Category Archives: story

The Christmas sausage roll

‘Great assembly about the sausage roll by the way’, said a Muslim student after Chapel today.
It was a celebration of Greggmas, a bit later perhaps but held over from the end of last term when I had been ill and had to cancel it. Now we’d had our respective celebrations and maxed out on Christmas adverts so it seemed a good time to invite reflection on it all.
I am not insulted by a sausage roll in a manger, I said. I can’t speak for everyone, or for all Christians, but I am not insulted. Each morning in chapel I stand in front of the cross, a far bigger insult to God than misplaced baked goods. To take the baby and, even though now grown up, crucify the Son, that was an insult. Being born is still the most dangerous journey in the world.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

Wise ones

I’ve known many wise ones in my time,
yet even some of them have found themselves
inadvertently
in the halls of power,
pursuing a detour that seemed harmless enough
at first sight,
reeled in by false piety and fake concern:
‘Come back and let me know
so I may also go’.
It takes an arresting dream to divert us to another route,
to send us home another, more fruitful way.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

Quirinius, Governor of Syria

As mentioned at the beginning of chapter 2 of Luke’s gospel, and performed last night in Huddersfield

They blame me, I know they do. The Jews, the Romans, the Christians, my ex- wife: they all blame me. Yet I was no better or worse than the entire imperial family and the legions of Roman administrators who bigged them up. I’d had my moments, strutted my stuff if you like, got a tribute for my military efforts, kept the Pax Romana as best I could. And then it was Syria, keeping the borders, being a diplomat. Me, a diplomat? Orders from Rome to count them, take a census, find out how many there were. Easier said than done. Chaos of course. And in the middle of it one insignificant Jewish couple, her pregnant, him too old for her by far, getting caught up on the route between Galillee and Bethlehem, and I’m done for. My reputation shot to pieces. I was Governor of Syria and it was all down to me. No word about the rest of them, the petty functionaries in every town, taking bribes, cutting corners. The endless Queues, the inadequate planning, the overbooked accommodation and the inevitable communal violence in hot spots like Bethlehem, it was my fault. Ah, Bethlehem, it’s got a lot to answer for. Never been there myself. Avoid all that if I can. Quiet retirement in Rome. A good supply of wine and enough slaves to keep me comfortable.
After all that other trouble in Bethlehem anyone with any sense would give it a wide birth. What happened to them? Heaven knows. She had the baby I think. But born in obscurity, died in obscurity most likely I reckon. Won’t be hearing from them again. But me, different matter, one little census and they never leave you alone. Governor of Syria, well you do better then.

And finally, two thousand years later…..
We pray for Syria,
Squeezed land, fought over, burnt and damaged.
Cities destroyed, people scattered.
We pray for the people of Syria,
And particularly for the children,
Those still there and those who moved,
Voluntarily or under duress, refugees,
Stranded, identity gone, no security,
What future?
We pray for Syria,
Not the first place in the news,
Not the place nearest to our hearts,
Not glamorous or celebrated,
We pray for the people of Syria of all ages
Looking for hope,
Looking for an end to suffering,
Looking for peace.

In our coming and our going,  the peace of God. 

Take a knee

Word of the Day: ADGENICULATION (n.) the act of kneeling

I was only a child when I worked out that Christians of our sort didn’t kneel down. Each week we’d go from our Primary school to the local parish church for a morning service. The church was old, and it had pews with little doors on that latched shut. There were hassocks on the floor like a line of little cushions, each one decorated in bright colours by parish members.
We didn’t have those in our church, not the little locking doors on the pews, not the hassocks. And we didn’t kneel down.
As a teenager an elderly priest told me he liked worshipping with us because he didn’t have to kneel down. I wondered what took him so long to work out that you could pray without doing that.
As a young adult I started to develop my Benedictine tendencies in various places around the country. And I have knelt down a few times. I have a meaning for it now that I didn’t have when I was younger. I can see a time and place for rebellion, for Dissent, for going my own way.
And I can see a time, however brief, for kneeling. It can bring you level with another person, it can provide a steady base to help someone up. It can provide you with a private place within yourself to think and reflect. It can express somethings words don’t say; humility, respect, solidarity.
In this country, we don’t usually kneel for the national anthem, even though the words, God save the Queen, are a prayer. Most of us don’t stand to attention, hand over heart, either. If they are able to, people do stand and sing. But we’d don’t have to.
Now imagine you come from a country that has given less value to you and your ancestors since before the nation began. Imagine you’ve had to fight for your rights, to vote, yes, but the right to sit on the bus on a seat you choose, to live where you wish, send your children to the school of your choice, and much more the right to freedom itself and equality under the Law. Imagine that due to the colour of the skin you were born with your rights and opportunities have always been less than a person from the same country with a different coloured skin. Imagine you’ve tried to change this. Leaders have come and gone and injustices continue to go unchallenged. And then you hit on the idea to kneel down during the national anthem.
Whoa! What a crazy, disrespectful idea. Kneel down you say. How could you? How can you?
That’s nonviolent protest and it’s happening now in the USA. Remember it, not because you’re bothered now about national anthems and stuff but because one day you may have to decide to make a nonviolent protest about something on the way to being the builders of justice and the peacemakers you are destined to be.
And when that happens this might just come back to you and you’ll understand why standing up and being counted can be done by taking a knee.

