Category Archives: Prayer

These stones would shout aloud

I grew up on the architecture of England. It was my father’s contribution to my general knowledge, complimenting my mother which was the common flora and fauna. As a result I can name seasonal wild flowers, birds and insects but I also know a Norman arch from a Gothic one.
Standing at Riveaulx the stones make me gasp. I saw it last summer but standing here again it was no less impressive.
It’s easy to imagine they prayed and sang in this lofty, now roofless sanctuary. I wonder what Henry VIII would have made of it all these centuries later after his greed and bad leadership laid waste to these holy houses of the North.

The trees clap their hands
But it is in the woods around Stanbrook Abbey that I find my true sanctuary. This enormous woodland cathedral, its green roof meeting across my path, letting in beams of sunlight, is a wonderfully restoring place.
A hind leaps across the path ahead of me. She also knows the value of this sanctuary. At this moment it seems to be the calmest place on earth and I know I need to store it in my core memory for later days.
Insects hum, birds sing and wild garlic makes a strong pong from ramsons deep as snow drifts. The light filters in catching small puddles and making the shine like jewels, giving the green leaves many different shades.
From time to time others pass by. Not many but a few who have also found peace here. They remark on how beautiful a place this is, a constant doxology, and walk on. The birds join in the refrain and the trees clap their hands, as the psalmist says.

As the hind rests peacefully in the wood
So may I rest peacefully in God.
As the birds sing joyfully in the branches
So may I praise God daily.
As the light flickers through the leaves
So may I pass each day in the light.
As the flowers carpet the ground
So may I hold the earth gently and honour the Creator.

In our coming and our going
The Peace of God

Prayer in a meadow

Here’s a meadow, here’s a may tree
Here’s the roots, twisted, brown.
Here I sit by the may tree
Here’s the meadow, all around.
Hear the birds singing skywards,
Walking forwards in the sun,
See the blue sky stretched above us,
See the Creator’s love abound.
There’s not much signal in this meadow,
Of the sort on which we rely,
But everywhere there is a signal
Of how the love of God comes near
Touches us in dark and night.
Keep on walking across the meadow,
Keep on walking into light.

When I heard about the bomb attack in Manchester I was on Retreat at Stanbrook Abbey, Wass, North Yorkshire, where there’s not much signal. In some ways it is a world away those events. Shock and disbelief are understandable emotions: not having words to express how we feel.
Wherever we are now, keep walking in the light.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

By the rivers of Babylon

By the rivers of Babylon
We sat down and remembered
Zion,
How can we sing God’s song in a strange land?

By a small stream trickling off the Derbyshire moors, I sat down, and remembered.
I remembered the story of the One who lived and loved and lost and lived again.
I remembered the route, or some of it, that I had taken to follow that Way.
I remembered my companions, the living and the dead.
I remembered the communities with which I had retold the story and tried to follow the Way, the living and the dead.
I heard the water moving over the rocks, singing its own song, to an age old tune.
I heard the birds singing their song in the trees and I heard the breeze moving through the branches.
I remembered that if Christ’s disciples are silent then these rocks, this water, this air will all sing aloud and praise God;
And the fire will be lit again in my heart, and I too will praise God.
I will continue on the living Way, whether the land is strange or well known.
I will remembered the songs and stories that have sustained us.
I will listen and give voice to new songs and stories as they come to me in the air.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

Swallows wood

Somedays, Swallows wood is under the flight path. It’s also on someone’s plan for a long delayed bypass. Today I can hear the birds and the breezes.
Last year’s leaves still lie where they fell. The breeze stirs them up from time to time making a sound like tiny pattering footsteps. But this year’s branches are well on with their greening.
Approaching the Bluebell Cathedral there are some cowslip and wood sorrel to light the way. A few bluebells come out as a welcoming party. Near the West Door, I meet a couple who say ‘We’ve never been here before’ and ‘It’s awesome’ and ‘You don’t see this in many places nowadays’.
So make the most of today’s main service: choral birdsong with bluebells.
I enter the nave, a path into the heart of the sanctuary. The bluebells get thicker in the chancel. Thickest still by the high altar, where you can also hear the local lambs.
All on an April Sunday, sitting here in the bluebell cathedral, listening to lambs and birds, I thought of the love of God, the green blade, and the rising.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

Through the wood

My suggestion that we take a clergy selfie before the Good Friday service was only partly in jest. We certainly are a team even after this short time and it is quite an experience to be guided and supported by Father Ian and Father Aloysius.
Understanding my concern at not having taken part in such a service before they kindly and gently walked me through it before we started. After what we’d call a vestry prayer with the servers we began.
There’s a lot of movement in the service, much more than in your average one of the sort I’m used to.
We began face down on the floor. It was for me to determine how long this lasted and then get up, which was the challenging bit.
During the reading of the Passion Narrative I read the part of Jesus. There were some bits to add to my remembered Bible, like the first time Jesus was struck on the face and asked the one that had struck him to point out to him how he, Jesus, had caused offence.
The other part that moved me whilst I was reading it aloud, was when Jesus said ‘woman, here is your son’.
I said a few words about remembering the Passion at school, recalling particularly the Good Enough Friday which was an earlier blog post.
Then we brought the cross in. It was the one the young people had carried here from south Wales. Two of the young people held it upright in the middle of the hall as each person came forward to venerate or acknowledge it in some way, most with kiss, some with a touch of hand or head, all prayerfully, even the very youngest. It was during this part that I thought about ‘through the wood you call us’ and even ‘I’d like to make the world a sign/a manger or a cross/ from birth to death the way life goes/for gain or even loss’ (the song I wrote for this term).
At the end of the service the cross was left standing alone as we quietly left the hall.

