Retreat

A Sunday talk :-

A few days ago I was talking to a friend who was soon to go for an MRI scan. Quite possibly you’ve had one yourself, and know all about it.  My friend hadn’t, which allowed me to parade my exhaustive knowledge of MRI scanners, the result of my having had one maybe five or six years ago at the Royal Shrewsbury.  What happens, I told him, is that they strap you onto a sort of stretcher and slide you into a metal tube that isn't all that much bigger than you are, and then you're in there for about half an hour, or I was, while they probe you using ultrasound technology.

The one thing I did clearly recall was that last thing before they slid me in they gave me a sort of panic button to press if I had any problems. There was a more than slight thrill of claustrophobia as they slid me into the tube;  I’m not usually good in confined spaces, and will use stairs rather than lifts even when I’m quite a few floors up. So I half expected I’d be pressing that button at some point, but, as I explained to my friend, I didn’t.  I didn’t need to.  In fact, once I was in there, I found it a strangely comforting and relaxing experience, despite their insistence on playing me the Jeremy Vine Show, not my favourite radio programme.  Even with the radio playing, I actually felt quite detached from the world outside;  I suppose it might even have been a little like returning to the womb.

Having said that, half an hour of it was certainly quite enough - but looking back I’d have to say that something I'd expected might have been a bit of an ordeal in the end wasn't that unpleasant.  And since I’m the sort of person who can find it hard to switch off and just relax for a while, being forced to relax in this way and in this rather artificial setting, but one from which I couldn’t escape . . . well, I think it probably was quite good for me.  In fact, leaving the ultrasound tests and the medical reasons for me being there on one side for a moment, the experience was similar to some of the therapies used when people go away to be de-stressed and to get their batteries recharged.

And this is something I'm sure is true:  whatever your personality type and the lifestyle you follow, everyone at some point needs refuge.  And it’s good that there are people and places about to help get us back in trim.  Places where we can change the pace of living, and lift the pressure off a bit, and maybe also find a listening ear that's not going to be judgemental or to turn what it hears into gossip.

In a faith context, we talk about this sort of thing as ‘going on retreat’.  It’s something that I as a Franciscan am supposed to do regularly, and I admit here and now that I’m not good at getting round to it.  The problem is that we do very often feel the need just to press on, as if taking time out is akin to giving up, and admitting to weaknesses we don’t want the world to know about.  But if Jesus needed a place of retreat, then his people need it too.

The home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus was surely a sort of retreat house for Jesus.  These people were friends he could trust and could relax with;  we don't how the friendship started, in fact we don’t know very much about them at all, but from the snippets of information the Gospels do give us we can tell that Jesus had something at Bethany, something that differed from and complemented the relationships he had with others who shared in his journey, including, even, the Twelve Apostles.  Bethany was the retreat house, I think, that Jesus made use of: a place of refuge where he, the Servant King, could feel treasured and be served.

I should have spent more time than I have on retreat; when I have made a retreat, it's always been a special and a healing and restoring time.  Retreat for me is time away from the world, with the aim not so much of drawing closer to God, but really being more aware than I usually am of his closeness to me.  Retreat houses are I think a growth point in the Church and in religious experience just now, and I’m sure that’s a good thing.

If organised religion is in decline, which I suppose it is, at least in its traditional forms, then the retreat movement would seem to be bucking the trend, since there seem to be more houses and places of retreat opening all the time, and they seem to appeal not only to established churchgoers but rather more widely.  Certainly, I suppose it will be people who are at least open to the reality of religious experience who go to places of retreat, but by no means all of them will be in church or chapel regularly  on a Sunday.

Of course, not all retreat centres are Christian.  There's one just up the road from here that I think is Hindu in ethos, and next door to where a friend of mine lives there's a small house used as a place of retreat by Buddhists.  And of course, there are retreat houses that claim no particular religious affiliation at all. All of them, though, would hope to be offering an antidote to today's fast-moving but so often rather heartless and uncaringly secular and selfish world, and to the way lives become weighed down by decisions and crises and responsibilities, but starved of spiritual resourcing.

The prayer I used at the beginning of this service spoke of Jesus finding in the household of his friends "learning, argument and hospitality".  Learning, argument and hospitality - I like that.  Those might not have been the first words in my mind if it'd been me that wrote that prayer, so they deserved a bit of reflection, I decided.  And I think on consideration that each of those words has something particular and important to say about our need for refuge and refreshment, and what will provide those things.

So let me just touch for a moment on each of them, starting with learning.  They say that the whole of life is a learning experience, and it is.  But how much do we manage to learn from all the stuff that hits us on a daily basis, and the ups and downs, the highs and lows of our own lives, while we’re still out there, while we’re on the hoof?

Not too much, I’d say.  You need time, space, the chance to step back for a while;  then, once you’ve been able to get a sense of perspective, once some of the pressure has been eased, then even some of the bad stuff can be truly a learning experience, that helps us grow stronger, more aware, more attentive, better at discipline and choices.  This sort of learning isn't of course about being remembering facts and figures - it’s about processing and understanding and realising the meaning and use in our own situation of things that have happened to us and around us.

The second word in the prayer was argument:  I came across a news report not long ago about an argument that turned into a brawl that eventually turned into a news item because the police had to break it up, and certain people found themselves in front of the magistrates in consequence.  Yes, I know, it happens all the time - but the thing that struck me in the story was that the argument originally had been about the age of some so-called celebrity of whom I’d never heard.

I found that really rather depressing, and a sort of statement of the emptiness of our so-called civilized society, in which the cult of the celebrity has, for me, expanded far out of proportion with reality.  Is that all they could find to argue about?  The kind of heated argument that comes to blows makes better TV, I suppose, than the more serious stuff.  “Eastenders” the other night never made it down to an acceptable vocal decibel level from the beginning of the programme to the end.  At the time I was at the other end of the house, trying to be quiet and read!

Argument in the sense of today's prayer, is about testing what we stand for and what we believe, in conversation with others. We need to do that so that we’re confident not only about what we believe but about why we believe it.  This too needs time and space, and the kind of friends who're prepared to both challenge and inform our awareness of ourselves and of our world.

The third word was hospitality.  How much hospitality should you have on retreat?  Shouldn’t retreat houses be a bit spartan and austere?  Shouldn’t retreats be a taste of the desert, of the wilderness?  One retreat house I used to know well was famed for its excellent food and comfy rooms, and when I first went there that raised exactly those questions in my mind: shouldn't my time on retreat be a bit more rigorous - shouldn't there be something of the discomfort of the medieval monastery?

Well, of course, that is genuinely and rightly part of the retreat movement in all its breadth.  Some Christian shrines are by tradition approached barefoot, some even on hands and knees, and of course days of fasting can be part of the discipline of a retreat or a pilgrimage.  But, when eventually I challenged them (or perhaps admitted my own uncertainty) the couple who ran this house told me they’d discovered that often a time of good spiritual refreshment requires our physical needs to be comfortably met, because then they’re not going to be always there at the forefront of your mind.

And I can understand that, and the hospitality of Mary and Martha is given full weight in the Gospel stories.  It appears that Bethany was open house for Jesus whenever he called by;  there’d always be food on the table and a place to lay his head.  In our Gospels we tend to find Martha providing traditional hospitality, and Mary maybe just sitting with Jesus enjoying his company. At one point we find Martha rather resenting the fact that she's slaving away in the kitchen while her sister's just sitting around.  But when she tells Jesus to send her sister in to help, he doesn't, but instead tells her that Mary has chosen the better way. We’re not told quite how Martha received that information, but there’s an important point made about hospitality.

True hospitality of course needs to include bread and board, but it isn't just about providing what the norms of society require (the appropriate meal, the well-laid table, and perhaps the best silver). Do that, and you’re still no more than a restaurant or a bed-and-breakfast place.  More is needed - making space for the other and attending on them, listening to what they have to say.  This sort of hospitality is healing - it helps renew and encourage and reinvigorate, it takes the other person seriously as who they are (more than just 'the guest').  And it’s a costly thing, that involves an offering of oneself.

Anyway, between the two of them, or the three, if we count Lazarus in, Mary and Martha provided retreat for Jesus, and I thank God for those who’ve done the same for me - sometimes by design and arrangement, when I have managed to get away to a retreat house, but just as often in informal ways, when friends have just made space, asked the pertinent question, allowed me room to perhaps grouse a bit about things, and been patient with me when I've done that.  I hope I've managed to do the same in my turn, and it’s an essential Christian ministry within a healthy Church.

But enough, I need to finish.  One last thought, going back to my memories of my MRI scan.  I recall having to take off all my metal bits and pieces before being slid into the tube.  In my case this included ring, watch and mobile phone.  Afterwards, putting them all back on was almost a sacramental thing.  It was about taking on again the responsibilities and relationships and work programmes of the real world, after my little bit of quiet time out of it.  In reality, all our Christian endeavours will benefit greatly from a directed and purposeful time out - because when we take the chance to learn more about who we are, review more deeply what it is we believe, and when others for while offer hospitality and attend to our needs and maybe our frets and fears as well, this will make us all the more ready for the road ahead, and all the more certain that we travel it in company with our Lord.

