Under pressure

I love this film for how it captures the stress that I used to be under facing essay deadlines. I just received my worst grade ever for a piece on Esther, I loved reading about it and thinking it all through but spending three days rather than a few weeks on an essay results in 2:2s, no better. It doesn't matter too much - I knew the direction it was heading in. I returned from NY missing lectures and scrambled it in before deadlines before we left college.

I always dreamt about being in an out of control car when the pressure mounted so it became easy to spot my stress signs. The film also captures that feeling of drowning and the sense, as I interpret it, that many different weathers are occurring outside over the period of your incarceration in front of a laptop inside the house.

Some of my peers have just finished their Masters dissertations and it is with some trepidation that I consider I need to finish mine before the curacy is up - maybe sooner, there is little information coming my way about it - but then I have done little to initiate any conversations about it yet.

I am trying to get used to a clergy working week. Sometimes it feels like you never stop and hours logged do not always reflect time working. If like me you suffer 'dislocatia' - (my own diagnosis) for a complete inability to find your way around spatially and particularly on roads and in large buildings, I can spend several wasted minutes each day just trying to find the next home I am on my way to visit.

Without technology my life would be very different - my phone's navigation button now speaks to me and directs me in an interchanging American/British accent.

When trying to locate the latest clergy social, I did laugh out loud to myself, for as I was walking/talking my way there, phone in hand, I should have only looked up, and 30 feet ahead, to know to follow the nearest bearded, middle of his life Christian minister, carrying silver-foiled tray with edible offering, to find my way.

Currently, I struggle a bit with the clergy social, suspecting we might all do so.  Once I am in a room and surrounded by other people just like me, I have an overwhelming urge to get out and find people totally unlike me as soon as I can. I get this feeling if I spend too long in church as well, and consider it somewhat ironic, the stuff I have been through to secure insider status to this institution. It rather reminds me of the man I met at Lee Abbey who exclaimed in my hearing:

'Bloodie Hell - I just want to go somewhere where there are no Christians,' which I decided was definitely strange considering his location but then perhaps it wasn't of his own volition that he was there.

In contrast to this feeling, I now close down all blogging, facebooking and google plussing to head off to New Wine, hardly an 'un'Christian in sight but I anticipate it will be great fun, the Holy Spirit will be manifest - he always is. I guess when 6500 people are exalting the name of Jesus, being made so welcome encourages you to stick around and show off who you are a little more than you might otherwise.

I remember explaining this to someone once who wondered why God always seemed to do stuff - miraculous stuff at New Wine and other places where Christians gather on mass. We go there to welcome and worship - it makes sense God would show up.

This time I go with a preach to prepare rather than an essay and so I take different books with me and probably still have a lot to learn regarding this writing to speak and call over inform and wrangle.

This time I go as a 'rev' myself but not serving on a team. I wonder if it will feel any different.

...and hopefully this time I will have time to blog through some of the conferences and seminars. I still have last years' but in scribbled notes. We will see. It could be i am internetless there - no bad thing really.

I am off, where ever you are and whatever you are doing to get refreshed this summer have fun!

...musing loudly

...so here I am after a different couple of days - a lull in the busyness, people-busy but not task-busy.

When I stop for a minute, I think, but often about the next thing... for a while anyway, until I remember not to do that and just think prayerfully or something-fully - it's the fully bit that matters.

I have been looking back on old posts, reflecting on the books that have shaped my thinking and the blog-posts that have captured me that other people have written. I have several of my own blogs, many that are private and one where I have recorded some of those God-adventures of the early days of calling. I remember writing a while ago, as I reflected on the Indaba process on that widening of perspectives that was rendering my old thinking somewhat naive. This last few weeks seem to have done that again. A double-naivity. I am not quite sure how all of this pans out.

I know that I have a deep-down, gut-need to keep my writing going, to find time to read too. I keep thinking about 'poet-priest calling' which was actually something triggered by a Phil Ritchie post, that expression from which I have never been able to shift.

I long to read more and more and more stuff - articles, books ... and write, but I know too that I am to live the three dimensional life and some of this attraction to academia is an impulse for a safe space.

I wonder what kind of a priest I am becoming, if one at all.

There is much about me that dis-satisfies - I am much the same as I ever was but then I perhaps invested less of my imagination in 'ontological change.'

Looking back on my ordination, I can see now the parts that will etch themselves into my memory and they were all the aspects of it that I had not spent much time anticipating. They were, however, answers to prayers that were deeply a part of me but had never surfaced to verbalisation.

