It’s amazing who you run into…

When sitting out on your steps!

It’s been quite a year for meeting people, first breakfast with the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and now a conversation with HRH!

We had been told that he would walk around the college court and then go into tea with a few selected staff and students and so we were sitting out fully expecting to just catch a glimpse of the prince as he walked past. When he actually stopped to talk to us it took us totally by surprise but he was quick to put us at ease and was really nice, he even apologised for intruding on revision time and said we could blame him if we didn’t get good marks!

I know that the Royal family often get bad press but I have nothing but admiration for the Prince after seeing him at work. We were his fourth visit of the day and yet he was still full of enthusiasm and took time talking with people, especially the children. I think even the more cynical college members were won over!

So I wonder who will I meet next?

Worrying developments…

… I think I am turning into a vestment-a-holic.

I entirely blame my attachment church who have a robe cupboard that is every little girls dressing up fantasy with vestments in every shade from deep green to rose pink and enough fringing, tassels and delicately embroidered silk brocade to sink a whole fleet of battleships. When you witness that week on week I think it starts to effect your perception of what is normal. It started off innocently enough, I bought a second hand clerical cloak last term, an absolute bargain as it had had only one careful lady owner and was less then half price. I consoled myself with the fact that I was merely being practical, thinking ahead to the time I will be performing internments in cold, wet churchyards and besides it would also be useful should anyone need to go to a fancy dress party as Count Dracula!

However this week I found myself racing to the reception after an email came out saying that the college had been given a set of stoles by the family of a recently deceased cleric and they were available to students on a first come, first served basis. I managed to acquire this ….

… which is just wonderful. I think it was made in the late 1930’s or early forties and the quality of the embroidery is exquisite and its all hand stitched. I tend to be very romantic about history and so I love the fact that its slightly scuffed and faded – it just adds to the sense that it has a great story to it….

However given that a few years ago I didn’t even think that the wearing of clerical collars was a good thing I am getting worried about my increasing love of clerical bling. I can but hope that should I ever attempt to buy a berretta some kind friends will stage an intervention and bring me back into the evangelical light!

It seems like my "avoidance of essay" tactics have been found out....

I was wiling away some time using stumbleUpon on Firefox and this came up... ooops
Better get back to the grind I suppose still another 7000 words needed by next Tuesday :o(

New definition of stupid…

…is, I have decided, a whole bunch of Ordinands, people who normally slouch around in jeans and trainers dressing up in suits and standing on wooden benches in the pouring rain trying to look happy for the camera so that in years to come we can look at the college photo and think “what possessed me to wear that jacket/tie/shoes (delete as appropriate)!”

However, I do take great comfort in the fact that we would have to get a whole lot stupider still to give Miss South Carolina, a run for her money…

Rogation – The craze that’s sweeping the nation…..

….. or so I was assured by friends last year, but I have to say I had seen little evidence that it had until… . yesterday when I discovered that there are pockets of the Anglican Church that still go all in for all the fun of Rogation Sunday and my attachment church is one of them.

So after the briefest of pit stops for coffee after the morning service the massed ranks of the church – i.e. those who hadn’t managed to make a quick getaway on some flimsy pretext set out to beat the bounds.

I wish I could have taken some photos but alas I think that would have been deemed out of keeping with the seriousness of the occasion so you will have to imagine…

The procession was headed up by the verger with her staff of office (very handy for stopping traffic as we crossed roads!), academic gown and wonderfully lacy white gloves, followed by the aspersory bearer who was the chap in cassock and cotta swinging the thurifer full of incense round for all he was worth. He was followed by two taperers carrying the processional candles, then of course the cross then the church banner complete with wonderfully kitch Madonna and child sewn on it and its two attendants. All these people of course also in cassocks and cottas. Next came the choir in their choir cassocks and the cantor who had the most splendid gold cope on. Following was the master of ceremonies (though he spent a great deal of the time not in place but running up and down the procession making sure everything was going to plan (not an easy thing to do in a cassock and full length lacey cotta I can tell you, I though we were going to have a disaster at one point when in his hurry he slipped in the mud but he thankfully managed to stay on his feet – just!)

