Present Moment, Perfect Moment

I've just started reading a book by Thich Nhat Hanh called Peace in Every Step. I'm always very interested in anything people like Thich Nhat Hanh have to say. He is both a deeply spiritual man abounding in peace and joy but also deeply involved in the daily sturggle of his people against poverty and war. Peace isn't an abstract concept or a nice warm feeling when your village is being stormed by rebels. Anything that comes out of that scenario has a depth and a reality to it that makes it worth hearing.

In Christian teaching Jesus stresses that the only thing we can really change is ourselves. Why go round trying to change others when you haven't even dealt with youself? If we want peace then we must be peace. War originates in the hearts and minds of people like us. If we hate then we contribute to the human created disasters we see, and are devastated over, on the news. We, by getting our own house in order, can contribute to a better, fairer world. Well, that's what I think anyway.

That's why I take this stuff seriously and see time investing in my own sanity and well being as important. I usually spend Monday mornings this way if I can, setting myself up for the week and setting intentions for how I want to tackle the week ahead. Today, after reading Peace in Every Step, I was reminded of the importance of being in the present monent. This is another thing that resonates with what Jesus taught, why worry about tomorrow when you cannot extend you life by even a single hour? All we really have is now. The past is gone, the future isn't here yet. So I spent half an hour just breathing and being where I am - in my house, in my pyjamas, on a slightly grey autumn day.

When I was travelling I was always in the present moment, there was so much to absorb, where else would you be? I tasted everything with the enthusiasm of someone who knew this might be my one and only chance to walk round a market in Madrid or eat gelato in Florence. I was deeply, deeply happy. But back at home it can feel like that is all slipping away and the days become so mundane again. But perhaps that is because we aren't really seeing them, too busy caught up in our thoughts and worries and so life just passes us by.

I loves taking photos on holiday, it made me see the detail in everything I was looking at and savour it. So this morning I walked around my ordinary place and took some snaps.

Snaps of ordinary things like the flowers in the corner of the room...

 

 

And the carpet beneath my bare feet...



The chilli that finally went red....

 

 

Piles of colourful felt....



A bathroom companion...

 

 

Crumpled bed sheets....

 

The things I love about home...



 

 

Where I 'make use of my time'....(and clearly don't dust much!!)

 

Present moment, perfect moment.

 

Gap Year Adventures

My Gap Year with Tearfund, taken after University, was a hugely life changing experience. I was a new Christian then and I felt like I was learning about myself like I was brand new. I was also laying the foundations in my faith. What would be central to me in this new understanding of the world? Sure, I had connected on a personal level to God but I was still working out what exactly God was like (now isn't that a life time project!) and what calling myself 'Christian' really meant for me.

At the recent IF rally in London I was introduced to the current co-ordinator of the Tearfund Gap Year programme and when she heard that my involvement with Tearfund began there she asked me to write a blog about that journey. It is now up on the Tearfund Journeys blog if you'd like to read more.

A lovely new friend made on my second trip to Zambia

Meanwhile I am off on another journey this month for some well needed rest and a healthy dose of adventure thrown in there to keep me on my toes! I'm signing off then until mid August when I will be back, revived, renewed and raring to go!

Don't Judge a Book by its Dodgy Pamphlet

When I first read any of the New Testament gospels it was from a dodgy looking pamphlet that one of my well meaning, but rather irritating, Christian friends had left lying around my house in an effort to convert me. God bless them, it was a noble effort, but it really wasn't getting anywhere. I ignored the pamphlet of Matthew's gospel for a good six months until a series of events sparked by a rather eventful pub outing lead to me picking it up from its dusty corner of my student apartment and giving it a look.



Needless to say I wasn't reading it in Greek back then!

I immediately had to rip the covers off, far too embarrassed to be reading anything that looked that naff (really, Christian publishers, enough with the dewy eyed lambs already!) and swallow my nagging feelings of annoyance at somehow vindicating my friend for having left it there. I didn't own a Bible except an illustrated childrens one I had been given at Primary School and hadn't even considered cracking that open since it was handed to me age nine.