From our Sixth Form Chapel this morning (29.09.2017)

The Path along the Wall

Butterflies
I saw a Wall on the Wall,
A Peacock on the path at my feet
And in the speckly sunlit wood
Two Speckled Woods danced

I met some more wall walkers, coming from the West. This was the best day’s weather they had had each reported to me.
Over breakfast this morning my host told me she worked for a churches heritage project in Northumbria. She told me about a small church dedicated to St Oswald on the route. As we talked it confirmed in my mind the importance of the stories of the Northern Saints and how the gospel came to this part of England. It is just one other pieces in my post menopause spirituality.
About the time I became Chaplain I began to take an annual retreat to Holy Island. The URC have a project there and I stayed several times, once writing a service for a dead school boy on St Cuthbert’s island.
Going on retreat has been important to me for over 30 years. This was just one place I visited. It was there that I first understood that Aidan missionary and pastoral ministry combined and how the monks from Iona had been re-christianising the North, after Paulinus and Ethelburga.
So I decided to seek out further bits of this story and piece them together if I could in a way that might speak to people today, both those of the faith and those of other faiths or none, so they could see what part faith had and might play in the future.
One person in the story of the Northern Saints is Oswald who is remembered near here for the Battle of Heavenfield. Sandra and I stopped there to see St Oswald’s church, mentioned earlier. The current building replaced a much older one, but it is still a relatively simple structure surrounded by a neat grave yard, and a view all the way to Scotland.
Later, with the evening sun still two hours from setting, I did a short local walk, surprising some deer, hinds and fawns, that bounded across the fields ahead of me

As pants the hart
For cooling streams,
when heated in the chase:
So longs my soul
O God for thee
And thy refreshing grace.

Post menopause spirituality

When I was pregnant in 1993 I reflected and wrote a lot about that time, how it changed me and how I celebrated the whole experience. However, as I was walking today, I realised I’d not done that since before my menopause, which I went through a few years ago now. I decided to rectify that today.

I am very aware of the way in which body, mind and spirit co-operate to do this walk along the Hadrian’s Wall path. Of course this is not the first time I’ve realised that but it fits here because it is foundational.
Going through the menopause coincided with me doing the job of Chaplain, and of course I wasn’t the only woman at school doing so during this time. It reminded me, in RB, of the gospel story of the two women, one just entering puberty, one a mature woman who Jesus meets. In fact he’s on his way to me the younger one when he meets the older one. She interrupts the story with her touch. She reaches out to Jesus and he recognising her, reaches out to her. They meet in that moment.
There have been many meetings and many interruptions during these last 7 years and here are some of those things from my post menopause spirituality that contributed to my survival and are part of this walk.
1. the natural world is a wonder and something I enjoy and learn from all of the time. Today I loved the walk through wild flowers, I loved the blackberries and some small plums in the hedges. There were many insects: common darter, speckled wood, peacock, small tortoiseshell, red admiral are some I remember. I keep a mental note of what I see and sometimes record them. I speak to the things as I pass them: a snail at my feet, a Jay flying across my path. I have always done this.
2. technology is helpful as it means I can photograph the things I see in an instant and that helps recall as well as journalling and scrapbooking later. It also means I can look stuff up easily if I don’t recognise it. Making stuff out of small things is essential to my creativity.
3. walking is simple enough but I have a huge sense of achievement even over just two days. Tired but happy is a good description of how it feels. Alone but connected, both to other walkers and those I meet but also to others. Bob and Hannah aren’t here but they have done other walks with which I have been involved and in itself those experiences have got me here. Bob is also on the other end of the phone if problems arise. They do. He tells me of a short cut. I am grateful.
4. prayer happens, it is so much a part of me. Grace texts me from Kenya to ask for prayer for the election process. There is fear and peace is fragile. I turn other things over in prayer as I walk along, things that have happened earlier in the year, concern for friends and family, the world and what happens in it.
5. I stopped going to church regularly a while ago now, in common with many other people I know. But I still visit churches as I go along, when they are not busy. The quiet is valuable. But I have not yet left the church. It extends all around me. I am surprised at every turn. As the woman extends her hand to touch him, he reaches out to touch her. It’s like that.