Are you still with me? – right well we now have the church wardens, also in academic gowns and carrying their staffs of office and then the vicar in quite the most magnificent get up of cassock, very lacy cotta, gold stole, gold heavily embroidered cape and his berretta with a red pom-pom on top. He was attended by two cope bearers whose job it was to hold up his cape to stop it dragging in the mud. He was followed by the Assistant priest and deacon also in gold and then the rear was taken by the congregation.

I can, hand on heart, say I have never seen anything quite like it in my whole life and judging by the shocked expressions on the faces of the people we passed, neither had they!

We walked round the whole parish boundary in this way stopping to pray for various things on the way. There was a worrying moment when we got the fields at the far end of the parish where we were due to bless the beasts only to find that the cows hadn’t been put out to pasture yet. I was wondering whether we were going to have to bless the nearby ducks in abstentia of the cows but thankfully a cow was spotted at the back of the next field and so all was well even though it did test the arm strength of the vicar trying to sprinkle the holy water that far…

The bounds were dully beaten towards the end when the building marking the boundary with our neighbouring parish was ceremonially struck with the churchwardens staffs and then all done for another year we retired to the church hall for a well earned cup of tea (and fantastic chocolate brownies…)

So will rogation sweep the nation? Sadly I doubt it – but I think I shall try and bring some bound beating to my churches in the future as it was wonderful to be out and about praying for the parish in this way – though I may well leave the gold cope at home, I wouldn’t want to overdo it after all…

Scrabulous…

I love playing scrabulous, I really do but its hard not to get disheartened when you end up more then 100 points behind anyone else in the game :o(
But honestly who knows words such as otoliths, venae and didies?

I really need to make myself some less educated friends…

Walking with God in today's world...

...is the title of the sermon series we have been running at the evening services during Lent. It basically a fancy title for various people to give their testimonies about how God is working in their lives. Tonight was my turn….

“Seeking to walk with God in today’s world”.
Matthew 20:17-34
Evensong Sunday 9^th March 2008

My mother always said I was destined to be a Librarian. I tried very hard not to be, I wanted to do something much more exciting then that! As a major league film fanatic I wanted to emulate the lives I saw on screen, but lacking the space flight needed to be Luke Skywalker or indeed the “license to kill” needed to be James Bond I instead settled on another great hero of mine and duly went to university to study Archaeology fully convinced that I was going to be the next Indiana Jones. Destiny is not something to be thwarted though it seems. My path was set early when I was elected the class librarian at the age of seven and I spent many happy hours re-arranging all the books into a classification scheme I had devised. By the sixth form I was 10 years into the job and had free reign of the schools book budget to order all the new stock and probably spent more time in the library then I did in my classroom. At university I spent weekends and evenings shelving and filing, classifying and labelling the diverse collections of the university library. There really was no question that this would be my career path It was only I that refused to see it!

I did give in, in the end of course and had 15 wonderful years working in a variety of libraries before I had to leave it behind to come to train in Cambridge.

I tell you this story, not as an advert for the joys of a career in librarianship, though it is great and I do heartily recommend it to any of you considering your career path! but rather because when I think of title of this series I came to the conclusion that my journey with God has been conducted in rather the same way as my journey to my initial career. For me I was less about “seeking to walk with God” rather I was usually to be found running as swiftly as possible in the opposite direction to him, determinedly set on a path of my own choosing, ignoring the rather obvious signs on the way, rather then walking at God’s side where I belonged.

The passage from Matthew we had read to us tonight tells us of Jesus and his disciples walking to Jerusalem – walking towards their destinies, walking towards the horror of Jesus’ passion. Jesus is clearer with his disciples then he has ever been. Time is short and he needs them to understand what it is that is going to happen. Nothing is more important on this journey surely then Jesus getting his point across? Well apparently it is, for he is diverted by the mother of two of his disciples who’s only concerned seems to be that her sons future is secure and settled.

