You got to love a community with a sense of humour...

A still point in a turning world…

One of the (many) perks of being a minister is the expectation that we will spend a week each year on retreat…. indeed such is the expectation that many churches, including mine, contribute to the cost.

I was supposed to have the first week in January as for a retreat but my general inability to do anything well ahead of time meant that when I eventually got around to calling some retreat houses everywhere was full. As it turned out this was no bad thing as the weather being what it was there would have been little possibility of me getting there anyway.

Finally last week a combination of space in my diary, rapidly melting snow and spare beds at a retreat house saw me heading way up north to the mother house of the Northumbria Community.

I first came across the community at Greenbelt where they were running morning prayer in Soul Space. I fell in love with their liturgy and their community ethos and so welcomed this chance to go and experience it first hand. In fact so eager was I to go there that I must admit I turned up knowing little more than the title of the retreat “A still point in a turning world” – was there going to be organised sessions, guided prayer, spiritual direction?

The answer to that was no… what there was was the warmest of welcomes, evident in the pile of wellies, scarves, hats and gloves in the front hall available to be used by those daft enough to come to the wilds of Northumbria without and by the fact that there was always a kettle ready to boil on the aga in the kitchen.
what there was was the feeling of being totally at peace with the world. This house is really in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the most beautiful and rugged countryside. There are comfy sofa’s, roaring fires, companionship or solitude as desired, and a gentle rhythm of community prayer.

What there was was freedom to just be. There are no expectations, no requirements, no obligations, just the company of fellow travellers.

And most importantly what there was was the chance to just stop.
I am 99% of the time a total Martha, always busy, always having a to do list a mile long and always feeling guilty that I am not doing more. Indeed I went on retreat with a pile of theological books I “needed” to read and several projects that “needed” planning…. and you know what I didn’t do any of it. Instead I drank endless cups of tea, had long conversations with wise and generous members of the community, lost myself in the beauty of the Celtic liturgy spoken out in their beautiful wooden chapel in the woods and allowed myself time to just breath…. it truly was a still point in my turning world…

We often talk about thin places, those places where the veil between God and mankind seems almost transparent – The Northumbria community is most definitely one of those places, and I thank God that I had the chance to experience it.

Rest in peace…

…. I was saddened to hear the news today that Miep Gies had died. Having reached the grand old age of 100 one cannot be sad for a life cut short but more for the loss of someone who was both a remarkable individual and the last surviving link to one of the most important stories to emerge from the second world war.

If her name is not familiar her story will be. Miep, along with her husband and 3 work colleagues, aided two Jewish families to hide in Nazi occupied Holland. One of those families was the Frank family and the diary of their daughter Ann is a worldwide best seller. It was Miep who rescued Ann’s diaries, left behind when the family were finally discovered. She kept it safe, never reading it, until she was able to give it to Ann’s father Otto, the only one of the hidden group to survive the war. She went on to aid with the publication of the diary and to spend her life working educating young people all over the world about the horrors of the holocaust.

Two things in particular strike me when I think of her. Firstly that she was, in her own words, a very ordinary person… and yet faced with an unimaginably difficult and dangerous situation she stepped up to the plate and gave her all. In an interview many years later she said “I am afraid that if people feel that I am a very special person, a sort of heroine, they may doubt whether they will do the same I once did. Not many consider themselves very talented or courageous and thus would refrain from helping endangered people. This the reason that I want everyone to know that I am a very common and cautious woman and definitely not a genius or dare-devil.I did help like so many others who ran the same or more risk than me. It was necessary so I helped."
“It was necessary so I helped “… it sounds so simple when she puts it like that, yet in reality she was risking her life, she lived in great danger for two years as day by day she kept the families going. Whatever she may say I believe it was a remarkable and courageous gesture for which I admire her tremendously.

Secondly, I admire the respect and dignity she gave to Ann. Miep never appears to have treated Ann as a child, even though the others in the house did. She talked honestly with her about what was happening outside the house, after their capture she retrieved the diaries from the hiding place. She understood their significance but never read them, respecting Ann’s privacy. It was only when Ann’s father gave permission that she read them and, recognising their potential, worked to get them published. It was through Miep’s work that Ann’s dream of becoming a published writer came true – a final act of love to the young woman who had come to mean so much to her.

I will always be grateful to Miep for bringing Ann’s story to the world and to me. She said a few years ago that "It surely is a painful experience to be the only survivor of the eight people in hiding and their five helpers, I miss them dearly, because I can no longer exchange memories and no longer enjoy their friendship." I pray now that she is resting in peace and can once again be with those she loved.

10 things I have learnt in my first six months of being a curate…

1) When the bride and groom arrive so late for their wedding that there is only 25 minutes until the next church booking is right about the time when you learn which bits of the marriage service are optional.

2) Dave Walker cartoons are soooooo true.

3) Wearing a clerical collar around the parish leads to some startling encounters including the inebriated gentleman who when encountering me in the street looked me up and down with a shocked expression on his face and exclaimed “you’re a f*****g lady vicar you are, aren’t you?”

4) No matter how much previous experience you have had the first time you preach in front of your new congregation is very scary (as is the second and third…)

5) Hawaiian pizzas are not a good idea for a youth club pizza party – no one eats them

6) Deptford rocks!

7) Putting your feet up on a Sunday night after church is so sweet when Monday is your day off.

8) No one asks you the questions you have been taught answers to like “what are the eschatological implications of a Christian view of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” but instead ask really complicated things that you don’t have a clue about like “Do you know how to deflate a bouncy castle?”