Roles and rolls

Getting started with the Lay Community of St Benedict (LCStB) couldn’t be easier. You pitch up and say you’re new and folks introduce themselves. There are lots of roles which are shared about amongst the participants women and men, young and old. I walked around a bit with Father Ian to take in the countryside and learn about the liturgy.
At the Maundy Thursday service, Ellen received her medal as an Altar Server. She made some promises: ‘with God’s help, I will’ she replied to each question. And so say all of us. ‘She was like a Bishop’ said one priest about Zoe, one of the servers, who clearly knew what she was doing.
Feet were washed and the Eucharist was celebrated and shared. Later Tom spoke to the young people about adoration. ‘It’s just like Jesus was sitting beside you’ he explained. So that’s like every day at Silcoates School then.

In our life and our believing
The Love of God

Table re-setters

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.

We are dust

Remember you are dust….

We are dust,
the very stuff of the universe;
atoms and molecules make us
and all things.
We return to dust
to be recycled across the cosmos
atoms and molecules
scattered across the heavens.
Dust to dust:
this is how we are resurrected,
born again, light years away,
bringing to birth the hope of heaven.

Dust creator, you cherish your creation:
Help us so to cherish it.
Dust bearer, you too come from dust:
May we wear our status humbly.
Dust animator, you activate us:
Whirl us up to dance together
In tune with God and with each other,
For 40 days and more.

Forgiveness

Following on from yesterday, this morning I read this: “I am not yet ready for my heart to soften, I am not yet ready to be vulnerable again, not yet ready to see that there is humanity in my tormentor’s eyes, or that the one who hurt me may also have cried.”
*From Desmond and Mpho Tutu’s The Book of Forgiving (William Collins)*
and so I wrote this….

Did any of you cry?
I’m pretty sure some of you didn’t.
There was a profound lack of empathy;
Few waves reached me here.

I have heard of the human spark in some of you:
One ‘didn’t look at all happy’,
Another tells a tale of sleeplessness,
But mostly there was silence.

And I who read a lot of silence
Have struggled to read this
Because I am hurt and rejected:
your silences feel hard and cruel.

So, although I can be vulnerable
In other places with different people,
I am not yet ready to be vulnerable again
With what I once considered my spiritual family.

Maybe the humanity I encounter
Beyond the hard edges of the church
Will be the catalyst
that softens my heart again.

On our hearts and on our homes
The Blessing of God
On our school and on our working
The Help of God
In our coming and our going
The Peace of God
In our life and our believing
The Love of God

Confused?

The word ‘confession’ shares several letters with the word ‘confusion’, so as one confused I’ll start there. I decided I was confused when during worship this morning we were urged to consider confession and forgiveness. Well, it was a church, so maybe that’s not too surprising.
The gospel story was about a woman ‘take in adultery’, a somewhat old fashioned phrase for an activity that takes two at least. You might wonder if this story is ever heard at the chapel door, but it is. A few years ago, a young woman who had survived a sexual assault told me that ‘If I was going to give a sermon it would be about that one where he says ‘anyone who has not sinned can throw the first stone’: that one’. It was an interesting comment from someone who had been under the age of 16 at the time of the assault, not a woman but a child, a victim a survivor. Of course there are many silences in the story recorded in the gospel as well.
And in most situations where the call is for forgiveness and confession there are also a lot of silences, which bring me back to confusion. Who should I forgive? What should I confess? I have a lot of things going round in my heard but mostly I’m confused. I’m told God will forgive me, but my experience is that like Zaccheus, I have been forgiven before I even thought of asking (note that Zach entertains Jesus to tea before he, Zach, makes any public statement of putting right past wrongs, and it’s Jesus who invites himself to tea, not Zach who initiates the tea thing).
I’ve heard folks say it can help a person feel better to forgive others, but as far as my own situation is concerned, God does not seem to require this of me, at least not yet. Understanding the depth of my hurt, God just stays with me. With so much silence surrounding the events themselves and no one much taking any responsibility for them, I still feel in limbo. The situation is unresolved. Should I forgive someone for sending me a poorly worded email for example and if so how?Am I forgiving an individual or a post holder who was doing a job on behalf of others that none of those involved had fully thought about? Where does the forgiveness start and what is my part in it? How will I record my forgiveness? I’m pretty sure the email is long gone in the memory of most, along with the reports, the inconsistencies, the insensitivity, the lack or truth or transparency, the poor leadership, and the silence of the bystanders who still don’t know what to say. I wonder if this will not change until the silence is broken somehow but I’m confused about how and where that happens.
Forgiveness is complicated so its no wonder confession and confusion seem to be linked. I don’t want to be dragging stuff along with me for ever but neither do I feel that brushing it all away or ignoring the hurting is a good idea. Whilst there is silence there is still something unresolved. Forgiveness implies an ongoing relationship. At the moment I don’t think I have one with those who caused the hurt. So I’ll remain confused at least for now.
There’s confusion in the gospel too. Zach stands at the bottom of the tree and the neighbours must be confused. Jesus writes on the ground with the stick when the woman is accused. We don’t know what he wrote, which is a bit confusing.
After the service we were offered bubbles to blow. At least that’s not confusing. I blew my bubbles and felt, as they floated away, that I’d aired the subject.

In our life and our believing
The love of God.

Notes from Chapel

a blog from Silcoates Chapel