The Shepherd's Song

There was always a song spinning round in my head,
a song I might sing in the village one day
with a girl by my side, and a beer and barm bread,
far away from the smell of wet sheep and stale hay.

But with no girls to please and no money to spend,
we were worlds away then from the taverns and bars,
with a long night ahead and the sheep safely penned,
and a good bit of fire and a sky full of stars.

A sky full of stars that you almost could touch,
so much closer it seemed than the village below,
where nobody cared much for shepherds and such,
rough men from the hills you’d prefer not to know.

We were welcome enough when we’d money to burn,
but otherwise best on the moors, out of sight;
tossing dice by the fireside, it came to my turn
when all of a sudden the sky flamed with light.

Don’t ask me to tell you now what we all saw,
or what voices we heard sing a new kind of song;
a moment of glory, then still as before,
yet our hearts were all filled with a yearning so strong,

it was as if each one had heard some great voice
say, “Tonight it begins, as God meant it to be,”
the voice of an angel that gave us no choice,
but to close up the sheep pens and go down to see.

And there in the stable out back of some inn
we found what the angel had sent us to see:
a mother and child, with the beasts looking in;
and we stumbling and clumsy, my workmates and me.

We’d no birth gift to bring him, we just stood a while,
tried to tell what we’d heard, saw the light in his face;
and she was so tired - yet how radiant her smile,
and we knew that we stood there surrounded by grace.

Then the song in the sky and the song in my head
met and mingled, so that I knew I must sing,
a sweet lullaby there by that rough manger bed:
it seemed angels sang with me on hovering wing.

And as bells rang in heavenly realms far above,
what we sang was forever, for all, and for love.

No Sermon

I had set myself the objective of writing a sermon for each Sunday, although few of them would actually be preached from a pulpit. That resolve has slipped rather over the past couple of weeks, but happily I've heard a few good sermons in that time, and maybe there will have been a few lessons learned.  No sermon from me today, then, but on the day of "Christ the King" it was good to be singing this morning about "the royal robe I don't deserve", which is such a telling phrase. We are given a royal robe to replace the rags which are all we deserve; but what are we to do once we are wearing that robe? We are to do what our king does, who tells us that the greatest in his kingdom is the one who is humblest and who takes the lowest place. We are to serve, for we best do honour to our King by seeking to be like him, and he is the one who is among us as one who serves. Simple message, vital message; but a message too often ignored, passed over, deferred, watered down, explained away. It can't be explained away: our King has a crown of thorns, and his throne is a cross of wood - and it is here that we must come, in sadness and awake to our own failure and wretchedness, to receive those royal robes.

Wise Word

"If it don't look like Jesus, then it ain't God." Wise words quoted to us at a workshop day yesterday by Roger Jones of Christian Music Ministries. There's a lot in the world that claims a religious justification, to which we could usefully apply that simple test. Sadly, there's a lot within the organised Church to which that test could also be applied.

Colonoscopy

Yesterday I attended the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital for a colonoscopy, as required by my GP. I've had this done before, but remember nothing about the previous occasions, since generally I seem completely to forget all that has happened while I was sedated. Not so yesterday, though - were they using a different sedative, I wonder? I was completely conscious and attentive throughout, and in a strange way almost enjoyed the experience. I certainly couldn't fault the staff in any way: from receptionist to doctor they were polite, efficient, attentive, and on the whole quite good at the sort of small talk that sets you at ease. I'm glad to report that nothing harmful or bad was found - indeed, looking at the inside of my bowel on the screen (something I must have done on previous occasions too, but remember nothing about), I have to say it looked rather pink and healthy and not in any way revolting, as I might have supposed. Of course, one is thoroughly cleaned out beforehand, using something called Moviprep . . . but that's another story.

"Are you worried at all?" I was asked by the kind nurse who booked me in. I replied that I wasn't, but then realised that actually, just a bit. My GP had said when she sent me that "I don't think there's anything to worry about, but it's always worth checking." But then you think, "Yes, but what if there is - even something small and caught early? It would still change everything." We live on a knife edge all the time; as one of the funeral prayers reminds us, the thread that separates life from death is a slender one. The clock ticking remorselessly in the background as I write this is an indicator of my mortality, each tick one less second of life. And it isn't just about me, but the many lives my life connects with - so that just for a moment back then, I understood how for some people their engagement with disabling or terminal illness includes dealing with the feelings of guilt they have, the sense of letting other people down.

Anyway, in my case there was nothing to worry about; not this time, anyway. But it's good to visit now and again the reality that we are mortal, that one day, as the men in the trenches knew, a bullet comes with our number on it. "Live each day as if thy last" is a good motto. Or, to put it another way, our best response to the reality of death is that we seize hold of life and live it well, adventurously, lovingly, fully - that we make the most of every moment.

Poem

A short verse, original by "anonymous", slightly tweaked by me, that I shall use today at a funeral :-

I’d like the memory of me to be a happy one,

I’d like to leave an afterglow of smiles when life is done.

I’d like to leave an echo whispering softly down the ways

of happy times and laughing times, and bright and sunny days.

I’d like the tears of those who grieve to dry before the rain,

for though sometimes the skies grow dark, the sun will shine again.

Sunday Talk

I was due to speak at a little chapel last Sunday, but in the end everyone decided to join the Remembrance Service at the parish church instead, which I think was the right thing to do. I had chosen not to preach on the Remembrance theme, as it happens, but on the set readings for the day (the parable of the wise and foolish virgins), as given below :-

  Weddings in first century Palestine were rather different from weddings today. So far as we can tell, the marriage ceremony followed a lengthy betrothal or engagement period which was itself a contractual arrangement that could be ended only by a formal divorce. On the marriage day itself, the bridegroom would come to collect his bride and they would make their way in procession to the place where the marriage was to be celebrated. In the story Jesus told, perhaps it was a procession of this sort for which the ten bridesmaids were waiting, with their oil lamps.  And the bridegroom, as we heard, was late.

I thought it was brides who were supposed to be late. My daughter got married two months ago, and she was 25 minutes late. That actually counted as a minor success; the photographer had told us she’d be an hour late. Her new hairdo fell out and they had to start again, apparently. On the day, all sorts of people could have been late in fact: my brother Colin was travelling from Llandudno, I’d a nephew coming from Anglesey; my sister was coming across from Oakham in Rutland and picking up her daughter in Stratford-on-Avon on the way. My son was coming from London, as were many of the groom’s friends, and another brother, Terry, was coming down from Blackpool. And since my son-in-law is Polish, all his family had flown in from Krakow. In fact everyone apart from the bride arrived on-time, though my brother and sister-in-law from Llandudno did run things a bit tight.

