Category Archives: journey

Who is this?

We are surprised by a donkey.
Our stereotyped view of donkeys has them gentle and readily overlooked
But there are many kinds of donkeys:
Slow seaside plodders in kiss me quick hats,
Old thin burros their bones sticking out showing their years of toil and abuse,
Warm nosed nuzzley donkeys in comfortable family farm parks,
The silly ass of popular cartoons,
Each one bearing the cross sign burned into the fur on its back.
The audacious one comes, donkey riding,
Challenging our stereotypes,
As he takes the cross wise way.

There was nothing luke warm about the response of those Palm wavers,
The day had taken a different turn
Everyone was excited.
These days a guy on a donkey is not likely to raise much comment.
The audacious one still comes,
Challenging our stereotypes, winding along the Cross Street,
Will we bear the cross-wise call, burned onto our lives

A few days later, broken trees, discarded branches,
were all that remained to remind them he had taken that route.
The donkey was back in its stall or on with its normal daily grind.
Everything back to normal or was it?

Look for the Holy,
Call out Hosanna,
See the blessed one,
The audacious one,
Coming to claim us.

On not keeping silent in the churches

There are many kinds of silence in our churches. In some you will encounter reverent and prayerful silence but in too many you will encounter oppressive silences concerned with things we can’t say or talk about.  This also happens in the councils of the church, like Synods and the other layers of meetings which can clutter up our life together,  but in certain smaller denominations these rarely make headlines.
So as one of the gender previously exhorted to keep silent in the churches, I find myself once again giving voice. Of course, this is not all that surprising as one who’s primary vocation is as a speech therapist because that lies at the very centre of who I am.
In the end it was that fundamental aspect of my identity that I relied on the guide me away from the harmful practices of my local Synod. Others, including those still inside it would tell this story differently. I can only tell it myself.
I have just completed my first half term of ministry outside and already feel lighter.  I didn’t expect to become the Chaplain of Silcoates School and I certainly didn’t expect to be still doing it 7 years after beginning in a temporary role. But I have stayed, now outside the Synod, to share to Gospel there and listen to God’s call to us all.
As a school affiliated to the United Reformed Church it began life as the Northern Congregational School nearly 200 years ago when faith and education in the same sentence was not such contentious ground. Now, with 6 such schools, and independent education a hot bed for debate, it’s clear that most local dissenters don’t know what to do with us.
‘It wasn’t fair’ for the school to have one of the Synod ministers for any longer than 5 years, was one comment recorded in the Synod minutes when the decision to cease its involvement in the school Chaplaincy was announced. The argument goes we, in the proper churches, have to share ministers, and therefore one whole minister only doing Chaplaincy to 600 or more children and their families was clearly profligate in the extreme. Besides which ‘no other Synods do it like this’ according to the final review report. It was just one example of Synod members demonstrating their lack of awareness of the central message of the Gospel.  They seemed unaware of God’s profligate love. They don’t seem to realise there are many ways of being church.
Well all this, however painful to live through and even recall now, is history. Indeed at the time it didn’t surprise me. But I didn’t predict how profoundly it would effect my sense of identity.
Having grown up in the United Reformed Church I find myself drifting further and further from what it now is. Are we not called to be profligate too? To give away our gifts and resources to further the Gospel call to ‘tell everyone’?
We seems to be content to swap this for some kind of partitioning that has bits of ministry scattered here and there,  some time 70/30% split, sometimes 66/34% split, presumably depending on the mathematics of any particular Synod (the significance of the 4% of ministry still eludes me). The result is not better leadership just more squabbling about ‘our share’ and more knackered ministers who it seems fear to voice their own reservations or more to the point, vision.
Well enough is enough.  I do remember and restate the call to ministry I received: Christ’s is the world in which we move, Christ’s are the folks we’re summonsed to love.
I was 18 months into my first speech therapy post when I was invited to speak to a group of parents of children with learning difficulties, as the local service had proved unwilling to respond to the request. I sat down and the Chair invited questions. The Manger of the local service rised to accuse me: ‘You would give all our skills away, you would’. Guilty as charged. I would, I continue to do so and I would again.
Only now I say we should give all our ministry away. No more tiny shares for this church or that in ever expanding geographical challenges. Only a whole lot of ministry in any one place for a vision, a light house, to be built or a new thing pioneered. If there’s no sign of vision and all folks want is maintenance until death they can arrange that for themselves. Harsh maybe but also generous. Give it away and see what comes back.
If we continue with our present piecemeal plans we are fast running out of life. Too many exhausted people running dysfunctional Sunday clubs (it seems few will actually vote to close theirs however unsustainable it has become).
A new thing is required,  not just for our churches, but of any who want a more outward looking faith that actually engages with people where they are now.
Back in the so called Dark Ages, Columba sent Aidan to Lindisfarne to Christianise the North of England. When they got there, they found a faint echo of the faith left behind by Paulinus and earlier pioneers. They were not Chritianising the North, they were re-christianising it. The local people welcomed the monks who had come to be with them, to create community,  not foist unjust taxes on them.
So to our task, the echo is still just about there. But it will not have much effect if all it does is echo around the insides of the tombs we have created. It is time not to keep silent in the churches.
‘Leave the tomb, it is empty. He has gone before you’.