Swifts etc

Well, another beautiful day today, if a bit on the warm side for those who, like me, were at work.  At least I was working outside most of the time.  The rain yesterday has greened up the grass, but the ground in many places will have been too hard to absorb much of it, I suppose.  Lots of annoying flies around today, several of which took the opportunity to bite me.

The garden birds have been mostly silent for a while now.  They no longer need to sing to defend territories (for the most part;  there are exceptions), and are in any case much too busy.  One sound that seems to have disappeared completely from the skies around where we are is the scream of swifts.  They've gone - though there were still parties of swifts screaming over Caersws when I was there last Friday, so they've not yet gone from everywhere.  Swifts are among the earliest of summer migrants to depart, and in fact if the summer is a good one they will often leave sooner - since, once they've raised their young, they're on their way.

They are so completely a summer bird, so far as we're concerned, that the sound of swifts for me is the strongest and most moving symbol of this season.  And when they're no longer here, even if the calendar still assures me it's high summer, for me there is a breath of autumn already in the air.

A harsh and querulous croak disturbed my reverie as I was reflecting on the absence of swifts from today's blue skies, and I looked round in time to see a pair of herons lurching away.  Herons aren't bad fliers in fact, but they always look as though any moment they'll just fall out of the sky.  We've seen a lot this summer, as they are nesting not far away.  One friend has lost all his fish, and had to restock (and fence them in).  But the heron is not a summer bird, as I see it.  Of course, they are with us through all four seasons, but I seem to notice them more in the autumn and winter.  I remember seeing a winter field not far from here dotted with herons, maybe seven or eight of them each standing singly;  I'm not sure what they were hoping to catch.

So, swifts gone, and herons about, and the nights drawing in;  is August really the first month of autumn?

Prayer

Lord,
I am not good at praying.
I have the lip of prayer,
I can find and form the words and speak them well.
But I have not the heart for prayer,
nor have I the ear for prayer.

I ask, Lord, for patience
and for stillness before you,
for surely true prayer begins
when I set aside my own agenda.
I shall not need to be so articulate,
nor is there any great distance for my words to cross.

All I need (all!)
is honesty and humility
and to be able to feel and to know
how close you are.

Nothing is hidden from you.  I have been adept
at self-presentation;  sometimes
I may even convince myself.  But you see
into the innermost depths of me,
into the places I dare not visit myself;
and still you love me.

I shall light a candle,
and sit for a while
with the dusk closing around me.

Grant me the grace, Lord,
to receive your love,
and then to pray.

On Finding the Way

Panic is rising now like bile in his gut;
he feels its acid measure within him
as he stumbles on through the waste of bracken and bramble.
The vegetation is sodden from the rain that has soaked through his clothes,
while thunder continues to rumble along the far horizon,
and the day's light is failing.  There are no
landmarks to be found, no signs to direct his path,
no safe ground on which to stand.  Behind him the trees are black,
and echo already with the screech of owls.
Now he pushes between unruly clumps of tall rushes, and
beneath his feet the hungry mud is
sucking and pulling at his boots, and it soaks between the seams.
He no longer has the breath for calling out, all his effort must go
to keep moving, best he can. And yet he finds he is singing now
as he walks, singing against the demons of the dark, singing
to time and encourage his steps, that old song from his childhood,
from those dusty Sunday afternoons in chapel:  "Lead, kindly light,
amid the encircling gloom."  Oh, if only he had not strayed
from the well-trod and waymarked path, if only he had listened
to the instructions given for the long day's journey.
If only he could have swallowed his pride.  Already
it is so very dark, so fearfully dark;

and yet as he presses forward
in that dark a light has appeared, small but clear,
and he hears singing to match his own, that
somewhere up ahead carries the promise of help and warmth of welcome,
of a known way and companions for the journey on; and of a certain
rejoicing in heaven.

Sparrows

We don't see many sparrows in our garden.  They're mostly over the road, where the houses are closer together.  Maybe the woodland edge that is our garden feels hostile or in some way unsatisfactory to them. Well, most of the time we're content with our robins, tits, finches and nuthatches, but yesterday a couple of sparrows did wander in to our patch, and it was a pleasure to watch them.

As communal birds with an air of the 'chancer' about them, adaptable, companionable, argumentative, there's much in the life and behaviour of a sparrow that we can relate to as human beings.  We are always being told that the behaviour of wild creatures is governed for the most part by instinct, that they don't so much think things out and make decisions as respond in a programmed and predictable way to environmental stimuli.  I suppose this is true, even when we see birds (like the black-headed gulls I was watching not far from here the other day, wheeling and soaring above the lake and marshes) seeming to do things just for the sheer fun of it.  But the common house sparrow really does seem to me to be making it all up as he - or she - goes along.

I suppose in the end it's a question hard to answer - firstly, what capacity other creatures have to override instinct and think out for themselves how to behave in this or that situation;  and secondly, the other side of that coin, to what extent are decisions we think of as the result of thinking things through and exercising our human free will are in fact predominantly instinctive. All I can say is that the sparrows I was watching had a nerve and a swagger about them (in my estimation) that suggested birds unafraid of strange and different places, and looking to turn new every situation to their own advantage, and that reminded me a bit of us.

Samaritan

I felt sad for a moment or two

today.  And the weight of it was pulling me down,

closing me off from the blue skies,

with my dark and desperate imaginings beginning to

feed off each other.  When it gets like that

I feel myself trapped in the vortex,

pulled down into a black hole, I am lost

to the light.  But today the fall was for

only a moment, until

somebody smiled who didn’t need to, and

their hand was placed upon my shoulder just for an instant

and at just the right time;

and so a small but necessary

miracle was enabled.  Like the man

on the Jericho road, I felt myself

taken to a safe place,

helped back onto my feet, amazed and delighted

to find the sun still shining.  My thank you goes

to someone I do not know, and

will likely as not never see again (probably

you do not even know what it was you did) - but that is in the nature of

good Samaritans.

Breaking Down

We had rain last night for the first time in a while.  I had been very confident we would, and so I hadn't done my usual round of watering everything.  It was cooler, fresher and gently misty this morning, a refreshing start to the day.  And so far as I could see, we'd had a gentle splash of rain, rather than the big thunderstorms the weathermen had promised, and which indeed arrived overnight not too far away, flattening flowers and fruit.

I had set up sound equipment for a funeral today, and left cabling in place ready overnight - piping the service from a small chapel not far from here into the community hall nearby . . . so I was a bit worried in case the rain did it damage.  I needn't have been, as so far as I could tell, they didn't have any there, even though it's not that far away from here.

Nonetheless, our spell of subtropical weather is breaking down, and we'll be back to something like a normal British summer by the end of the week, or so they tell me.  I don't mind, really;  I'll sleep a bit better if the nights are cooler and fresher, and I'm happy not to go a-watering every evening.  But there's still a bit of sadness in me to be at the end of what has been a super spell of weather if you like that kind of thing - and lots of people seem to.  Yes, it may have been a bit hot to work in, and to sleep in, but an hour or so out on our veranda with a good book or a cryptic crossword, a glass of decent ale and a pair of field glasses to hand:  well, I have enjoyed that of an evening.

The field glasses have been employed in following the antics of the many families of young birds that have turned up in our garden.  Yesterday, there were clouds of young blue tits - plumage much greyer than that of the parents;  this morning, a quarrelsome pack of chaffinches, doing exactly the things that young creatures of all kinds, human included, seem to do - picking fights and playing games with one another, begging off mother, and being a bit gauche and awkward as they learn the ropes.  I have to say, our local birds seem to have produced well this year!

Evensong

Tonight I found myself asked to take evensong at very short notice - a bit of an emergency had happened;  so, instead of attending the service and sitting with Ann in one of the front pews, I took my place in the stall by the organ with a degree of trepidation.  It's been a few years since I last led an Anglican service, and my departure from the Anglican ministry was painful, traumatic and - I would have to say without saying more - reflected poorly on me.  It has been a long journey from where I was that day to the sense I have today of the beginning of a revived confidence in myself not just as a Christian believer and disciple but as a minister, and there's a fair way to go yet.

The service went well, I think;  I enjoyed it, we had a good sing, and one or two people said some very kind things at the end.  The testimony I gave was very personal, but clearly touched other hearts too, and I thank God for that.  I am still waiting on him, and maybe I need to learn to do that with more patience and hope;  at the moment so many things remain difficult, muddled, uncertain, unsatisfactory - while the answer I sense to my prayers is along the lines of 'Just hang on in there; you remain my dear child, and in my own time I will show you what must happen next.'