But the tension! Had we done everything, prepared everything, paid for everything? For weeks, my daughter’d been sending us planning rotas, showing what we should all be doing, and the date we should have done it by. Mostly, we ignored them, and it didn’t matter. It all went really well, and everyone had a good day, especially the bride and groom.

We forgot a few things, and we didn’t quite get round to doing a few things. None of them mattered too much as it happens, but with so much to coordinate, we could easily have missed something important. And then it would have mattered a lot. Weddings today are very different from weddings in first century Palestine, but they’re just as important, that’s for sure.

Whatever you’re planning, it’s important to have a plan B. Not everything will go exactly as predicted in plan A, so you need to make sure you can still keep all the wheels on the road, even so.  Keep things slick, and no-one else will notice, that’s the theory. It’s wise to make sure you have oil in your lamp.

Well, this is a parable about judgement, of course. Jesus had a lot to say about judgement, of course. He didn’t only talk about finding lost sheep and binding up wounds; there’s also a hard edge to his teaching. His people will have to answer for their action and for their inaction.

It’s good that this is a parable about inaction. When we use the word ‘sin’, we’re mostly thinking in term of sins, plural, in other words of the bad things we might do, or maybe see other people doing. Mostly we ourselves are nice and good, and don’t do much that’s wrong. But sin mostly isn’t sins at all. Sin is less about what we do, more about what we don’t do. When we don’t get round to things, when we can’t be bothered. Too much of the time, that’s me. I’m dreadful at not getting round to things. A procrastinator, a last-minute man, that’s me. To be honest, we’re a family of them; that’s why my daughter kept making out her rotas and lists, and that’s also why we mostly ignored them. Which group of bridesmaids would I have been in? I think I know.

More than once, I’ve been saved by the fact that Tesco’s open 24 hours. Well, there were no 24 hour superstores back in those days, to sell foolish young ladies oil for their lamps. I can imagine them hammering on the dealer’s door to wake him up. It must have taken them ages; and when they got back, they were too late.

So let’s think about what the message might be of this story for the people who first heard it, and for us today. We all know the song, “Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning.” This is a story about how we make ourselves ready for the Lord. Maybe those who first heard Jesus were thinking mostly about being prepared and ready for the second coming, the Lord coming in judgement and fire, the end of all things, the moment of reckoning. Will he find us ready and prepared, or will he find us wanting? It has that meaning for us as well, but I think we must also read it as referring to the ways in which we prepare ourselves for service in the world today. These are not alternative readings, and mutually exclusive; as we wait for our Lord, our waiting needs to be active and purposeful. We should be waiting as witnesses and as those who have a story to share.

We wait as members of a servant Church, dedicating its energies and skills into making the world around us here as heavenly a place as it can be. We proclaim the kingdom to come by building kingdom values of love and peace and compassion and service here where we are – loving our neighbours as ourselves.  Our beginning point in being sorted out and ready and prepared as Christians is constancy in prayer and in our reading of God’s word. If we don’t pray regularly and we don’t read regularly that’s like having the lamp but no oil to put in it. Lamps without oil go out; so does faith without prayer.

So, next question: what do I mean by prayer, and how do we go about reading God’s word? It isn’t just that we do it, it’s how we do it. Let’s think about prayer. Prayer isn’t really about reciting things, even something as holy and relevant and beautiful as the Lord’s Prayer. Of course reciting prayers can and should be part of our prayer life, but it shouldn’t be all we do. We don’t necessarily have to kneel to pray, nor even to speak. One definition of prayer speaks of “the practice of the presence of God”.

I love the story of the old men who used to wander into church every lunchtime and sit there for a half hour or so. One day the minister stopped him as he was leaving and said, “I love the way you come here every day to talk to God.” “Oh, I don’t talk to God,” said the old man, “leastways, I do sometimes, when I’ve got something to say, and sometimes I reckon he talks to me. But most of the time we just sits here together in peace.” Now that’s praying: choosing, in our busy lives, to make some space to sit a while with God. Words are optional, so is sitting, some to that. We may be busy, but we can never be too busy to pray. So I know one person who prays as she washes up after breakfast, another who prays as she drives to work each day (in case you’re worrying, she doesn’t close her eyes to do it).

How we do our reading is also important. There’s no prize for being able to devour bigger chunks of scripture than the next person. Often, small is beautiful in our scripture reading. It’s good to hear what others make of what we read, which is why bible study groups can be helpful. A word of warning, though: avoid any bible studies I might be leading, if you want to actually stay on the subject! Better still perhaps, read using a study guide or notes like the ones produced by Scripture Union, Bible Reading Fellowship and others.

But don’t read just to be dutiful, just in order to have done it.  It’s often worth doing a bit of serious study: the Bible comes alive when we understand it more clearly, the geography, the political context, the cultural practices, all of that. When we understand clearly what each story meant for the people who first read it, then that can help us to understand what it might be saying for us today.

But on the other hand we don’t always want to get too academic about things, because we can also just use the Bible as a catalyst for prayer. Read a short passage, perhaps one that’s so well known you don’t need to really think about it too deeply; so just read it and pause, reflect, don’t worry about the meaning so much as what God might be wanting to say to you personally through those verses. I remember being told about this sort of use of the Bible by a member of the Iona Community, and finding it quite exciting, that God might use these age old words today to say something to me that’s fresh and new. Expect to find new things as you read, expect that God might want to meet you here.

Please don’t imagine that I’m any sort of expert. In fact, I suppose I’m advising you to do things I don’t do very well myself. That’s something I have to admit. But I know I need to pray and to read, and I know I can always grow and develop in the way I do those things, and I know that it’s here, in my praying and in my reading, that I’ll I get the fuel and the motivation to keep on serving, burning.

Here’s a final thought, not about fuel for oil lamps but fuel for motors. I’ve an old friend who’s a motor mechanic, and he always has virtually no fuel in his car; someone else I know who drives for a living never lets his fuel tank go below half way. I know which one of the two I’d prefer to travel with!

