The last day

Potatoes at the roundabout,
Herons by the canal,
Pointing the way
On the last day.
We make our way to Tyne Cot,
Last and biggest,
An endless wall of names
Row upon row of stones,
The dead held here forever.
This fought over land
That emerged from mud
Now a perpetual piece of Empire:
A never to be forgotten field.

25.10.2017 Tyne Cot

Grace

For everything there is seasoning ;
There’s a time to eat and a time to fast;
A time to fill your plate and a time to empty it;
A time for the first supper and a time for the last.

25.10.2017, Poperinge

At the name

We find them every time:
Those with names the same
As ours, the same age
As a brother or fellow student.

If this was your local regiment
Would you have volunteered?

“Not me I’m a coward.”
You’re no coward if you understand
That peace is a better way than war,
And you live as if that matters most.

24.10.2017 Fricourt

Air

A white butterfly flew into the crater,
Vast expanse of air lined with grass,
Held up by molecules, supported by atoms,
Summonsed by the mist, called to by birds.

24.10.2017 Lochnagar crater

The ridge 

When you stand at the top of Thiepval ridge,
And see the way they came, weighed down,
And look across the landscape still bearing signs,
One hundred years later you are still speechless.

JAL 24.10.2017 Thiepval

The son

The sun shone on Langermaark today
Which I don’t remember it doing before.
The acorns crunched under our feet,
As the canopy of heroes oaks wept for their sons.
Here they lie; students, artists,
others too numerous to imagine,
With three crosses to recall
the promise made by the Son:
‘Today you will be with me in paradise’.

JAL 23.10.2017

A blessing a Hospital Farm cemetery 

The blessing of the Creator, watching like the deer;
The blessing of the Son, running like the Hare;
The blessing of the Holy Spirit, hovering like the buzzard;
Bless those who tread this holy ground
And those waiting for the final trumpet sound.

JAL 23.10.2017

He descended into hell

Down, down, down
Into the dark earth,
Through the white limestone,
Along the barely lit tunnel,
Past the latrines,
The command post,
The altar and the well,
To eight days of dripping darkness
Of boards for beds and meals from cans,
Of icy water for washing and damp boots,
Before standing ready at the steps
In the cold light of predawn,
When your name’s called and the signal given,
The stone is moved
And like the tomb quitting gardener,
you emerge as a newborn lamb,
To the barrage and the bomb:
A shell bursts overhead
And it’s ‘killed in action’ on the telegram,
And ‘greater love has no one than this’
On the neatly cut stone.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

JAL 22.10.2017
Wellington Quarry, Arras, 1917.

Live, create, offer

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Last weekend I took Bambi to the Northern regional meeting of the Lay Community of St Benedict. It was in Wolverhampton. It’s OK, we will get them further north eventually (there were people there from Torquay).
I’ve been a seeker in the Lay Community since last autumn, and last weekend made my first formal promise of membership in the community. The words include the promise to ‘Live Holy communion, create Holy space and offer Holy service’. It’s likely to take a lifetime to unpack.
I’m grateful to my fellow lay Benedictines for their welcome. As a wandering loose canon for a while now, it’s good to feel some connection again.
Bambi played her part: others came to visit, to look, talk and share. This small beginning confirmed me that Bambi can be a space for communion and service, amongst other things.

Everyday we are held in God’s gaze,
On right or wrong days,
Through wide or narrow ways:
God is eye to eye with us
Holding, confirming, loving.

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)

Lud’s mud

Lud’s mud is deep and sticky and brown.
It lines the floor of the aisles and the knave of Lud’s Church.
The stone walls are green and dripping.
The sky is a thin strip above my head.
It takes concentration to negotiate the logs, stepping stones and sunken walkways through the mud.
I think of the reaction in other churches I’ve visited to mud like this.
A tell-tale dampness suggests my boots are not as waterproof as I would like.
The next day, in the bath, I see the brown mud line, a meridian round my heel.
I have bought some of Lud’s mud home with me with the memories of the green ferns and mosses dripping a benediction on my head.

Pioneering anyone?