So I will just hang on in there.  Holy Trinity, Leighton on a bright and sunny Sunday evening in July is, in any case, no bad place to be doing it.  I am among friends, and in a safe and peaceful place.  When the time is right I shall reach up and reach out, and find his hand is waiting for me.

Bronybuckley Wood

I had to walk down into town the other day, and decided to take the path through the woods.  It was a baking hot day, but I reckoned it would be a fair bit cooler under the trees, and so it was.  From here it's a bit of a pull up through the estate and out along the road to Guilsfield, until a stile is spotted with footpath sign, over on the left hand side.  Over that, dodging the nettles, and down the side of the field, through a gate, and then into the wood.

The way into the wood isn't all that easy to spot, in fact, and the best trodden paths seem to lead you away from it.  I'm a touch reminded of the small and low entrance to the great Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem - and the resemblance is enhanced by the cathedralesque nature of the space you then step into.  This is a mature beech wood, with great smooth trunks rising up like the pillars in the nave of a medieval church, and a monastic stillness (at this season anyway) to go with that.  A few great tits were calling, and a chiffchaff.  Later I heard a green woodpecker, and was disappointed not to see it.  Otherwise, all was still.

There is not much vegetation under beech cover.  A few campions and herb Robert plants were blooming, but little else, just a few brambles, until towards the bottom of the fairly steep path I found some fair stands of the delightfully named enchanter's nightshade.  This is not a nightshade (Solanaceae), but belongs with the willow herbs.  It is able to grow in deep shade, and flowers much later than most woodland plants, with very small white or occasionally pinkish flowers that together can give quite a pleasing impact.  It spreads by creeping stolons which are a very bright white in colour, and can develop (as here) substantial colonies.

I like it, but it can be a bit of a pest in local gardens, as it is quite persistent.  Having said that, it pulls up easily, so is nothing like as much a problem as squitch, creeping cinquefoil or rose bay willow herb, to name three of the familiar perennial weeds I encounter.  There has been at least one garden variety in fact, or so I am told, though I do not think I have seen it.  As a garden plant, it would be grown more for its foliage than its flowers;  the leaves are heart-shaped but fairly undistinguished in the wild, but I think varieties were developed with mottled leaves that I can imagine would have covered some ground quite attractively.

At the bottom of the bank I emerged from the darkness and coolness of the cathedral wood into the bright sunlight and busy gardens of the town, a pleasant stroll that left me feeling well prepared for the choir practice for which I was headed.

Baby

Just found a very confused baby blackbird on our veranda.  I suspect it had hit something and come down there unexpectedly;  it could fly, quite strongly and rapidly in fact, but without much sense of co-ordination or direction.  It eventually decided to fly down into the garden, and almost made it between the uprights of our balustrade - result: another crash landing, this time on the lawn, though no great harm done, happily.

Another short flight took baby to the paved area by our shed.  Here it sat, cheeping piteously, and after a while mother appeared, clucking and clearly trying to tempt junior up onto the sloping roof of the shed, where she was sitting with a tasty berry in her bill.  Nothing doing;  baby sat there cheeping, and eventually mother wandered off.

Maybe two or three minutes later she returned, still with the berry in her bill, to take up her position on the same corner of the shed roof as before, clucking, raising her tail, and turning her head to see where the youngster was.  It was out of sight of me (sitting at the veranda table, glass of Stella in hand), but from the crashing sounds I would say it was trying to climb up the nearby hedge to reach mother, not trusting its wings any more.

Mother decided enough was enough, swallowed the berry, changed the tone of her voice to something that sounded to me more like a scold (but let's not be anthropomorphic), and, moments later, flew off into one of our ornamental trees, the berries of which are a particular favourite with blackbirds.  Seconds later, with an energetic whirring of young wings, a second bird crashed into the tree behind her.

Vine

A lady whose garden I help look after asked me yesterday to completely remove the lush trailing vine that was a feature of her back garden.  The vine did not produce edible grapes, but its leaves were picked through the season for making dolmades, a traditional Green dish; but no more, alas - her Greek Cypriot husband passed away last year, and maybe the vine, growing so lushly, was too potent a reminder of his absence.

So the vine had to go (the main stem remains, so it will grow back, if allowed to), but it was a sad task to remove it, the more so in that the vine is such a symbol of life in Scripture.  It is such a free-growing plant, so rampant in its profusion of new leaves and shoots - and is held up as an example of self-sacrifice, as the trailing branches, which need to be supported as they cannot support themselves, are supposed to pass on all of their strength and vigour to the fruit, keeping nothing back.  No wonder Jesus shared a cup of wine on the eve of his crucifixion.

The lushness of the growth of this vine could be in part I suppose because it had not been cut back as usual before the growing season - but I imagine this year's warm summer will also have played its part.  Anyhow, there was growth a-plenty - a large builder's sack was filled to the brim with the collected leaves and branches.

They will be recycled, composted - and so life goes on.  But this potent symbol of life remains only as a shadow of what it was, and I am sorry to have been the one who had to wield the shears.

Finches

We had a lovely day out yesterday.  Ann and I and our two Mums took the road out through Llanfair Caereinion, Mallwyd and Machynlleth to Aberystwyth, and later drove back via Llangurig, Llanidloes and Newtown.  Rather a nice round trip along open roads with mountain scenery such as only Wales can provide, with a stroll along the prom and cod and chips with a fine and sunny sea view.

On the way we also stopped at the 'Osprey Project' at Cors Dyfi.  This is the most famous component of the conservation work of the Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust, having features on BBC Springwatch, which I suppose makes Monty, the male who has been at Cors Dyfi for a fair few summers now, Britain's most famous osprey.  This year he has a new mate, but the late spring and a very confused start to their relationship mean that their two chicks are maybe a month behind where one might expect them to be, in terms of growth and development.  Most years that would be very bad news, but maybe this year, with our pretty good summer so far, will be an exception.

We watched the webcams of the nest, and scanned the marshes with our field glasses.  The chicks are little punks with their spikey feathers, but are growing well.  Monty brought a fish while we were watching (a pollack, I think), and his mate fed the chicks with great care, tearing off very small pieces.  We also walked along part of the boardwalk through the marshes, noting a fine stand of marsh St John's wort but not seeing the reclusive water buffalo which help graze the area.

But I think we enjoyed the hide best, not just because of the views of Monty and his family, both on screen and through our glasses, but also because of the busy feeding station just outside.  I love finches, and they were there in plenty - chaffinches and greenfinches, but also (and delightfully) the smaller and very lively siskins and redpolls.  The males are specially colourful, the male redpoll having not just a prominent red cap to his brow but also pink suffusing the brown streaks of his breast.  Male siskins are lovely birds, with a black cap and green plumage with prominent black and yellow markings.  One male had so much yellow that he really shone in the bright sunshine of the day.

These are lively and acrobatic birds, and to watch them jostling for space on the feeders was an entertainment in itself.  For this stage in the season they were all in fine condition, which is I suppose a tribute both to the excellent weather and the excellent feeding they get from the Trust!  In our garden, these small finches are winter birds, not seen at this time of the year (we have to make do with chaffinches, greenfinches and bullfinches, not that that's much hardship!), so it was good to see them on a bright summer's day.

Arena

I had a dream of running
blood, of stone columned terraces filled with
snarling and baying faces, of whips and nails and spears.
The stench of it all seemed to stay in my nostrils,
the noise of it still rang in my ears
even as I awoke to dappled sun behind my curtains
and the gentle murmur of a distant dove.

Perhaps I read too much history,
and perhaps I think about it more than I should; anyway,
praise the Lord that today we live in a calmer clime; there are
no Christians thrown to the lions in these parts,
no tiered crowds to delight in the violent spectacle
acted out in the arena beneath them, and
to cheer on every hurt inflicted.

These days we stay at home, and watch the soaps.

Jackdaws

My most recent 'Nature Notes' :-

I was watching some young jackdaws the other day, and was reminded that this was an annual delight when we lived in Minsterley, as they always nested in the locality.  Indeed, living as we did in an old Victorian house, it was an ongoing battle to prevent them nesting in any of the many chimneys, and the protective mesh had to be regularly checked.  For someone I know, failure to prevent this resulted in two young jackdaws, plus amounts of soot, arriving unexpectedly in the lounge, via the fireplace (you can imagine the mess).  More commonly, the chimney just gets blocked.

Outdoors, the young jackdaws were as ungainly as any other young bird, but of course much bigger than most.  They had much to learn, but the parents always seemed attentive and watchful.  It can be a stressful life as a young jackdaw, as viewers of this year’s ‘Springwatch’ programmes will know: two young birds were mercilessly harassed by a couple of adult birds who it seems wanted the nest, though these youngsters did seem to be fighting back pretty well.  But for social birds like jackdaws, pecking orders and argumentative neighbours are just part of the scene.