Each Life Matters

Some words I've prepared for a memorial ceremony :-

What does it mean, to belong together? Simply that, on our own, even the greatest of us is only quite small. We are formed and made to be part of something greater than our mere selves: to give and to receive, to love and to be loved, to be cared for and to care. We are measured not by what we get and gather and own, but by what we give: within our families and with our children, in the nurture and teaching we have offered; among our friends, in our loyalty, and in our sharing of joys and tears; and within the wider world, in service and compassion, in perseverance and honest work. Like leaves on a tree, one day it will be our time to fall, and for some this will be too soon and out of season. But what each of us has given to the greater whole really matters; each life matters, each person matters, and what we have given of ourselves is what will live on.

Quite a long time . . .

. . . since I last posted anything here. There's lots happening, maybe too much, so that I find myself both not having time to post stuff and also not really being able to properly interpret what's going on around me. It's a bit like pushing a huge great boulder up a hill; it's all right just so long as you keep pushing . . . the trouble is that as soon as you stop, the boulder rolls back and crushes you.

Or maybe it's just that we fool ourselves into thinking that. Perhaps what happens is that we stop, the boulder rolls back, but someone steps forward and takes the strain. Or perhaps the boulder doesn't roll back but is quite all right just sitting there a while, it's just that we spook ourselves into thinking it's bound to roll back.

Maybe I'm in danger of taking this particular metaphor too far!  Here's something I posted earlier on today on Facebook, which is a reflection on stuff from last weekend. Many of my FB friends have "shared" material posted by rather extreme right wing groups, who have done their best this year to hijack the Poppy Appeal for their own ends. I'm sure the friends concerned would not, for the most part, subscribe to the aims of these groups (some might, I suppose, I don't require any of my friends, FB or otherwise, to pass some kind of political opinion test, and on the whole I enjoy the variety of their views). Myself, I don't share anything until I know where it's come from.

Anyway, here's what I wrote -

I have been very moved this weekend at the attendances and the quality of worship, music, ceremony and preaching I've encountered at a number of Remembrance events. Good and powerful address by Steve Willson at St Mary's Welshpool yesterday making the essential point that the enemy is extremism, of all kinds, in all places, in (sadly) all faiths, creeds and political groupings. I hope it was heard, not least by the many young people in church. With that in mind, how sad that groups like Britain First have sought to hijack the poppy and remembrance for their own sectarian ends. They presume to know what those who fought were fighting for: I prefer to believe they were fighting for freedom, tolerance and a world where all are affirmed and valued - in a world war in which they fought alongside comrades of many different creeds, colours and cultures. I am proud of my country and my heritage, but proud most of all of what it can do and be in a world where peace and justice should be the right and the possession of all.

I'm pleased to see that it's had more "likes" than any other of my recent posts.

Blessed are the gentle

A talk prepared but not given . . .

Blessed are the gentle; they shall have the earth for their possession. As I read through this morning’s Gospel reading, that was the verse that caught my eye, though I have to confess it did so for a slightly unworthy reason. I was reminded of a poster I saw on a railway station platform, which simply said, paraphrasing that verse, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Underneath, someone had written, one of the meek, presumably: “If that’s all right with the rest of you.”

For it does seem a bit far fetched, don’t you think, that the meek should inherit the earth. How’s that going to happen? If, for example, you take a very literal view of a re-created earth like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Christadelphians do, then yes, the gentle and meek are left to take possession of an earth just like this one but with all the bad bits taken out. That isn’t quite what I believe, but I’ll come back to that.

It seems to me that on the whole, religion these days is getting less and less meek. A hundred or more years ago, murders and bomb outrages were likely to be perpetrated by young atheistic anarchists, but now the bombs are liable to be planted by young converts to Islam, or perhaps young people converted within Islam to a form of the faith they believe to be purer and truer, and to a war which they believe – and are taught – God is requiring them to fight. The carnage their actions produce is they believe blessed by God, and they themselves are blessed by God, the more so if they die as martyrs to this holy cause. I find it hard to comprehend how anyone can choose to believe in a God who calls us to kill and maim and destroy; but when I said that to a non-religious friend he pointed out that the Bible is full of instances where God does seem to demand just that from his people.

So that caused me to think again. The Old Testament very vividly recounts occasions when people were slain in their hundreds and thousands, and whole families executed for what seem to us trivial reasons, and kings brought low for not slaying and destroying everything they should have. It can make uncomfortable reading for the naturally meek and gentle.

“This is the word of the Lord” we say at the end of a reading. But it doesn’t always quite feel like that. Or not always when it’s from the Old Testament, anyway. Someone asked me the other day whether I was a fundamentalist where the Bible is concerned, and my answer was “Yes and no”. Yes, in that the Bible is fundamental to my faith, and this is where I must go, and do repeatedly go, to discern the word and the will of God. But no, if what you mean by fundamentalism is the “every word is holy” attitude that has to give each part of this amazing collection of literature the same prescriptive power and authority.

In other words, I value and I use the Bible, but I’m not held prisoner by it. And more to the point, when I read the Bible I do so as a Christian; my beginning point is the Gospels, the story and the words of Jesus, and the New Testament provides the glass, the prism, through which I may read and understand the Old. Not rejecting it or throwing it out, for, difficult though they may be, these Old Testament verses are the scriptures that informed and empowered our Lord himself; but at the same time, not reading them and being bound by them as though our Lord Jesus had never walked among us and said and done the things he did. I think of the Old Testament as the winding quest of a people seeking to follow and serve and discover the God who is fully revealed in the witness of the New Testament, and in the person of Jesus. And whatever I read, I read from the foot of the cross.

There are many Christian martyrs, and indeed most I would think of the saints we honour at All Saints’ Tide will have died as martyrs. Nowadays martyrdom is maybe the ambition of young idealistic Muslim jihadis, but that’s a martyrdom achieved in the course of killing others: scandalously, all too often those who have never lifted hand against them, sometimes those who have actively sought to help, and indeed many who were themselves fellow Muslims. How does that compare to what we read in scripture? It’s maybe not too far from some of what we read in the Old Testament, but it’s a world away from the Gospels; and when we stand at the foot of the cross, and see the nails and the spear and the crown of thorns, what rules there is meekness and gentleness, and I am reminded of the words of Graham Kendrick’s lovely worship song “Meekness and Majesty”, or the immense words of Isaac Watts, “When I survey the wondrous cross”.

