Keeping the Faith

Sometimes it seems nothing is more simple than love… I don’t mean romantic shilly-shallying between couples on the verge of relationship… I mean LOVE, all love real love… the kind between a happy mother and child, or close siblings, or best friends, or old colleagues, and yes, sometimes between couples too, the kind that says essentially:’Oh yes I know YOU and you know ME… and isn’t that wonderful’

It is a kind of deep reciprocal recognition that transcends words, and such moments of reciprocal recognition are wonderful, and can happen with almost anyone. They are moments of real humanity and also of divinity, such moments of love.

Yet often it seems that nothing is more difficult than love… amid the jostling to assert our own identities, we trample others’ and distort our own… In the struggle to be loved, we put forward all sorts of social masks that render our true selves unrecognisable… And in the movement of life, we will often do almost anything to avoid the vulnerability that such moments of love entail… It is an almost constant, often unconscious game of hide-and-seek.

And it is a game we play with God and with ourselves as well as others… but it won’t be played forever: ‘now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known’ (1 Corinthians 13:12)

And in the hiding and seeking, when we encounter moments of love, even then they can become distorted… we can try to fight to hold onto them, with demands of loyalty, of exclusivity, with the threat of guilt and with a hundred other worldly interventions… We encounter love , God, in the moment of stillness and recognition… and then we move again to possess it and make it our own, motivated by fear of loss… loss of that love to another person, loss of that love through our own imperfection, loss of that love through another’s imposition, and by the time we are afraid, we have already ceased to recognise, and the moment of love has passed.

But it is not love that decieves us, it is everything else in the world -and principally the fear that love will abandon us, that we are unloved, unlovable, unloving and unlovely… that we must compete for love. But that is not true.

We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. (1John 4:16)

So the next time you encounter one of those moments of complete recognition… be it in the eyes of that stranger at the bus-stop as you smile at something beautiful together, or in the handshake of an old friend as you both catch yourselves being glad for each other at the same time… then remember and give thanks, that you are together in love, and that you are thus together in God, and those moments are moments of truth.

 

Words Words Words

There are SO MANY forms to fill out just prior to ordination, there are enhanced CRB checks, contact details and allergies, Ministry Division Payroll Forms, health check and identity check forms, Tax and National Insurance Forms, a ministry CV to stay on your permanent record, a self-assessment form for the bishop, an ordination details form for the diocese, forms for the relocation and removals, an equal opportunities form, a data protection form and an entry in Crockfords Clerical Directory!

There are also letters to the diocese and title parish, change of address cards and ember cards, not to mention 24,000 words of essays to complete the MA course.

All in all too many words, so I’m looking forward to the silence of the pre-ordination retreat… which reminds me, I must fill out the form for parking and dietary requirements on the pre-ordination retreat <sigh>

Plodding on

Sometimes, even the most enlightened ordinand can have an off day…

A bad night’s sleep, a sore throat, a letter from one’s mother declaring there will be no more Christmas presents, an unproductive workday, a strange anonymous-meat-and-vegetable log for lunch, coming out of the study to examine a poorly friend’s vomit, and having her cough in your face…

I abandoned my plan to make a few notes on how Hegel’s ‘Pneumatology’ arguably owed as much to Hindu literature such as the Upanishads, as it does to Christian theology, and how with Hegel it was not so much a matter of Father and Son relating in Spirit (an unbalanced Trinity anyway) as Brahman and Atman relating in Om. Instead I tinkered on the computer, tried to stay awake, and frittered time away with fairly unimportant messages.

But on the plus side, rubbish days like this are a good reminder that it doesn’t work as Hegel would like to imagine… we are not able by effort of meditation to simply move intellectually towards some lovely spiritual awakening whereby we become aware of our ‘oneness’ with the Universe… our desires and persuasions and weaknesses do not, as Hegel would have it, simply provide the dark side of the dialectic which encourages us to strain ever higher towards Truth and Reason… it often seems these are just unhelpful, and hard to work with, like unwanted and uncommunicative but demanding lodgers, who move things around the house of the Mind, using up the gentle Soul’s resources and and costing the Will an enormous effort just to keep the place habitable and functional.

In the same way, it often seems that the Holy Spirit is like a visitor who drops by, and tidies up as she goes… even using the lumbering and unhelpful activities of the uninvited weaknesses and desires to reorder and renovate the house… Sometimes, shooing them out whilst the Soul is hiding gloomily in a corner, and opening the windows to let in some fresh air… the Holy Spirit ministers to us, even (or perhaps particularly) when we feel we are in too much disorder to ask for specific help. It would be easy (it often is), when the plodding day is over, and the inner house seems light, hopeful and peaceful… to imagine that we had not been in difficulty, or that we have ourselves somehow sorted things out by work we had done.