Jackdaws are black-plumaged with a distinctive grey nape, and typical habitats might be cliffs and derelict buildings, but also woodland and open country.  They are of course members of the crow family, smaller than ravens, rooks and carrion crows, but still pretty big.  They are very happy to live close to people, and jackdaws used to visit our feeders in a previous garden, but without much success, being too big and ungainly to access them, despite scaring most of the smaller birds away.

Away from human habitation, jackdaws will exploit holes of any sort, including rabbit burrows sometimes, as nest sites, though they will build nests in more exposed situations.  Nests are untidy, made of twigs lined with grass, hair and wool.  Jackdaws have been known to pluck wool for their nests from the backs of grazing sheep.  Like other members of the crow family, jackdaws will steal and collect shiny objects.

Jackdaws lay between three and seven eggs, which are incubated by the female, with the male making sure she is fed on the nest.  The young fledge at about a month old.  The jackdaw’s “jack” cry gives it its name - my great-aunt, who had a pet one, told me she’d taught it to speak, but I only ever heard it say its name, which as it happens was Jack, which fell some way short of convincing proof.  Jack had a liking for bits of apple and for ham sandwiches, I seem to recall.

In the wild jackdaws eat a wide range of foods, including grain, fruit and insects and invertebrates.  They eat carrion, competing with magpies and carrion crows for roadkill.  They will also take young birds and eggs, though they represent a danger mainly to inexperienced young parents whose nests are not well hidden.

Jackdaws are common throughout the UK, and are present all year, sometimes in very large flocks.  Numbers are increased by continental birds that winter here.

Moth

I am not sure why I should have such a fear of moths,
knowing them to be harmless, but, alas, I do.
Nor do I know what it is
that so alarms me - perhaps the size of the body,
gross against the slim form of the butterfly,
perhaps the pulse that I seem to sense in the brown and grey moth wings,
when forced to touch or hold them.  Today’s moth,
encountered while mowing the lawn,
I could identify:  a yellow underwing, scrambling helplessly about,
nervously flashing the bright yellow beneath its upper browns, but
seemingly unable to fly very far, and in my way.
This moth was beautiful, I suppose, but also very big -
but also not to be destroyed.  It took a lot of nerve
to stop and scoop it up, but I am glad I did.
It lifted out of my trembling hands, to fall rather than fly
down onto that part of the lawn I had already mowed:
a life saved (for now) despite my fear.  And a small hooray as, settling into its new refuge,
the moth quickly hid the bright yellow of its lower wings, to become
just one more withered leaf, snagged in the shortened grass.

Kingfisher

I had heard him before seeing him
along the narrow chalk stream,
that disturbed and distinctive cry
that rippled through to my spine.  In fact
there wasn’t much to see,
just a flash of electric blue,
a tiny bird made larger by its brightness, but still
gone too quickly for those walking with me to see.

We were walking quiet paths in search of a pub lunch,
on an early summer’s day of dappled sunshine
and vivid greens, of dustings of lady’s lace along the hedgerows
and, as we rounded one shaded corner,
a cascade of long-tailed tits flitting through the alders.

And it had already been, I think,
my happiest day of the year - and yet I’d have traded all the rest,
every bit of it,
for that one single flash of blue fire.

Morning Prayer

Under a perfect sky
where
every leaf’s gold-splashed with morning dew
with
curlew and cuckoo calling
and
pigeons clapping their wings in soaring and tumbling flight
I see
mayflies dance their ephemeral waltz above the slow waters
I hear
a sedge warbler chirr from the bright jumble of kingcup and yellow flag
I taste
a myriad scents that mingle in the gentle air.

And if heaven is not something at least a bit like this
then I shall feel sorely cheated.

Thoughts on Prophecy

A Sunday talk . . .

Jesus talked to his disciples about being like light, and salt, and yeast.  Small things that maybe work quietly and unobtrusively, but which make a real difference where they’re used.  I preached about this somewhere else last week, and I talked about how even a small light, a single candle perhaps, drives back the dark and makes a place brighter, better and indeed safer.  I talked about how a little bit of salt can bring out the flavour of the tomato on my sandwich, or the fish and chips in my paper.  I talked about the way just a pinch of yeast allows my dough to rise and to become something than can be baked into a loaf of bread.  And part at least of the task of the Christian disciple is to work in quiet ways, and not to our own glory but to God’s glory, to make the world around us a better place, more light and more loving.

But then thinking it over later, it occurred to me that light and salt and maybe even yeast can also be troublesome things. Of course we know that too much light can be an instrument of torture, and too much salt can swamp and spoil the flavour rather than bring it out, and too much yeast will produce something sour and inedible.  But even in smaller quantities, light and salt and yeast can be a bit troublesome.  Light shows up things we might prefer stayed hidden away.  Salt gets into sore or wounded places and makes them smart.  Yeast changes the shape of things and forces the components of my loaf of bread to work together in ways they otherwise might not.  These images show up another necessary part of the ministry of the Christian disciple.  Christians are called to be troublesome sometimes and not just nice, because we are called to bring the truth of God into places where just perhaps that truth is denied or distorted.  One word for this is prophecy.  Christians and the Church, capital C, are called to a prophetic ministry.  So what does that mean?

There were lots of prophets in the Old Testament days.  Our Bibles hold the writings of some of them, and tell the stories of others.  Prophets had a place in the courts of kings, and in the decisions made by great men.  So let’s look for a moment or two at two prophets who were around at the same time as each other, but whose prophecies followed dramatically different paths.

One of these prophets was Hananiah, and the other was Jeremiah. They were both important and well known figures within the court of the king - and this at a time when, politically speaking, things were tense and worrisome in the little kingdom of Judea.  The Babylonians whose empire lay to the north were flexing their muscles. They’d already carried the previous king and many of his people into exile, along with a substantial part of the temple treasury.  Faced with this situation, Jeremiah was saying 'Things must not go on as they are.  We need to face up to the truth.  We've let God down, and now we are being punished for that.  It's his will that Babylon should conquer us.'  That’s what Jeremiah was saying;  Hananiah, on the other hand, was saying something quite different, along the lines of: 'Don't worry. You know that God will always be on our side, because we are his special people.  So of course he won't allow the Babylonians to win. Everything will be all right.'

In our New Testaments we can read St Paul’s warning to Timothy about the false teachers whose words would, as he said, 'tickle the ears' of those who heard them.  Of course it's always a big temptation for a speaker or preacher to say things that will please his audience.  Everyone likes to be liked.  To his cost Jeremiah discovered that if you say things people don't want to hear they won't like you.  They may even attack you.  But these were the words God had given him to say - they burned inside him, and he couldn’t be silent.

That's what being a prophet is like, or should be like.  There’s an important and valid Christian ministry of comforting and soothing, of affirming and supporting.  We are to be bearers of good news, and good news should be a good thing to hear, a comfort and a strength.  But not at the expense of the truth.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be nice all the time?  The Christian Church continues to be very much part of the establishment of our nation, so that all kinds of civic and national events have a Christian religious content; so that bishops still sit in the House of Lords, and officiate at royal weddings, and crown a new king or queen.  I don’t have a problem with that, unless being part of the establishment means you’re expected to give uncritical support and blessing to whoever is in power and to whatever they might choose to do.

Because that's the sort of thing the prophet Hananiah was doing.  It’s also what he said God ought to be doing. If we're God's people then it's his job to stand beside us and fight for us:  that's more or less what Hananiah had to say.  But when Jeremiah talks about God he talks about him in very different terms.  Jeremiah talks about a holy God, about the righteous God who calls from his people a standard of holiness and righteousness that is a match for his.  St Paul is saying something very similar when he writes about becoming slaves to righteousness.  If instead we choose to go our own way, if instead we choose to live in a way that denies God's justice and righteousness, we can't expect him to come and bail us out of trouble whenever we ask him to.

I'm sure that when Jesus talked to his disciples about being light and salt and yeast he was urging them to take hold of the truth and to speak it and act it out in a prophetic way. Faith that’s a living faith has to be do much more than a safety net or a comfort blanket or a spare time hobby - it ask of us nothing less than the whole of our life.

Faith that’s a living faith will be the faith of a prophet.  A prophetic Church will be ready to comfort the afflicted, but part of its brief is also to afflict the comfortable;  it will be quick to bind up the wounds of those who are hurt, but will also be salt to aggravate a few wounds where people are too apathetic to see their neighbour's need or too self-obsessed to recognise their own responsibility.

What will that mean in practice?  It means that the Church, capital C, must never be afraid of unpopularity, for it must always be on the side of the truth.  The prophet is the one who sees the bad things that happen and doesn’t turn aside from that;  who hears the voices of those who are weak and powerless, and responds, and speaks for them, and pleads their cause.  Politicians may say, “Keep out of our world of politics”; and others will say the same, from their own positions of entrenched self-interest.  But the Church has a duty not only to seek out the lost and the hurt and to bind up wounds, but to challenge the people and the policies that do damage.  That’s a political task perhaps, but it isn’t a party political task.  The Church has to be independent of party politics, for we serve a higher master than any earthly ruler.