My reaction, then, to this sad looking pamphlet took me rather by surprise. It actually contained some quite good stuff. It was the teaching that grabbed me first.

‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? ….So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.' (from Matthew 6)

Good stuff eh? I started to catch a voice in there, of someone really quite interested with a depth and wisdom that I knew I was very much seeking in my own life. As I read more and, horror of horrors, went into a shop and, very red faced, purchased a Bible I heard more and more of this voice, in the different gospels, in the Jewish prophets, all through the book. It was pretty exciting.

It is a strange thing as an adult to come to some of the stories of the Bible in a church that is so familiar with them they sometimes can't even hear them any more. This was the case none more so that the crucifixion stories. I merrily plodded my way through the gospels, drinking in the teaching and laughing (yes, the gospels are actually intentionally funny some times!) at some of the wry remarks of Jesus. I really started to like this guy. He was wise, sure, but kind too. This voice emanating from the page was so very kind. But not in soft, lamb hugging, kind of way. He had a razor sharp tongue and no issue putting people in their place if need be. But he was good, the best really, and like no one I had read about before.

Like a kid watching Narnia and not really getting the whole 'Aslan comes back to life thing' I got to the crucifixion scenes and they knocked me sideways. Sure I knew the story but the narratives are brutal and by now this guy had found a place quite firmly in my heart. I cried a bucket load for someone I didn't even know. I still do in fact, even now when I come back to them for study or in a service, I want to run in like Lucy in Narnia and wrap my arms around him and it make it all ok.

Something in the story sums up so much loss to me. The cruelty of humanity to humanity. How we tear down and destroy even what is good and beautiful. How we are filled with this anger somehow, this alienation and we act it out in such violence and turmoil. And then the loss, the terrible grief that comes with being human. The disciples run away and the women, including Jesus' mother, watch on as he is taken away and beaten and killed. That deep seated horror at the finality of life is summed up in that story for me somehow. That moment when everything is lost.

And then of course comes the resurrection. That great stumbling block that scholars are still arguing about in universities today. I've written my reasons for taking something that seems so utterly fanciful seriously before. But needless to say here there comes up the other part of these stories that has captivated me so very much. They are sown through and sprinkled with hope. At the end of Matthew's gospel I felt like I had been on an epic journey. Met this wonderful new person, learned amazing new things and then horror upon horror lost him in the cruellest way only to find him back again and saying these wonderful words,

'And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age'.

What a story, what a book.

The Beating Heart of Community

One of the greatest appeals of church to me is the random hotch-potch of people it brings together. In fact, the more random the group the better. I've never had much time for the church made up of simply 'the white middle'. There has got to be something wrong there and the simplest explanation is that other sectors of the community feel excluded, cannot understand or are unable to participate in what the church is doing. This, of course, would be fine if the church were operating as some kind of suburban social club but it is supposed to be a community bringing God's light and fullness to the earth so in that case it doesn't quite cut the mustard for it to be a homogeneous mass, does it?

Who is locked out of our churches?

It is one of my often banged drums that I am from one of the poorly represented minorities in the church. A recent survey in the Church of England found that only 6% of members came from 'non-churched' backgrounds. It can be easy to gloss over the significance of this but as the number of people with no faith background increases the more interesting this statistic becomes. It speaks rather loudly that the church needs to address the every widening group of people who frankly have no idea what the church is going on about.

Of course the answer to this comes in many guises. I am convinced there is no one size fits all. Some like it formal, some like is casual. Some like drums, some like organs. Some want a hymn book, some want a big screen. That's cool. But more than anything church must have integrity, a beating heart, to be that place of God's light and love. Without that, well, it is dead in the water. Which is why, I believe, that signs of diverse, loving communities are so key.