A number of the early Christian martyrs died not in the course of killing but because they would not kill, and many more because they would not speak against their Lord, or deny him, having given their lives to him. The hallmark of such people was meekness, but let’s be sure about one thing here: such meekness was not a wishy washy doormat sort of a thing, in which you let everybody walk over you because you’re afraid to stand up for what you believe. Not for a moment: what we see in the saints we honour today, and in the martyrs of our Church especially, is a tough meekness that knows what it believes, and will not let go of that whatever threats may be made. What these men and women have in common with today’s Islamic so-called martyrs is that they have found something that is to them of more value and importance than anything else, even than their own life; but for the Christian saint everything rests in Jesus, and the only way of life – or of death – is to be as like him as we can be.

I said “as we can be” to make the simple but important point that though we tend to reserve the word saint for specially good and holy people, in its original use the word was used for anyone who follows Jesus. If we use the word in that way, then we are all saints; and we should all aspire to the meekness and the gentleness we find in Jesus.

And in so doing we shall inherit the earth; or, in the version from which I read this morning, we shall have the earth for our possession. Here is what I think that means: it means that the things that will truly endure in this world are cross shaped things. It may look as though might will always win the day, and that those who by their guns and bombs instil fear in others, the tyrants and the terrorists, and for that matter the greedy and the grabbers, will always have the upper hand, but the reality is that nothing built on those foundations can last. As Jesus himself said, “Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.”

In a way I feel sorry for the idealistic young men, young women too, who have been seduced into fighting for ISIS, or engaging in acts of more or less random terrorism, in the name of Islam and in the belief that they are serving and pleasing God. I mourn with a heavy heart for their victims; but I have nothing but contempt for the twisted and bitter teachers who hijack the name and the authority of imam in order to twist and poison idealistic young minds. These so called holy men bear if anything by far the greater guilt. These are men with hands covered in blood. They proclaim a god who loves the righteous and hates in the infidel . . . but what sort of righteousness involves a man covering his hands in innocent blood? We proclaim the God who from the cross proclaims his meek and gentle and forgiving love for all the world, and even for those who nailed him there and left him to die.

Those who live according to the Spirit of this man will always be life-affirmers rather than life-deniers. The offering of our own lives is not an attempt at earning or cadging our way into heaven, but our response to what has already been achieved for us, on the cross, and that what the cross stands for is not ours alone, but a message for the world, a word of love that everyone needs to hear.

There will always be those in the world who will stop their ears to it; for them, might is always right, and they will even find religious excuses for their cruelty and barbarism or to justify their greed. Often it will look as though they are winning, but nothing they build can last. Only in the meekness of the man who died at Calvary can we find the true majesty we take as our model of how to live, by his grace, and as givers and enablers and life-bringers. We honour this in the saints, men and women whose lives were transparent to that great example of love; may that same light shine also in us, and in the meek and courageous witness of his Church in all the world.

All Saints

A talk prepared but not given . . .

  I heard the other day about a type of cloud called a noctilucent cloud. Noctilucent means “shining at night”, and that’s what these clouds do. They’re very high clouds indeed, made up of ice crystals, and they appear to us when it’s dark, shining with a blueish or faint white glow. The sun is below the horizon, but it’s light still reaches that portion of sky, so that the clouds to glow in a way that’s quite different from the light on clouds along the horizon at sunset.

You think of clouds normally as blocking the light, but these ones shine instead. To see them you might almost believe they can somehow make their own light, but of course they can’t: they just take the light that is offered them, and then share that light with us the cloud watchers, somewhere far below.

Another cloud image that came to me as I was thinking what to speak about today is this; my particular story is located in the little northern market town of Glossop between Manchester and Sheffield, on a cold and grimy and grey winter’s day a few years ago. I’d gone there to walk up into the hills and take part of the Pennine Way. I arrived by train, walked from the station to the town centre, and couldn’t help but feel rather depressed, because it was one of those days when everything just seemed grey and dismal. Glossop was completely covered by clouds that seemed to start somewhere around chimney pot level. And everywhere was dripping wet, water dripped from every telegraph wire, down the drain pipes and the awning of the shops and the market stalls, and you got showered every time you happened to knock the branch of a tree. I trudged up out of the town and onto the Pennines, and as I did so, I reached a point at which the world was utterly and completely transformed. I came out of the clouds and into a magical and sunlit world on the hill tops, looking down now on the cloud in the valleys changed from dull grey into dazzling white.

On All Saints’ Day we celebrate and remember those who, as the Book of Revelation reminds us, are clothed in dazzling white. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Like those noctilucent clouds, the light with which they shine is not their own, they shine with the light of Christ.

Another image that always comes to mind on All Saints’ Day is the stained glass window. Most stained glass windows contain pictures of saints, I suppose, and our ancestors would have learned about the saints from the stained glass and the wall paintings in their church. I remember that in one of my previous churches we had a very large and lovely stained glass window at the east end, behind the altar, and we thought it was a bit of a shame that at our biggest service of the year, the Christmas Eve carol service, all you could see of it was a big black shape behind the altar. So my churchwarden had the bright idea of installing temporary floodlights to shine up at the window from outside; the whole scene was transformed into  the Victorian equivalent of glorious Technicolor.

Like stained glass windows and noctilucent clouds, saints shine with a light that isn’t their own, it’s been given them by God. We think of saints as people so irradiated with God’s love that they glow, and that glow touches those around them. Each stained glass window glows in its own special way, with colours and shapes and designs that you only see when the light shines through - in the case of our big East window, a rich display of purples and reds and gold. Saints also each shine in his or her own special way; their stories are all different, their skills and talents and loves, so each saint we encounter will shine in a special and unique way.

But all of them shine because of the one light they have been given, the love-light gifted them from above; and so the one true light of God shines into the world in a myriad different ways. Each shard of saintly light bears witness to the loveliness of God in a new and special way, and all form part of the one unbroken glory that is God’s alone.

I love to read about the saints, and their stories both encourage me and challenge me. I’m encouraged by their stories of kindness, constancy, valour, and steadfast faith. But I can’t help but be challenged when I think, would I have done that? Could I have done that? Would I have remained true, or would I have drifted away? It’s easy to be a saint when the road is clear and everything is sunny; much harder when there are rocks about and the road is dark. I’m all right till tested, but how would I cope with the test?

Saints are not super-heroes, but they are people who know the truth about themselves. Saints aren’t specially good and perfect, but they are honest: honest in admitting their weakness, honest in owning up to their mistakes, honest in accepting the discipline they needed, and honest in opening their hearts to God’s forgiving love and healing touch. Peter the foremost of the apostles denied his Lord three times, and then burst into tears when he realised what he’d done; and like him, many of the greatest saints were and are men and women who’d been brought face to face with their own weakness. Saints don’t set out to be heroes of the faith, it’s something that happens to them. And it happens because these are people who’ve said yes to God and who’ve gone on saying yes to God, even when the world told them it was a foolish thing to do, even when the world attacked and persecuted them for doing it. At its simplest, that’s what makes a saint – a saint is someone who, when God calls, keeps on saying yes.