But I know that I do not usually manage to work through: the difficult essay that I can’t get a grip on, or the emotional situation that feels so demanding, or the circumstances that it will take a miracle to change… Instead the essay just suddenly makes sense, and a book I’ve never read falls open at the sentence which will help me go on; the intensity of the emotions is just lifted, and there is suddenly more love to go round, in place of the hurt I felt at first… and those bleak circumstances change – a volunteer appears, some money arrives, a stranger comes and offers just the piece of advice needed.

As William Temple said:

‘When I pray, coincidences happen… When I don’t they don’t’.

Well even when I don’t know what’s good for me… God does, and his Loving Spirit is welcome to run my household any day… I just have to see to it that I don’t side with the grumpy, lumbering lodgers, and shut the Spirit out!

Soul music

Qui cantat bis orat -’He who sings, prays twice‘, to paraphrase that great and rather troubled theologian, Augustine of Hippo. Here at the College of the Resurrection, as part of our daily prayer, we join with the monastic Community every Sunday and every evening of the week for Evensong…

… this is not Anglican choral evensong such as one hears broadcast on the ‘wireless’ of an evening… that sort of high-speed harmony intoned on the grand organ and trilled out by a well-drilled band of child choristers: which is more of a spectator sport than a community evening prayer.

… no, this is monastic plainchant. The psalms are in English, but the antiphons and chants are at least 1000 years old, give or take a little reconstruction. They are sung in unison and the idea of the music is not to embellish or distract from the words of the ancient biblical texts, but simply to make the texts come alive.

The way it works is that the cantor leads the singing by singing the first part of the antiphon… which is a short refrain that comes like a bookend at the start and the end of the psalm… in words, it highlights a key theme in the psalm, and in melody, it gives everyone a clue as to in which ‘mode’ or mood the following psalm is to be sung.

For example the cantor starts: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart…

… and everyone joins together ‘- for they shall see God’.

Then the psalm begins, alternate verses intoned and modulated by the cantors and by the rest of the gathered people -in our case here, mostly monks and ordinands in training for the priesthood. But it’s not as straightforward as a jolly sing-song, nor as practiced as a choral presentation… it is restrained, and live, and really rather unpredictable… as everyone seeks to listen to everyone else as they sing… ideally sounding ‘of one voice’ as they pray… but also seeking to sing to the best of their ability… and sometimes one has to sacrifice the perfect notes in order to be kind and sing flat but stay together… it is a state of constant tension, seeking to sing to God beautifully and to stay united as a group… and the timing is just as important as the music… there is no real timing written into plainchant, the notes last as long as the words naturally do, with a little emphasis on certain words and notes… and they last as long as the group makes them last… it is rather like a prayerful game of keepy-uppy.

So we are led a little and we play our parts together… quieting our voices if needs be to blend, and raising them a little to encourage if the notes are lost and wavering. Above all, and whilst listening to one another, we also have to constantly focus on the words that we are singing, not just in our mouths but in our hearts, so that we can pray them.

For my entire first year as an ordinand, I was so humbled by the clear, ringing acoustic in the Upper Church, and so lost in the words, and the marks of the plainchant, that I hardly made a sound, I whispered in tune, seeking to sing with my heart and mind what I dared not voice with my lungs. Then it began to make sense to me… the words of the psalms began to be familiar, and the melodies less alien, and the one triggered the other…

… Then we were out of the grand, stone church for more than a year… we moved to a smaller chapel with no acoustic and I began to dare to voice the now familiar words and modulations, which more often than not seem to spring to my unconscious mind before my conscious mind has caught up -it is as though my soul knows what it is doing, the psalms are very familiar to it… but my mind is more sinful and cluttered, and inclined to get distracted. Now, back in Upper Church, where even the drop of a pin rings round like an angel losing his halo… we sing again.

Sometimes, when fellow cohorts in the ranks of ordinands elbow me in the ribs, or stand on my cassock… or sing loudly and slightly out of time in my ear… I feel like the most sinful creature on earth -competing in pettiness and irritability, with that legendary worship-leader: Lucifer … Why must life be so cramped, so abrasive and discordant...?

But other times, when new voices begin cautiously to join in the prayer, or when the music of the gathered people seems to blend so that it is as loving and intimate as though we were all drinking from the same cup; as though somehow we are both singing, and holding our breath in awe… then it is beautiful. The most beautiful prayers in the world -not our words, not our music, but God’s words, God’s music, and we are the instruments… giving voice to sounds that somehow seem as though they already exist, they do not belong to us, but to heaven.

The Work of the People

Last year I posted in ‘The Prayer of Work’, how impossible it is to engage with the glorious liturgy of the Church, without it triggering a response to the suffering in the world. Did you know that the word ‘Liturgy’ comes from the Greek words, laos: people and ourgos: work… it literally means ‘the work of the people‘.

It was St Chrysostom who said (I paraphrase) ‘How can we worship God in fine clothes whilst others in the world go poor and hungry?’

