Charity and Daily Bread

A busy, foodie week, in the worlds of media, local charity, and academia. A lot of time has gone into work with my friend and colleague Carole Peters, devising and preparing the BBC Radio 4 Sunday morning service next week on Lammas — the original havest festival. Our theme has been Bread of heaven, with music, readings and a meditation — all UK insomniacs not in Church at 8·00 next Sunday welcome!

Meanwhile, yesterday, I spent a morning with Sue Wall, who runs Milton Keynes Food Bank. I’ve often noticed the food pantry ministryies of US Churches and wondered why they didn't happen more in the UK. Perhaps, I thought, it’s because the welfare state means the need is less. That’s a nice thought, but way off base with reality.

It’s a disturbng fact, but even in an outwardly prosperous city like MK, many ordinary people, especially at times of crisis, struggle to feed themselves and their families. We live in a welfare state, but the largest single cause of temporary need is delay in benefit payment; for example if someone on benefit gets a part time job, it can take two weeks and more whilst benefit is adjusted, whilst they have no money coming in at all.

MK Food Bank provides a limited number (up to 6) short term (3 day) packs of simple but high quality food, made up to a standard nutritional specification. It began as a ministry of MK Christian centre, a thriving non-denominational Church in the city, and now engages all sorts of volunteers, mainly but not exclusively from the whole range of churches.

People are referred through a variety of agencies, and parcels can be collected from various local collection points. The work began in a Church cupboard, moved into a sea container, and now has its own warehouse unit in Stacey Bushes. Food comes from donations, including some from leading supermarkets. Local businesses, especialy Mercedes Benz, whose HQ is in the city, have also backed the project with sponsorship and services. So far this year over 4,400 packs have gone out. MKFB began as part of, and still operates in close collaboration with the Trussell Trust, an Evangelical Christian chatity that fights Poverty, deprivation and despair in the UK and abroad. It was an immensely moving privilage to spend a morning with Sue and some members of her team, to see how many parallel lines our passion run along, and to pray together.

Finally, yesterday, an afternoon teaching in the Business School of the University of Buckingham, where a wonderful colleague, Andrew Lightbown, is conducting fascinating doctoral research with which I’ve been helping into the meaning and dynamic of Agape (Love). After my lecture we reviewed his work together, including an emerging working definition of Charity which struck me as relevant to MKFB, as to all expressions of Christian love in action:

To exercise Charity is to act intentionally to promote wellbeing in solidarity with, and reverential response to the other.

Start by saying yes

I am often struck by the force of St Paul’s words about all God’s promises being "yes" in Christ. This week I have been going round meeting churchwardens — the process, evey three years, of formal “visitation.” I’ll post some material early next week.
For now, I notice that parishes where there is life, vibrancy and growth, seem to approach their surrounding contexts positively rather than defensively.

This doesn’t mean they can’t criticise those contexts; indeed the capacity of a church to critique its surrounding culture is far greater, not less, when it does it from a positive relationship, not fear. Interestingly, some such places seem to be running services where they begin with coffee, not end with it — a new trend?

I am taken back to some words of Richard Rohr about the need to see everything (in the tradition of Hugh of St Victor) contemplatively, not simply in terms of our preconceptions about it. God’s vision is surely fresher, and more understanding than ours. So he says

Philosphically and psychologically, a certain assent precedes all true knowing. If you watch closely, you will often see that an initial change of heart or attitude precedes any willingness to change your mind. In my own Franciscan philosophical tradition, both St Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus thaught that love or willingness were higher than mere knowledge. You only really know that which first you love, they felt, because otherwise you invariably distort and divide your sight and eliminate any bothersome or threatening information. Then you do not love it but (at best) only your idea of it. How often we see this in our relationships; Romance instead of real love, and infatuation (“false fire” in Latin) instead of genuine fire. Words and thoughts are invariably dualistic, but pure experience is always nondualistic. Think about that!

