Through the wood you call us:
Wood of manger, stable, cross.
Through the wood you call us
To be your people in the world:
Vulnerable, active, giving
Category Archives: Prayer
Advent and Solstice: a contemplation
As we slip gently into darkness again;
the street lights caste their halo,
the park gates close early
and the last of the unhelpful leaves clog the gutter.
Far off, someone starts a spark:
a beacon on the beach,
lit with imagination for the suffering
of a distant besieged city .¹
We have reached that season again,
when light and dark tussle
for the lives and souls of the population
of a small island groping for good news.
So bring in the yule log,
strike up the band,
sit a merry Santa on a sleigh
and keep future uncertainty at bay.
Because, we who age, limp and scar,
who look down the tunnel of our own existence
to a mean spot with confining walls
and machines that bleep out the beat;
We, who seek to preserve yesterday
because we cannot hope in tomorrow,
who have put the ‘f’ into prophets,
so they are reassuringly fat;
We who shun addictions and abuse,
yet indulge our socially destructive habits;
We who wall ourselves up against the world
and yet demand rights to global markets;
We who hover between life and death,
who have every choice for last rites;
how can we embrace the dark-light way,
and live as winter people today?
Last night, in darkness,
I traveled a high street ²
with its seasonal cheer hung out
and crowded pubs and bars.
For each shop front garlanded
others were boarded up,
still bearing the marks
of a relentless river in spate
that came and went almost a year ago:
the two economies of cheer and grief
existing side by side.
This then is a way to navigate the season;
where darkness drapes itself around
and we search for quick fix lighting
to lift our plunging spirits.
Hold them both then,
one in each hand,
balancing concerns;
weave the two paths together
with honest acknowledgement
of the place of both
in your life and community.
To the Solstice say welcome dark night,
grey day, heavenly movement.
To Advent say welcome small spark,
weak flame, heavenly moment;
for dark and light are both the same
in the heart of heaven, ³
where we are called only to live honestly,
not off of the backs of one another,
but with open hearts and doors
to welcome all who appear in this season.
In our life and our believing
The love of God
Advent Sunday 2016
¹ Aleppo of course #StandWithAleppo
² In Calderdale,West Yorkshire, which was flooded on 26.12.2016
³ Psalm 139, verse 12
Making a quilt
The quilt top that I began earlier in the week is progressing. Like any quilt it tells stories at many levels; in the colours, the patterns, the motivation behind the quilt and in the actual piecing.
This quilt began with the idea of remembering my recent visit to the Battlefields of WW1 with the students, but that idea of using a quilt fir this kind if remembering is not new. Whilst on the trip we saw some quilts made by Canadian women at Vimy and Beaumont-Hammell. We started some fabric work at school last summer, which we may yet complete before 2018.
I had thought to reflect some of the colours that recalled the visit as well using up some fabric from my stash of course. The layout based on different sized squares came from a recent quilting magazine and I’ve adapted it, as most of us probably do.
So that’s something about the background.
In the foreground are some of the traditions of remembering like the poppy and the cornflower with the maple leaf another motif seen on our visit.
As I piece the top together each section currently looks like a small section of the journey; a street, a walk, a crater, a cemetery, a field or wood. Later they will be joined together in one piece. At the moment they continue to occupy a space on the dining room floor.
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
Views of the Somme
A kestrel’s eye view of the Somme,
Hovering above the front line,
The brown fields with their tell-tale chalk marks,
a hundred years of burial and reburial,
Of neat white stones in lines
Known only unto God.
A squirrel’s eye view of the Somme,
Climbing trees at Beaumont -Hammel
Pines at different heroic angles
Craters to hide in,
Trenches that snake to a line ahead
A break in the wire and a dead tree.
A human eye view of the Somme:
Can there be such a thing?
When inconceivable numbers
don’t add up
And incompressible plans are carved
Into the landscape.
A crater like a pit
a monument so huge,
A list of names so long,
Acts of unbelievable courage.
What is human about any of this?
The human view only really strikes you
When a boy takes a football shirt or scarf,
Precious emblem of allegiance,
And in a group of trees,
At the end of a track
Uses it to remember another never met.
On our school and on our working
The help of God
(today we took part in a ceremony to remember 100 years since the Battle of the Somme at the Thiepval Memorial)
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.
Autumn on Vimy Ridge
As the coach winds its way along the road of the Canadian Memorial Park at Vimy, Northern France, you might think you could start counting the trees, one for every Canadian lost here in WW1. But of course you can’t. The shell holes still mark the ground and the lines of the trenches are still visible between the trees.