Should the individual Christian be a member of a political party?  Personally, I’m not, and I’ve cast my vote for many a different party in my time.  But of course an individual Christian can be a member of the political party of his or her choice - and I’ve met many politicians who are marvellously inspired and motivated by their active Christian faith.  But as with our membership of any organisation, I think that Christians should always be somewhat uncomfortable members - active, hard working, encouraging, supportive, all of those things, but never so tied to our allegiance to any one cause that it takes precedence over our allegiance to our Lord.  Sometimes our faith will require us to challenge things that are wrong.  Sometimes other people won’t like that.

But while a prophetic Church will always praise, applaud, encourage and pray blessing upon the things that are good in the world around us, the prophetic mantle we inherit is that of Jeremiah and not of Hananiah.  So easy to turn a blind eye, but we must never do that.  So easy too to go along with the crowd, to say the popular and populist things that everyone else is saying, but we must never do that either.  So easy to pass by on the other side, and you may remember that in the parable Jesus told that’s exactly what the expected good guys, the priest and the Levite, chose to do.

But where would that leave us?  I’m reminded here of the well-known piece by the German pastor Martin Niemoller, who was imprisoned by the Nazis and became a symbol of peace and reconciliation in the post-War German church:

First they came for the communists,
 and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
 and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
 and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
 and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
 and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic.
Then they came for me,
 and there was no one left to speak for me.

We must never keep silence about the things that are wrong, about the abuses of power, the distortions of the truth, the injustices that mar the face of the world.  It's no excuse to claim that they don’t directly impinge on our lives or the places where we happen to live.  Anything that hurts other people, that cripples other lives, that damages other parts of our world has to be our business, because it is our Lord’s business, and we are his people.

Christ continues to call us to be lights in the world, to the glory of God - lights to comfort and reassure, lights for joy and safety and peace, but also lights to reveal and challenge and change the things that other people try to hide, and the deeds that are born of darkness.

Telling the Faith

Another Sunday talk . . .

I remember that once when I was very small my grandfather took me to see a launch at the shipyard where he worked on the banks of the River Tyne.  I stood in a big crowd of people to watch the bottle smash against the hull of the new ship.  And then nothing happened.  Not straight away, and not for quite some time.  In fact, in my youthful naivety I began to suspect things had somehow gone badly wrong, but of course that wasn’t so.  It’s just that some things take a while to get moving.  And yes, at last I could see that the hull was moving, moving very slowly at first, almost too slowly to see, but moving. And then the newly named vessel gathered pace on its maiden journey down the slipway, to slide smoothly into the river to the shouts and cheers of the crowd.

I used that story a few weeks ago when I preached in another chapel on Trinity Sunday.  It came into my mind on that occasion because I found I wanted to think about naming things - and of course every new ship gets named at its launch.  But perhaps there’s also a lesson to take away from the slowness of it all;  things were happening straight away in fact, once the vessel had been released from the chocks that held it - but from where I was standing there was nothing to see, nothing changing, no movement.  In my innocence I’d imagined a sudden dash down the slipway and a great splash into the river, almost as soon as the bottle had hit, but it isn’t like that.  A giant pile of metal like that is going to take some time to start moving.

This theme of things that happen unseen is one that Jesus returned to again and again as he taught his disciples and the crowds that came out to hear him.  He told them stories about hidden things that became revealed or discovered, like the pearl of great price, or the seed that grows in secret.  He told them stories about little things that have a big impact, like the mustard seed that grows to be a huge great plant.

And Jesus called his own disciples his ‘little flock’. He told them they must be like salt and yeast - they must be like the small and hidden things that make a big and crucial difference when they’re put to use.

St Paul described the work of an apostle as planting seeds from which others will reap a harvest. The one who starts the process off may very well not see things through to fruition.  Maybe from where he’s standing nothing seems to be happening, despite all his hard work and careful planning, despite all his prayers, even.

But things are happening, even so;  seeds grow in secret. Of course, some of the seed may not grow at all, or at least not fruitfully, as we know from a reading of the Parable of the Sower.  But the sower’s work must still be done.  For if the seed hasn’t been sown, nothing can ever grow; and if the word hasn’t been proclaimed, then no-one will ever respond.

Reality today, for the churches of our land with their history of being large and secure, is one of having to come to terms with being little flocks, even perhaps just barely hanging on, with a future that looks anything but certain.  It could feel like an inescapable decline, and it certainly does involve a real loss of influence and position and security.  Perhaps, though, the picture isn’t as bleak as it may look from where we’re standing.  The shape of the Church, capital ‘C’ is changing, but meanwhile my experience is that people are still asking big questions about faith. One form of worship and of church organisation may be in decline, but meanwhile other ways of being Christians together emerge and grow. Of course it’s also no longer true that Christianity’s the only faith option in town - that can feel uncomfortable and even a bit threatening to those of us with a long history in church or chapel, but in a way it’s only a return to the situation in which the mission of the first apostles began.

The work of mission is essential, be the Church large or small, because it is the Church’s raison d’etre. The German theologian Emil Brunner once said that the Church exists by mission as a fire exists by burning. That’s a good comparison, for if the Church isn’t doing mission, then its fire has gone out. But how are we to do mission today, and what sort of return will we see, and when?

Well:  churches are organisations, and so they’re organised;  sometimes they’re so organised that the organisation of things matters more than anything else.  I’ve been in churches like that, anyway.  How do we do mission?  Let’s organise ourselves to do it.  Let’s look at methodology, lets set a few targets, let’s train some people up and commission them and give them special titles.  Maybe we’ll be really serious, and do a feasibility study and a cost-benefit analysis;  oh - probably we ought to stick a health and safety audit in there too.  And we’ll need a committee and quite probably a few sub-committees too.  And a budget.  And an archdeacon or a moderator or a chairman of district, someone like that to chair the working party.  Goodness, there’s the advertising to sort out as well.  We’ll need a catchy slogan;  let’s see if we can get some air time;  and how about a big service in a football stadium, just to start things off? I wonder why Jesus didn’t think of all that?  You’d think he would have.

Let’s look at what he did do, when at one point in his ministry he sent his disciples out to prepare the way.  He said to them, you won’t need much, in fact take as little with you as you can get away with.  It’ll only get in the way if you have too much.  And then, just do and say things that’ll make a positive difference:  feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit those in prison . . . love your neighbour.  Mission should be the natural activity of the Church, but that doesn’t mean we all need to stand on soap boxes to do it.  St Francis told his followers: preach the word at all times, and where necessary, use words.

Much of the best mission is wordless.  It’s about loving our neighbour;  it’s about walking the extra mile;  it’s about daring to be a bit different from those around us, though without making a big thing of it.  After all, mission never says “Hey, look at me” - it’s always about Jesus.

Light, salt, yeast - the images used by our Lord.  None of these things is about making a fundamental change, they’re all about making what’s already there that bit better, that bit tastier.  Sunlight through a stained glass window brings the colours to life;  a single candle burning in a dark room drives back the dark, so we can find our way and see all the things that are there, and, I suppose, not bump into things too much.  A grain or two of salt will make my salad tomatoes taste much more tomatoey, or my fish and chips like fish and chips really should.  And just a grain or two of yeast will allow the things I mix together to make my loaf of bread achieve their full potential.

There’s no need to be too heavy about this.  Too much light simply dazzles, or indeed becomes painful, it can even be used as a form of torture.  Too much salt, and my tomatoes don’t taste of tomatoes any more, they just taste of salt.  The same with yeast:  too much, and the loaf rises too quickly and just tastes sour.  In fact, of course there are times when the churches of a place need a big mission push, so in reality all the planning and organisation I made such fun of earlier can be good and have a purpose - but even then, if the quiet work of yeasty and salty mission isn’t going on before and during and especially after the big event, then all those big plans will have gone for not very much at all.

In fact, any big declarations in mission that we make as churches stand or fall by what people see of the local Christians they know, or the local churches or chapels they may occasionally attend.  We are the measure by which the message is judged to be true or false.

That feels like a big ask, and it is.  It would no doubt be better if mission was something we held back on until we were sure we had the strength and the resources and the courage and the cash to really do it.  But in fact everything we are and do as Christians is mission.  It isn’t that we’re either doing mission or we aren’t, so much as that we’re doing it all the time, sometimes well, sometimes badly.  All that we are and do either proclaims Jesus as Lord, or else doesn’t.  In which case, it’s sort of negative mission, isn’t it?  I was cut up quite badly the other day by a car with a fish emblem on the back - there was a bit of negative mission, if you like.

