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.
Now see
ms 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
Today I went for a walk with Preschool. There were about 18 of us and we put on our coats and wellies and went out to look for frost and ice, or which we found some patches. We also found some frozen leaves that were quite crisp, and a pond covered in the green algae. I know it was green algae because one four year old boy told me what it was. We sang a well known song, but we kept changing the words depending on our experiences. Rather than going ’round the mulberry bush’ we went ’round the pond’ and ‘looked at the algae’ and so on. The other pond was still and clear and just like a mirror reflecting back the winter branches. Altogether our walk took about 20 minutes. It reminded me of the ideas about Forest Church I read last year. This was a good short act of adoration and exploration. I look forward to more similar opportunities in the days ahead.
This is not about queuing for the sales at popular shopping venues. It’s about the Lake, the Sea, that wet and watery place in Galilee that was such a focal part of Jesus’ ministry. We are getting to it a bit early, as most are today, still back in Bethlehem sorting through an odd selection of gifts. We, however, have got to the lakeside early…..
That vast expanse of water, it was bound to generate a lot of stories. We who had lived round it all of our lives, and for generations before that, knew only too well that stories abounded on these shores. So when it was all over, and some of us came back here whilst others went on elsewhere it is not surprising that so many stories came back to the surface.
Fishermen tell stories everywhere, and their families do too. Not all are about huge catches and many are about the struggles and challenges encountered in this environment for individuals and communities. Each of us knew of men who had lost a finger or more, had a twisted limb, a limp a scar, from some sort of accident, the story of which might be told aloud or in secret depending on the company. Everyone knew widows or siblings who had lost sailors in storms and wrecking. Just as the lake was full of bounty so it was full or terror.
To tell a story of a storm on the lake then is no big deal. Weather is just one facet of the natural world that kept us in awe and wonder and ensured some level of obedience, in most if not all of us. To be in a boat on the lake in a storm could be terrifying, there’s no doubt about it. Most of us had been through a few by the time we got to adulthood as we’d started young. Some of us had lost fathers and brothers that way.
You couldn’t always tell about the lake, what sort of day it would or wouldn’t turn out to be, what sort of night would follow. But you had to fish and fish you did.
From first meeting him it was clear Jesus loved the lake. He loved to walk the shoreline, to stand on a headland or hill, to let the water at the lakes edge run through his fingers or cover his toes. It was a place of deep communion for him and he returned often, even though his own family were not fishing people. So we spent quite a bit of time with him there, us getting on with fishing, showing him what we did, talking, telling stories and listening, one with the other. It became a bit of a model for what we did later and of course it’s one reason why many of us came back. Equally it’s why many went on, over wider seas to new places.
But for now let’s remember the lake for what it was, a place of community around which stories were told and families grew up. If I remember a story about a storm on this lake then I’m probably adding several of them together, from child to adult, so frequent were they, so terrifying in nature. To have him on board your boat, well that was a joy. He’d be excited, interested, watching, listening. Later, as we came home, he might sleep, less used to the work of the long night than us. If a storm came in then we’d pull all the harder to get back safely, home lights beckoning, a hold full of fish to sell.
We’d all be pulling together, and maybe he’d wake up and see something of what we were grappling with. A storm like a great water monster chasing us down, determined to swallow us all. Each of us soaked and tired, nearly disparing, yet he’d stand up and mock the wind, berate it and send it away, calling down the Father’s love on us and the protection of his arms.
We’d pull into harbour exhausted, but alive. We’d look at each other and store up the memory of having escaped another storm which would certainly never be the last. Life would go on around the lake: work to be done, families to feed. Until the next storm.
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.
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
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 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.
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
O God, we who are not with it, need you with us.
We’ve got lost in a maze of our own making;
Preferring trivia and ephemera, we’ve lost our focus.
We think Justice means when we get what we want;
Mercy we confuse with people being kind to us
And humility has fallen out of the dictionary,
To be trodden underfoot as irrelevant.
We need you with us to restore us to a fuller understanding
Of the way of Justice, Mercy and Humility.
Come and be with us, not temporarily,
But on permanent loan, as a native,
Knowing what being human means from the inside.
That way, maybe we stand a chance
Of doing justice, loving mercy and travelling humbly [1].
In our life and our believing
The Love of God
[1] Micah 6:8