Being in training to be a future church leader necessarily involves a lot of thinking about how things ought to be done and the best way to structure a service and so on. These things are all extremely useful when it comes to keeping people engaged or even allowing them to hear what us being said in the first place. This said, I still have a real soft spot for a church where it is all a bit random. And you know why? Because people are a bit random.

I like it when everyone in this big, slightly dysfunctional family we call the church gets to stand up and play their part. I like it when people bring their real prayer requests to God rather than the ones the Vicar thinks sound nice. I like it when people bring their old guitar and just have a bloomin' good go. In the same vein I like it when the organist has been there for forty years and misses every third beat. Because it tells me that people matter more than perfect music or eloquent prayers. That community and love and joy is what we are here for, not getting it 'right'.

So how about you? What is the beating heart that you look for in community?

We are Water

Water is the stuff of life, all life on earth depends on it. We are used to seeing the earth as land surrounded by sea but in ancient thinking, not knowing what lay beyond the ocean, the sea was the dominant, most imposing feature of the earth. It was a powerful entity onto which the land simply clung.

The Bible has a lot to say about water too. Interestingly it links it to the early days on earth when we know, from biological research, that the earth was something of a 'soup of life'. Cells formed and developed to form the building blocks of everything we see on earth today.

As well as the source of early physical life water is seen as the source of spiritual life. The spiritual searcher is like a deer who pants for water. If you have ever been truly thirsty and unable to access water then you will know what this means.

 

In my own spiritual searching images of water have featured prominently. One of the first quotes I wrote down when I first started to ponder such things was from an ancient Japanese poem. It reads,

 

'My heart thinking "how beautiful he is" is like a swift river.
Though one dams it and dams it,
it will still break through.'

Water is the spring of life and is the description used of Jesus in the Christian tradition and notably the Gospel of John. Jesus is the spring, bubbling up to life abundant. In baptism, the start of the Christian life, water makes new just as it gave life in the beginning.

One of my favourite programmes of late is the American series Nashville and I particularly love this song 'We are water'.

It reminds me so much of the journey we are all on. Constantly moving over new terrain, constantly on the move, always searching but ultimately heading back to the sea. As Zora Neale Hurston writes,

'Don't you realize that the sea is the home of the water? All the water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday.'

Thank you for stopping by!
 

Justice – an essential issue?

The Church, in all its human frailty, has done some pretty rubbish things over the ages. I don't need to give you a list, I'm sure you have your own, but for me one of the prime examples of where the church has got it so right in some instances and oh so horribly wrong in others is the issue of justice for the poor.

I first learnt about this issue as a new Christian, about a year into going to Church for the first time, at the start of my gap year programme with Tearfund. Passage by passage our leader opened up the bible and pointed out passages where God entreats his people to care for the orphan and the widow.

I sat there dumb struck, at a complete loss as to why no one had spoken to me in Church about this fundamental issue before. It is said that if you cut out all the passages about justice for the poor from the Bible it literally falls apart. I saw that for myself that day and realised that my faith would fall apart without it too.

One of my set texts in my degree course is some large chunks from the book of the prophet Isaiah. The prophets scream and yell this message from the roof tops. Isaiah, a prophet from around the 8^th century BC (now doesn't THAT blow your mind!) spends 39 chapters pleading with the people of Israel to turn from oppression of the poor towards justice. That is Gods complaint before them, you have no compassion, you do not care for the oppressed, in fact you do the oppressing, and I cannot stand to see it any more.

'Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean, remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.' (Isaiah 1:16)

When I think of our situation today, I shudder. I know how complicit I am in the oppression of others. I know how little I love others as I love myself. How often do I plead the case of the widow or the orphan? As much as I speak up for my own needs? The judgement in Isaiah rings out through the ages.