But, thinking back to the story of Jesus sending his disciples out - he sent them to the towns and villages he was intending to visit himself.  And that’s still the case.  There isn’t anywhere we go in mission, nowhere we get sent to, that Jesus isn’t going to himself.  I’m reminded of something written by a missionary of a century or more ago, who had gone into dark and pagan places to take the light of Christ.  Or that’s what he thought he’d been doing - but in his memoirs he noted how again and again he found his Lord already at work in the places he travelled to preach the Gospel, and in the hearts of those to whom he preached.

And, to repeat what I’ve already said, often there won’t be anything much for us to see, but that doesn’t mean that nothing is happening.  We sow the seed, someone else may reap the harvest;  or, we knock away the chocks on the slipway, but it may be a while before anyone can tell that the ship is moving.  A former colleague of mine, when visiting his local hospital as a young curate, once called to see a parishioner who at the time was quite rude and resentful, and didn’t want to be bothered by God or by anyone working for him.  Years later, revisiting the church where he’d served his curacy, he found that the man he’d visited that day was now one of the churchwardens.  That day, unknown to himself, he’d planted a seed of faith that eventually blossomed big time.

I had a similar experience.  When clergy take weddings and funerals - and even baptisms, for that matter, a lot of the people in church look bored, uncomfortable and even hostile at times.  They don’t want to be in a church;  they’re just there because they have to be, or maybe they’re just there for the beer and sandwiches afterwards. It’s tempting for the minister - and for the regular churchfolk there too - to write off such people, or maybe not to try too hard.  I hope that’s not been true of me, but if it has, I should stand corrected by someone I came across in a church not far from here, who told me his conversion began with something I said in the address I gave at a wedding he happened to attend.  I don’t even remember the event;  I’m just glad that on that one occasion, the Lord was able to use me.  Maybe there were other I’ll never hear about, who knows?

But there are other stories I could tell you, such as the lady who eventually started coming to church despite her own doubts and inhibitions just because her neighbour who did attend always seemed so happy and positive and helpful, so much so that she started wondering why.  Or the chap out walking his dog who each Sunday used to pass the time of day with a neighbour on her way to church.  Their greeting was the same each time:  “Say one for me while you’re there!” he used to say.  “Why don’t you come yourself some time?” she’d reply.  “Maybe I will and surprise you!” he would always say back.  And one day he did;  and the next week he brought his wife;  and the week after her brother came, with his wife;  and then his wife’s parents started coming;  and ultimately the church grew by ten or eleven souls because of that one encounter.

Well, God moves in mysterious ways, but always exciting ways as well - and it is his work, of course, and not ours.  All we need do, but we must do it, is to keep sowing the seed, not by saying a lot, but just being Christ-like in our thinking and in our acting, and adding a bit of salt or a bit of yeast to the mix.

Thoughts on Trees

My "Nature Notes" article for this month :-

We’re very fortunate in that our new garden backs onto woodland, and so as we look down from our veranda there’s a green wall on the other side of the flower beds, providing lots of hiding places for birds and squirrels.  It’s quite a varied patchwork of green;  there are many different species of tree here - oak, sycamore, rowan, wild cherry, crab apple, a good stand of laurel that ensures some green leaves all the year round, elder just waiting to come into flower, and, planted at our garden edge, pyrocanthus, rhododendron (beautifully in flower as I write this), various blossom trees and what looks to us like a climbing hydrangea.

But the trees I want to dwell on specifically are two that are a cause for concern:  ash and elm.  Since elm trees have more or less disappeared from much of the UK, thanks to the depredations of Dutch elm disease, I was delighted to see a mature specimen directly at the back of our garden.  It has flowered and fruited well this year, and looks very healthy (see picture above).  Has the dreaded disease simply not found it out yet, I wonder - or is it one of those fortunate trees that has a natural immunity to it?  I hope for the latter.  I hear that there’s a scheme under way to establish cuttings taken from disease-resistant elms in settings throughout the UK, n the hope that one day the elm can be once again be as familiar a sight as it is in, say, the paintings of John Constable.  The young trees will be carefully monitored, and I hope the project meets with success.

There are several ash trees in our patch of woodland, and now we have ash die-back disease to contend with, a disease that has already been identified in Wales, where it seems usually to be associated with the import of young saplings.  It astonishes me that we should have felt we needed to import saplings of a tree that reproduces so readily in this country that I must have pulled up over a hundred baby ash trees already since moving in here, growing in gravel paths, plant pots and even in one untended gutter.  The answer, presumably, is all to do with money, and sometimes what seems to be cheap is in fact ruinously expensive.

There are indications that warnings were ignored from conservationists and foresters  - though I suppose it’s easy to be wise after the event, and deciding which warnings, out of the many that cross the desks of environment ministers and their staff, should receive a prompt response can’t be easy.  If there is any cause for hope it’s that ash reproduces so well and is a comparatively quick-growing young tree.  Given a natural immunity within our ash stocks, they should recover in time, and perhaps, as with elms, a helping hand can be given.  However, although dead trees have their own wildlife benefits (ask any woodpecker, if you can prise him away from the nut feeders in your garden), it would be sad to see the old standard ash trees bare and dead that are such a familiar feature of our field edges and the turnings in our lanes.

And you can’t help but wonder - what next, for the ancient and lovely trees of our green and pleasant land?

Daffodil

A surprise on June 1st to still have a daffodil in bloom in our garden.  Here it is, photographed this morning :-

Names

A Sunday talk for Trinity Sunday :-


I remember that when I was very small I was taken by my grandfather to see a launch, at the shipyard where he worked on the banks of the River Tyne.  I stood in the crowd and watched as a bottle was swung with due ceremony to smash against the hull of the new ship.  After which, nothing happened.  Nothing happened for quite a while, in fact.  In my youthful naivete, I began to think that something had gone wrong, but of course it hadn’t.  I became at last aware that the hull was moving, very very slowly at first, almost too slowly to see, like the minute hand of a clock.  Then it gathered pace, and to shouts and cheers it slid smoothly into the river, where it was positioned by tugs so that the remaining work on the superstructure of the vessel could be carried out.

The reason why that story came to mind is that one significant thing that happens at a launch is that a new vessel gets named.  Until the launch ceremony it’s still just a giant pile of metal on the stocks - but then she’s named, she’s given an identity, she becomes a ship.  I suppose the other significant thing alongside that is that words of blessing are used, and the name of God invoked:  when the ship’s been named, the next words are ‘God bless all who sail in her.’

Names are often very important in the Bible, in the Old Testament especially.  I could think of Genesis chapter two, for example: Adam gives names to each of the creatures God has made, and that giving of names establishes the identity of each creature, and also Adam’s authority over them. I could also think of the ways in which names are changed to reflect a new reality or status, like when Abram becomes Abraham, and Sarai Sarah.  Their new names mean, respectively, ‘Father of a Multitude’ and ‘Princess’.  Or when Jacob, after wrestling with the angel of God, received the new name of Israel - which means ‘God fights’.

In the Church calendar today is Trinity Sunday.  All the churches which form part of the World Council of Churches, that is - are Trinitarian in belief:  God, we say, is Father and Son and Holy Spirit, and yet not three Gods but one God. One God who has chosen to reveal himself and make relationship with us in these three ways.  We may speak of there being ‘three persons, yet one God’ - though for me the word ‘person’ can be a little misleading.  I find myself thinking of an individual and separate human being, the chap sitting on the bus, the lady ahead of me in the queue at the supermarket, or for that matter the fellow standing in the pulpit to preach.

To say ‘three persons’ can feel as if we’re breaking God up into three separate and individual parts, but that’s not what the Church teaches.  Each person of the Trinity participates fully in the life of the other two, so that, as Jesus says to his disciples, in St John chapter 17, ‘the Father and I are one’.  That’s also why Paul can say as he reflects on what it means to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, that ‘we have the mind of Christ’.  Trinity is an essential doctrine, a belief that we as Christians are bound to share - but I don’t find myself thinking of it as a precise and complete definition of God, just our way of making some sense of how God relates to us and reveals himself to us.

How relevant to that is my reflection on names, I wonder? In the Bible the naming of things establishes identity, and says something about status and purpose - as when Adam names the animals. I suppose the same thing would have been true of the ship I saw launched. It occurs to me though that to give a name, or even to know and to use a name, says something important about relationship.  The same person might be called ‘sir’, or ‘Mr Jones’, or ‘Dave’, or ‘Daddy’ - depending on what the relationship is.  To give or know or use a name may also claim a knowledge of a person or even an authority over them, which is why Jacob asked to know the name of the person with whom he wrestled at the Jabbok ford.

The word God isn’t a name, but a title.  But God does have names, in the Old Testament.  He is ‘Yahweh’ or ‘Jehovah’ - which sort of means ‘I am’ or indeed ‘I am who I am’. Like when he is encountered by Moses in the wilderness. He is also ‘Elohim’, which may mean ‘Majesties’ (note the plural).  But the people of the Old Testament would have felt it wrong and even blasphemous to call him by those names.  That would imply that he was in some sense their possession, rather than that they were his possession.

