Category Archives: journey

What’s in a word?

Last week there was a notice on my seat at the Nativity service. It said ‘reserved’. Not a very good description of me.
Yesterday I was ‘retiring’. Also not a good description, but I did it anyway and now it’s done.
It was amazing and also the right decision. I was surprised by how calm I felt. It was mostly the children who disarmed me when I stood on the path saying goodbye to them as they walked to the school gate.
After that there were photos and speeches from my friends and colleagues on the staff. I didn’t remember half the stories that were told. What I did realise, seeing the whole thing through other people’s eyes, was just how bonkers it all was! The dressing up, the whirlwind makes, the badly spelt messages, the songs, poems and stories, the bouncing and bowling down corridors and into classrooms, the words and the silences. And just how important to the children and young people.
It’s been amazing, both in sorrow and in joy.
I’m glad I was Chaplain of Silcoates. It truly was an honour and a privilege.
In the story of the Not Last Supper at Emmaus, it says ‘Jesus went to go on’. I’m following him: Road Walker, bread sharer, life giver.
In our life and our believing
The love of God


From the chapel door (above) and a gift from the school (below)

 

Fragments from the Battlefields 2018

Our most recent visit to the Battlefields of the Western Front WW1 is recalled here in a few fragments between 20th and 25th October 2018

As the sun went down at Ypres :

Trees like monuments,
Silhouettes against the sky,
Or reflections in still water.

Figures for memories,
Silhouettes sharing space
Silent alongside the living.

You who are there but not there,
Here but not here,
Gone but not forgotten.

Ode to a banana; at breakfast one morning my banana went missing

Woe to the memory
Of my lost banana,
Smiling crescent of the morning
Snatched from my plate
By one I called friend.

Wind at Thiepval:


When the wind blows the cradle will fall,
The sepulchre too.
When the bough breaks the leaves will fall,
The young men come tumbling after,
Down will come wreaths and memories
One by one by one by one.

Homage to mangelwurzels: mangelwurzels are always a feature of our Battlefields tours
Now bow your head
As mangelwurzels are moved
And we are too:
Heaped high, a harvest
Of huge roots
Of hidden sweetness.

Moon rise: a Hunter’s moon rose on the last evening of our tour

The mangelwurzel moon
Looks down with orange glow,
As home from the front we go.
Benevolent, gentle it’s blessing to bring,
As on the coach the students sing,
With joy in heart at end of day
And praise of moon and everything:
The moon emoji communicates it all.

Some Beatitudes

Blessed are the bagtakers
They will leave a smaller footprint on the earth

Blessed are the sandwich makers
They will share what they have with thousands.

Ploegestreet memorial: one of our Silcoatians is remembered here


Looking skywards
Into the blue,
Searching for you
Amongst the names

In our life and our believing
The love of God 

JAL 25.10.2018

Inner Farne

St Cuthbert died on Inner Farne and there is a small chapel dedicated to him amongst the seasonal migrating seabirds:

Strong stomached were the saints
Who to Inner Farne for solitude came.
Annually their congregations would increase
With raucous crowds of visiting terns.
Today the pilgrims brave the seas,
Salute the seals, gasp at the maid’s brave route,
And gently tread their way to the chapel door.
Mindful of the egg strewn path,
Where Cuthbert still cradles Oswald’s head.
On the rim of the font in the yard,
An artic tern, an epic voyager,
catches my eye before soaring skywards.
Try it, you might like it, it seems to cry.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

Inner Farne 23.05.2018

God is our refuge

Today’s prayers begin with a bit of a remembered psalm:

God is our refuge and strength, a present help in trouble

At the first refuge box

As the tide rises
God is our refuge.
As the tide falls
God is our strength.
As the posts mark the way
God is present, our companion.

See the small pools and the mud:
God’s own for the world.
See the posts and the pilgrims:
God’s own for the world.
See the way and the footsteps :
It is God’s way and we will try to follow it.

In the boiler house chapel of St Cuthbert

It’s still OK to take stuff with me
From the tradition in which I grew,
It’s still OK to travel onwards,
Explore, be challenged, encounter new.
It’s still OK to leave stuff here now
In this warming tiny cell.
It’s still OK, someone may want it:
Hear the echo: All is well.

Back at the refuge box

Across the sands the seals sing
By the bridge the Heron stands
Keeping pace with the tide times
The pilgrims cross the sands.

Be still And know that I am God

Now in this small refuge,
God is close to me,
Encouraging my resting,
Still as the flat calm sea.

On Holy Island,  21.05.2018

Holy Island Retreat

This is my first retreat in Bambi. I’ve come back to Holy Island where I took retreats earlier in my time as Chaplain.

Some say it is a thin place
Where heaven and earth come close to meeting.
For me, that can be any place at all
If you tune into the sense of it.
Flat salt marshes, wavy dunes,
The detritus of the tide and
The light falling as the sun sinks westward.
Above the sound of the east coast main line rushing on
A linnet sings.
Then the Greylag geese fly in,
Calling to each other companionably.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

The wilderness of Dungeness

You’ve heard of Burnham Beeches,
Or the plain of Salisbury Plain
With heaps of giant stones,
Of the rugged Cumbria lakeland
Complete with Wrynose Bottom
And fells covered in sheep;
But have you ever ever been
To the wild wilderness of Dungeness.

