journey – Notes from Bambi

Burden

Dear Benedict,

When I think about putting your rule into practice today, it sometimes seems too complicated. All 73 chapters are about how to live in community. It’s a daunting prospect. Would you suggest a top ten perhaps? Most days I barely scratch the beginning and end: ‘Listen’ and ‘try not to be discouraged’ (my remembered versions).

This is partly because my usual companion is the remembered bible, rather than the remembered rule. The bit I’m thinking of today is about bearing each other’s burdens. We developed some strange ideas in the 21st century and one of them that has caught hold and will not seem to let go, is that as we age we become a burden.

We don’t. We are never that. We need a major reboot here.

What becomes tough, daunting, frustrating, can be re-balanced if we can only think of sharing the load, standing by each other, giving a hand. Of course the complexity of our lives has made that harder. Everyone needs to work, and often at several jobs, to maintain the expected multi-holiday, big car, comfortable house, lifestyle that is advertised in our celebrity endorsing, selfie-society.

I haven’t seen a dentist in over five years. There are no NHS dentists in the area where I live or in many other parts of the country. Is this because the NHS has failed. No, it’s more complicated than that. The best dental service I ever received was from the students at the dental hospital (that was years ago now). Yet, even then it was clear that one of the motivating factors for some students was the high salaries they believed they could and should command.

Too many of the people not now able to afford dentistry are now in the grip of the worst post-war poverty epidemic we have yet seen in this country. There’s a two child limit on family financial help via child allowance and too many families are having to rely on food banks.

My first profession was as a speech therapist in the NHS. Even then it was hard to find speech therapists, and sometimes waiting lists were very long. Once again you could look to pay for private speech therapy but it’s not a part of the profession I ever went into. I learnt at a young age to give stuff away and most of all to give away my time. I didn’t get my first paid job until I was 18 and that was as an au-pair. During my adulthood I’ve often worked for nothing, volunteered for stuff, had unpaid roles one way or another. I don’t have a large income, because I’m a woman born in the 1950s so I don’t get my pension until I’m 66. But I still have enough to give my time and efforts to other people, make soup, sew up things, visit people.

I’m fortunate that is the case but it does puzzle me what multi-millionaires think they will need all that money for….Or even why ordinary people get hooked into the must have this or that culture. Later today, I hope I will put my walking boots on and walk up the valley. I’ll see some birds, plants and maybe something unexpected. It will cost me nothing.

If you want to live with the Risen Christ, think about how you can take life beyond the restrictions and false attractions of a culture that promises much but delivers so little. Think about how you can be part of a community that ‘shares each others burdens’. It seems to be a somewhat counter cultural way of life now in a context in which everything costs more and the fear of having nothing dominates the richest, while the poor have to scrap by on several low paid jobs and a bag of free groceries.

Bob carrying Hannah and Sally Bunny, sometime ago.

If there’s a rule it should be ‘Let no one go without what they need to thrive’.

From my remembered bible: ‘Jesus said ‘I have come so you might have the fullest life possible’.

Show us how to bear each others burdens.

Janet lees, Friend of Scholastica, living in Longdendale. Easter Sunday 2024.

Marys

Four Christmas cards……

From Nazareth

The cold, still, starry nights remind me of Bethlehem. Glory to God in the highest. See you in Jerusalem for Passover.

Love from Mary of Nazareth.

From Magdala

The cold, still, starry nights remind me of our journey through Galilee. Give us this day our daily bread. See you in Jerusalem for Passover.

Love from Mary of Magdala.

From Bethany

The cold, still starry nights remind me of the waiting when Lazarus died. Only the grave is more silent. See you in Jerusalem for Passover.

Love from Mary of Bethany.

From Emmaus

The cold, still starry nights remind me of everything we shared. When I bake bread I remember. See you in Jerusalem for Passover.

Love from Mary of Emmaus.

The Love of God comes close where stands an open door

Janet Lees in Longdendale: 14.12.2022

Pilgrim

Dear Benedict: One thing that has characterised this phase of my life is being on the move. I keep walking, even if it may not be as much as in 2019, when I completed the End to End. Each day includes, where possible, the little end to end. To embark on pilgrimage, first go up the High Street as if it’s sacred ground: the butcher’s is closed, the baker get’s up at 3 am, they still sell candles in a couple of shops. In a holy valley like Longdendale, what ever the weather, something is trickling down one gulley or another, from the top reservoir to the bottom. But here like other places in England, there’s a partial drought and the behaviour of reservoirs is not a good image for how to treat real people when it comes to economics.