On a train…
I wrote this on a train. In the seat in front of me a young child exhorts her mother to ‘more bubbles’. Yes please, Let’s have more bubbles: more bubbles of enthusiasm,  of joy, more bubbles of colour and light. More bubbles to float our concerns for the world, to take our sins and short comings far from us, more bubbles of leadership from the youngest among us. Of course I’m a speech therapist, I’d spend my last breath on bubbles. Better than on the unhealthy, cold, closed in silences of churches and Synods that don’t know a light house when they see one.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

Passing the same gritter twice

A fox slipped under the gate,
having crossed the high street,
brush sweeping the floor;
Street lights made orange pools,
reflected back in random puddles.
I took the climb, the switchback
up to the top and then down;
darker here, lights up
no visible eyes shone back at me.
The return journey was just as dark,
but no critter to leave its mark:
the night I passed the same gritter,
twice!

In our coming and our going,
The Peace of God.

My ancestor was a wandering Iraqi

Now seeC3RkpTxWIAAYRGdms a good time to affirm this. My first weekend retreat with @LCStBen to study the family ties we have to that ancient wandering Iraqi, coincided with a ill judged move to exclude certain people from a country largely made up from the descendants of both ancient and modern wandering people. A move that seemed to have been orchestrated by the ignorant and bigoted. Or else why did they not know themselves as descendants of that Ancient and faithful Iraqi.
Of course he’s not my most recent ancestor. The ones I remember best are the fish sellers of North East London. The one lot with the fish barrow selling in the streets to poor, often immigrant households. My grandmother a good neighbour to those of different races and faiths, turning on the lights on the Sabbath. The other lot, the fish shop owners with open hearts and table, generous to growing families.
But if these were the ones I had grown up knowing, they’re just the latest in a long line stretching back centuries, across continents to that wandering family from the middle east.
This weekend we revisited that ancient story and recalled the twists and turns of life over several generations and from a culture far removed from our own that has shaped our understanding of faith.
Abram and Sarai set out from Ur with flocks and herds and family members. Along the way they twist and turn to right and left, sometimes righteous, sometimes foolish. There are plenty of ‘leave it out Phil’ moments and dramatic music.
But there are also many highlights, points when half dead and essentially impotent, that wandering Iraqi is lifted up by God and receives new life. It’s all in the ‘h’. With added ‘h’, breath and life are added and these two ancestors are reborn as Abraham and Sarah.
The story’s not yet over. We all need new life after all.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

Cartoon shows Lot and his family approaching Zoar, a small place according to Genesis 19