There more shingle here than ever
Arnold counted on Dover Beach,
There’s tiny clapped out houses
Who’s sides and doors are bleached,
There’s a chain link fence for miles
Not fencing but lying down
There’s bottle tops and bottoms,
And a lost boot no one found,
A tiny railway station for tiny railway trains,
And flowers bloom in miniature of course;
Scabious, pink, campion and gorse,
There are tracks that criss cross the shingle
And as we rattle past
We wondered at those folks lost
Who wandered from the path
Into the windswept wilderness of wild Dungeness.

There’s cabbage of the sea sort
And hidden artists sheds
Along decorated paths,
An horizon marked by ferries
Going somewhere else.
A flag that flutters bravely
A pair of lighthouse towers,
A hardy little garden with ragged little flowers.
The sky is domed and lovely,
The sun has its own pups:
And all the Ewes are waiting
For a visit from their Tups.

Do not miss it sticking off the end of Kent:
The Magnox now dismantled,
The road curves round a bend.
The wild Saxon Shore curves on,
By stones and shells it’s marked
And if you tread along it the scenery is stark.
Your way is found by guesswork
And so is the route back.
It is the wild wilderness by way of Dungeness.

JAL 01.11.2017

Warning: this is an epic poem about the British landscape. Do not study it for your GCSE coursework. Just enjoy the anarchy and chaos it contains.

At the name

We find them every time:
Those with names the same
As ours, the same age
As a brother or fellow student.

If this was your local regiment
Would you have volunteered?

“Not me I’m a coward.”
You’re no coward if you understand
That peace is a better way than war,
And you live as if that matters most.

24.10.2017 Fricourt

Air

A white butterfly flew into the crater,
Vast expanse of air lined with grass,
Held up by molecules, supported by atoms,
Summonsed by the mist, called to by birds.

24.10.2017 Lochnagar crater

The ridge 

When you stand at the top of Thiepval ridge,
And see the way they came, weighed down,
And look across the landscape still bearing signs,
One hundred years later you are still speechless.

JAL 24.10.2017 Thiepval

He descended into hell

Down, down, down
Into the dark earth,
Through the white limestone,
Along the barely lit tunnel,
Past the latrines,
The command post,
The altar and the well,
To eight days of dripping darkness
Of boards for beds and meals from cans,
Of icy water for washing and damp boots,
Before standing ready at the steps
In the cold light of predawn,
When your name’s called and the signal given,
The stone is moved
And like the tomb quitting gardener,
you emerge as a newborn lamb,
To the barrage and the bomb:
A shell bursts overhead
And it’s ‘killed in action’ on the telegram,
And ‘greater love has no one than this’
On the neatly cut stone.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

JAL 22.10.2017
Wellington Quarry, Arras, 1917.

Feed my sheep

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I do wonder what a small town carpenter would have know about sheep rearing. But then again the image crops up many times in the Hebrew scriptures. The idea that people were ‘the sheep of God’s hand’ would therefore have been commonplace and the image would have worked for Peter and for all the others on that basis alone.
For my part, I like sheep but have very little to do with real ones. Even so hearing these words on the radio this morning was enough to push me gently but firmly into the image again, and find there a playground for imagination which is the ‘fundation’ of remembering the bible.
I’m willing to feed the sheep. I started the week a bit cranky, my mind not quite on task, but by the end I was once again fully engaged and bouncing in the meadows. It was the sheep wot did it, in this instance the children and young people. Worshipping together and then waiting and listening with them got me back on track again. ‘Can I talk to you Rev?’ The same question in a new office with boxes piled up everywhere and other things to avoid tripping over. One said ‘I forgot to thank you for your help last year so I came today to thank you’. Well by the end of that little speech I was eating out of their hands again.
So the sheep aren’t the problem. But the sheepdog trails are, or the Synods as we call them. Not just them but all the other sheep trading paraphenalia of Country Fairs and Auctions and Markets. You see, that first command to ‘Feed my sheep’ soon got hijacked and developed into a full scale industry which now spends more time preserving itself than getting on with feeding the sheep. And it’s all that I have the problem with. You might argue that the gospel would not have survived without it. My point now is can it survive with it?
For the next few weeks our chapel theme is ‘All one’ and that notion Paul sent to the Christians in Galatia two thousand years ago that ‘In Christ’s family there are no divisions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female’. Because of course there still are. But what does that look like from the perspective of a young person today. A much greater understanding of diversity in some ways and a much narrower toleration of ‘others’ in another. Two thousand years ago people from modern day Iraq and Syria were making their way across the North of England. They were Romans and Hadrian’s Wall was their highway. They bought with them many new ideas, including the stories of the carpenter and his friends and the command to ‘Feed my Sheep.
So free yourself from the preservation order and get on with living with and sharing the story yourself.

In our life and our believing
The Love of God