This week has been another of my roving weeks. When on the move I take a few things with me: my phone stands in for many things, but also a paper map for backup, and my remembered bible and remembered rule. Days away from home are different from days at home. Here I’m sat down writing. There I’m on the move, observing and reflecting. A balance between these is my current pilgrim life.

My adventures took me to Angelsey, Yns Mon, across the Menai Bridge where only bicycles can overtake bicycles. I visited four small churches on the island, sometimes on islands next to the island. These probably all began life as hermit cells and are not often used today, though each is still a part of a local group of churches.

St Tysilio’s Church on church Island, Menai.

St Tysilio’s near Menai Bridge is on Church Island which is joined to the main island by causeway. Lit by candlelight, an open door explained that it was founded in 630AD. These are churches of the Celtic version of the faith that was circulating in the West well before Augustine, a Benedictine, turned up in Canterbury (597AD). Simple, less heirarchical and misinformed (according to Rome) about the date of Easter, these small hermitages have been visited by local people for centuries. The early Celtic saints were often on the move and Tysilio is said to have died in Brittany, where the great western seaway took him.

The Church in the Sea is also linked by a causeway to the main island, but is only accessible at low tide, the journey made over a trail of rocks.

St Cwyfan’s Church in the Sea, near Aberffraw

A simple building, services are still held during the summer. Through the window I could see the font surrounded by sea shells, sign of the pilgrim’s baptismal vows renewed.

Sea shells surround the font at the Church in the Sea.

Lligwy Chapel, built in the 12th century, is now a ruin, its community having moved away. There’s no note of it being dedicated to any saint, but all saints came here and in the 16th century at least some were buried here. It stands within a circle of boulders in a meadow not far from an ancient settlement that dates to the Roman occupation and a Neolithic burial mound, all of which indicates this ground has been considered holy since at least 2,500 BC.

The final one of the four is dedicated to St Seiriol and is a small well chamber alongside the ruins of the Augustinian Abbey at Penmon, proof that one St Augustine did finally catch up with the inhabitants of Angelsey. But it was the other St Augustine, this time from Hippo who’s writings date to about 400 AD. St Seiriol is remembered as one of the early Welsh Fathers, and his occupation of the site dates to the 6th century.

The Penmon cross now housed in the Abbey, 9th century, is incised with simple Celtic patterns.

I’ll end my pilgrimage at St Seiriol’s Well, which is behind the Abbey. This well probably has, like most holy wells in Wales, pre Christian origins. Wells have been sites of pilgrimage for generations and the water here still runs clear.

I love to visit the homes of the saints, ancient and modern. Each spot reminds me that at sometime someone else sat here and prayed. I join in the timeless action.

From my remembered bible: The swallow makes its nest near your altar.

Note that swallows are migratory birds even now leaving Britain until next spring.

May my prayer migrate as I pray for the migrating ones, all who are travelling beyond borders.

From A Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Janet Lees, Angelsey, 17-24 September 2022.

End to End via the Churches: part 2

In the hot summer of 2022 I’m reblogging the cooler summer of 2019, especially the churches I visited on my End to End. We take up the route at Truro Cathedral, where this sign urged me onwards.

Probus Parish Church was not far further on and you can see my boots reflected in the figures of the Remembrance Campaign for 2018: There but not there. The thing we most remember about Probus is the fish and chip shop (of course). They gave a generous donation to Hannah’s walk ten years ago when we walked through in the rain. The chips are also good.

St Mewan Parish church, the next day, was also very welcoming with free drinks and chocolate biscuits. It’s not far from the great cathedral-like bio-domes of the Eden Project. You do get a reduction on the entrance price at the Eden Project for arriving on foot.

Next it was up and over Bodmin Moor. The Doniert Stone is worth a look. Thought to date from the 9th century it commemorates Doniert, the last king of Cornwall. There are many stone monuments, from the Neolithic onwards, on Bodmin Moor.

Walking onto Launceston where the Parish Church is quite large and dedicated to Mary Magdalene, seen here sleeping on the back wall. She is remembered in a poem by Charles Causley, Cornish poet from the town. He recalls an old custom of flipping a penny onto her back as you pass by.