But fundamentally what Isaiah and the countless other passages reveal to me is the nature of God and that gives me the most intense joy and tremendous fear. His standards are not our standards. His cry is for justice and peace. His Kingdom is upside down and topsy turvy, populated by the humble and the childlike. He is not interested in status, he rejoices over the weak. When we stand up for the poor, when we cry our for justice, the Bible tells us that we stand side by side with God. He calls for it page after page through voice after voice.

I feel challenged. Challenged and ready again to hear just how fundamental this issue is to the heart of God and just how fundamental it is to being a person who claims to follow Jesus, who spent his whole live with the outcast and had compassion on the suffering and the weak. So what do you think? Should justice for the poor move up the agenda in our churches?

He is risen? I'm confused

I remember when I first started going to church in my early twenties and I decided to visit the church where I had been baptised as a baby on what happened to be Easter Sunday. I entered the church and all the lights were turned off. After navigating the whole 'this is my pew' minefield I sat down somewhere unoccupied and waited for the service to begin.

The vicar processed in and lead the congregation, whom I followed behind dutifully, outside of the church where the he lit a candle and said 'He is risen!' to which everyone replied 'He is risen indeed!' I look around the garden, wondering if I had missed something and half expecting to see the risen Jesus amongst the shrubbery. That service left me utterly baffled as a church newbie and I can quite understand how all the pronouncements of 'He is risen' leaves much of the population equally baffled today.

The thing about the resurrection is that it all sounds rather barmy. We all know people don't rise from the dead so it must be a fairy story, right? Well for me, no. It's become the most important story I've ever heard. I'll say it once again, I am no theologian, but these are the thoughts that I bring to Easter Sunday and how I have made sense of 'He is risen' for myself.

 

Day 40 - The final of the Lent Photo Diary. Light breaks in.

 

Nature

I studied Biology as an undergraduate and, perhaps rather oddly given most people's idea of science and religion as utterly divided, it really set me up for eventually developing a belief in God. In what I saw in the natural world resurrection made perfect sense. The natural world is full of examples of things needing to die to truly come to life. Many Mediterranean ecosystems require fire to release health, vitality and new life into the plant life. The land looks utterly destroyed but the fire sets long dormant seeds into action and it springs back stronger than before. There is something irrepressible about life that I learned about while studying Biology. It is constantly evolving, constantly finding a way. I never found the Easter story to be that far from what I was seeing around me.

The disciples

The second reason I believe in the resurrection is the story of the early disciples and it grows more and more as I study the history of Christianity. Those early days were just remarkable. In the first instance the disciples of Jesus fled the scene and yet within a few weeks they were wandering the land telling a very peculiar story about Jesus having risen from the dead. Lots of reasons have been given for what might have lead to this intense and fast emerging movement. Perhaps they were just unwilling to let the whole movement go after Jesus died, perhaps they had a mass delusion.

 

The question is, if created, where did such a strange belief emerge from? There had been plenty of 'Messiahs' before who has been dispatched and whose followers simply moved on and found a new person to follow. In the Jewish context and religion into which Jesus came people were certainly anticipating a Messiah but not one that would suffer and die and certainly not one that would rise from the dead. It seems a strange belief to create and to have emerged as quickly as it did.

When it did emerged it raised A LOT of conflict. Nearly all of the first disciples were executed for the claims they made about Jesus. That seems an awfully long way to go for something you cooked up together from nothing rather than simply finding another 'Messiah-to-be' on which to pin your hopes.

Experience

My last reason comes from my own experience of living a resurrection life through this maddening and wonderful faith I've found. Through it I have found joy, purpose and a depth of life that I never imagined let alone thought possible. The Apostle Paul in one of his letters writes of the resurrection, 'Where, O Death, is your sting?' In my life this isn't just a nice thought, it is a reality that allows me to face up to the darkest places with the firmest hope. The resurrection is utterly central for me and at the heart of everything I believe and do.

So that's my resurrection story and what it means to me, I hope it adds some thoughts into your own mix.

Wishing you a very Happy Easter for you and yours.