Go home by another way

Today I’m going home but by another way. It’s not the route I took to get here. I’ve been a sort of pilgrim in Canterbury for the last few days with my gentle exploring of the city and visits to the Cathedral. I’ve tried several places to eat, walk, write and pray. Now it’s time to go back, as term begins again in a few days.
On the way I will go via some London suburbs which 30 years ago I knew better. In those days I was an evangelist for speech therapy and my pilgrim places were child development centres in the south east. Trains were my usual form of transport as I criss crossed from one to another. It was a job I loved and when I first went to Oxford for ministry training, I missed the whole of it enormously. It was speech therapy that had informed and fed my theology and call at that time.
I have many good friends to remember in those days. One such is Brian Neville, who died in December, and for whom we gather in thanksgiving today at Petts Wood Methodist Church, on my way home, so to speak.
I first met Brian Neville in a lift in Guys hospital in 1983. He said l understand you’re interested in language and the brain. If I was astonished that he’d heard if me, very much a junior speech therapist, my reply tried not to show it. Oh I’m interested in much more than that, I said. And I was and still am. But that first subject, language and the brain, launched several years of clinical and research work with children who had acquired aphasias , and their families, some of whom I continue to keep in touch with.
That range of enquiry survived my time in Oxford, where in addition to my ministry training, I wrote two speech therapy books, to resurface again at the Institute for Child Health, where Brian was working with a team doing clinical and research work with children who had epilepsy and their families. I joined in again. Although I later went to Sheffield as a minister, and there did my PhD in of course speech therapy, Brian and I stayed in touch.
However, at the time if his death I’d not seen him for a couple of years. But his approach to detailed enquiry of anything at all continued to inform mine. I’d learnt to look deep and wide at any subject, to frame questions, to examine evidence. I still do all of these things.
We shared a love of organ music. He was a very good organist and I was a rather feeble one. But playing the organ is a kind of church based fun that few adults bother to enjoy for themselves. I was introduced to it during my childhood by Ruth, the organist at the church where I grew up. It was awesome. At Mansfield College, one of The Good Bits, and I need to remember those, was that Carolyn Brock, the college organist, taught me properly for a few years, and I played weekly, and probably weakly, for Matins on Thursday mornings. The instrument was a small chamber organ which has recently been moved elsewhere for restoration. Sometimes I’d play the big one. It was a great way to de-stress. Later my own daughter took up the organ and so that form of church based fun has been passed on to another generation.
All this then is about going home by a long and complex route.

Arriving early at Petts Wood I began with fish and chips. Meals were always a hearty part of working with Brian. Meeting over lunch and talking about current research anywhere in the world was always a good aid to digestion.
The local cafe soon became a meeting point for those going to the service and many hugs and kisses were exchanged often with folks not seen for several years.
Petts Wood Methodist Church is not large and we were soon filling it up. Edward, the steward, kindly took my overnight bag but of course I was by no means the furthest travelled. Richard had come from Edinburgh, Rob from Vermont, and Charles from Nairobi to name a few. The service was all we could have hoped for and a super tribute to one much loved. Memories of family and friends mingled together into a seamless celebration.
Music was a significant part of Brian’s life and faith. The hymns, many of which feature amongst my favourites, we’re good to sing together.
Now thank we all our God
Awake awake to love and work
To be a pilgrim 
Be though my vision 

Andrew also played the ‘cello to help us all to reflect. There were words but there was much more. Psalm 139 might now be viewed as the paediatric neurologist’s psalm. Here’s a remembered version with commentary :

I have know you all your life, since you were formed in your mother’s womb
This is more than the cradle to grave service of the NHS many of us work/ed in, but what we later become  begins here

I know your sitting down and your standing up.
This reminded me of the clinical encounters we shared where sitting, standing and much more would observed as functional skills. The patella hammer would be deployed. That bit often made me laugh.

Where can I go to get away from you. Not to the east, or the north, west or south. Wherever I am you are there.
So not just a local service either. Truly universal in extent, equal in accessibility, just, merciful and humble.

The darkness and the light are both the same to you
This is the amazing high point in this psalm for me: whether good news or bad God would keep the vigil with us until we rose again. Before each encounter I would pray. I still do.

The service ended with the voluntary Brian played at my wedding to Bob 25 years ago.
And so to greetings and eating, stories shared and more hugs. More than 30 years since we first met but it has passed all too quickly. It was good to catch up with others and discover where they were still travelling to.
Some of us then travelled on together for a while, talking and thinking. I parted from the final colleague, Maria, at Charing Cross. Here I am travelling home by another way, that went by Petts Wood Methodist Church. It is the feast of the Epiphany and a notice outside the church is old fashioned in its language. I’ll refashion it for 2017: wise ones looked for Jesus, wiser ones still do.
Brian was such a one, wise indeed.