On the way out of Launceston, this well house is one of several I visited on the End to End. Water holds a special place in our lives and is often celebrated in our landscape. This is to be particularly remembered in times of drought like the current one in 2022.

Old Cornish well house near St Stephen’s.

That’s it from Cornwall – next episode I get to Devon!

From my remembered bible: Look for the road that leads to life.

Mary, Mary Magdalene
lying on the wall,
I throw a pebble on your back,
Will it lie or fall?

Words by Charles Causley.

Janet Lees, in Longdendale, 14.08.2022

End to End via the Churches, part 1

Welcome to a bit of a summer blog about the churches I visited on my End to End in 2019 that was inspired by a recent conversation on Twitter. The actual blog on the 2019 End to End started in April of that year and took 117 days for a distance of 1110 miles. At that time most Parish churches in England were open, though I can’t say what you will find now. Some other churches were open from to time time, depending on local conditions and events, like flower festivals and the like. There will be several parts to this blog because there were a lot of churches and because I started at Land’s End we have the South West up first. In part 1 I’ll cover Land’s End to Truro.

St Sennen, founded 520AD

St Sennen church under blue sky, April 2019

Founded before Columba landed on Iona or Augustine made it to Kent, the early date of this foundation is probably accounted for by missionaries between West Ireland and Brittany. There are a lot of unusual saints names in Western Cornwall for this reason. The church yard and surrounding path include several early stone slab crosses.

2. Borah Chapel, 1878

West Cornwall is also full of chapels, often in very small villages. not all of these survive as places of worship but, like this one at Borah, have been converted to other, often domestic use. Interesting because many of the nonconformist denominations began as worshipping communities in people’s homes. The tradition has come full circle in some places, like Borah.

3. St Michael’s Mount

Not actually visited in 2019, I have crossed the causeway several times over the years. Named for the Archangel himself (rather than a brand of underwear), it’s an interesting spot, under the care of the National Trust.

4. Marazion Methodist Church

This village is on the SW Coast path opposite St Michael’s Mount. The church has a history of of hospitality and shelter. We once left our tandem there and they kindly kept an eye on it.

5. St Hilary Parish Church

This is a fascinating place, with early stone slab crosses in the churchyard and inside the remains of a Roman stone inscription. The interior is also decorated with painting by local people of the early Cornish Saints.

6. Gwennap Pit

Associated with early Methodism, this is an open air place of worship, visit by John Wesley. There is also a small Methodist Chapel on the site. Wesley is said to have preached at Gwennap Pit 18 times between 1762 and 1789.

6. St Kea Parish Church

Another delightful Parish Church named for a local Cornish Saint, the small village of St Kea is just off the A39 on the way to Truro. We had a picnic in the churchyard.

7. Truro Cathedral

The first Cathedral on my LEJOG route was at Truro. It has a small pigrim chapel inside the main door, otherwise you’ll need to pay the entrance fee for the main part of the building. The style is Victorian Gothic and it was built between 1880 and 1910.

From my remembered bible: Come and be a living stone!

One more step along the world I go……

Janet Lees, one time End to Ender, now living in Longdendale.

Human

Dear Benedict,

Back from our long Spring/Summer Walk I think I better get back to writing to you, about your Rule and living with it in the 21st century. Two human beings many centuries apart, I wonder what we would make of each others lives? You a monastic, me a lay Benedictine in a very different world, both of us wondering about how to be human in community.

At the moment our society is going through a very divisive phase. There are many different attempts to glorify ‘us’ and demonise ‘them’ when in fact of course we’re all members of one race: the human race. Such attempts have been ongoing throughout history. Each Empire has given rise to folks who think they are in some ways superior to another set of people. Within each set rules have developed that segregate, exclude and disadvantage some on the grounds of specific characteristics: for example sex, race, ability, sexuality, gender and income.

Walking seems like a simple thing. The majority of the population can do it and it’s a form of movement seen us defining human evolution, until of course you can’t do it or not very well when all sort of obstacles and challenges appear and you are no longer in the mainstream. At that point discrimination steps in and all the ‘non-walkers’ or ‘poor-walkers’ are excluded from quite large parts of life because of their lack of bipedal motion or their difficulty with it. It’s just one example. One that from a position of current privilege (I can walk) I have experienced the world recently having walked to London and back.