Fundamentalism suffers from the same false seeing. It is basically a love affair with words and ideas about God instead of God himself or herself. But you cannot really love words; you can only think them. You cannot really love reaity with the judgmental mind, because you’ll always try to control it, fix it, or understand it before you give yourself to it. And usually it is never fixed enough to deserve your unprotected gift of self. So you stay on Delay, Paue or Still forever. We see this fear of intimacy in most people, but in particular with men, who tend to have a more defended ego structure.

The fact that some form of loving must precede true knowing helps us appreciate why the prophets used the intimate word for carnal knowledge or sexual intimacy when they spoke of “knowing” God (see, for example Hosea 2:21, 6:6, and John 10:14-5, 14:20, 17:3). This is a tremendous insight, but one that comes only from inner realization and not from books. So many of the mystics and the Song of Songs had to make use of sexual imagery to describe the relationship of the soul to God. From inside experience, you know God’s love is a tender dance of give-and-take, rescue and holding.

The Time Traveler’s Wife

This is unquestionably the best Relativity-based weepie you will see this summer. Wacky time travel will take some of us oldies back to the future as a comedic device, but it has not hiterto been a staple device of the big love story. The Time Traveler’s Wife, which does elegantly exactly what it says on the tin, is, in fact, the only relativity based weepie you will see this summer.

Note to self and thanks to commenters — Benjamin Button involved grown up malarkey with time running backwards, and there is a Dorian Gray on the stocks (though the trailer makes it look rather schlocky). Time Traveler is more random but also rather more emotionally engaging and satisfying than Benjamin Button was. If I had to take one to a desert island, it would be Time Traveler.

Time Travel, notoriously, discombobulates the making of plots. Writers need a good, stout card index to keep everything together, so be warned: to get the best out of this film you do have to suspend disbelief occasionally:

Here’s the deal. Most peoples’ lives run like tape, in one inexorable sequence of events from A to Z. Imagine, however, a strange genetic disorder that made your life occasionally run non-sequentially like a CD skipping between tracks. You’d be in and out of scenes and all over the place. This sounds fun, especially if you are a lottery player, but remember everybody else is still on the old tape sequential thing and you can’t change the future. Remember also that you can’t take anything with you, so be prepared for some chilly zipping around Chicago filching clothes on cold winter nights. Now try and build a regular loving relationship with someone like that, et voilà! Beware also Republican parents in law, remembering what the NRA didn’t want you to know — guns do, in fact, kill people...

Confused? You could be. But not impossibly. Anna, at almost 11, was perfectly able to work out what was going on without having read the novel. If you’re still with me, go see this film. It carries off an improbably high concept magnificently and should win over all but hardened cynics. The leads play it straight, with excellent chemistry and total commitment. There is an unsentimental edge to the way they handle the weepie aspects of the deal, along with a surprising amount of that rare quality the French call tendresse.

Women wishing to validate their feelie credentials should go watch this film, as should men emotionally developed enough not to have preferred G I Joe, or indeed The Ugly Truth, the ghastly trogoladytic sex-romp showing simultaneously in your local multiplex. The time will fly, indeed you will be surprised at how elegantly and winningly a long novel has been fitted into only one hour forty. This was probably the result of rare genetic mutation. Four out of five stars.

Time passing, beloved

A rather marvellous week of silver wedding jollifications with family and friends. Lucy, like me, get a bit embarrassed about ballyhoo, but we did have fun marking a quietly amazing 25 years together. I meant to post earlier in the week this rather marvellous poem by Donald Davie. It first intrigued me as an English teaching assistant 35 years ago, and I always wondered whether I would ever be able to own such words from the inside.

God has been very good to us both, way beyond our deserving.

Time passing, beloved

Time passing,
and the memories of love
Coming back to me,
carissima, no more mockingly
Than ever before;
time passing, unslackening,
Unhastening, steadily; and no more
Bitterly, beloved, the memories of love
Coming into the shore.