And so we all get our chance to be saints. There’s no pre-qualification. It’s not like the Olympics, where you only get into the team when you’ve beaten a certain time or won a certain race. God calls, and we say – Sorry, what was that again? Or – Not just now, thanks; or – Isn’t there someone else who could do that? Or – Yes, sure, I would, but I’m doing my hair tonight.  That’s what we say, or is it just me? But the saints we honour today didn’t say any of those things, or any of the hundred and one other excuses we come up with to justify being lukewarm or part time in our faith. No – these guys said “Yes” – maybe not straight away, but once they’d said it they went on saying it; they persevered in the faith.

Getting back to clouds for a moment, bits of the song “Both Sides Now” started playing in my head as I sat down to write these words. Judy Collins, I think, singing this about clouds: “Now they only block the sun, they rain and snow on everyone; so many things I could have done, but clouds got in my way.” Some last, cloud-based thoughts, then. Firstly, that when we’re not part of the solution, we may well be part of the problem. Saints shine to lead people to the Lord, but we could be blocking the light, and barring the way, or concentrating on looking good ourselves, instead of pointing the way to Jesus’. Let’s be noctilucent clouds, that shine God’s love where otherwise it would be dark.

And finally, thinking of my day in Glossop, maybe saints are those who even while they live in the grimy and grey world trapped under the clouds, can see the glory above the clouds, and bear witness to that glory. They’re not restricted by the ordinary and the everyday, and that’s why they could do such amazing things, all the time saying, with St Paul, “Yet not I, but Christ at work within me.”

Hallowe'en

A Christian name (the Eve of All Hallows or All Saints) for what is in essence a pagan festival, and one of the many such festivals designed to counter our very basic fear of the dark and all that the dark might contain. The lighting of fires at this time has been transferred to bonfire night, and to the memory of Guy Fawkes, but would originally have been a practice at this season.

Having said that, what for some people is designed to counter evil can become for others a celebration of the dark side. Perhaps Hallowe'en is at risk of becoming too much a celebration these days, not least because for many people there is no established and practised faith in the light side. I don't necessarily believe that youngsters are seduced into satanism because they celebrate Hallowe'en - well, I don't believe that at all, and I find those who shout about that from (generally) a conservative evangelical standpoint, somewhat risible; what I do believe is that when we turn the occult into an occasion of fun, we maybe cease to believe as much as we should in the true presence and persistence of evil.

That's not to say that a bit of play and fun today is always unhealthy. While the wealth of plastic Hallowe'en trivia sold in the supermarkets is probably doing more for the Chinese economy than it is for our own wellbeing, I remember how much I used to enjoy Hallowe'en as a child, and that the experience of being just a bit scared of the dark and the turnip lanterns (not pumpkins, for the most part, in those days) was probably good for me - not least because the following day we also celebrated All Saints and the triumph of light. I used to hate apple-bobbing, though . . .

As a Christian, I believe (with Desmond Tutu) that light is always stronger than darkness. How can the Church demonstrate this and teach it? Not, I think, by fulminating against Hallowe'en, not by setting up alternatives to it, but by joining in the fun. All the Hallowe'en activities I attended as a child were church-based, since that's where much of our social life centred. Today a church that seemed to celebrate Hallowe'en would come in for a lot of stick from other Christians, I suspect - but that's a shame. We should include Hallowe'en in what we do, but just make sure that when we do so, we teach the whole story: firstly, being serious among the fun about the reality of fear and of evil, that the stuff we make light of and have fun with today is still real and still doing harm; and secondly, making clear that the reason we can have wholesome fun with the dark is that we know in Christ the ultimate victory is already won. Dark is scary, but in the end the light is stronger; even the smallest of candles, once lit, will drive the shadows back.

Panel

This should have posted yesterday, but something went wrong . . . probably my fault, technology and I don't really mix, and in my heart I mourn the loss of the inkwell and the nib pen, on my old wooden desk with its tip-up seat in class 4b at school. Ball points were banned for a while at my school, I recall, though I think that was mostly because of a craze we had for converting the plastic tubes into blowpipes to fire little darts constructed from pins.

Anyway, the other day I was part of a four person panel assembled at a local Presbyterian church for an 'any questions' evening. It was a good experience, I enjoyed being put on the spot and having to think things through. I knew the other three members of the panel, and, if there was a fault with the whole process it was perhaps that we all seemed to agree most of the time, so there was none of the combative stuff you see on the telly.

But I think we had between us some useful things to say, on subjects ranging from the situation in the Middle East, through what sort of music to choose for Sunday worship, to who we might choose to invite for a meal, and what we might cook for them (me: Mel and Sue from 'Bake-Off', and cakes, of course, and plenty of them). The evening was well attended, and the chapel (New Street in Welshpool) is lovely, well appointed, nicely cared for, and deserves a bigger congregation than it gets.

Of course, this was an evening for insiders, that is, for members of the churches of the local presbytery. It would be good for the churches together in our town to do something similar as an outreach event, to present in open forum what Christians believe about issues of note, even if we don't all always believe the same things - and to take the risk of criticism and attack from outside our fellowships, for that in itself is a test of our faith and resolve, and an opportunity for witness.

A Sunday Talk . . .

. . . based on the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the Temple :-

“No, I don’t have a prayer, really.” Those were the words of a friend of mine - we’ll call him Terry - in a conversation we had the other day.  He told me he didn’t have a prayer.  He’d just been interviewed for a job, and I’d asked him what he thought his chances were.  He’d started out with high hopes, but he didn’t think the interview had gone all that well (not that he minded too much, from what he said, he’d also found he didn’t want that job quite as much as he’d thought he did).

But it’s an odd phrase, I think, especially in this rather secular world, to say you don’t have a prayer. As a Christian, I’d want to reply that we always do have a prayer. But as today’s Gospel reading reminds us, we have to do it right if we want our prayers to be heard. We have to know ourselves, and we have to know what we’re praying for, and why. And we have to honest and sincere when we do it.