Along the way I meet many other folks and interacting with them found of course that I had more in common with some than others. It was ever thus. Religion is one thing that currently gets bad press. ‘I’m not religious’ countless people tell me. Some add a story of having fallen out of the church or feeling they got pushed out. Mostly religion comes out of it poorly. It was experienced as a set of dogmatic rules and a straight jacket to behaviour that was applied without care or concern by a hierarchy of leaders who were later found, too often, to be suspect at least and dangerous at worst. So much for religion then.

But religious or not, many people share stories and embedded in most of these is a thorny issue of identity. ‘I used to be…’ is a commonly encountered beginning. The one thing we still are, and cannot relegate to the past, is human. So what is it to be human and be united by our attempts to find identity in humanity?

Your Rule offers a group of human who want to live in community a way of living together to discover more about this. But it wouldn’t suit everyone of the humans I know. The idea of rules is coming into question everyday. What is legal or illegal? Can a person legally be illegal? I wonder what it is we don’t like about ourselves that means we want to define people like this.

In a week of weeks this business of being human came up in many forms. A small group of people, whether legal or not, were to be put on a plane, whether they wanted to be on it or not, and taken to another country, whether they wanted to go there or not because another group of people, human like them but not subject to the same rules, had decided, without asking even more people, that it was a good idea, whether legal or not.

Some of the other people who said they didn’t support it were religious leaders. It lead to a further ramping up of the debate about whether being religious and political was tenable or not. Now you need to know that some significant aspects of my faith formation happened in South Africa between 1984 and 1994, a time when the religious and political things was a major issue in that country. Religious leaders had said that discrimination on the grounds of race (and more specifically a way of governing called Apartheid) was morally repugnant and could not be defended on religious grounds. That it had been so defended by a white minority for a long time is a matter of record. It was, to some extent, down to the way people interpreted the bible, a religious things, but it was mostly about being human.

Earlier in the year, one of the leading opponents of that struggle against Apartheid died (I wrote about him then). ‘The Arch’, Desmond Tutu was quite a human but as a religious man he didn’t shy away from the link between religion and politics, and neither do I. ‘When White people came to Africa’, he, a Black African, used to say, ‘They had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray” and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land’.

It was my time in South Africa that influenced my interpretation of the bible the most. It has been living in Britain in the 21st century that has challenged me to use those interpretative skills the most, including amongst my religious siblings in an out of community. Our shared humanity is not negotiable when it comes to being religious. At the centre of it is One Human who I choose to follow. On the walk someone asked me about that.

A fellow traveller, he described himself as a Pagan and told me he’d been very moved by the companionship and community he’d experienced when taking part in the Camino, that 800 kms centuries old walk across the north of Spain known as the Way of St James. I was walking a few hundred kms on a route of canal towpaths and disused railways in England at the time, but it was my Camino. He asked me what I thought the essence of Christian faith was. For me that comes from me remembered bible: Jesus said ‘Love one another’. He also ‘Follow me’.

He told me he could understand the first but he wasn’t sure about the second point. Why follow? On a towpath or disused railway line this may seem redundant advice. The path has one direction and away we go. But life is not all canal towpaths or disused railway lines, as this week has amply illustrated. How we will decide our direction? What will be our moral compass?

Will it be the further accumulation of wealth and status? Will it be how to bend to rules to suit ourselves and disadvantage some other people? How could it be arranged that my direction is inclusive and encouraging to others such that we travel as fellow humans, thriving in each others company whoever we are.

Some say it’s like that on the Camino. I’ve never been so I can’t comment. But I have been End to End and on a lot of other paths. I have considered how to stop planes from taking off and what to do about food poverty in a rich country. I have though about other human beings, both known and unknown and whilst I’ve not always made the right decision I’m still following the Human One. I’m grateful to all those who keep me company, religious or not.

From my remembered gospel: Jesus said ‘Follow me’.

I journey this day in the name of the Human One

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Stranger

Dear Benedict,

Maybe stranger things have happened than Jesus rising from the dead, but for me that’s the new beginning. We celebrated together as a Lay Community this weekend and we said a lot of Alleluias.