How will it end? Time passing and our passages of love
As ever, beloved, blind
As ever before; time binding, unbinding
About us; and yet to remember
Never less chastening, nor the flame of love
Less like an amber.

What will become of us? Time
Passing, beloved, and we in a sealed
Assurance unassailed
By memory. How can it end,
This siege of a shore that no misgivings have steeled,
No doubts defend?

Revolutionary Road — to nowhere?

Kate Winslett and Leonardo deCaprio were last seen bobbing in the sea off Newfoundland. But what if they’d made it ashore? Surely they would have lived happily ever after, raised a big corn-fed premium family. Wouldn't they? Don’t bet on that.

In Revolutionary Road Kate & Leo are the Wheelers, exploring true love, locked-in frustration and ennui in 1953. There’s no way like the American way. The babies are booming and so are the ’burbs. Under the sink, however, various streptococci breed, and the worst ones eat you up, from the inside out. Gatsby showed us the toxic tender underbelly of the jazz age; Frank and April do the same for the McCarthy era.

Off and on, hopes raised in the Wheelers’ cute meeting scene seem teasingly capable of fulfilment. 95% of the time, however, the film pokes around the bend under the sink, where germs lurk. Frank works in a dead end job; April is bored out of her mind. Frank tries to impress a girl in the typing pool; April tumbles meaninglessly with a neighbour in the front bench seat of his Buick. This is not elegant, or even particularly erotic, but maintains Kate’s record of making out in a car once per blockbuster.

Enter John, the neighbours’ wacky spaced out son, fresh off a massive breakdown. John tells it like it is, like Lear’s fool. Life is suffocating, unbearable. It’s enough to make D. H. Lawrence run off into the woods, roll around naked in wet leaves and write a poem about it, but you can’t even do that in suburban Connecticut. Paris calls, in the form of a breakout that, in itself, would have made a jolly alternative movie. Cary Grant would have moved to Connecticut, but the Wheelers have already done that, with no place else to go and April newly pregnant with No 3. The Wheelers are now in big trouble...

Beneath Sam Mendes beautifully crafted well-scripted film lurk big questions. What is the relationship between love and the marriage bond? What are our masks good for and bad for? When things unravel, how does one level fill with hope, and the next deflate to absolute zero? How does happiness come, from outside in and inside out, and what is it anyway?

Tracking the Wheelers through their downward spiral, Kate Winslet in particular eases deeper into her character in a truly remarkable way. Banking down, she becomes, increasingly, a complete outsider to the honeytone fifties colour scheme. Everything stays intact around her as she catastrophically crumbles internally. Increasingly, the show feels like a horror film. The kids go curiously out of focus as all the wheels come off the wagon. Pleasantville, friends, is a sham.

Understsood or not quite understood, love or loathe the implicit message, this is a very good movie, just a squeak, perhaps, off a really great movie. Just do yourself a favour, and take your first date to a more optimisitc show, like Friday the 13th.

Belated Valentine in the Snow

Saturday was almost the last day with enough snow in our back garden for play. Whilst our children were still abed, Lucy and I popped out the back for something of what I think UK tabloids used to call a Love Romp.

Valentine’s Day this year also brought a poem shared by poet Elspeth Murray (using Twitter) — short enough to write on a card, as she pointed out.

A Betrothal
E. J. Scovell

Put your hand on my heart, say that you love me as
The words upon the hills cleave to the hills’ contours

I will uphold you, trunk and shoot and flowering sheaf,
And I will hold you, roots and fruit and fallen leaf.

Chocolate heart from Hotel Chocolat in MK — highly recommended.
Heigh ho. That could well be it for another 18 years...
PS also a chance to play with the new iMovie, complete with cheesy effects.

...and just to see how the other half lives, for details of an expensove nightmare Valentine experience for poor Ben the Debt Monkey, click here.