Today the Canadian Memorial of white limestone is shrouded in mist, as it rises from the ridge into the autumn air, its whiteness still and stark against the misty sky. The features of the statues on the memorial make grief in stone. Here and there eternal stone carve leaves mingle with the squashed maple leaves of this year’s fall making the memories of a century ago and the current pilgrimages blend together. The figures of Truth, Faith and Justice look down on us.
We are here
to remember,
to discover,
to learn,
to become peacemakers
and builders of justice,
to serve God and each other.
And we are ready to serve God today.
(I am currently on a visit to the Battlefields of the Western Front with 40 others from Silcoates school)
It’s hard to believe
There are many conversations happen at the Chapel Door. This reflection, which you are welcome to use, is based on a few conversations in the last few days.
It’s hard to believe
God looks down on Haiti
With the same love;
Hurricane’s come and go,
And the twenty-four seven news moves on:
Remember children in Haiti.
It’s hard to believe
God looks down on Aleppo
With the same love;
Bombs come crashing down,
And the twenty-four seven news moves on:
Remember children in Aleppo.
It’s hard to believe
God looks down on Bradford
With the same love;
When bullying gets you down
And the twenty-four seven news moves on:
Remember children in Bradford.
It’s hard to believe.
Is God looking down?
Or is God in Haiti now,
Shoveling through mud,
Or in Aleppo now,
Digging through rubble,
Or in Bradford now,
Standing up to bullying.
Because if it’s hard to believe
The best thing you can do,
Is to do the unbelievable:
We take a stand with Haiti, Aleppo and Bradford.
My God,
at time you’re hard to believe in,
when hell comes closest
and hope seems to trickle into the ground.
At times like this,
May the smallest spark of love,
Seen in the out stretched hand,
Keep us alive to your presence in us all,
And may that give us the will to believe.
Chapel outdoors
Beyond the chapel door there are lots of places to choose for an outdoor chapel opportunity. There’s the playground, where we once danced ‘Lord of the dance’ and a piece of grass where we once did ‘The Enormous Turnip ‘.
This school year I was determined to hold chapel outdoors sometimes after reading about The Forest Church Movement. I love to worship in the open air myself so I really wanted to introduce this option more regularly. I also wanted to emphasise that we don’t just do chapel in chapel.
So far this term (currently it’s week 5) we’ve had Preschool Chapel Storytime outside, in their own playground. We did a circle story about a boat in a stormy sea making the wind and waves together followed by some songs.
We also had years 1 and 2 chapel outside when we did the Jesus life line string game. I have described this activity before: you need a long bit of string and some pegs. We put pegs on the string together as we remember things from Jesus’ life.
Today we had chapel for years 3 to 6 outside on the grass tennis court (no tennis happening at the time). It was a bit last minute as I had only discovered the chapel was not available 10 minutes before we were due to start.
We did a rather bigger circle activity with about 60 children in the circle. As we sang the song ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands ‘ We passed a world around the circle. It was quite windy but nothing like Haiti so we spent a moment thinking of children there and in other parts if the Caribbean experiencing extreme weather conditions today. Then we threw the ball to each other as we prayed for people and places we are concerned about: our families, our school, children in other countries including Syria and Pakistan and homeless people were some if them.
It was about 10 minutes altogether but enough to mark the end if the school day.
On our school and on our working
The help of God
Tweeting in Chapel
Today we had opportunity to BYOD to Sixth Form Chapel to take advantage of the new WiFi network.
Over the summer, what with blogging and wotnot, I’ve been doing a lot more tweeting. I’ve found it has helped to calm me down at times. At other times it has been very informative and motivating.
There’s a number of strands to my tweeting: the natural world, peace, prayer, social and community action and of course humourless . It has also helped me to stay in touch with more friends including @FPFoecumenisme in Paris.
The best link has been to @Dangerouswomenproject.org based in Edinburgh which has been tweeting about lost, forgotten or overlooked women and women’s issues. It has been brilliant and very uplifting. I’ve even submitted a couple of items including one about Madge Saunders, Jamaican pioneer of intercultural ministry.
So this morning Tim, our senior chapel steward, spoke about the Duke of Edinburgh Award and Alex, senior student for antibullying spoke about working with the Diana Award. I spoke about the campaign by UNICEF, #childrenfirst.
In the 90years or so that chapel has been there this was the first tweeting service. We hope to have some more.
In our life and our believing
The love of God