It was a strange time to celebrate. It seems that the Easter message is still misunderstood even in the UK which claims a long back story with Christianity (it was probably brought here by the Romans in the first century). But this Easter the usual nonsense was rolled out to deter Christians from living life in community according to the faith we share. Foremost amongst these is the nonsense that Christians should not be political.

I’ve no idea what the dominant view was in the 5th and 6th centuries when you were just getting started. But there’s no doubt that the Rule you are remembered for is a political document as is the bible we share. The heart of the Rule is that ‘All guests should be welcomed as Christ’ for ‘When I was a stranger you welcomed me’ (chapter 53). It is this strange business of being a stranger that we stumbled over again this Easter.

A stranger is just someone we don’t know yet. A stranger is a person, a human being just like us. Unfortunately we have developed the unpleasant tendency of ‘othering’ the stranger, ostracising and excluding anyone ‘not like us’. We seem to be at our most vicious when it comes to strangers who arrive in boats and lorries unexpectedly. Aspects of our media and politics have developed very hostile narratives around such strangers.

In all my travels I have never found myself treated in this way, however unexpectedly I’ve turned up. I have sometimes been told my interpretation of Christianity is ‘too political’ sometimes in the oddest of circumstances. This usually means the hearer disagrees with my interpretation. I don’t think I’ve ever accused anyone of an interpretation that was either ‘too political’ or conversely, ‘not political enough’.

Some of you will be rolling your eyes and saying ‘Yes, but…’ Not buts here. Of course the community could get filled up with strangers, who would then not be strangers. What is it that we can’t share?

Later this week I shall be experimenting with stranger status again as I set off with Bob on another long walk. This one was postponed since 2020 and will take us down to London and back. I will be a gyrovague once more, a rootless stranger looking for a welcome of sorts. Now you are fairly unhappy about gyrovagues in your Rule as I’ve mentioned before, partly to counteract the tendency for people just to roam about. You liked your settled community and wanted others to both enjoy and commit to it as well. But sometimes life causes us to roam and when that happens we desperately need not censure or exclusion, not resettlement camps in far flung places, but welcome.

From my remembered bible I was a stranger and you welcomed me.

Welcome us all.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

The blog of the walk will be found here from 22nd April 2022, instead of the usual letters to Benedict.

Forwards

Dear Benedict

I doubt you are familiar with the Pirate Song. I was thinking about it in relation to the New Year and reading your Rule, which starts again at the beginning of the Prologue on New Year’s Day. As I have been reading this Rule backwards for the last few months, starting forwards again reminded me of the Pirate Song: ‘this way, that way, forwards, backwards over the Irish Sea’.

From the words of the song we get the idea that life as a member of a pirate community was full of fun and rum, even for the children. And the first rule of Pirating was going backwards and forwards. I suspect, on those grounds, I make a better pirate than a Lay Benedictine.

Going ‘this way, that way, forwards, backwards’…

It’s good to start again and the Rule repeats several times a year which means we become familiar at least with the first bit: Listen, my child. As I walk in the valley on winter days there are quite a few sounds, not least the migrating birds making their way down from north to south, and sometimes west to east calling to each other ‘this way, that way, forwards, backwards’, trying to keep together, like a community.

In 2021 our walking plan was ‘joining up the dots’: linking the walks we had done over the years to each other in a countrywide network. I managed 1017 miles like that in 2021. This year I’m hoping for some more ‘this way, that way, forwards, backwards’ though I’m not planning on crossing any seas or taking up rum. But I will keep trying to read the Rule in the context of ordinary life in Britain in the 21st century, some 15 centuries after you wrote it. I will not be alone. Many others will attempt the same thing. There’s no test at the end of the year and sometimes it can be hard to tell whether one is travelling forwards to backwards, but I will trust the Rule to show me some direction, offer me some support and encouragement and something to get my teeth into.

A Nursery Rhyme….

When I was one, I sucked my thumb,
The day I went to sea.
I climbed aboard a pirate ship
And the Captain said to me:
‘We’re going this way, that way,
Forwards backwards,
Over the Irish Sea.
A bottle of rum to fill my tum
A Pirates’ life for me’.

