being soul friend, lover, gardener and, in every sense, home maker round here.

Not the Anglican Covenant

Half Term is time for goofing about with the family. “I've got just the thing for your blog” said Stewart, and showed me a wonderful Peter Serafinowicz spoof of an ad for a well known domestic cleaning product. (big plug: for people this side of the pond, the show is currently on Thursdays (BBC2). For people the other side of the pond, campaign to get it over there soon.) Clean family fun for half term. Nothing whatever to do with pure churches, clean ecclesiastical plumbing, or Anglican Covenants — is it?

Beverley Ruddock (1947-2007)

Beverley Ruddock’s funeral today at Binfield Parish Church. She died terribly suddenly a couple of weeks ago. Beverley was the Chair of the Diocesan Council for Racial Justice, an educational psychologist with a special interest in Children with learning difficulties. Comng here from Jamaica in 1965, her professional career began in nursing before education. She was a Deputy Lord Lieutenant for Berkshire. She was a canny and perceptive selector for Clergy and other vocations.

In a very full church, many kind and true things were said about Beverley — about her strong sense of justice, her refusal to give up on people or issues that affected people, her kindness and wide smile, courage and integrity. All I can add is that she also made a mean spicy chicken, that stole the show at this year’s Racial Justice barbecue here.

I hope the very inspiring service left me a little more committed to clarity and honesty about injustice in all its forms, less accommodating to bullying and pretence about real world issues, within or beyond the Church.

Bishop Richard Harries brought a poem to share, characteristically spot on.
Into the Hour by Elizabeth Jennings [from Recoveries (1964)]
was written whilst recovering from a breakdown, and talks of loss and grief,
and the journey towards wholeness through hope:

I have come into the hour of a white healing.
Grief's surgery is over and I wear
The scar of my remorse and of my feeling.

I have come into a sudden sunlit hour
When ghosts are scared to comers. I have come
Into the time when grief begins to flower

Into a new love. It had filled my room
Long before I recognised it. Now I speak its name.
Grief finds its good way home.

The apple-blossom's handsome on the bough
And Paradise spreads round. I touch its grass.
I want to celebrate but don't know how.

I need not speak though everyone I pass
Stares at me kindly. I would put my hand
Into their hands. Now I have lost my loss

In some way I may later understand.
I hear the singing of the summer grass.
And love, I find, has no considered end,

Nor is it subject to the wilderness
Which follows death. I am not traitor to
A person or a memory. I trace

Behind that love another which is running
Around, ahead. I need not ask its meaning.

Wrestling with angels up the A1

Stamford last Sunday to preach the Burghley Sermon. In 1581, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth I’s chief minister, endowed 24 scholarships at St John’s College Cambridge. Ever since there has been an annual sermon , with mayor and council and descendants of the founder. Many thanks to Miranda Rock, Director of Burghley House, for lunch. Burghley is a refreshing antidote to cheesy theme park “heritage”. The house is well managed but still, at heart, a family home rather than a museum, with a sense of fun as well as history.

The ancient bidding prayer gives a living snapshot of the Elizabethan Church settlement — “the holy Catholic Church, particularly that pure and reformed part of it established in this kingdom.” It doesn't rubbish others like the puritans, but it implicitly denies that Rome is the franchise holder for all Christianity. By “pure” it doesn’t mean “excluding impure people” but “stripped of recent accretions.” The word “Anglican” is nowhere to be seen — but of course it wouldn’t be, since it was invented in its present meaning by Gladstone in 1838, I believe.

The Old Testament reading was about Jacob wrestling with a stranger — Shallow people think that pain, contradiction and struggle in the Church is, in itself, wrong. Before his encounter at Peniel, Jacob sought blessing by deception, manipulation, hard work, diplomacy, even brute force. He received the blessing he sought, not in the way he had planned it, but by being broken. Pain, struggle and uncertainty, far from being some dreadful failure to manage things smoothly, is the normal condition of an emergent community experiencing the blessing described in Genesis 32:

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the Light gets in.

Leonard Cohen Anthem.

Just Fancy That...

Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph fulminates:

internal Church documents – leaked to The Sunday Telegraph – show that even if churchwardens, who are lay officials, are found to have previous allegations against them, the Church has no power to suspend them.

Perhaps the secret document is the Daily Telegraph of 25 May 1999, which vigorously led the charge, successfully, against proposed legislation which would have given bishops powers to suspend churchwardens:

John Gummer, the former Tory minister and a member of the Ecclesiastical Committee, said: "The Church of England has not needed provision to suspend churchwardens for 700 years and it does not need it now. They have come up with a solution for a problem that does not exist."

Half Term Friends, Fish and Noodles

Just for the family record, on the day Catherine started work for six weeks (fundraising on behalf of Shelter), we all goofed off to London taking Jo, Anna’s godmother, and son Sam. Wagamama is still a good thing. So were the rather strange people down the South Bank.

New cause of the day, by way of the London Aquarium, is a Dutch charity that campaigns against Shark finning — a revolting, cruel practice that demeans everyone involved, and all for a bowl of greasy soup — not the sort they have in Wagamama.

horribly twisted Vicar?

Does this Mitchell and Webb experience ring any bells for you?

Immortal Memory and service life

Today, as any British scholboy would have known between 1805 and 1914, is Trafalgar Day.