...my mum in tears telling me she was proud of me and I am kissing her hand - I am not sure why... I had never done that before. In New York, I had watched a priest kiss the hand of the bishop that we were travelling with, and I was so struck by it ...

...Canon Andie Brown's preach and his communication of the irresistible love of God and my hopes for the hearts of the people listening and then the unfolding of new-found faith in one of my guests, right there before my very eyes... visible... tear-stained...

...a consciousness of the strangeness of all of it - the ceremony. I can never shift this - it accompanies me everywhere I go.

I remember as a child standing at a road-side and objectifying the cars hurtling past me, just for a few seconds becoming capable of seeing them as if for the very first time.

On the birth of my first child, quite delirious with love for her, I saw everything as if I had landed from another planet, seeing the world as if for the first time because for her, each of her pointings to something, was to a new thing and so I saw it too... I really saw it...

...and so at my ordination, I stand there and I parade and I kneel and I turn and I sing and most of me is fully engaged, present in the moment but some part of me is wondering if it matters very much and to whom and what do they make of it? And what does He make of it? And mostly He smiles benevolently and it matters to God because it matters to us ... a little... but really he accommodates us, our need for pomp and circumstance and tradition. It is a rite of passage, an unusual rite of passage I suppose. There was a before and there is an after but as I say, much of me is very much the same.

... and so now I want to read ... but other stuff - stuff to fluff, to reshape, to provoke. I am fed up of Charles Raven and his dissatisfaction with a refusal to do orthodoxy on his terms, I am a little irritated by Rob Bell and his too trendy tendencies to twist and re-frame. Neither of their books have been finished but I will try. I want to read Borg and his Reading the Bible again for the first time. I might even read Spong and his texts of terror. I am ready to ask more questions. I want to know what I do with this lot now that my job is not to write pretty essays about it all but answer the questions of real people. I am disturbed by my bed-time Bible readings, where parts of her body are sent off to the nations and where he drops down on the threshhold decapitated near the ark of the covenant. I want to find better ways of communicating the irresistible love of God even whilst I walk with a congregation to the place where Abraham might execute his son.

...and when that stuff is not happening, mostly many conversations are.

I am beginning to understand that transition that I speculated about with Andii Bowsher. People treat you a little differently and it is still too early to articulate this. Some do not but many do. Conversations are more frequent and settle to a depth more quickly than they used to - small talk is smaller and takes up less space. This is good.

...and so much of ordained ministry carries about it that feeling of 'feeling most fully alive' and sometimes you need to get away to recapture this, as I did in a four hour round trip to Oxford today. Sometimes it requires an active and vivid imagination, so that when you are taken to tour the balcony of your church building, you can see the faces that would have sat there once upon a time during nineteenth century revival and you look down too on the preacher in the now absent three tier pulpit as he waves his arms around and mops his brow...

...and for much of the time it involves listening to the questions of the people around you, those that are expressed and those that are not and realising that their questions, for all your own credal assertions, are also very much your own.

Whatever this thing is that I am being called into, it is a good and rather painful thing, but it is a some-thing and I hope to be present in it more and more fully.

Look at Jesus

Untitled from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

Daily office and not in the office daily

I have now completed three full weeks in parish ministry - it's early days.

This morning I was just about to reach into a huge bookshelf - all white wood and endless and begin the daily office with my sister-in-law, who had wanted to join me in this huge, open, modern office space with ceiling to floor windows, when my husband woke me up.

I was dreaming.

It happened instead to be my day off. I felt disappointed because I was just about to open this book of prayers and psalms and space and intercession with someone who was as excited as I was about whom we were about to encounter through it.

Instead, I had 20 minutes to shower, make-up and get in the car, mug of tea on the go, only half full because the roads are windy back to Nottingham so that two children could be delivered to their last day of school and then hubbie and I could whiz off down the motorway to Gran, 97 years old, whom we would be visiting in Worcester. I had not woken up early enough on my day off for prayer-time.

It made me realise, as I shared the dream, mid-motorway, how essential the Daily Office has become to the beginning of my day, even though it all happened rather later today. The daily office happened in college because there, as well, a community gathered to hold the day before God.

There is a different feel to it now.

Nestled in the corner of church, with its church smell, which made me sneeze and reach for tissues in my first ten days, but doesn't now, my incumbent and I join, just the two of us, with the rest of the praying world in a time of commitment to God, both for ourselves and the parish and the wider church and world.