Grief transformed, prayer answered

Someone recently bereaved was telling me about his first new year alone — bleak and unpromising, nothing doing in an empty house, he wandered slightly aimlessly into town. There on the streets, he met a beggar. “What are you doing here?” the beggar asked him. “I don’t know. I’ll tell you what,” replied my friend. “You’re coming with me. We’re going tenpin bowling, then MacDonalds and New Year together.” They had a memorable evening. And next term, at school, the children sang in assembly love isn’t love unless you give it away. They’re right.

I was reminded of a sappy perhaps, but profoundly true sentiment about prayer from the (rather uneven) Evan Almighty, voiced by Morgan Freeman, who is fast cornering the market in playing the Voice of God:

Let’s begin at the very beginning...

... the Baptism of Christ yesterday and Aelred of Rievaulx today. I was delighted to celebrate the Eucharist with a religious community this morning, Burnham Abbey. 750 years ago, Aelred wrote about the problem of “particular friendships” in the monastery. Of course monastics will have positive/ negative reactions to others in community, and preferences. G. K. Chesterton said the reason Christ bids us love our enemies and love our neighbours is that these are generally the same people. All the more so in Community. Here’s the Big Issue about this:

1. On the one hand, If people pair off, where does that leave the common life of the house?
   
2. On the other hand, all love is particular and if people hold themselves entirely aloof, how can it be said that the love of Christ dwells in them?
   

Aelred says that all love is particular; but chaste particular love will be generous, and increase our capacity to offer unconditional love, which does not seek its own. Selfish desire, however is always a narrowing thing. The kingdom has to be worked out in community with others; it cannot be done by ego in isolation.

Yesterday morning in Church, Rosie our Vicar took a penetrating view of the baptism of Christ as the place we have to begin if we want to be Christians. Descartes said “Cogito Ergo sum.” Really? Brains on sticks? Is it really worth getting up in the morning for that? How about “Amo ergo sum?”

Mike Higton has found a starting point for understanding the theology of Rowan Williams, during a trying few hours, wasted in an airport lounge:

aware of the work-stale glances of the airport staff, of the quickly averted eyes of my fellow travellers, of the anticipated scrutiny of those I was going to meet, of the assessing gaze of my employers carried around in my head, and of my own anxious self-regard. What difference would it have made if I had let myself believe that, beyond all these, I was held in a wholly loving gaze... subject to a gaze that saw all my surface accidents and arrangement, all my inner habits and inheritances, all my anxieties and arrogances, all my history — and yet a gaze which nevertheless loved that whole tangled bundle which makes me the self I am, with an utterly free, utterly selfless love?

And what difference would it have made if I had seen each face around me in that departure lounge... as individually held in the same overwhelming loving gaze... if I believed each person around me to be loved ith the same focus, by a love which sw each person’s unique history, unique problems, unique capacity, unique gift?

Yesterday morning, Rosie quoted Raymond Carver’s poem “Late Fragment,” writen shorly before his tragically early death:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth

“This is my beloved Son...” Jesus begins by knwing that there is a God who loves us with open eyes, always there, in whose gentle but searching sight we live, and fear, and dream and hope, and fail and try again.

If our image of ourselves is degraded and impersonal, our image of God will be impoverished, shrill and graceless. Unless we know that he calls us his beloved children, religion can be no more than a harsh, sour business. Zeal for ideology compounds this problem. The only way out is loving relationships in a community of grace. We love because he first loved us; showing us how to love, by doing it. But when you try to love someone who finds themselves unlovable, they will initially do everything they can to prove their negative image of themselves was right...

Jesus warned pharisees against sincerely searching the Scriptures for God, only to find a vengeful idol of their own invention, reflecting their own self-absorbtion, personal insecurity and self-righteousness. Perhaps, for some people, this is the Idol they can only junk by boarding the atheist bus. One sign of knowing God for ourselves is the ability to let go of paranoid anxiety, the cornerstone of Pelagianism masquerading as faith.