High church liturgy, with beautiful vestments, sweet-smelling incense, calm and ordered processions, candlelight and peaceful music, is so very different from the noise, smell and chaos of much of the world, that many people dismiss it irritably as ‘out of touch’. But that is to miss the point in a big way… because the human beings clothed in beautiful light and colour, are the same human beings who afterwards will go back out into the darkness and disorder of the world… it is the human element which is fully ‘in touch’…

So the very sense of incongruity, the sense of beauty and peace contrasting with the misery and disorder, is a force for change…

-As a ‘cradle Christian’, coming from a fairly low church and also Baptist background, I had sat through years of PowerPoint displays about poverty, and video presentations of earthly suffering, and whilst I always joined in with the donations and projects, I was never changed by them… I always thought, ‘how sad -I must try to help’ and then I helped, and then I felt less sad.

But nothing can compare to the effect of BEAUTY in the face of suffering… At first, in very beautiful high church services, my emotional response was always ANGER: deep, unsettled anger which I could not quite understand. Then I decided that it must be hypocrisy which made me angry: here were human beings indulging in beautiful worship when they could have been out working with the poor of the world…

…Many people get stuck at this viewpoint… on retreat in a very pretty cottage in Dorset, I met an Indian Roman Catholic nun, who usually lived surrounded by extreme poverty and was, quite rightly, angry at some of the treasures held and maintained by the Roman Catholic Church… but when she spoke of someone who shared her own experience of poverty and yet had decided, when she had some money, to donate it to beautify the little local church… she was still very angry… and I disagreed -I reminded her of the woman who poured expensive perfume over Jesus and how that was an acceptable gift,  and she said ‘but that was different, that woman encountered Christ‘ and I found myself saying ‘no… it isn’t different… because people still truly encounter Christ -and want to offer him beautiful freewill gifts, and they shouldn’t be stopped’ …

So, I couldn’t stop with anger and criticism at ‘hypocrisy’ as my response to the beauty of the liturgy… besides, I could feel the truth in some of the services (not all… I’ve been to some ghastly ‘choral evensongs’ which were like performances for tourists).

So I thought and I prayed and I gradually realised that the fact is, there is something TRUE about beautiful liturgy, something unapologetically abundant and undeservedly glorious… at its best, it conveys something of the court of the Kingdom of God. And we stand there as sinners, freely and undeservedly blessed… and my ANGER was actually guilt at my own ingratitude…

Look what you are called to, look what you are given! Look at all the blessings and then imagine them multiplied hundredfold… This is not hypocrisy, this is your life in God!

And now look at your response…

So I came to accept that what was needed was not a change to the liturgy: making it simpler,with services more like the rest of life, but a change to my life... out in the chaotic world, that expressed the kind of gratitude and awareness of the majesty of God, a sense of the beauty of his purposes and order and the innate nobility of every human being… that then rendered the liturgy a true expression of worship.

Anyway, tonight I am starting my first stint as a helper in the night kitchen in Huddersfield. Not, as I might once have done, in order to stop myself feeling angry or hypocritical… but simply as an expression of gratitude to God, and recognition of the nobility of all human beings.

It may not sound like a big deal… but other college students are coming too… and will be able to pair high church worship with practical service… something which from my very first year here at college I longed for… I hope we will all appreciate both liturgy and service more. Certainly in my opinion we should all get a fuller sense of ‘liturgy‘ as ‘the work of the people‘.

Christmas Present

To quote a wise old archbishop, Michael Ramsey, sometimes ‘I hate the Church of England, I do, I do, I do’ (see The Faber Book of Church and Clergy)… not quite enough to lay down on a bed and ‘hooray with my heels’ as I believe he did as he spoke to his press officer… but then he knew it far better than I yet do.

But whilst the fussy, tangled machinations of any one division of the Church-in-the-world provide easily enough mental macrame to  hang oneself… (or at least to tempt one to take up an easier pastime such as atheism)…still, God is there, God is in his Church, there in its broken Thanksgiving, enlivening it with his Spirit, redeeming it with his love, and even reaching out to the wider world through its sometimes clumsy overtures.

It is summed up in Simon Peter’s words in the Gospel of John 6:68, ‘Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life.’

So this is to you, Lord…

I am very tired,  but I do love you. Not very well, but you can help me to keep trying. So please Lord, as a present, help me to keep trying this Christmas… do not abandon me to the imagination of my heart, but help me to live in the light of your presence, now and always… Amen

 

 

Unoriginal Sin

I wrote before, in ‘A Sword will Pierce Your Heart Also’, about the pain caused by division and disagreement between fellow Christians, and in many ways it is a  subject I am loth to return to… no need to say why, it is simply painful.

I am a woman, God is calling me to be a priest, I am thrilled and delighted at that… my soul indeed magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour!

But to many people I’m just a hussy, pregnant with an illegitimate idea and sustained by rumours of angels and delusions of grandeur.

Some people still shake their heads in pity at my poor husband for agreeing to support me, and whilst I trust in God, I often wonder just what it is that He has conceived for me, and how he will bring it to birth…

I ponder all these things in my heart.