After this there are a number of events that are going to either occur, be discussed or be prepared - from pastoral visits to wedding rehearsals to discussions about the theology of a thanksgiving compared to that of a baptism. Funerals are observed, homilies and sermons are prepared and schools are visited, particularly for year 6 leavers' assemblies, of late.

Clergy socials or curate training intersperses the daily catalogue of events and DCCs and PCCs are an opportunity to hear new ideas being fleshed out in community with suggestions and affirmations, questions and hesitations. I have, been unprepared for the lack of resistance to change, when we were trained so carefully to anticipate it in huge measure.

... and I read that this thing that is the Church of England might be no more in twenty years time or so and I wonder...

Our articles refer to the possibility of the institution fading with the assurance that the Kingdom continues, so does it really matter?

I guess, it does.

I love this, at times, maybe, all times, fusty and much misunderstood institution with all its fears and failings and fudge, for the way that it offers people like me an opportunity to mark the pivotal moments of people's lives and take them in a God-ward direction. Baptism / Thanksgiving preparation with the CPAS course brings seekers, agnostics, spiritual pick and mixers into a space that perhaps they only entered as children, to consider again whether a relationship with God is something they are being called into. The Lord re-becomes 'my shepherd' to those trying to make some sense of the death of a relative and hopefully the bride and groom's heart leap as much as mine always does each time those words about no man putting asunder what God has joined together, are read.

Some will never return but some will. Some will not return here but will land somewhere and engage in the Kingdom... some will land here perhaps and then they will engage in this thing that is church, that is rumoured to be dying but continues to breathe. It lives.

There is much talk - net-talk - about curates not getting incumbencies and pioneers not being able to pioneer and that is indeed lamentable - when there are churches that need leadership and a church that desperately needs to continue to proclaim afresh. I am reminded also on the call to be poet-priest and look out and in and up and reflect on this state of affairs. There are such arrhythmias in the constancy of the beat. The uncertainty of future does flutter the present and I hold each move forward with the grace of an unskilled tight-rope walker because everything seems temporary now, even as I look around my front room and write this, I am not connected to it, it will only be a place I sit in for a little while before three or four years is finished and we pack boxes again.

In the several slotted slicings through each day and the unknown quantities that lie about us everywhere, I am glad of the constancy of the daily office, even if its beat is interrupted every now and then with those extra and necessary journeys somewhere else. It's helped to hang everything together this last three weeks.

Open Source Discipleship

The future of the global church is Open from Distant Shores Media on Vimeo.

TOP TEN CURATE SURVIVAL

What I have learnt in my first two weeks:

If in doubt, just smile

1. Turn up to church ten minutes early, then if you are at the wrong church, you can still make it to the right one and no one will notice
2. Eat plenty of breakfast before downing half a pint of remaining communion wine on a Sunday morning
3. Accept the 'you can't remember my name game' - ask for the first letter, they will not mind
4. Just use a loud voice, they might think you know what you're talking about (not convinced this really works)
5. Go to short meetings via long journeys so you can tell God exactly what you're feeling to some very loud music on the way and way back
6. Be prepared to drink a lot of tea and have strategies ready for the polite refusal of cake if it's your third slice that day
7. Try the informal/formal look by pushing your dog collar into your shirt with just a little sticking out and your collar turned back - this says 'Yes, I am the new curate but hey, I know how to have fun!' (Maybe)
8. Send google diary to your phone and you'll always know what's coming up next with its reminder settings
9. Make friends with the owners of a very nice coffee shop who will be happy for you to work there between appointments
10. Keep up with the latest songs so that 'My God is a great big God' - gets supplemented with some other alternatives - ban your own kids from singing the classics around the house ...

Actually - I really love it! 

What is truth?

I am reading my way through Charles Raven's 'Shadow gospel.' As I mentioned before, I have never covered a book in so many scribbles and underlinings. You can not help but get the feeling that he is reading Williams to fit his own agenda; that he is quick to see the holes in William's apophatic theology but not in his own proposition based advocacy of the Jerusalem Declaration, Clause 2 of which is in serious need of qualification and explanation, but I have blogged about that before.

I am wondering about my own theology. Williams' theology in its neo-orthodoxy is often very Barthian in temperament. I am aware, of course, that my training contained teaching from a Barth-inspired faculty with two members of the teaching staff particularly well versed in the dogmatics with our principal's doctorate exploring  Barth. We also had members of faculty quite averse to him however and frustrated in the face of this theology that is an exploration more of the what is not, than the what is, the conversation than the declaration, the ongoing revelation that reads us rather than our ever reading with absolutes, although absolutes there are, but expressed with a kind of humility.