So here is my personal checklist of de-personalising symptoms to watch out for this coming year, each of them far more spiritual perilous than “Liberalism” or “Conservatism” could ever be:

• Temptation to treat God as either a vengeful Mikado or breezy disengaged “boys will be boys” uncle.
  
  
• “Glass half empty” whining and self pity.
  
  
• Greater allowance for my own failings than those of others, and its old friend, being an expert on the shortcomings of people who differ from me, but less of an expert on my own. The only answer to this is to seek out and listen carefully to the people whose presence makes me most awkward.
  
  
• Sarcasm really is the cheapest form of wit.
  
  
• Selective reading of the Bible, with the subtlety and paradox of the actual text surgically removed, reducing it to a series of soundbites which prove God, giess what, agrees with me and my chums.
  
  
• Fixation on dogma as though it were, in itself faith. Which it isn’t. It’s just the aspect of faith that’s easiest to verbalise about, that’s all; and the most provisional.
  

I might also take another read of these:

Love and Death — and coming alive

Bishop Stephen brought a fabulous love poem to today’s senior staff Eucharist. Reflecting on the physicality of Anglo-Catholic worship, and the propensity to kiss altars, books, even human beings sometimes, this poem somehow made sense of breaking bread — a kind of St John of the Cross thing. The poem is from Carol Ann Duffy’s extended exploration of love’s moods and realities, Rapture.

If I was Dead

If I was dead,
and my bones adrift
like dropped oars
in the deep, turning earth;

or drowned,
and my skull
a listening shell
on the dark ocean bed;

if I was dead,
and my heart
soft mulch
for a red, red rose;

or burned,
and my body
a fistful of grit, thrown
in the face of the wind;

if I was dead,
and my eyes,
blind at the roots of flowers,
wept into nothing,

I swear your love
would raise me
out of my grave,
in my flesh and blood,

like Lazarus;
hungry for this,
and this, and this,
your living kiss.

Carol Ann Duffy, 1955-

And then, precisely timed in the great scheme of things, I noticed a quote from Howard Thurman on Maggi Dawn’s blog:

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive.

Yes!

How those Christians love one another

Great to take the morning service in Burnham, Slough yesterday, and see the new Vicar, Bill Jackson, settling in so well. Readings were Romans 13 (whatever regulation, love is the fulfilling of the law) with a gospel from Matthew about people being accountable to the body, and direct with one another when wronged. People sometimes make it sound as though “the faith once delivered to the saints” is an entirely dogmatic reality. In fact it does, as I understand it, include the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus’ enacted parable of the women taken in adultery, and these remarkable words from Romans... Gospel is inherently relational; and more people don’t believe in God because they perceive relational deficits in Church than because of any dogmatic factor.

Feeling a little sappy about loving other Christians, someone showed me a bit of graffiti at St Peter’s. The Church was trashed about 350 years ago in the English Civil War, and around that time someone inscribed on a pillar

THE:P
OPE:IS
A KNAV
E:

I suppose Alexander VII probably was a bit of a card (Alexander VI Borgia certanly was). Those were the days...

Round Tabling

I preached last night for the inauguration of Camilla Walton’s ministry as Team Vicar of St Michael’s Beaconsfield. Dom Gregory Dix’s monumental work, The Shape of the Liturgy, continuously in print since 1944, and profoundly influential in the remodeling of Roman Catholic, Anglican and Free Church liturgies in the 60’s and 70’s, was actually written not in Oxford, nor even a monastery, but the vicarage of Saint Michael’s which he had been sent to serve by his community early in the World War II. It was a joy and honour to meet someone who had served mass for Dom Gregory.

Camilla had chosen the Hymn to Love from I Corinthians 13 for her induction, along with Jesus washing his disciples feet in John 13. It reminded me of this poem, that various people last night asked me to put on the blog. I first encountered it from my friend and close colleague Sheila Nunn when she used it as the basis for the design of our Diocesan Convention Eucharist in 2002. I saw Sheila a lot as she was dying of cancer in 2003, and we talked through this poem together, and its implications for the kind of church we have to be, and the kind of bishop I was supposed to be — that had just been announced. I think of it often...