Jesus’ question to this woman and his subsequent reply had real resonance for me as I reflected on my walk with God.
What do you want? To which his reply was - You don’t know what you are asking?
so true isn’t it – so often we go to God with a list of things we want, things that we are convinced are just what we need for everything to be just great – but the reality so often is that we “don’t know what we are asking for.”

I turn 39 next month – I first heard God call me to ordination when I was 26. I wasn’t joking when I said I ran in the opposite direction! Being a vicar was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I had just finished my library training and had an interesting and well paid new post. I had just got my foot on the property ladder and was engrossed in DIY projects transforming my small flat into the home of my dreams. I was settled at church and amongst family and friends I had no intention of disturbing that, thank you very much! I knew exactly where my life was going and managed, most of the time, to convince myself that this was the path that I was supposed to be on, really it was. I was focused and driven, the childhood dreams of being Indiana Jones being replaced by a desire to one day run a library of my own, preferably something nice and prestigious like the British Library or the Bodleian,

The problem was, there was, as the years past this persistent little nagging sense that I wasn’t on the right road, that this was not the journey I should be taking.

And so we have Jesus’ second walk of tonight’s bible passage. The walk from Jericho. The one where the noisy hecklers on the sidelines could not be quieted by the orders of the crowd. Over the years I tried every trick I could think of to get rid of the nagging sense I carried. I thought that if I got more involved in church God would be satisfied and I could keep my life as well as serving him. I joined the PCC, started to help with the youth group, helped out with small group studies and eventually started even to lead services and preach, trained as a Reader, I was putting in anything up to 20 hours a week at the church on top of a full time job ….and yet the nagging just shouted louder.

It came to a head in the summer of 2006 – I was approaching sheer exhaustion. I was so determined to walk the path that I believed was right for me, had put in so much effort to make it work I just couldn’t understand why God still seemed to want more – How could I give more – I had nothing left to give.

It was at this point that I found myself, through a curious set of circumstances, walking a prayer labyrinth. You may have come across such things before but for those of you that haven’t it’s an ancient way of Christian meditation that invites you to take a walk with God physically and prayerfully by following a complex set of intertwining pathways marked on the floor. During this walk for the first time in a long time I found myself rather then going to God with a list of all the things I needed him to do for me, that I was opening myself up to God to ask him “what do I need to do for you.”

The answer came so clear, he didn’t want more, he just wanted different – I was taken back to the day I accepted God as my saviour, I was put back in the chair I was sitting in then, I could feel and smell and hear that day so clearly – but now I could hear the additional commentary – “you gave me your life that day” – “Its mine now and I want it.”

I wish I could say I was gracious with my acquiescence. I wasn’t. I argued with God for nigh on 2 hours trying to counter each request with a perfectly good reason why not. But he persisted “you gave me your life” but….. “you gave me your life” It is mine, I want it.

In the end there were no more buts to be found. Exhausted I knew that from then on I needed to walk this different path, a new path that was mine alone but a path not decided by me.

The journey to being accepted to ordination is a strange one, not least because you, as the candidate, have virtually no say in the decisions being made. A long line of diocesan ordination directors, bishops, selectors and college admission officers are the ones that decide the course of your future. By the processes end I has this piece of A4 paper with a yes on it – a yes that would change my life forever and yet the reality was that my life had changed forever the year before – It changed when I finally allowed God to guide the route, to choose the path.

Just as the two beggar’s on the Jericho road had been I had been touched by Jesus, my sight was regained and I followed him.

I don’t know how well you know the Indiana Jones films but for those of you that do there is the famous scene in the film the “last Crusade” where the path that Indiana Jones is on leads him to the edge of a deep cavern. There is no way across and yet the map he has shows he is to step out. After much hesitation he does so only to realise that there is a bridge there painted in such a way as to be invisible until you are standing on it.

So in a bizarre way I did get to be Indiana Jones because each day now feels like that scene from the film. Each day I step out on the walk knowing that I am not sure where it is going to take me, but trusting that the path will continue underfoot.

It took me a long time, and wanderings up several cul-de-sacs for me to get onto this path but now that I am finally on it I know that it is the right journey for me, for no matter how hard it gets I know that God walks along it with me, and there can be no greater contentment then that.