Monthly Archives: April 2017

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

In secret

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

Full of holes

What are those for? This has been a recurring question since I left home to take part in the Easter weekend in Wales with the Lay Community of St Benedict. No, not what are Lay Benedictines for, but what are these wooden trays full of holes for, that I am carrying?
It seems that Communion trays, which is what they are, are not a common sight on public transport in these parts. But they are an interesting talking point, both in the Lay Community and beyond.
I brought the Communion trays from school for the Easter Sunday service which was described on the leaflet as Ecumenical.
I was cheerfully told that the Sunday morning service on these occasions was usually chaotic. And that was before I started.
We did some RB, remembered Bible. We made a table into a tomb with a black cloth. We talked to each other about what it might have been like to go to the tomb early in the morning. Some of the things mentioned were
It was women that went first and we were not surprised;
When the men followed, they had a race;
It was warming up outside but it was cold inside the tomb – this was a physical thing we’d notice;
When we saw the tomb was empty we were surprised, fearful, confused and had ‘other feelings difficult to put into words ‘
We all came to look in the tomb. I’d noticed that LCStB liked to move around in worship so I shouldn’t have been surprised when most got up to look. A little girl called Mary went inside and reported that the cloths she found there folded up were very soft.

Later we had a second bite at RB when we thought about left overs. Could we remember any stories from Jesus’ ministry about left overs? If course we could – loads.
The most common one was feeding the five thousand and the baskets of left overs.
One person suggested the catch of fish. First there were no fish and then the second time there were more fish.
The syrophonecian woman was remembered for her remark about the crumbs under the table; a remark showing the faith of an outsider, or one left over.
Turning the water into wine reminded us that the best had been ‘kept until last’.
The parable of the barns, suggested that rather than keeping lots for ourselves we should give more away in the first place.
In the Passover story we remembered that there were to be no left overs, and in the wilderness the people were not to keep the left over Manna. This was interesting as Jesus’ last supper was about making a new story from the left overs of the old, using the left overs from the Passover meal to make a new meaning of his body and blood.
All this and more came out from our shared RB.
Towards the end we heard that the rejected and left over stone became the new cornerstone: Christ himself. At his Ascension we became the left over people charged with the mission of taking the message to all people. For this the left over people received the left over Holy Spirit: my Spirit I give you.
Our task to be left overs, is to be scattered in our communities where it seems, Jesus thinks left overs are enough to feed the world.
During our sharing many members of the community, young and old, women and men, found their voice and became theologians. Someone asked Is it the homily? Call it what you like, we did it together.
After that we shared the bread we’d made and the small cups from the communion trays. For some this was the first time of celebrating Communion in this way.
The whole thing was fairly chaotic and certainly full of holes, but it seemed to feed us all and send us out with more to share.

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

Housework

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

Muddled daze

‘The fig tree you cursed has died’

I don’t know about you but this bit of Holy Week is something of a muddled daze. I take my remembered bible along with me and bits pop out of it from time to time: widows with mites, parables and questions from all comers and the whiff of heavy perfume following us everywhere.
I once used the Kenning ‘fig tree curser’ in an RB session, to describe Jesus in Holy Week. The recipient of the card, a computer user, was baffled as it was not a curser he’d heard of. Such can be the fun and chaos of RB that makes it ideal for muddled daze.

Anxious days make me muddled.
Searching for peace neath vine and fig tree
I find the one you cursed has died;
one of the most puzzling events of this whole week.
Setting out on another ordinary day,
not whole, but quite weak,
I can only listen to the stories,
keep time with the footsteps,
and breathe in the wasted scent.

Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy
Lord have mercy

Walking back……

On my way back from the village (now there’s a fruitful word of RB for you) a child waved to me from the doorway of a house. ‘Hello’, he said: ‘This is my Tigger.’ He held up a faded stuffed orange creature which might once have had stripes. ‘That’s a lovely Tigger,’ I replied and waved back.
And then I realised I’d misplaced my Tigger. If anyone comes across it in these muddled days, please do send it back. ‘Let the children come to me. The kindom of God belongs to them’.

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.

Who is this?

We are surprised by a donkey.
Our stereotyped view of donkeys has them gentle and readily overlooked
But there are many kinds of donkeys:
Slow seaside plodders in kiss me quick hats,
Old thin burros their bones sticking out showing their years of toil and abuse,
Warm nosed nuzzley donkeys in comfortable family farm parks,
The silly ass of popular cartoons,
Each one bearing the cross sign burned into the fur on its back.
The audacious one comes, donkey riding,
Challenging our stereotypes,
As he takes the cross wise way.

There was nothing luke warm about the response of those Palm wavers,
The day had taken a different turn
Everyone was excited.
These days a guy on a donkey is not likely to raise much comment.
The audacious one still comes,
Challenging our stereotypes, winding along the Cross Street,
Will we bear the cross-wise call, burned onto our lives

A few days later, broken trees, discarded branches,
were all that remained to remind them he had taken that route.
The donkey was back in its stall or on with its normal daily grind.
Everything back to normal or was it?

Look for the Holy,
Call out Hosanna,
See the blessed one,
The audacious one,
Coming to claim us.

The leftovers

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.

Notes from Chapel

a blog from Silcoates Chapel