In search of a round table

Concerning the why and how and what and who of ministry,
One image keeps surfacing: A table that is round.
It will take some sawing
To be roundtabled.
Some redefining
And redesigning,
Some redoing and rebirthing
Of narrow long Churching
Can painful be
For people and tables.
It would mean no daising
And throning,
For but one king is there
And he is a foot washer,
At table no less.
And what of narrow long ministers
When they confront
A round table people,
After years of working up the table
To finally sit at its head,
Only to discover
That the table has been turned round?
They must be loved into roundness,
For God has called a People
Not "them and us".
"them and us" are unable
to gather round; for at a round table
there are no sides
and ALL are invited
to wholeness and to food.
At one time
Our narrowing churches
Were built to resemble the Cross
But it does no good
For building to do so,
If lives do not.
Round tabling means
No preferred seating,
No first and last,
No better, and no corners
For the "least of these".
Roundtabling means
Being with,
A part of,
Together and one.
It means room for the Spirit
And gifts
And disturbing profound peace for all.
We can no longer prepare for the past.
To be Church,
And if He calls for other than a round table
We are bound to follow.
Leaving the sawdust
And chips, designs and redesigns
Behind, in search of and in presence of
The Kingdom
That is His and not ours.

Chuck Lathrop

John Dale: Gentle Anchorman

Sad, but immensely privileged, to be in Winslow on Friday to help with the funeral of John Dale (1945-2008), Licensed Lay Minster. It’s a thriving parish, and a great pleasure to minister with Belnda Searle-Barnes, Vicar, even on a very sad day for everyone. Hundreds and hundreds of people came — indeed the roads were thick with people twenty minutes before. The weather was amazing — Dark clouds and thick hail in Winslow, then beautiful spring sunshine for the burial in Addington Churchyard.

John was a remarkable man, combining the roles of reader, sacristan, and general factotum in all things pastoral and practical. I’m almost always a virtual newcomer in any Church I visit. Visitors easily sense the quality of welcome and connectedness, spiritually and personally, in a congregation. John was the anchorman for both of these at Winslow; the special person who somehow catalysed the best in everybody else, as well as keeping things running smoothly in the background.

Everything in St Laurence vestry was immaculately kept but not in a fussy way. He was immensely loyal and gentle, improvising and easing things into order, so that services could just begin as though everything had been waiting to go for hours. But that wasn’t the best of John’s ministry. At the end of the service he’d stand in a Jeeves-like way by me in the porch whispering occasional comments — “that's Mr Smith; his daughter’s baby’s been ill and he’d never ask, but he’d love a word of prayer,’’ “Have you met Mrs Jones; her ruby wedding’s coming up, and you could bless her new eternity ring,” and so on and so forth. You get the idea. It was like pastoral satnav for Vicars. To this very inexperienced Bishop, John’s ministry was striking and just wonderful. Every Church needs someone like that, and more churches than you’d think do have somebody a bit like that. John raised this gift to an art form, in his own gentle, unassuming way.

Professionally speaking, John never did anything but a very ordinary clerking job. His peculiarly Church of England, lay, holiness was not about doing extraordinary things but noticing people, and doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. There was pain and sadness in John’s life, but he never let it cloud his clear awareness of the beauty and spiritual possiblities in everybody. John was a gentle, implicit, son of peace. Much love and support was there on Friday for Jean and Luke, his son.
Let God’s peace rest on John as he rests, until with him, we rise in glory!

Love and Death

Having given up Chocs for Lent we’re on dried Apricots and Mango chunks in our little love nest this Valentine's Day.

Egg headed lovers with a taste for something slightly alternative can celebrate Cyril and Methodius, apostles of the Slavs, instead. Meanwhile, if you’re more into Galactic than Glagolitic, true love is conquering everything up on the Death Star:

Peter Serafinowicz — who else?