Category Archives: ancestor

Tidings of comfort and joy

Like the proverbial curate’s egg Twitter has good and not so good parts. I want to celebrate some of the good bits I’ve found personally
1: it connects me more readily with my best friend who lives in a different country and who I see maybe a couple of times a year. She tweets a lot, and was really responsible for getting me started in this. She connects me to her global concerns and also translates stuff for me to join in.
2: as a result I’m connected to more people. This was important at the time, a couple of years ago, when I felt much less connected particularly to the small part of the church to which I had belonged. The silence and isolation I received there was in stark contrast to the voices of those who I connected with on Twitter, many of whom were women working in different ministries and communities and concerns.
3: being more connected meant I heard about stuff I didn’t know about, projects I got involved in, some I still am. Some have reached their goals others are still struggling. Justice and peace are common themes. There is connection. We don’t give up
4: I also connected with other pray-ers and that helped me to feel reconnected to the true concerns of the church, even if I no longer attended and still got angry or cried a lot about what had happened.
5: it also helped me to connect with a world of other things. A boy at school tweets about Rhinos, others choose anti bullying, homelessness or community development. This way I can stay connected to their concerns even when we don’t meet.
6: I met other people through Twitter, some made cakes, were artists, writers, gardeners, foragers, mental health campaigners and much more. I was not alone or isolated
7: of course it didn’t always go well. A troll thought I should stick to the Church of England instead of getting involved in politics. This was when we were ringing for Aleppo. It was amusing because my forbears left the Church of England in 1662. Faith is not apolitical (even in the Church of England).
I know Twitter had an unkind side and that bothers me a lot but it also communicates kindness, concern and connection, and I really appreciate that.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

Born in the Elsie Inglis

The thirst for faith may take you far away
Or call you to serve the sick, the poor each day,
To make your mark and seeing all this say
You were born in the Elsie Inglis

Your heart of hope may open every door,
Open to every stranger and clothe more,
Ready to aid all others at you core:
You were born in the Elsie Inglis.

The way of love be ever in your sight,
As hand in hand we work in great delight
Ready to build the kindom of the light
We were born in the Elsie Inglis

JAL 25.11.2017

In memory of Elsie Inglis (1864-1917), doctor of medicine, Served in WW1, her 100th anniversary is this week. A maternity hospital is named after her in Edinburgh. Her memorial in St Giles cathedral includes the figures of Faith, Hope and Love.

Take a knee

Word of the Day: ADGENICULATION (n.) the act of kneeling

I was only a child when I worked out that Christians of our sort didn’t kneel down. Each week we’d go from our Primary school to the local parish church for a morning service. The church was old, and it had pews with little doors on that latched shut. There were hassocks on the floor like a line of little cushions, each one decorated in bright colours by parish members.
We didn’t have those in our church, not the little locking doors on the pews, not the hassocks. And we didn’t kneel down.
As a teenager an elderly priest told me he liked worshipping with us because he didn’t have to kneel down. I wondered what took him so long to work out that you could pray without doing that.
As a young adult I started to develop my Benedictine tendencies in various places around the country. And I have knelt down a few times. I have a meaning for it now that I didn’t have when I was younger. I can see a time and place for rebellion, for Dissent, for going my own way.
And I can see a time, however brief, for kneeling. It can bring you level with another person, it can provide a steady base to help someone up. It can provide you with a private place within yourself to think and reflect. It can express somethings words don’t say; humility, respect, solidarity.
In this country, we don’t usually kneel for the national anthem, even though the words, God save the Queen, are a prayer. Most of us don’t stand to attention, hand over heart, either. If they are able to, people do stand and sing. But we’d don’t have to.
Now imagine you come from a country that has given less value to you and your ancestors since before the nation began. Imagine you’ve had to fight for your rights, to vote, yes, but the right to sit on the bus on a seat you choose, to live where you wish, send your children to the school of your choice, and much more the right to freedom itself and equality under the Law. Imagine that due to the colour of the skin you were born with your rights and opportunities have always been less than a person from the same country with a different coloured skin. Imagine you’ve tried to change this. Leaders have come and gone and injustices continue to go unchallenged. And then you hit on the idea to kneel down during the national anthem.
Whoa! What a crazy, disrespectful idea. Kneel down you say. How could you? How can you?
That’s nonviolent protest and it’s happening now in the USA. Remember it, not because you’re bothered now about national anthems and stuff but because one day you may have to decide to make a nonviolent protest about something on the way to being the builders of justice and the peacemakers you are destined to be.
And when that happens this might just come back to you and you’ll understand why standing up and being counted can be done by taking a knee.

From our Sixth Form Chapel this morning (29.09.2017)

Durham

The Surplus to Requirements Summer Adventure starts today. First stop by train from Huddersfield is Durham. This world famous city and World Heritage Site is a very fascinating place with its narrow historical streets and buildings.
First call in Durham is Bells, fish and chip restaurant, housed in buildings dating from 15th to 17th centuries near the market place. The fish was a crispy fresh and welcome as ever for the memory of my fish selling ancestors. It’s certainly busy and popular with both locals and global visitors.
A little further on in North Bailey, St Chad’s College offers guest rooms in the summer and very nice it is too, if you get the right room key. If you don’t it’s doubly nice as you get the free work out on the stairs as everyone tries to help and eventually discover you have been given the wrong key.
Outside my window I can see the small wooden college chapel. A list in the entrance tells the visitor that of those listed on the WW1 Roll of honour, four were serving as Army Chaplains.
I had heard a lot about Treasures of St Cuthbert and had bought a ticket. It didn’t disappoint. The coffin of St Cuthbert and the things that were found in it are quite remarkable. The Anglo Saxon embroidery was not something I’d heard about before.
Although I’d been to the Cathedral before I didn’t remember it all that well. It truly is an awesome place. I started in the Galillee chapel where there is the tomb of St Bede, and walked through the nave to the place where St Cuthbert’s tomb is behind the altar. A small boy was fascinated by the crucified Jesus of the Pieta that was there. He venerated it by sliding down the shiny outstretched arm.
There were many things that interested me: the cross from The Somme in the Chapel of Remembrance to the Durham Light Infantry, the embroidery at the altars dedicated to St Hilda and St Margaret, the story of the Scots POWs kept in the Cathedral in 1650 after the Battle of Dunbar, amongst others. Although it was busy, there were many quiet places.

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