So some of these things were at the back of my preach today. They probably did not come across too strongly. And I suspect on the whole that I said little that was overly radical, many will believe that the truth of the Bible resides in its witness to Truth the person: Jesus Christ. I wonder how I feel about the Anglican church and its tendency at times to a kind of 'Pontius Pilate' syndrome. There is this over emphasis on doctrine and proposition but there is also, of course, the danger of a church that does not know what it is and for whom it is living.

I hope to be the kind of preacher who is only too aware of our own mess-ups as a church - mine included. I hope to communicate something of the power of the Holy Spirit and how the Spirit brings scripture to life so that the words become the Living Word. Who knows what God does with our words? We can only trust that because he is such a generous God and chooses to use us despite and even because of our inadequacies that he will use our thoughts to reach his people.


John 18:28-40

So to flesh out our reading a little, Pontius Pilate is posted in Jerusalem to oversee the time of the Passover festival with thousands of Jews visiting the city for this event. Perhaps picture in your mind the crowds visiting London for that Royal Wedding earlier this year. Similarly, people would have travelled, but to Jerusalem, from miles around, setting up their tents to sleep in as they waited for the festivities to begin.

Have you ever been to a party where everyone around you seems to be having fun but you. At the latest one I hosted I enjoyed it up until 2 o'clock in the morning when 8 young children having their first sleepover were still awake!

Everyone in Jerusalem is getting ready to party apart from Pilate who really wants to be home in Caesarea-by-the-sea, with its Coliseum and amphitheatre, its tasteful developments, as the place has undergone Herod's latest renovations, its sophisticated sewer system even. Jerusalem, by contrast, is crowded, dusty and oppressive. Jerusalem, quite literally, stinks. Pilate just wants to get it all over and done with without incident. He has serious crowd control issues to face!

A crowd do indeed press in on him the very next morning and early! - a crowd determined to get rid of Jesus. They bang on Pilate's door, rude enough to suggest he come outside to enquire after their needs, else they will become ritually unclean for entering the property of a Gentile. This would prevent them from celebrating the Passover – an event they did not want to miss.

At this festival, they celebrated their ancestors' release from captivity in Egypt back in the days of Moses. It was always an exciting time because it was also believed that if the promised Messiah were to set them free again, this time from Roman oppression, he would choose Passover to do so.

Oh the irony – they do miss the entire point of it – they miss the fact that the very promised Messiah stands before them. As they prepare to feast on lamb, they prepare also to offer up to death the very lamb of God himself. There is much we can learn from them about missing the point.

Pilate, from whom we have as much to learn and my focus for this morning, needs to get to the bottom of what is going on. He wants to get home, remember. So he seeks the truth behind charges levelled at Jesus by these very priests who have woken him up so early. Of course, he looks for truth in all the wrong places as well. It is truth that I want us to explore this morning.

Pilate's morning visitors charge Jesus with blasphemy – he claims to be the Son of God- but this merits stoning, not the death penalty. They need Rome who can administer the death penalty on their behalf. It is important however that Pilate does his job properly: he must establish Jesus' identity. Pilate has friends in high places and his career means everything to him.

We face these kinds of tests on a daily basis too, between aspiring to better ourselves, or so we think, and our part in the Kingdom. When I was nine years old I distinctly remember having aspirations of my own. I wanted to join the girl-gang in the street where I lived and for some strange reason (but then we were only nine) the qualifications for entry were – Favourite football team – Man United, favourite colour: red and belief in God: none. So I approached Julie, so trendy –a full year and a half older than me, and allowed to watch Top-of-the Pops when I wasn't, and did the right thing by each criterion. I then scurried off into a corner though, to tell God as I understood him then, that I hope he understood, I loved him really, I did not mean it and surely he knew how much I wanted to be in the gang. As I spoke earnestly and pleadingly, God, in his own way, revealed himself to me that day, for I suddenly became acutely aware that there I was talking to God – 'I must believe in you' I said – 'Wow – I believe in you'. And I ran off happy and also joined the gang. God can also be very generous!

As Pilate asks Jesus if he is the king of the Jews, he reveals that his only interest is in power but to challenge this Jesus talks about his kingdom rather than his Kingship. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he tells Pilate. It is not OF this World because it is not FROM this world but it is FOR this world – it is very good news FOR this world because it is a Kingdom of Truth.