In our touch and in our encounters
The affirmation of God

Proper Church

I met a grandmother who told me she loved her grandson but she was concerned that he didn’t have faith. I asked her if she’d give me a tenner if I could prove he did. She was surprised and asked what I meant. So I told her various stories of Silcoates Chapel and of the leadership role the young man played there and how he had grown in so many ways in the eight years I’d known him. ‘But he doesn’t come to church with me’ she said. I enquired if there were any other teenagers at the church she attended. ‘None’ she confirmed.
Maybe you know a church like that. Often mono-generational, or at least dominated by the generation passed retirement age, there is a pattern of practice and attitude in such places that says ‘This is proper church: one hour on Sundays, all committees and rotas up to date’. Moreover it disregards those who come on Tuesday morning to ‘Toddlers’ or Friday evening to ‘Scouts’, seeing these of lesser value and even ‘They’re not our Brownies’.
Well I know another pattern and that’s just as ‘proper’. It’s a place where young people have opportunity to find their own voice about faith and how to practice it, where they grow as leaders and theologians. After what may be five to ten years, they leave, as some will do this summer, but for the time they were part of it Silcoates Chapel is rightly church to them, on any day of the week and whatever we are doing.
The multi-generational church of my childhood was dwindling even then, over forty years ago, so the challenge is not a new one. Neither is it a competition: Sunday church and weekday church may be different expressions of the same urge to engage with faith in community. To engage with children and young people and share faith with them in this way is exciting and demanding. There have been some wonderful moments, like the stories I shared with the grandmother. ‘Did I win the tenner?’ I asked her.

In our life and and our believing
The Love of God

Changing the world at Passchendaele

As together we remember the 100th Anniversary of the one of the bloodiest muddiest battles of WW1 I would like to share some glimpses of the ripples that spread out from Passchendaele and that we can still appreciate today. This way of using personal memoir to inform mass mourning and remembering has become something of a mark of our commemoration of the 100th anniversary of what, in the Register of Silcoates School, is interestingly referred to as The Great European War.

A father and a son
Abraham takes Isaac up a mountain and prepares to slaughter him. Wilfred Owen uses the same image in on of his war poems ‘The Old Man and the Young‘. There must have been many fathers and sons died in WW1, and I know one pair.
Harry and Ronald Moorhouse, father and son, both formerly of Silcoates School, died on the same day, at the Battle of Passchendaele: it is said less than thirty minutes separated their dying. They were professional soldiers. Harry had first served in South Africa, and was a contemporary of John Yonge the war-time Headmaster of Silcoates. The story goes that on 9th October 1917, Ronald was brought in wounded. Harry lept up to find medical help for his son and was killed in the process. Even though this story is recorded their names were never reunited with their bodies: they are listed with thousands of others on the walls that surrounded Tyne Cot Cemetery. We visit them every year with our students.

Two women
Nellie Spindler was killed on 21st August 1917. She was a Staff Nurse from Wakefield, serving with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, and is one of only a very few British nurses who were killed in action on the Western Front to be buried with full military honours. Brought up a Roman Catholic, she was the daughter of a police sargeant in Wakefield. She trained as a nurse in Leeds and eventually found her way to the Western Front under the command of a Matron from Batley. She was killed, aged 26, when a shell fell on the tent in which she was sleeping and is burried in Lijssenthoek Military Cenemtery. We visit her every year too.
Constance Coltman is a different matter. She was a pacifist. On the 17th September 1917, at the height of the Battle of Passchendaele, she was ordained to the Christian Ministry in the Congregational Union of England and Wales by four other pacifist ministers, one of the first women to be ordained in Britain. Many men had gone to war, and quite a few women, and that had changed Britian quite a bit. Women did war work, and some campaigned for peace: Constance was one of them. We will remember her ordination in September this year.
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The story of war is always the story of the lives of ordinary people, both women and men. Wars also often mark a change, geographical maybe but also social. Many things change with war, some of which are forgotten and some remembered a long time later. We are still learning lessons from WW1. ‘Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it’: best we keep learning then.

In our coming and our going
The peace of God

30.07.2017, being the 100th Anniversary of GS Golding, remembered at Thiepval.

We know a song or two

Just at the Southend of the Kintyre peninsula is a small ruined chapel, some caves and a well linked to St Columba by what are said to be his footprints.
He is said to have stopped here in 563 on his way to Iona. The Antrim coast is visible and pilgrims made the crossing from there up until the mid 18th century.
The graveyards have a long history and many stories, not least the three grandsons of the local minister lost in WW1. My song was ‘Jesus, remember them’.
We took the switchback Road that leads to the Mull of Kintyre, ruminating on opening a Paul McCartney theme park in a local disused hotel. At the end of the public road the small car park was almost empty. We set off downhill to the lighthouse 2 kms away. There were many Magpie Moths trying to navigate in the wind, and a lovely range of flowering plants including heather, harebell and scabious.
The downward journey took half an hour and the journey back, with 280 metres of ascent only 50 minutes, which given the rather relentless gradient was satisfying. We could see the rain clouds gathering over the Antrim coast. Obviously there was only one song for this part of the journey. Join in when you know it…. Mull of Kintyre

Over my head, I hear music in the air:
There must be a God somewhere

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?

DSC_0535

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.

DSC_0534

In our life and our believing
The love of God