The story Jesus told concerned two people who went up to the temple to pray, and the prayer of one of them was heard by God, the prayer of the other was not. I think the people listening to this story would have been pretty sure straight away whose prayer would be heard, and their assessment would have been wrong. The Pharisee went into the temple full of confidence and knowing all was well between him and God. If that’s not the sort of guy whose prayer is heard then something must be going very wrong. The other man was a tax collector, a betrayer of his people and his faith, a man in league with the pagan Romans, a collaborator and probably a swindler and a cheat to boot. He probably entered the temple half expecting to be thrown out at any moment.  But in fact the one of those two whose prayer was heard by God was the one who probably didn’t really think he had a prayer.  But in reality it was the other guy who didn’t have a prayer, for I don’t think the Pharisee was even talking to God at all. 

Imagine him, standing there to declaim his prayers in a confident and loud voice. And picture the tax-collector, mumbling prayers in a way that you probably couldn’t tell what he was saying even if you were right next to him.  And anyway, he wasn’t standing like the Pharisee, but flat on his face not daring even to look upwards.  But here’s the thing: the tax-collector was praying, while the Pharisee was just showing off.  The tax-collector was talking to God, even though perhaps he didn’t think he had much of a chance of being heard; the Pharisee, super-sure of his own goodness, was really talking to anyone within earshot, to anyone he could show off to.

The famous preacher and Biblical teacher Charles Spurgeon was once listening to young ministers in training, as they practised their preaching skills.  He watched one young man ascending the steps to the pulpit full of confidence, almost showing off, and looking very certain of himself.  Sadly his performance as a preacher didn’t match his show;  he made a mess of his address, had nothing really to say, and at the end of it he descended the steps full of shame and dejection.  Charles Spurgeon took him to one side and said, “Young man, if you had ascended those steps the way you came down them, you might have descended them the way you went up!”

In other words, we should always avoid boastful show.  For it isn’t how good we are that matters ever, all that matters is how good God is.  And this is the great theme of the story Jesus told: what we offer God in humility, what we offer knowing we’re not worthy, not sufficient, not spiritually healthy and wealthy, well, it may not even seem worth offering, we may not think we have a prayer - but what we offer God will transform, to make it more than we could ever have been, ever have achieved on our own.  When we’re tempted in our prayer and our worship into too confident a show of what we have and who we are, then we tread on very dangerous ground. I have lost count of the times in my life when pride has come before a fall.

But even when our pride brings us down, we still have a prayer. Over the years I’ve been greatly drawn to the gentle and persuasive writings of Mother Julian of Norwich.  Mother Julian was a medieval mystic, an anchoress or female hermit living and ministering from the church of St Julian’s, in Norwich, from which she took her name - her real name is unknown.  I think her writings speak just as profoundly in this modern world as they did to the people of her day; and I think I’m right in saying that her work has never been out of print since its first publication.  She had a deep and wonderful awareness of the all-availing love of God, coupled with just as deep an awareness of her own frailty and sin. The visions that informed her writing occurred during a period of her life that involved both severe physical illness and alongside that a profound sense of her own spiritual unworthiness.

But one of the wonderful things she says is that she realised how God loved her at the point of her own sinfulness (and even at the times when she was openly rejecting him) - he loved her just as much, just as deeply and fully, in those bad times as he would love her in heaven.  Even at the times when she herself chose to be lost and perhaps also chose to be unlovely, she was never lost to God, never unloved by her Lord.

And that’s true for all of us, and that’s why the prayer of the penitent and suddenly so self-aware tax-collector was heard that day in the temple.  That’s true for me.  I haven’t got a prayer;  or frankly I shouldn’t have, not the way I see it.  What right have I to expect that God should want to hear anything I say, what right have I to insist he should grant anything I might ask?  Haven’t I rejected him, again and again, by the selfish choices I’ve made, by the hurtful things I’ve said and thought, by the unthoughtful and uncaring things I’ve done or the good and kind things I’ve left undone?  I needn’t expect him to like me, and perhaps he doesn’t, or at least I suppose he doesn’t like the ways in which I hurt him.  But he does love me, and so he does hear me, he does listen to me.

I used to hate it when children came up to me at the end of school assembly or at our messy church or family service, to ask me questions about God.  Because they would always ask really hard things, like ‘If God made everything, who made God?’  But the other week a young child asked the minister at a service I was attending, ‘What do you think God looks like?’ and that was I think a bit easier to answer.  As Christians we can say that God is like Jesus.  In Jesus we see the what complete and divine love looks like when expressed in human terms, when lived in a human life:  for Jesus is the one called Emmanuel, God-is-with-us.  So this is what God’s like:  he is like the man who, as the nails were hammered through his wrists to secure him to the cross on which he would die, still said, still prayed, ‘Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they are doing.’

God loves me now as much as he will ever love me.  That’s the insight Mother Julian had;  and it’s true for you as it is for me, and it’s true for all those people out there who aren’t thinking of church, or God, or sin, or righteousness today.  God doesn’t only love nice and safe and good people - in fact sometimes we must be harder to love than the prodigal sons of this world, because they might wake up to just who they are and what they’ve done, whereas we might fool ourselves that we’re good enough as we are. For here’s the thing about that story Jesus told: God loved the Pharisee in the temple that day just as much as he loved the tax-collector;  indeed, if either one of those two men was breaking the heart of God it would have been the Pharisee, because that shell of supreme and yet unfounded self-confidence with which he surrounded himself was fatally separating him from the love God so much wanted him to know and to share.  Fatally separating him from the love of God - the way to life is open to us, but we’re made worthy of it not by our own goodness and piety and regular attendance at divine worship, but only by God’s love, by grace, by Jesus. It’s true what they say: blessed are those who know their need of God.

I don’t have a prayer;  that’s as true for me as it was for my friend Terry.  But that’s sort of the point;  as a Christian, I have to wake up to the fact that it’s not about me, it’s about what God can do for me, and to me, and through me, if I let him - with what I can offer him, not from strength and certainty and success, but from weakness and failure.  I don’t have a prayer, except that God gives me a prayer to say out of weakness and brokenness;  not from any place of security or achievement, but when I know I need his healing grace;  not from some high place where I can be seen and admired and respected, but at the foot of the cross where the reality of me is exposed, and I can’t still be the fake me I’d like the world to see and applaud. 

We need always and constantly in our prayers and our meditation, in our planning and our preparation, to come to the cross. We need to come to the place where our Lord bears the pains and the penalty that should have been mine but have become his, that should have been yours but have become his. In the end I have a prayer not because I believe in God but because, amazingly and against all the odds, he believes in me;  and in you;  and in those who don’t yet know him, but who might come to know him if we tell them about the prayers he hears, this prayer of ours he has heard: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Another day . . .