The Army and Navy Gazette of 23 July 1896 contained a poem by Rear Admiral Ronald A. Hopwood, setting the unwritten rules for survival in the Victorian Navy. Its principles apply to any corporate life, even that of Christians, who are urged in II Timothy 2:4 to aim for military standards of discipline and corporate loyalty.

The poem describes various aspects of service life.

Interdependence of the individual unit and the whole:
As naught may outrun the destroyer,
Even so with the law and its grip,
The strength of the ship is the Service,
and the strength of the service the Ship.

Lack of recognition:
If ye labour from morn until even,
And meet with reproof for your toil,
It is well — that the gun may be humbled,
The compressor must check the recoil.

Being able to rely on others:
On the strength of one link in the cable
Dependeth the might of the chain:
Who knows when thou mayest be tested?
So live that thou bearest the strain!

Leave:
When the ship that is tired returneth,
With the signs of the sea showing plain,
Men place her in dock for a season,
And her speed she reneweth again.
So shalt thou, lest perchance thou grow weary
In the uttermost parts of the sea,
Pray for leave, for the good of the Service,
As much and as oft as may be.

Lack of recognition:
If ye win, through an African jungle,
Unmentioned at home in the Press,
Heed it not: no man seeth the piston,
But it driveth the ship none the less.

Anger directed at authority:
Dost thou think, in a moment of anger,
’Tis well with thy seniors to fight?
They prosper, who burn in the morning,
The letters they wrote overnight;
For some there be, shelved and forgotten,
With nothing to thank for their fate,
Save that (on a half-sheet of foolscap,)
Which a fool “had the honour to state — ”

Stirring Stuff!

Crooks for Cats and Sport for all

I really enjoyed going back to Lacey Green School yesterday, three years after I first visited to open a new ICT suite. Paul de Wolf, then deputy head, is now head, and the school is a warm but focussed learning and social community. There’s an active school council, and I noticed how direct and confident the children were in their interactions with each other and adults.

The school’s large grounds are very well used, formally and informally. It buys in coaching from Wycombe Wanderers, London Wasps, and others, and large numbers are involved in team games — rugby, football, hockey, netball and even lacrosse. There’s real enthusiasm about organised sport in the school, but also a wonderful scheme where older children help out as structured play leaders for younger children, using informal play equipment like these space hoppers. There’s also a superb ecology garden, with raised beds which classes can fill for themselves. There’s major development going on to develop the reception area, and a really interesting project to put an outdoor learning area where there used to be a swimming pool.

In assembly, Children were sometimes lively and interactive and sometimes very focussed and quiet. There’s a prayer corner, and Denise Critchell, the local vicar, comes in every week, sharing friendship and faith with everyone in the school. I told the children about Jesus the good shepherd, who really cares whatever the cost, and will never give up on us. Someone in reception thought my crook has a hook to help me climb trees to rescue my cat, if it ever got stuck up there... I must try that sometime. Last year I confirmed Melissa Stone, the RE and worship co-ordinator, and I was really excited to see how her work in the school is really flourishing.

Paul told me about extended project work the children do on topics that interest them — The dragon (right) was part of a project on a painting of St George, and I was rather wowed by some particularly magnificent turtles from a Bermuda Triangle project:

The school mission statement says that St John’s School

exists in the community to provide all round excellence in education, developing and nurturing the intellectual, artistic, social, spiritual and physical resources of each child in a Christian context, enabling all pupils to achieve their full potential in a caring environment.

It’s been doing this for over 150 years, and right now it’s on a bit of a roll...

Building Jerusalem in Seer Green

Back to Seer Green on Sunday, where I had such fun in the school, to confirm 12 people from there and Slough. One reading was slightly unusual — the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem in Nehemiah 16. This story shows that Christianity is an inherently corporate enterprise. People who stay together accomplish the impossible in spite of the politics of the proud. Chapters full of names make the point that everybody is somebody; a good note on which to be confirmed in the Christian faith. The other reading was from John 15. Jesus never wrote a book or founded a corporation, but he made friends, and calls us his friends, not servants. Abraham, from whose faith, and with whose faith, we find blessing, was called God’s friend.

• Real friends respect the other person as they really are, not just for what they can get out of them. So goodbye to the idea that Jesus is somehow after our money, or out to clone us all or homogenise us into something we’re not.
• Real friends desire and work for the real good of the other person, whatever the cost. Goodbye, then to the idea that Jesus is trying to recruit us all to some kind of cult that’s out to get us.
• Real friends love with open eyes and understand. They are always there for the other person. So goodbye to the plaster saint view of Jesus.
• Real friends show genuine empathy and sympathy. Jesus is not some great copper in the sky. True friendship also means having a vision for your friends. It’s accepting the way they are, but being open to what they could be.

True friendship with God and each other, is transformational, and a far more accurate model for discipleship than institutional religion. It was an honour to be among friends on Sunday. Thanks to Sarah Allen for a picture of seven of the eight confirmees from Holy Trinity — Gaenor the Vicar, Amelia, Tom, Conor, Sarah, Me, Matthew, Katharine, Roger. Sarah also brought an obscenely yummy fruitcake (from a mystery source I shall certainly use in future) which contained all kinds of strong liquor, and should be banned. Except at confirmations, where it should be compulsory.