Our gardens here are small so I mostly go for containers. I try to make them attractive to insects using wild flowers and well known garden plants. My neighbour Sue also had a lot of containers. One always had sweet peas. She died last year in the summer, when the sweet peas were flowering. She said ‘no funeral, thanks’ so I grew these from those sweet pea seeds in memory of her.
We do remember you, Sue.
In our coming and our going
The peace of God
In secret
The kindom of God is like a woman, who takes some yeast and mixes it with forty litres of flour and the whole batch rises
We are all doing it in secret:
Stuff we don’t tell anyone,
Making tracks we cover up.
We are all doing it in secret:
Unsure what to say
Or how to care for ourselves.
We are all doing it in secret:
Emotional work holding things together,
Yet feeling inadequate to the task.
So too, the yeast, works in secret,
Makes no sound or declaration.
We see the eventual effect
But we do not know how the kindom comes.
May it also come in us.
Whether secretly or openly:
May we know the rising.
In our life and our believing
The love of God
JAL: 27.04.2017
If sweeping out endless rooms looking for lost coins was not enough, here we go again. We the anonymous and silent Passover Preparers are at it again as we move soundless to ready an upper room for a meal we may not serve. We can’t even do the directions. It’s a young man who carries the water jar who they follow to find the place. If men can carry water jars, why don’t they do it every day?
Well, the room is spotless and the table ready, the bowl and towel set in place and the food prepared. They’ll be here soon so we’d better go. Back later to clear up the left overs.
In our coming and our going
The peace of God
He overturned the tables
Yesterday we had a meeting, just three of us: me, Gwen and Lisa. Now given my acknowledged meetings phobia you might be surprised by this. But it was a different kind of meeting. There was cake and as you can see by the photograph, it was chocolate cake.
We sat around the table and ate the cake and talked, remembering the bible as we went, remembering those with and for whom we worked, telling stories of families and friends both near and far away, cataloguing our prayerful concerns and our priorities for action. We were three women and some might have called us wise.
We were re-setting the table. On the day when we remembered the table up-setter who said ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’ we were resetting a perfectly ordinary table to be the centre of such a revolution.
In my remembered bible this is a week of tables, from those upset to those reset. Just as the stuff slips off of one table so it is placed more carefully on another. Of course we can, and do, become obsessed with furniture. I once heard of a church that had to have a secret ballot to move a lectern six inches. It could be one of those church myths but I don’t think it is.
You see this table re-setting is not about the actual table but about what goes on around it and where it takes us. It’s more about who is invited to the table and the sharing that happens there. This week I have been reading Lavinia Byrne’s book The Journey is my Home (2000, Hodder and Stoughton) in which she tells her own faith story. I used to know her when she was ‘Cybernun’ at the CCBI but we’ve not been in touch since then. I wanted to tell her how much the book had helped me to ‘re-set the table’ this week, so I’m telling this blog in the hope it goes into cyberspace somewhere.
Later this week, I will take a journey to meet a new community, the Lay Community of St Benedict, who have invited me to reset the table with them. I’m looking forward to it and I’m hoping there will be cake.
They left the Upper Room, going, I was told, to the Mount of Olives, singing as they went. I stood on the threshold, looking in, waiting. As their voices receded and the air became still it was as if I could rerun the scene in my mind: the talking and arguments, the chaos and then the still point with him in the centre. I stepped into the room and crossed to the table where the left overs were scattered around, abandoned without thought. The other women came panting up the stairs with trays and cloths to help me clear up. They saw me standing by the table and stopped, as I had. ‘What is it?’ one queried from the back of the group. ‘Come in’, I said ‘Come over here’.
They gathered around and I took the left overs and passed them round. Surely he hand’t meant to leave us out. ‘Here, take this. It is his body’ I said, just as I’d heard him say moments earlier. They looked surprised. ‘Eat it’ I urged. ‘Do it to remember him’. Then I took the cup with only the dregs left in it. I lifted it up and said ‘Drink this all of you, it is his blood. Do this to remember him’. They passed the cup round taking a small sip of its bitterness.
‘Every time you eat and drink like this you remember the Lord Jesus, until he comes back again’ I said, and we began to clear the tables.
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
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
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
I want to live
To see an albatross
Glide over the southern ocean.
I want to live
To know that babies
Are born safely world-wide.
I want to live
To understand
How East and West can feast together.
I want to live
To read the books
The children of Aleppo will write.
I want to live
To ensure that any woman
Can walk any street anytime anywhere.
I want to live
In peace with justice
Sharing the promise of abundant life
With all of you.
Today I’m Katherina von Bora, picking over herrings for my family. When I do this I remember our escape from the monastery in the barrels of fish. The smell was awful. It was hard not to retch. I kept thinking we were not going to be fishers of men but very fishy women.
But of course after our escape the joke was on me. The other women were able to find homes, marriages, families. I was the one left over. I often wondered if the smell had clung to me. There were a few who sniffed around for a while. I rejected them, like the builder rejects the less favoured stones.
After I married Sir Doctor Luther I ran the household efficiently and even the clinic, so he had no worries. Cattle were tended to, beer was brewed, the Bible was read to the children.
They grew up and our lives together became both a pattern for other families and food for gossips. I got up early, read my Bible and kept my opinions to myself, unless he asked me directly which wasn’t that often. There was plenty to do: more children to raise meant building work on the house to make room for us all. There were morning prayers and evening prayers to supervise for the household when he was away or at the university.
After his death I went to pieces. I missed him more than I can express. Mourning is exhausting and much about the household organisation just slipped from my grasp. I didn’t know who to turn to and I made some decisions that didn’t turn out too well. But I never neglected my Bible. Although much about me has been forgotten, I remained true to Christ. I stuck to him like a burr to cloth, or like the smell of herrings sticks to a woman in a barrel of fish.