Another day on Planet Earth, and quite a busy one. Some good conversations with great people. Some good singing, and a pleasant meal. A decent pint of ale, and a nice glass of Pinotage, and a glass of champagne to help celebrate a colleague's birthday. We belong to one another, and the ways in which we move between carer and cared-for, giver and receiver, learner and instructor, worker and relaxer - that's what makes life interesting. I am no longer a Priest (note the capital), but I am bound to be a priest without the capital, because all of us who believe are called on to speak of God to others, and to speak for others to God. Again, some of the time we are ministers, and at other times we are the ones receiving ministry.

I have been hugely grateful for the ministry I have received over the past few years, and would like categorically to state (with some sadness) that virtually none of it has been given by Priests, capital P, almost all of it by priests, small p, who might not really have been aware of the priestly status of what they were doing. I hope I have been able to give ministry through this time; I feel I have, and I think I've been able to today.

I've been reading some really rather involved Facebook conversations about the detailed (and rather over-literal and out-of-context, to my view) interpretation of what are obviously seen to be important and key Bible passages. But the quality of our Christian witness is not to be measured by whether we believe exactly the right thing about this or that verse; the measure is simply this - that people look at us, hear what we say, notice what we give and say, "If that's what being a Christian is about, then maybe I should try it too."

It won't always work. Some people will see us as weak, simple, easy targets, there to be exploited. We have to live with that (which is a point I think the Parable of the Sower was told to make), because it will sometimes work, maybe even often. Hearts will be changed.

October

This is the poem I was working on yesterday, after some more work today. I'm not sure that it's finished yet; nor is quite where I am, though it does perhaps represent one version of me at this time. I've used a rhyming structure that deliberately opposes the first and last quartets.

Was Jesus really tugging at my sleeve

that crazy autumn day so long ago,

my collar turned against the cooling wind,

my tears mixed with the soft October rain?

And so in hope a journey was begun;

I set myself in faith the race to run.

And now I trace it back through tumbling years

that score the lines of laughter, tracks of tears,

recall my sense of purpose, truth and call,

recall as well my stumbling step, my fall.

The gold once grasped turned into dust and waste,

the fruit when plucked no longer sweet to taste.

And so, beset by fears I can’t explain,

more sinned against than thinking I had sinned,

I turn aside from paths I used to know;

I’m running short of things I can believe.

Winter Wildlife

I shall continue to post the 'nature notes' column I write regularly for a few local publications. This one is mainly about swans . . .

Asked recently about my favourite winter birds, I had no hesitation in replying “Fieldfares”, since I’ve always been excited by these large and attractive winter thrushes, often to be found in large and noisy flocks. But the winter wildfowl that arrive at this time of the year are also exciting, bringing with them, often, a flavour of the frozen Arctic.

In past years, I’ve enjoyed visiting Wildfowl Trust refuges, particularly Martin Mere in Lancashire, to see the winter swans that arrive there at this time of year, to stay until March or April. The large whooper swan and the slightly smaller Bewick’s are much noisier birds than our native mute swans, though they’re not quite as silent as the name suggests. These winter swans have yellow and black bills, rather than the orange of the mute swan, and when here they may be found in large flocks or herds, within which they form family groups. The term herd is appropriate when the swans are grazing on grassland or stubble, as whooper swans (and wintering geese) frequently do. Swans will also up-end to feed on underwater vegetation - this will sometimes lead to staining of the head and neck feathers, when feeding in iron-rich waters. Both whooper and Bewick’s swans visit Martin Mere. Generally the whooper swan has a more northerly distribution in the UK.

The cygnets of both species are brown with pink bills (mute swan cygnets have black bills), with the whooper swan cygnet being generally paler than the Bewick’s. The adult whooper swan generally carries its neck very straight, unlike the curve of the native mute swan. The shorter neck of the Bewick’s swan gives it a slightly goose-like appearance, in comparison. The Bewick’s swan also has a rounder and more goose-like head than the whooper swan, and the yellow patch on its bill is smaller and more rounded. The precise pattern of the bill is different for different birds, and is useful when identifying individuals who can then be studied.

These are tremendous birds, I think, and the sight of Bewick’s swans flying over in a great V formation is not to be forgotten. The Bewick’s swan is completely an Arctic bird so far as breeding is concerned, but a few whooper swans may nest by moorland tarns in the north of Scotland, and Orkney and Shetland.

I haven’t left much space to write about other winter wildfowl. Locally these are likely to be ducks (our Canada and greylag geese are here all the year round), with wigeon, pintail, pochard and shoveler (all British breeding species) likely to visit our ponds and lakes at this time of the year. But, to mention one other white winter bird, I was delighted a couple of years ago when visiting north Norfolk in late autumn to see about a few snow geese, white with distinctive red bills and black wing tips, feeding with a larger flock of pink-footed geese. Just a few reach us each winter (they are really American birds), though there are also some escapes from captivity.

Poems

An interesting day today, beginning with a long overdue visit to the informal eucharist held once a month at our local Methodist church. I found it relaxing, friendly and quite moving, and it was followed by a simple breakfast before their main service, for which I also stayed. I was brought up to attend both church and chapel, and have continued to have a foot in both camps, while still feeling that the Anglican boat is the one I am called to fish from.

I will, however, give the local Methodist minister a ring sometime over the next week or three, and arrange to meet. She is aware of my situation, and we have had some good conversation in the past. I think at present that were I to make the move to join that church, a place in which Ann and I both feel very comfortable, it would be as a lay person, having resigned my orders to do so. At present I have laid my orders to one side, but have not felt able to formally resign them. When I have tried to do so, or at least to think and plan towards such a move, I seem to feel God saying to me, "No, you are a priest."

I am in fact something of an accidental priest. I would have been happy to have been told, all those years ago, that I was not recommended for training. The pressure would have been off me, and I could have just got on with life. In one sense, I should be happy now then, perhaps - but instead there's a sense of a space that needs to be filled, and a place I need to be, for all that my life is busy enough, for all that I don't feel any urge to stand again at the altar. Stuff to work through, then. I don't know what God wants of me, but I know he wants something.

Here's the thing, I suppose. I feel that God has forgiven me, accepts me, wants me and has things for me to do; the Church, however, continued to be quite hung up about it all. Anyway, this evening, in an Anglican church, I conducted the male voice choir I sing with at a harvest concert, and was reminded once again, if I had needed to be, that music is the stuff that makes sense of it all. I was rather afraid - I don't very often conduct, am third choice, if that, but a few notes in I was really enjoying myself. And I think it went well.