Catching up with Ruth

We caught up with Ruth at Evensong tonight. Having missed the early episodes, the journeying and the gleaning, we were reunited on the threshing floor.

Naomi advises Ruth to go to the threshing floor, clean and in her best clothes, after dark, and there to uncover the feet of Boaz.

It’s somewhat odd to have this read at Evensong, when it belongs better to an episode of Eastenders. Naomi is telling Ruth how to catch Boaz. But it’s a risk. He may not take the bait, or having tasted may reject her or come up with another excuse.

He certainly appears to. He wants her gone before anyone recognises her. She leaves whilst it us still dark enough to leave her anonymous, and he gives her six measures of barley to take with her. Is that it? After all he has said there is another with a closer claim. If so, why did Naomi not send Ruth to him? Did she know about him?

If that was all of the story you knew so far then the music played and the next episode was delayed, then you’d not already know the outcome. Not know about the sandal and that moment at the gate when Ruth is up for grabs, like so many still are today.

Before I get to the gate this evening , the stone Westgate of Canterbury, in a biting January wind, I duck into the Turkish Restaurant, so far the only customer, to sit and consider Ruth’s story over red wine and hummus.

How many women’s stories will I tell this year? Who will listen?

In our life and our believing
The love of God

Meanwhile at the inn: from Barmaid to Scholar

So Bethlehem was full. Didn’t I just know it. Every last lousy room full of travellers from heaven knows where, and me on my fleabitten back in several of them. There were endless pots to wash and food and drink to serve, not all of it that wholesome. Here at The Key of David they’d got hold of an old ewe from a rustler and were trying to pass it off as lamb. Well I know how that felt.
I hadn’t had much time to consider what was euphemistically called strange goings on. I had enough trouble of my own, trying to keep wandering hands at bay, avoiding the master’s eye and the back of the mistresses hand. More folks kept arriving and every last space was filled. I heard they’d put a young pregnant lass in part of the stable. Well in some ways there was less vermin there than inside the house.
I spent several mornings heaving up in the gutter outside. What I’d thought was a bad brew of ale was looking increasingly less gastric and more drastic. I didn’t really have time to think or listen to vague stories from drunk locals about angels and peace on earth. There was always more work to do and no one else to do it.
Things began to thin out a bit once people started to get registered. Once done they left for their own homes again. The master agreed the young mother (she had given birth out there after all) could move into one if the inside rooms and I was kept busy enough running food and water and whatnot up and down the stairs. She was quiet most of the time, thoughful maybe, tired of course and trying to get the hang of managing an infant.
One day an odd bunch of foreigners turned up, a sort of camel train. Said they were looking for one born a king.’ Look all you want’ the master laughed at them. ‘Only baby here was born in a stable and is now upstairs’. They went to look anyway, and decided to stay over. That pleased the master most because it meant more money. I cleaned out some rooms as best I could and found something for them to eat. They were serious reserved gents but they told an odd story of ancient wisdom, stars and a long journey with many twists and turns. They’d even been to Herod’s court which made most of us shudder. But they were polite and didn’t take advantage, even though the mistress kept hinting at how there were extras available if they were interested.
They weren’t but went to bed early. Next day we were all woken by noise and chaos. News had it troops had been sighted. The little family and the camel riders all wanted to move on suddenly. Something about bad dreams; well I know how that felt. I’d not been sleeping for quite a few nights now wondering what to do about my own situation. I was bright enough to know that my news would not go down well in this household.
‘We have to go at once’ they all seemed to speak at once but in different ways. The camels were loaded up and a couple of donkeys too. Seemed the family and the foreigners had decided to travel together. It wasn’t the right way back for any of them but it was a way out for now.
Turned out it was also a way out for me. The mother could not travel alone with all those men. Who would help her with the baby? I would. I rolled my few possessions into a bundle, and seizing the bridle of the pack donkey I set off without looking back.
We were on odd bunch, the little family, the three gents and me, now an ex-barmaid but something bound us together.
As we left chaos erupted in Bethlehem. Troops went from house to house searching violently, killing male infants and even toddlers, maiming family members who got in the way. Mothers wailed: there was a crescendo of pain that could be heard beyond the walls as we set our sights on Egypt. Somehow in the confusion we made it, though those were anxious days.
We left the family on the border and we turned to cross the desert again. What, you are surprised I stayed with the three gents and not the family of three? Well it was a difficult decision but I’d learnt a lot on that journey. To go to a new place and start again, a new life with a new story and identity; that attracted me. From barmaid to scholar might have sounded unplanned, unlikely and not without hidden dangers but I’d come to enjoy their company, their storytelling and wisdom and amongst them I’d found myself valued. My own voice had begun to emerge as my belly grew with the child I carried. No one can say what the future holds but I began to understand what stories I would tell and get a glimpse of the wisdom I would grow from this.