9) It’s amazing how much people are capable of if they are supported and encouraged well.

10) To be able to minister full time is an immense privilege, and in those rare moments when you forget that, God always sends someone along to remind you.

You are welcome?

How it is that on visiting two churches yesterday, one open and available for public worship and the other redundant I got by far the friendliest welcome at the redundant one?

The visit to the open church started well. As I was spending the weekend at my parents house I headed off on the Sunday morning, feeling smug that I had remembered the time change, to worship at the local parish church. Describing itself as liberal, catholic and inclusive certainly this church did all the right things on paper…. a note in the service sheet as well as a general greeting at the beginning of the service welcomes new comers and invites them to stay for coffee afterwards. The curate on the way out, shook my hand, recognised I wasn’t a regular and so enquired of my name and such like…. and a nice lady, rushing off to open the fair trade stall, invited me to come and shop...but that was it as far as being made welcome went.
I arrived fairly early and sat in the church at the end of a row watching the pre-service bustle, neither the people handing out the books/service sheets nor the people who sat around me in the church managed to say anything to me beyond, is this seat taken? Even when I was clearly struggling in the service trying to work out where we were in the liturgy (to many sheets/service books/hymn books for my liking!) there was no offer of help. At the end of the service, I got a cup of tea and stood in the hall drinking it for a good ten minutes, numerous people bustle passed me and yet not one of them said a word to me, or even seemed to notice I was there. At this point I cut my losses and headed home…

… contrast this with a few hours on. My parents and I decided to head over to look at Gorton Monastery. Once a Franciscan abbey and parish church it was closed in the late eighties and after a period of neglect and looting was in a terrible state by the mid-nineties. Fortunately for the monastery, a group of passionately devoted people were determined to save it and formed a trust which took ownership of the building and performed a truly magnificent restoration job on it. The monastery now operates primarily as an events venue but opens for a few hours on Sunday afternoons for the general public to look around, at no charge. At the door were a few greeters with wonderful smiles, handing out leaflets about the building, asking us about our reasons for coming, pointing us in the direction of some people who have expertise that might interest us … in our case an expert on the building restoration in response to my fathers expressed interest in the architecture.
Once inside there was activities for children scattered around, various information points with videos and photos of the restoration and several more volunteers on hand to pass on their enthusiasm for the building and to answer any questions. All this was done is a really friendly and yet un-pressured way. Several visitors there seemed happy to wander quietly on their own and no-one bothered them from their solitude.

Why, oh why, oh why can we not display that level of enthusiasm, passion for our mission and care of visitors in our parish churches?? My parents local parish church is far from unique in its inability to deal with visitors well. I have visited or indeed been a member of many other churches where the exact same scenario happens… It’s not in anyway deliberate but rather that everyone is so busy with their stuff, whether it be a particular job to do or catching up with their friends, or doing some business over after church coffee that the stranger amongst them is all but invisible. It’s so easy to do and yet so off putting. My parent’s parish church is clearly a lovely place, with huge amounts going on, and they clearly feel a mission to engage with their local neighbourhood, but ….. maybe they are so busy doing all that that they have ceased to expect that the local neighbourhood may be in their church and feeling uncared for and unwanted.

Yesterday was certainly a salutatory reminder to me quite how easy it is to get it very right and also how even easier it is to get it very wrong…

1662 and all that…. (addendum)

Morning prayer this morning reminded me of another revelation that I have had about BCP since being at Ridley. That is that is remarkably flexible… no really it is…

This morning in chapel we came into an open space where all the chairs had been removed and we were invited to stand, sit, kneel or lie down as we wanted. The service was a BCP Taize and the combination was extraordinarily powerful. The tradition language sang, underpinned as it was by the simple music of piano, cello and violin. The simple chants sung as responses enabled me to focus truly on the depth of the commitments I had just made in the liturgical prayers, and the sense of the world wide connectedness of the Taize movement was enhanced beyond measure by the sense of historical connectedness of the BCP liturgy.

For hundreds of years and in hundreds of places these two streams of worship have refreshed people, this morning they combined into a torrent of living water…

Truly God is good.

1662 and all that….

Its that time of term again…for 3 weeks at the end of each term, college goes incredibly retro and switches to book of common prayer for its morning services.

Why you may ask (certainly many people round here ask that!) well primarily because BCP is still authorised liturgy of the church and as trainee church ministers we need to know how to use it. I think it’s fair to say that for almost all the students at college this is the first time they have come across BCP and certainly the first time they have attempted to lead it, and I like them, was not at all impressed by the idea when it first came around. Being dyslexic I was fearful of the strange language and the incredibly small print and the complications of knowing what to keep in and what to leave out… but most of all I thought it was totally ridiculous that the church could keep something so out of touch with the modern world and I didn’t want anything to do with it…. That was last year… after this week when I have started my fourth cycle of BCP I find that it has really grown on me. Now that I know my way around it I find the language is understandable and, more than that is incredibly beautiful. It’s fantastically portable with all the services, lectionary and scripture in one small book, quite the contrast to my shelf full of the various books of Common Worship services… and the simplicity of saying the same liturgy every morning gives a real rhythm to the day. I particularly like the fact that the service starts with confession, particularly welcome in this season of Lent.

There are some down sides though…. particularly when reciting familiar passages such as the grace, I have lost track of the number of times I have worshipped the Holy Sp-ost…. as my brain just automatically provides my mouth with the modern version and I still find the text ridiculously small.. but all in all I am glad that the church still has BCP. Whether I ever get to use it out in the parishes however, will I think, be an entirely different matter….