Being a pioneer, can, in my experience, be painful. It is for me today.
I just read a piece advocating we all do something that I’ve been doing and promoting for a long time. It didn’t make me happy. Instead I thought ‘what took you so long?’
At the 100th anniversary of the ordination of Constance Coltman to the Christian Ministry (actually tomorrow) I’m confused. Should I be celebrating in some way or mourning?
So many women’s gifts wasted in so many places. All around the world there are still churches who refuse to value the leadership gifts of women. When they finally get it we are supposed to be pleased, grateful even. All I can say is ‘what took you so long?’
A century of crawling progress we are supposed to rejoice over. Dates reeled off one after another as each denomination in turn finally gets it. Each time the same Scriptures referred to, the same arguments rehearsed.
Forty years ago I got somewhat frustrated when speech therapists took what seemed like forever to get the message about the needs of children with acquired speech and language problems (in real life I was a speech therapist and this was my early work). Little did I realise then that the church would be even more frustrating.
This week in Chapel we have been thinking about how ‘in Christ’s family there should be no divisions among you: neither Jew nor non-Jew, slave or free, male or female’. This message came to us two thousand years ago. For goodness sake, we are so slow.
Yes, I know we will be forgiven even that, but do buck up, and let’s not be taking another hundred years to get this sorted. About fifteen years or so ago in Sheffield, speaking at an event about women’s leadership in the church I referred to the record of the United Reformed Church saying how often people told I was lucky to belong to this denomination. I affirmed that saying ironically how I felt so ‘lucky, lucky, lucky’.
One powerful lay woman in the denomination was incensed and made sure I knew it. I should have been grateful and not telling too many truths in the company of other Christians, seemed to be the message. Well, the truth is, luck hasn’t part in it. God requires Justice from us all. If we are not willing to deal justly with each other then we are not the people God hopes we will be. Don’t cover up the churches short comings with sugar sweet stories about how lucky we are. If you do not intend to do justice in the church do not call yourselves God’s people.
I certainly can’t stand it any further. A women wrote a letter to our ‘Daughters of Dissent’ project (this was the title of the book we published about 15 years ago to record the history of the leadership of women in the URC in their own voices). She declined to take part saying she didn’t ‘want to remember the battles’. At the time I didn’t understand. Now I understand more.
But I do choose to remember the battles, while I can, and to hold you, the church, to account for all the ways in which women have been under valued and all the ways in which the wasted energy in those battles could have created the kindom.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

On the eve of the 100th anniversary of the ordination of Constance Coltman to the Christian ministry.

Feed my sheep

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I do wonder what a small town carpenter would have know about sheep rearing. But then again the image crops up many times in the Hebrew scriptures. The idea that people were ‘the sheep of God’s hand’ would therefore have been commonplace and the image would have worked for Peter and for all the others on that basis alone.
For my part, I like sheep but have very little to do with real ones. Even so hearing these words on the radio this morning was enough to push me gently but firmly into the image again, and find there a playground for imagination which is the ‘fundation’ of remembering the bible.
I’m willing to feed the sheep. I started the week a bit cranky, my mind not quite on task, but by the end I was once again fully engaged and bouncing in the meadows. It was the sheep wot did it, in this instance the children and young people. Worshipping together and then waiting and listening with them got me back on track again. ‘Can I talk to you Rev?’ The same question in a new office with boxes piled up everywhere and other things to avoid tripping over. One said ‘I forgot to thank you for your help last year so I came today to thank you’. Well by the end of that little speech I was eating out of their hands again.
So the sheep aren’t the problem. But the sheepdog trails are, or the Synods as we call them. Not just them but all the other sheep trading paraphenalia of Country Fairs and Auctions and Markets. You see, that first command to ‘Feed my sheep’ soon got hijacked and developed into a full scale industry which now spends more time preserving itself than getting on with feeding the sheep. And it’s all that I have the problem with. You might argue that the gospel would not have survived without it. My point now is can it survive with it?
For the next few weeks our chapel theme is ‘All one’ and that notion Paul sent to the Christians in Galatia two thousand years ago that ‘In Christ’s family there are no divisions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female’. Because of course there still are. But what does that look like from the perspective of a young person today. A much greater understanding of diversity in some ways and a much narrower toleration of ‘others’ in another. Two thousand years ago people from modern day Iraq and Syria were making their way across the North of England. They were Romans and Hadrian’s Wall was their highway. They bought with them many new ideas, including the stories of the carpenter and his friends and the command to ‘Feed my Sheep.
So free yourself from the preservation order and get on with living with and sharing the story yourself.

In our life and our believing
The Love of God

The Last Day

I started today’s final section of the Hadrian’s Wall Path early in some lovely weather. I met someone on his first day of the walk. It depends if your an East to West person like me or a West to East person, you see.
It was actually yesterday lunchtime when the realisation struck me that there were more miles behind me than ahead of me.
Today there were some beligerent cows, some puddles, a top toilet at St Michael’s Church Burgh on Sands, a lovely pub, the Highland Laddie at Glasson, a lot of butterflies in the sunny bits, and the juicy blackberries were back.
At Port Carlisle there were the ruins of the old structures associated with the former ship canal and many interesting wading birds, including several herons and some egrets. These observations just some of what have made the whole walk both ordinary and extraordinary.
The rain started just as I got to the Bowness on Solway sign but it wasn’t far from there to the final bed and breakfast of this adventure where I was greeted with free cake. It’s been quite an adventure. Tomorrow I begin the journey home.

May the road rise to meet you,
Whatever that means;
May the cattle part before you;
May the blackberries be juicy and plentiful in the hedges;
May the tide be in your favour;
And may God hold you in the palm of his hand.

In our life and our believing
The love of God