From my remembered gospel: Jesus said ‘Follow me’

This way, that way, forwards or backwards, a Lay Benedictines life for me, please.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Voting for change

Dear Benedict,

The world keeps on changing. In 1984 when I first visited South Africa, I could not have known that it would be the last decade for Apartheid, or that I’d be back in 1994 to see the first democratic elections take place. I mention it because Archbishop Desmond Tutu has died, aged 90.

I might have mentioned before that I’m not very good with the great men and that I find the leadership sections of your Rule problematic at times. It’s always good to celebrate an exception. The Arch, as he was called, was one of those rare exceptions for me, and he seems relevant to the rest of chapter 64 of your Rule.

A monument to world leaders made of recycled material for COP26, in Stockport.

When I arrived in south Africa in 1984 all I knew about Apartheid was that we didn’t eat their apples. By the time I left a month later I’d learnt a whole lot more. I’d read about Black Liberation Theology, I’d seen the signs of racial segregation all around me and I’d heard about Desmond Tutu. I was to continue my education both in South Africa and the UK for the next ten years at least. I read the Kairos Document, I listened to people of all races and eventually I went back and learnt about contextual bible study (CBS) at the University of Kwa Zulu Natal in 1994.

One of the books I read in South Africa in the 1980s

These things became foundations for my ministry. Later I followed the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In all of this the face of Tutu was often seen weeping or laughing and much in between. The world recognised him for the ‘goodness in life and wisdom in teaching’ that chapter 64 of your Rule recommends in a leader.

Not every leader can be a Tutu, but to aim for ‘love not fear’ seems to be the bottom line.

From my Remembered Tutu: ‘Every human person is a stand in for God’ (Desmond Tutu).

Go well, Arch.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Ignorance

Dear Benedict

Most folks know how to open a door, you’d think. But seeing it as particularly important you dedicate chapter 66 of your Rule to this vital task. It’s not just any old door. It’s the door to the community, after all.

The door to Bromfield Gatehouse, Shropshire, which was one the gateway to a Benedictine community.

This week, walking in Suffolk, I saw lots of doors and I heard or read about others. The way we open our doors says a great deal about who we are and who we follow. I find it particularly interesting when the door officer (you call them Porter) charged with the initial hospitality of the community, are those who were previously welcomed in and who now slam similar doors in the faces of others. That’s not the Rule, and indeed there’s no excuse for ignorance, as you point out.

Door, from the beach at Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

Another thing that happened this week was the leader of the Lay Community said how much I reminded him of Frank Skinner. In fact he sent me a copy of Frank’s book .

Now Frank I and do have things in common. We both make jokes about Wolverhampton. But he supports West Brom and I support Spurs (in the nostalgic way one does remembering the glory days of the early 1960s). We also both pray and that’s what he writes about in his book.

He’s not the first comic from the Midlands I’ve been said to resemble. I was 18 when some other A Level students said I reminded them of Jasper Carrot (other comedians are available). I’ve always had an admiration for stand up and want to try it myself, up to a point. I do a brilliant one woman show that my husband is the one man audience for. But mostly I just keep walking.

Frank’s book reminded me of the many many ways we pray. I love Frank’s way of doing it. Some prayers are long and others are short but I think they are all honest. He says he prays like parking ‘You get as close as you can’. It’s a good aim; I’m not great at parking either. The book had me bubbling with laughter. I like to think God reacts to my prayers like that: the wordy ones with the wacky metaphors and the silent ones with the awesome views.

Prayer is a door thing. It’s about opening and for that we are each our own door opener, though one or more assistants may have been provided to get us started. Once we’re off it’s up to us. Like me, Frank uses a remembered bible. He returns to some bits more than once, like most remembered bible users, turning them over again, examining our own ignorance.

He considers the line ‘Hallowed be your name’ a few times. It is a puzzling one, well padded with ignorance. I look into the night sky and I’m humbled by all the names I don’t know. I imagine anyone who attempts any name for God in whatever circumstances scores at least a point for trying, even if it doesn’t seem so promising a start to the Prayer Police. Like Frank, the God I pray with is open to offers; friendship, love…

And so back to the door to the community. On the news a woman in Aberdeen gave a home to a family from Afghanistan. She opened the door and they went in. I wept and I’m sure many others did too. Of course there will be other people needing houses in Aberdeen. But this open door is just a start. Consider who you are and who you follow. Just open the flipping door.

From my remembered bible: I stand at the door…

Help me to open doors.

From A Friend of Scholastic and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.