Janet Lees/ 01.01.2017

Creed 2016

Creed for a School Chaplain: I actually wrote this at the beginning of 2016, and it was used during the service of Hallowing that we held in Chapel on my birthday.

I believe in Jesus,
in whose footsteps we follow;
born like us,
challenged by life,
alone in death.
He rose again
in unlikely circumstances,
inspiring our forebears
to remember his stories, words and actions.

I believe in this community
of not quite saints,
who daily undergo challenges
to develop and grow
in faith and love.
We tell his story with our lives,
not perfectly but winsomely.

I believe in the Holy Spirit
who inspires me everyday
with the reflection of Christ’s glory
in each person here:
who surprises us
in classrooms and corridors
with the unlikely signs
of God’s presence with us.
This is the God in whom we believe:
one who waits for unlikely moments,
creates unexpected opportunities,
listens and observes
the smallest details of our lives
and makes them count.

I believe
and by God’s grace will go on believing,
that the church is bigger than we have made it,
that our neighbours are closer than we dare think,
and I understand I am called to share these things with you all,
modifying and sculpting together our responses
to God active in us and the world around us.

In our life and our believing
The Love of God

JAL: 06.01.2016
The Feast of the Epiphany.

December 24th, O Mary

O Mary:
did you say ‘O my God’
when the journey began?
Did you say ‘O my God’
when you realised the city was full?
Did you say ‘O my God’
when you saw the stable?
Did you say ‘O my God’
when the labour pains started?
Did you say ‘O my God’
when his head was crowning?
did you say ‘O my God’
when the chord was cut?
Did you say ‘O my God’
when you laid him in a manger?
May we who say ‘O my God’ now
at even the slightest thing,
look with you and wonder
as around the world today,
women follow this same journey
to motherhood and beyond.

In our life and our believing
The Love of God

 

…these roads we never planned to take

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This year I will be travelling as a Seeker with the Lay Community of St Benedict. My journey into Benedictine Spirituality began when in my middle 20’s I first visited the Abbey of St Mary’s West Malling, in Kent, which is a Benedictine community. There I was introduced to the Rule and the Hours and they became part of my journey, sometimes close, sometimes more distant companions.
I first read about the Lay Community of St Benedict in the summer when I was walking on the Cleveland Way. It started to pop up on my Twitter feed. Before that I’d taken a retreat in May with another Benedictine Community at Stanbrook Abbey in Wass, and felt a homecoming there. I therefore decided to explore this invitation to be a Seeker and began at the end of November (around my birthday).
The Lay Community is diverse and widespread, I am told. Here begins a year to discern whether my unlikely path merges with theirs. As a result of ‘joining up’ I now receive their regular verses for meditation. Today’s blog title is from the first one and the words are by Peter Millar of the Iona Community, so that is familiar company so far.
There are many roads in my life I never planned to take and I acknowledge the surprising wisdom I have so often encountered on these unlooked for paths. This week I have been ministered to by people of all ages and I have shared in that ministry with them as we fill our Advent cupboard and share our Advent worship, tell our personal stories and listen to each other, as we travel on together on roads we never planned to take.

In our coming and our going
The Peace of God