I read some comic poems as well. I must buckle down to write some more, and serious poetry too. I did spend some time today on a more serious piece of verse, and almost posted it here - but I think it needs more work yet. When I was at my lowest, poetry poured out of me, and it helped, it really did. The fact that I'm not writing as easily now is therefore probably a positive rather than a negative (a sign that I'm too sorted and stable to have much to say), but still, I'd like to be able to do it.

Flu Jab

I went down to get my flu jab this morning. The surgery was very busy, but we were processed through very quickly and efficiently. I'm not quite old enough to merit a flu jab on my own account, and have no health problems, asthma etc, that might qualify me, but I qualify as a carer. In fact I seem hardly ever to catch flu, but it's better safe than sorry, always.

Flu is a serious threat every winter, and the epidemic that does real damage, when it comes as one day it will, is probably going to be a new variant on flu. I suppose today's flu jab wouldn't protect me from a new strain, but the existing ones are bad enough, so I'm glad we do it, and that as many people as do opt to receive it, and if it gets us all through this winter that'll be something. In the meantime, ebola . . . we have been rather slow to respond to this one. Perhaps West Africa isn't very high on the international radar? Perhaps we rather thought it was a tropical disease striking a part of the world where life is pretty cheap anyway, until people in Texas started catching it.

The quality of our world community is to be measured not just by our military response to, say, ISIS in Iraq or Syria, or in our technological co-operation in such projects as CERN or the International Space Station, but in our willingness to respond, and to respond speedily to crises like the one caused by ebola. The UNO believes (according to today's press) that we have fallen short here, and who am I to disagree? Liberia and Sierra Leone are far from economic giants, nor are they important in any strategic sense (as far as I know, anyway), but that only makes the way we respond (or don't) to their need a better and more rigorous test of our humanity.

It occurs to me also that both these countries are, in their foundation, responses to one of the deepest shadows on our western conscience, the transatlantic slave trade. Maybe that might also motivate and inform the generosity of our response: arguably, we still owe them.

Caring

Ann and I care for our two elderly mothers, who live here with us. Evelyn, Ann's mum, has been with us for four years (and two house moves), following a stroke, a bereavement and a fall and broken hip, while my mum, Maisie, came to live with us on our move to our present home just under two years ago. It is quite a commitment, but one we gladly make, along with many people who are, like us, of pensionable age but caring for parents or other elderly relatives. Many of them I came to know well during my years in parish ministry, and sometimes they found little support, help or understanding for what they did.

We have been on the whole pleasantly surprised at the amount of help that is available, once the right contacts have been established. That last clause is carefully and deliberately added, because I suspect there are many people who slip below the radar and are just not known about. We have carers who come in twice a day to help my mum, and to give Ann and me the opportunity to do other things; my mum needs quite a lot of practical support, and we're able to get her up and put her to bed, but it does help to have other people here during the day - someone else to talk to and have a cup of coffee with, too, from Maisie's point of view.  District nurses look in regularly, equipment of all kinds has been provided, and we have a social worker through whom we can access other support if needed. We do have to pay for the carers, but a grant from Social Services defrays about half of that; we had to pay to have one bathroom converted into a wet room and therefore made more accessible, but we had help in accessing good contractors, producing a design for the new room and making sure the work was done to the best standards.

Maisie was in a nursing home while that work was done, and, while she was treated kindly there so far as we can tell, sometimes it felt rather haphazard, and we had the impression that communication was poor. She had lost a degree of mobility by the time she came home, and, without prompt action by occupational therapists and the equipment they provided, I am not sure we would have coped with her return home.

During my time in active ministry, like most ministers I regularly visited care homes to take communion services, visit residents and do things like harvest festivals, carol services and little concerts. I have a huge respect for the work they do and the people who do that work, though well aware of the horror stories that have received publicity nationally in recent months. But many very elderly and very infirm people remain in the community, some in sheltered or specially adapted accommodation, but many not. A lot of carers are themselves just as old as the person being cared for - they are spouses or perhaps brother or sister. I think the degree to which a society cares for its carers is one of the best measurements of its overall health. Ann and I are glad to do what we do, and regard it as a privilege, to be able to return in this way some of the care we've received over so many years. We're not saints, and sometimes we get tired, worried, frustrated - often we feel less than fully skilled. Thank you to those to whom we're able to look for encouragement and support.

Starting Afresh

Time, I think, to start afresh with this blog. "Poetic and other notes on an attempt at life" is how I subtitled it when I first began, and maybe I ought to be trying a bit harder to ensure that the blog does what it says on the tin, so to speak.

So, maybe I need to begin with some background. I am a sixty-something man, married to Ann, father of four grown up children, and we have two grandchildren. I spent thirty years as an Anglican priest; now I'm not one in any practical sense, though I haven't gone so far as to formally set aside my ministerial orders. I remain a believer, though not always conventional and correct in my creed - nor, indeed, am I always very good at believing in the Church. I am a member of the Third Order of the Society of St Francis, though, of which more anon, and while I may not be all that brilliant at keeping to my Franciscan rule of life, I do try to take seriously the call to obedience. So while I may not always manage to love the Church, I do applaud and support what the Church is (or is supposed to be) there for.

And I do still have a personal sense of God's presence and call and challenge, without being very sure just now where that might be leading me. I am in transition - that's maybe the best way of putting it. There is still some repair work to be done, and even when that is all complete, there'll be no going back, only a distance further to go, to places and pastures new. I was a parish priest, and I resigned from that because I had to . . . more about that in a later post, when I've thought a bit about how I can phrase it. So unlike other former parish priests, I don't have a priestly ministry in retirement, though I am retired, having reached an age at my resignation when I could claim my Church of England pension.

As it happens, I am able to live quite comfortably, in a large and pleasant bungalow backing on to woodland, in a small and busy Welsh border town. I work part time for a local funeral director, and also have my own small business. I can't minister as a priest, but I can and do speak and lead worship as a fellow pilgrim, when invited to do so. And I can also minister through music and poetry: I enjoy writing and I enjoy sharing what I write with others, and I enjoy singing and have been blessed with a halfway decent tenor voice. I am an enthusiast for gardens and for wildlife and the countryside, and it's here, as also in music, that I feel most aware of, and closest to, the life-giving and life-enhancing mystery that is God.

So there's a start. More, God willing, tomorrow.