Category Archives: journey

Mary’s story

Over twenty years ago a friend of mine, called Mary was detained by Border Control Officers. This is her story as I remember it.

Mary was my friend, a black woman I understood to have been born in Britain some twenty-five years previously; she worked in the local social security office. We went to the same church and sang together in the choir. I had known her about two years when she and a fellow member decided to marry. She asked me if she could borrow my wedding dress (I’d got married about 6 months previously) as she didn’t have a dress. That was fine: it fitted her, we were the same size.

About a week after the wedding, she was detained at work and taken to a detention centre near us. We visited her regularly and her husband often stayed with us too. A different story emerged that Mary was from Tanzania and in the UK illegally according to the Border Agency.

During a visit to see Mary one afternoon, she told me that she had indeed been born in Tanzania and grown up there. In fact she had a daughter who lived there with her parents. She had come to UK via Germany, first as a student and had then overstayed after her visa expired. She had made up the story of begin born in Britain. She was crying and apologising for not telling me the truth.

She was deported back to Tanzania. Before she left UK I gave her some money and bought her a new pair of shoes as she asked me. Mary was the first friend I had who this happened to. Although it happened 20 years ago, it’s still happening now to more people like Mary.

I was not angry with Mary. I was angry that the situation we were both in had her as a migrant and me as not a migrant. Mary was my friend and she had worn my wedding dress. This is the time to think of Mary’s story, that the poor be lifted up and for us to show mercy.

In our coming and our going

The peace of God

Dance, then, wherever you may be

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Video of Harry and Jacob showing us a dance they learnt from children in Tanzania at Chapel yesterday.

Each day this week we have had a presentation from members of the Tanzania Team telling us of their experiences during half term. It was an opportunity to hear them give voice to the experiences that they all acknowledged as ‘life-changing’.

In a week that has also seen us undergo a full school inspection, it is true to say that what they said sums up what we are about: the development of the full potential of each child and young person, not just in academic terms, but as rounded human beings.

In 14 days, 46 young people and 6 staff, working with members of the local community and a voluntary organisation they transformed two schools together, both inside and outside and made resources for the local community and school to share, principally to improve the local supply of water. On the way they ate, slept and used toilets way outside their previous experiences and interacted with people of all ages. Life-changing for all involved.

On our life and our beleiving

The love of God

Who am I?

(this crucifix is in the church in Messines in northern France)

The pace of the journey had always been hard. The circumstances in which we traveled were never comfortable. There were constant demands on him from both outside and inside the group. He pushed on. That’s when we found we had climbed to the top of another mountain. These places meant much to him; isolated, quite, an awesome view. It was in places like this that he often chose to be alone. On other occasions it would be a major expedition, getting us all up there and back.

We were all still getting our breath when he started: ‘Who am I?’ he asked. Some thought it was a trick question and stated the obvious: ‘You’re Jesus, from Nazareth’, said one, laughing. He went on, going round the group, getting more insistent; ‘Who do other people say I am?’ He came to me: ‘Why do you ask us?’ I said. He licked his cracked, dried lips, and said in a barely audible voice; ‘I don’t know who I am anymore’.

The members of the group looked at each other and no one knew how to break the silence. Eventually, one said; ‘I heard someone say you’re John the Baptist’. That triggered them all off. ‘Well that’s rubbish – he’s already dead’. ‘Herod got him, so what do they mean?’ Another said; ‘Well I’ve heard Elijah’, and another said ‘Yeh, and Jeremiah’. They were all talking at once, trying to help I know, but not really in tune with his state of mind or what he needed right then.

The babble eventually trailed off into silence again. He looked up at Peter and asked him ‘Who do you say I am?’ I wondered what Peter would say, as did we all. What would we have said if he’d have asked us? But Peter, not always good with words, chose a few and tried them. ‘That’s easy’, he said, looking him straight in the face. ‘You’re the one we’ve been waiting for, the Life Giver. God is in you and because of you we have seen God’.

This time no one broke the silence which followed until he did so himself. He weighed up what Peter had said and then he said; ‘Thanks, Peter, you’re a rock to me. I will build on what you’ve said. It is the key to God’s plan and you will be the key keeper. But let’s keep it to ourselves for now, shall we?’ And we did as he asked.

I wrote this in 2010 and I republish it here after a Twitter conversation concerning images of Jesus living with impairments; in this example a challenge to his mental health. You can use this free in your church, school or community groups as long as it is not for profit and you acknowledge my copyright.

Coming back

Coming back is always difficult. We had stood at Tyne Cot in a circle by the names of Harry and Ronald Moorhouse, killed in action on 7th October 1917, and I had called out every 7th person round the circle. This was to represent the one in seven who, having served in WW1 didn’t return at the wars end.
I reminded them of what Mr Yonge said when the war memorial was dedicated in 1920 heard not say much, burnt out as he was from the emotional draining of the war years but he reminded those present of the vision of peace and justice they had struggled to uphold.
There are many things that separate us from the generation of 100 years ago, just as there were many ways in which they differed from each other: volunteers and conscripts, combatants and noncombattants, pacifists and conscientious objectors.
We are a digital generation: blogs replacing letters from the front line. Even so human emotions link us together. The group had reflected on the lives of some of those ‘shot at dawn’ earlier in the day in Poperinge. We were tired and still a long way from home when we boarded our ferry at Zebrugge to Hull.
So what will we remember about our journey together? Some cited the visits to trenches still visible a hundred years after the conflict. There was the misty morning at La Boiselle crater and later at the Thiepval Memorial: the mist itself making its contribution to the emotions of the day. As the landscape emerged from the fog so the cemeteries if the old front line of The Somme Battlefield began to be seen more clearly, each one marking the sacrifice of another hundred or thousand young men.
There was the rebuilt city of Ypres and the tunnels dug under the city of Arras. There were the small personal items in a display case: a bible, a letter, a photograph. There were the old rusting remains of ordinance piled up alongside manglewurzels at the edges of fields. There was name after name on gravestones and on walls and sprinkled amongst the hundreds of thousands that tiny few, the 42 we looked for and acknowledge as our own.
I never knew them in life, the Silcoates Pals, not like John Yonge did who taught 39 of them, but their photographs and stories have been a big part of our remembering in these centenary years. We will return to remember again next year with another group of students.
For those who think we have spent too long on such remembering, I have said before that it is a serious and challenging task. We hold it in common with so many other people. Daily other human beings join the ranks of those remembering others killed in war. We cannot shirk the task. Just as the Psalmist recalls the trees clapping their hand and the valleys singing, so we too know that cities can wail and fields can weep.
Meanwhile, the sun rises on another day.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

Four seasons

We go to the Battlefields in Autumn
When the leaves are falling,
Piling up in drifts,
Squashed onto stones.
Red, orange, yellow;
Dull down to brown as we advance.

Imagine if we went in summer:
How the earth would be baked and cracked,
How the grass would be waving, high,
Scattered with blue and red;
The poppy and the cornflower
Side by side.

As for spring: what if it was spring?
Time of new growth and promise:
Ideal season for an offensive.
Maybe there would be blossom,
Or bulbs bursting like shells
On a gradually greening landscape.

What about winter, the bare time:
Frost on boughs and grass and stones.
Even snow covering the ditches and mounds,
Berries bleeding blood red through the white.
Bones still rattling in the graves.

But every year we make this pilgrimage
In Autumn, colourful season
Of variety and fruitfulness
And we remember the name soaked ground
And how a generation was swallowed up
To wait the final trumpet
And the last call.

In our coming and our going
The Peace of God.

Notes from Chapel

a blog from Silcoates Chapel