That’s why the name of God remains hidden and unspoken in most renditions of the Old Testament. God is generally called 'The LORD' - the word 'Lord' being printed in capitals.  That’s an English version of the Hebrew title 'Adonai', used in place of the name of God because that name was too holy to be spoken aloud.

But we no longer stand under the Law, and Christ sets us free to call God by name. The name Jehovah in fact derives from the vowel sounds in Adonai, blended in with the YHWH which are the consonants in Yahweh.  And while as members of the mainstream Churches we don't often call God Jehovah, we do sing hymns like 'Guide me, O thou great Jehovah'. And some Christian Bibles, like the New Jerusalem Bible used in Roman Catholic churches, always use the name 'Yahweh' rather than ‘the LORD’ (Adonai), as in other versions. But Jesus teaches us a new and better name than the Old Testament Jehovah. For when his disciples asked to be taught how to pray, Jesus told them: "When you pray, say 'Our Father, who art in heaven...'"

That’s amazing, don’t you think, that God the unknowable Creator of all things, we can call him ‘our Father’!  St John writes:  'No-one has ever seen God, but Jesus Christ, the only Son from the Father, he has made him known to us.'  On Easter morning in the garden, Jesus told Mary Magdalene to say to the others that he was ‘ascending to my Father, and your Father, to my God, and your God.'

Here is a great mystery over which the Church has pondered through many years.  Jesus was a man with a known origin and provenance.  He didn't appear out of nowhere.  People knew him to be the son of a carpenter in Nazareth.  One of a fair-sized family in fact:  he had four brothers, and he had sisters too.  His disciples knew all this too. They travelled with him, ate and drank with him, listened to him and learned from him.  And they knew who he was, in human terms. They knew his name.

But as they reflected on all they had seen and heard, they wanted to say more about Jesus than the name Jesus could contain. He wasn’t just a specially good and godly man, he wasn’t even just a prophet like the prophets of the olden days.  They’d seen how this man died, and they’d also seen what happened on Easter Day and on the days that followed.  They wanted to say like Paul that in some way 'God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.'  And then there is what John says right at the beginning of his Gospel. John’s great image is of Jesus as the living Word of God, the Word through whom all created things were made.  The Word who first named all things into being.

And John also tells us that "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son."  In his life and through his death Jesus shows us the truth about the Father:  that he loves his creation with a love that cannot be denied and that calls us to respond.

John again tells us how Jesus says to Nicodemus that he must be born again, not of flesh but of water and the Spirit. In both Greek and Hebrew the word translated as ‘spirit’ can also mean ‘wind’, and I’m reminded of how the wind makes itself known in the way it moves and changes things, though we can’t see the wind itself. If you were to catch the wind in a bottle, it would immediately disappear.  Paul, writing to the Romans, completes the circle by saying that it’s through the Spirit that we’re able to call God ‘our Father’.

So it’s our experience of God that leads us to speak of him as Trinity, as Father and Son and Holy Spirit.  This isn’t a philosophy dreamt up from nowhere, but the way God is to us, in scripture and in our own encounters with him.  Nor is it the last word about God, a formula that neatly ties God up, just the best way we can find to express the ways in which he reveals himself to us.

In brief, we first of all know him and name him as our Father: and as our Maker and Creator, the Origin of life and the Ground of Our Being. He names himself Elohim and Yahweh, names that may speak to us of unapproachable holiness, but he also names himself as Father, and he opens the way for us to call him by that name.

Secondly, his nature and creative power is divine love, and that love was made visible among us in human form; in Jesus of Nazareth, the Man for Others, the Christ.  Here is God present within what he has made and sustains in being, present among his people as both priest and sacrifice, as both lover and gift.

And the God of love continues to offer himself to us, continues to be present in and with and among his people.  His love is revealed not only in the creative work of the Father, and the redeeming presence of Jesus, but also in the living power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God strengthens our faith, renews our vision, enriches our fellowship, enables our love.

This is why the Church dares to speak of the one God who is equally three persons: God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, together in a perpetually loving relationship into which we are invited, through which we too are made holy.  Trinity is not a closed and fully worked out formula but a way to speak of the dynamic nature of God, the constant movement and interplay of love between Father and Son and Holy Spirit that affirms our being and inspires our love.

Love: the key to all of this is love.  Whatever other names we may have for God, including those three great names of Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit, to speak of God as Trinity is to affirm what one of the hymns calls ‘his new blest name of love’.  Here is what establishes the unity of the Godhead.  So finally, if we are Trinitarian in our belief and doctrine as the Church of God, so we should be Trinitarian in our action and service.  The divine interplay of love and mutual sharing should be constantly and consistently modelled in us - in our relationships together as people of faith within God's Church, and in the service we as Church render to the world in God’s name.  For Jesus who said ‘The Father and I are one’ also said of his disciples, 'May they be one as we are one, that the world may believe.'

Potato Field

Somewhere on a rock that hurtles through space

at a speed incomprehensible to him,

a man is standing in a field of potatoes

scanning the crop for spots on leaves.

He sees the things that matter:

the weeds between the rows,

the good growth and the yellowing,

the low grey clouds with their promise of rain.

Kicking the stones, he curses his aching back

and blows on his hands: do you call this summer?

And he watches the kestrel standing high against the wind

at the field’s edge;  and the kestrel’s eyes have not missed

the vole on the headland below

as it scurries for cover in the nettles and docks.

Meanwhile, the rock continues to race around its star,

spinning on an axis of iron as it goes.

We cannot tell its motion, only in the things that matter:

hours and days, the turning seasons, changing leaves,

greetings and farewells

and the tumbling circles of the ageing years. 

Comma

The latest of my 'nature notes' articles :-

Despite the rather cool and changeable weather we’ve had quite a bit of, I have managed to see a few butterflies around this spring - small tortoiseshells, peacocks, large whites (the gardener’s delight - not!), and spring specialities like the orange tip and the holly blue.  But I was delighted to see a bright and beautiful orange comma in our new garden, on a sunny day at the beginning of the month.

The comma has been described as “looking like a tatty small tortoiseshell”, as its wings have a jagged outline.  When at rest with its wings closed this provides good camouflage, as the undersides of the wings are dark, and the butterfly looks for all the world like an old withered leaf. The Comma is now a quite familiar sight across much of the UK, bucking the trend of butterfly decline by expanding its range. The butterfly carries a single white marking on its underside, which looks like a letter “c” (hence its Latin name of  Polygonia c-album) - or a comma.

This butterfly is one of several for which the stinging nettle is a larval food plant. The caterpillars do feed on other plants as well, including hops, and a decline in hop growing is thought to have been the reason for a sharp decline in comma numbers a century or so ago. The comma overwinters as an adult, and emerges quite early in spring if the weather is suitable. The male will establish a territory, often on the sunny edge of a patch of woodland (which exactly describes our garden). I observed “our” comma flying up and down and returning to settle on a chosen perch - typical behaviour. The caterpillars are black and white, and manage to look a lot like bird droppings.  As well as nettles and hops, they may feed on blackcurrant plants.

The adult butterfly is known in a number of forms, but there are two main types, one with a dark underside and one with a lighter underside (these are also brighter on the upper side).  The darker butterflies are normally the majority, and these appear by about the end of June or early July, to overwinter as adults.  The lighter coloured butterflies, however, go on to breed again almost straight away, to give a second generation of comma butterflies, appearing in August and September.  There will be more of these after a good and warm spring (so not this year, I should think!).

Butterfly life-cycles are often quite complicated; the trigger in this case seems to be day-length at the time the larvae are developing.  More of the lighter type of adult will be produced if at the time the larvae are developing the day length is still increasing. But a gloomier spring, and therefore a later start with the first brood, will mean that most of the offspring will not breed again, but will overwinter as adults.  Their darker coloration adapts them well for hiding in dusty corners or under bark.

Adult commas can be seen at any time of the year - even emerging on some warm winter days - but the main flying period is from April to the end of October.  Adults take the nectar of thistles, along with, for example, blackthorn in spring, ivy late in the season, and also fallen plums, blackberries and other fruit.

Listening - a Sunday talk

English is an easy language to speak, but it’s rather a hard language to speak well. And two words that often get confused by those who are learning to speak English are “listen” and “hear”.  For example, someone may say (as a non-English friend said to me not long ago over the phone), “I am not listening you very well.”  I knew what he meant . . . but of course, to hear and to listen do have quite different meanings, don’t they?  I suppose you can’t really listen without hearing, but you certainly can hear without listening.

I can think of lots of examples of that, but the one that lodged in my mind as I prepared these words was a sketch eons ago from Les Dawson. Les himself and - I think - Hugh Paddick played the part of two elderly ladies, all headscarves and self-righteous rolling of eyes;  and on this occasion there they were, gossiping over the garden fence, except that what you got were two monologues and not any sort of conversation.  Neither was paying a blind bit of notice to anything the other one had said.  The comedy, of course, derived from the accidental meanings and double entendres that happened as the two monologues were connected together.

At other times it can be quite frustrating when you’re trying to explain something and proper attention isn’t being paid.  I recall how in my schooldays, my teachers got rid of their frustration by flicking bits of chalk and occasional board rubbers at recalcitrant boys.  These days of course, they’re no longer allowed to do that, and quite possibly they weren’t supposed to then, either.  And so the frustration remains;  I was giving a talk a couple of weeks back, and the fact that two of the people attending engaged in conversation all the way through all but knocked me off my stride. In a previous church Doreen used to get her knitting out as soon as I started to preach.  I was dismayed at first, but she explained that it helped her to listen.

And maybe that was so, since the one Sunday she forgot her knitting she was fast asleep about five minutes into my address.  The rest of the congregation kindly allowed her to sleep on until the end of the service, when, highly embarrassed, she told us she’d had her little grandson staying, so she’d had hardly a wink of sleep the previous night.

Anyway - last Thursday was Ascension Day, and next Sunday is Pentecost, and in the Bible (in St Luke’s Gospel and his second book, the Acts of the Apostles), this, for the disciples of Jesus, was a time of preparation and prayer.  And that always sets me thinking about the difference between hearing and listening.

The Gospel stories of Jesus don’t always present the disciples in a very good light.  Don’t you find that strange?  Don’t you think they might have tweaked the story so as to look a bit better and brighter than they do?  St Mark’s Gospel was written, we’re told, by Peter’s companion and secretary, who therefore is really telling Peter’s story - yet in it Peter himself comes across as fallible and sometimes foolish.  I’m reassured by that, and I hope you are too;  there’s nothing self-serving in the Gospels - it’s all about Jesus.

But I can’t help but think that it must have been frustrating for Jesus from time to time.  He spoke to great crowds sometimes, other times round supper tables. Folk heard him and were even entertained by him, but often they never really listened.  There were those who didn’t listen because they’d already got their own agenda. People of the party of the Pharisees, or of Herod, or the Temple priests - they weren’t there to be informed or persuaded, certainly not to be changed in any way.  They just wanted to trip him up, to find some creative ways of misusing his own words against him, as indeed they did their best to do on the night before Good Friday, as Jesus stood there on trial for his life.

Meanwhile, for many in the crowds it was all about the thrill of the spectacle, the latest thing.  It almost didn’t matter what he actually said. Maybe some of the time that was true of his own disciples, too.  They already knew what he was going to do.  For why else would you go to Jerusalem, other than to seize the throne and re-establish the ancient kingdom of David?  And if they were the new king’s men then surely they too would get thrones.

So it’s no great surprise to me as I read the Gospels to find the disciples getting it wrong, failing to understand, not  really listening.  Hearing is of course a passive activity;  odd bits of what goes in one ear might lodge within, but no effort gets made to prevent it from all going out through the other.  But listening is an active thing, and it can be hard work.  So there’s a difference between hearing someone - passive - and giving someone a hearing, which means more, doesn’t it?  To give a hearing means you’re involved, you’re giving something.  More to the point, it means (or I think  it does) that you’re exposing yourself to the risk of being challenged, changed even, by what you are hearing.

There are times in the Gospels when we see that happens - to Nicodemus and to Nathaniel;  to Mary and maybe also Martha, out at Bethany;  perhaps to Joseph of Arimathea, certainly to Mary Magdalene.  But there are lots of times when what Jesus says isn’t received, isn’t understood.  Is that surprising, do you think? - that when the Son of God speaks the message of God, which is a message of inclusion and acceptance and of forgiving and healing and reconciling love, it isn’t gladly received by all who hear;  that he preaches, and yet there’s opposition and, more to the point maybe, misunderstanding.  Some of the stories Jesus told address this very point, notably perhaps the parable of the sower, which compares what the preacher does to someone sowing seed on every part of his land. It’s all potentially good seed, but it doesn’t all grow well, and it doesn’t all bear fruit.

And, if you remember, when Jesus spoke about this parable to his disciples, he quoted the scripture about those who look and look, but do not perceive;  those who hear and hear, but fail to understand.  That’s how things are - yet the fact that not all the seed takes is no a reason to stop sowing it - that you still have to do.  Perhaps there’s also a note of challenge to the disciples themselves:  don’t be like that yourselves - work at this, put in the effort to listen and to understand, to be changed, and to grow.

When we read about the earthly ministry of Jesus we often find the disciples not listening, not understanding, failing really to absorb his teaching, but after Easter Day it’s a different world.  One of the features of the Easter stories is that we read a lot about eyes being opened;  we see people not recognising to begin with, but then the scales fall away.  And this isn’t just to do with what they see, but also what they hear.  Like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus - “didn’t our hearts burn within us, as he taught us along the way?”

To mention hearts prompts me to say that surely faith can never just be about being persuaded by intellectual argument or by factual analysis - there needs also to be an emotional investment.  You could say we need not just to listen to the words, but to sing the whole song.  Or that Jesus doesn’t just argue us into faith, he also loves us into faith;  and those aren’t two separate strands to his teaching, it’s all one.  As someone, maybe the great William Barclay, said: “Jesus was himself the message he preached.”  In the precious time between the resurrection and the ascension, the disciples had experienced that to the full;  but now their Lord was gone from them, gone with a blessing and with a promise, but no longer with them in the way he had been.  But he has told them to wait.  To wait in Jerusalem, and to wait in prayer, for the new thing that God would soon be doing among them.  For his wonderful gift of himself, as Holy Spirit.

Wait in prayer.  We tend very often to use a lot of words in our prayer times, but I suspect there wouldn’t have been a lot of words in the prayers of the disciples over that time.  It’s right of course that we should use words in prayer, whether that prayer be praise, or penitence, of petition, for God wants to hear what we have to tell him, or ask him, or even beg of him.  But prayer is (or should be) conversation.  And good conversation can’t happen without listening. Sometimes the listening is far more important than the speaking.  For the disciples of Jesus, this was surely one of those times.

I came across a rather jokey piece a while back in a manazine which ranked voices: which voices were listened to with most attention?  Preachers didn’t come too high on the list, if I remember rightly, but they were some way ahead of politicians, even so.  Stand-up comedians came higher than preachers, but the real winners were satnavs and bingo callers.  Interesting, don’t you think?  Satnavs and bingo callers.

I rarely use the satnav in my car, but when I do I sit fairly lightly to what it tells me.  Clearly that’s not true of everyone, since I know a chap who lives along a narrow lane, and often there are big lorries stuck up there trying to turn round because (quote) “that’s where the satnav brought me.”  For better or for worse, some people are prepared to place themselves completely at the disposal of their satnav when they travel. It’s as if they no longer belong to themselves, but to the disembodied voice on the top of the dashboard.

While that seems daft to me, but it does say something important about real listening, and about prayerful waiting such as the disciples were doing in Jerusalem: it needs to involve a measure of letting go - letting go of our own autonomy, lowering the barriers that normally we raise around our selves.  It’s about taking the risk of faith.  How well founded that faith may be when it comes to satnavs is one thing - but the disciples knew they could trust their Lord.

So they waited, and they waited in listening mode, so that when it happened, whatever it was that was going to happen, they’d be ready.  I’m sure they were also speaking words of prayer, and reading words of scripture, and singing words of praise, but the words weren’t as important as the listening.  And this was real listening, now; self-offering, and purposeful.  No longer were they just passively hearing as they sort of drifted along;  now they were attending, getting themselves tuned in.  They were taking the risk of faith, and opening themselves to the possibility, no, to the certainty of change.

And here’s where to leave it for now, perhaps.  Next week is Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, and the birth day of the Church.  “Be still, and know that I am God,” - the words of the Psalmist.  Sometimes it’s good for us just to take the time to wait;  always, I think, it’s good for us to take the time and make the effort to train ourselves up in the discipline of listening - so that we’re able to listen well to one another, and to those to whose voices we need to attend, because they need us to respond and perhaps then to speak for them;  and to the voice, sometimes the still small voice, of our Lord.

Having Moved

We've just moved house.  We liked our old place, but we like where we are now too - but it's a different world, having moved.  We're a different household, with one more member than before, and there's some settling in to do, not just in terms of finding our way about the premises, and getting to know the neighbours, but also in finding a sustainable and enjoyable - and ultimately fruitful - way of living together.

Years ago I remember reading Bonhoeffer's little book on community life.  This morning I was listening to an interesting radio interview on renunciation.  Living together (the title, if I recall it correctly, of Bonhoeffer's book, which I no longer have to hand) requires some measure of renunciation.  I can't do everything I want to, I have other people's welfare and happiness to consider too.  But one of the wise things said this morning was that it is as we renounce our selves that we find our selves.  There are those who are called to a genuinely solo, and perhaps eremetical, existence, but for most of us the self is formed and re-formed in the various patterns of relationship and community through which we travel, or so it seems to me.