This past two weeks we have all been exposed to the way the News of the World has contaminated the truth through deceit, manipulation and corruption. More interested in story at the cost of truth, the damage done has been lasting and widespread. Jesus' truth in contrast – a truth told in story available to us through the Bible becomes meaningful when we understand that the Bible points to to the person of Jesus – the Living Word, the Living truth. In relationship with Jesus – the Way, the Truth and the Life, we discern the truth of the Bible.

Where Pilate is interested in power “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus is all about truth: “King is your word, not mine. .... My task is to testify to the truth.” Two worlds clash – one obsessed with power and another with the establishment of truth. Worlds that clash today as much as they ever did, whether we are adults or children. We must pray that we do not value power more than truth even in our daily walk of faith.

How might we do this?

We do this by ensuring that Pilate's final question is not our own – 'What is truth?' says Pilate. 'What is truth?' and 'What is truth?' seems reasonable enough. But it is the stuff that makes for the competition that exists between faiths. Jesus wants us to contend with truth the person – truth the person that is Jesus Christ and it is when we begin to do this that any other truths we profess come to life. Truth is not only thought, truth is felt and truth is acted upon. It’s a way of life. “What is truth?” is completely the wrong question to ask, when we should be asking “Who is truth?” and find that the answer is Jesus.

We have a responsibility to not repeat Pilate's mistake and reduce Christianity to a set of truth statements that are grasped with the intellect. Truth is not a set of propositions, truth is a person. We will be looking carefully at our creed in church in the Autumn. In the creed we hear that Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate but perhaps it is not too radical to say that the church can suffer to this day a kind of Pontius Pilate syndrome. When we reduce following in the way of Jesus Christ to a subscription to a set of propositions, we only set up words that divide. If we are to recite the creed, a set of truths, we must do so from the perspective of relationship which will become the focus of our journeying through the creed together in the coming months. When the Spirit breathes his life into our words we can encounter the Word. When we reduce following in the way of Christ to wordy propositions, we create words that divide rather than unite.

The Jews failed to recognise their Messiah, we might fail to recognise the Christ in one another if we compare truth statements with our neighbour, and ask who is the most right - we might miss the truth altogether.

Jesus asked Pilate whether he enquired as to whom Jesus were of his own volition or not. Jesus' was an appeal to Pilate, if Pilate were really asking, Jesus would reveal himself and does so in the cross and his resurrection. If people ask us who Jesus is, they will see who he is through our lives, through the way that we worship and through the welcome that we create. We must ask Jesus to reveal himself in us and through us, by engaging with Jesus at a heart level and a head level.

I do not love my husband and children because I state a set of beliefs about who they are, I love them in relationship with them and hope to express it with my whole self. It is the same in relationship with Jesus – we need to seek to love him with our whole selves so that our lives tell it out, we are not afraid of showing emotion as we worship him and we seek to grow in understanding too.

In the Greek the idea of knowing also has connotations of being intimate with. We would do well to consider this as we seek to know more about this Jesus who loves us so much as he knows us.

In explaining what his kingdom is and is not, Jesus says that, if his kingdom were of this world, his disciples would have risen up and fought to keep him from being arrested. In other words, the truth of Christ’s kingdom can be seen in the behavior of His disciples.

What does our behavior say about God’s Kingdom?

The Church begins to heal when we encounter truth the person that is Jesus Christ and we see Christ more obviously in one another. But there's more.

Pilate missed the truth. He got the “what,” but he missed the “who.” He got the proposition, but he missed the person: the Person of Jesus Christ. The One standing right before him. The One who was born and came into the world to testify to the truth. This is a Truth that comes from listening to Jesus' voice and being in relationship with him. In such a relationship we also discover the truth about ourselves, about Christ’s call on our lives and about what God might be calling us to do. We actually become our truest selves because Jesus' truth brings freedom. Pilate in contrast was obsessed with what everyone else thought about him.

Jesus will continue to encounter the wrong kinds of questions, Pilate walked away from the question, but Jesus does not. Jesus does not walk away from us and our questions. He wants to reveal himself as the answer to our questions. What we need to do is live our way into the answer, journey with the answer, allow the answer to unfold in us – be patient with one another as we watch our transformation together. Pilate learned what he wanted to know, settled for that and walked away.

What about us? Do we settle for just learning what we wanted to know? Or do we brave the question and stick around to meet with the real answer.

Anne spoke at the end of June, when you looked at the beginning of John's gospel, about how the Word is not just an abstract concept, the Word is Jesus and his is an invitation into relationship. The truth is not an abstract concept either even though our tendency is to make it so. The truth is a person. The truth is Jesus. He invites us into a relationship with himself. From there he reveals himself so that we become also our own truest selves.

Live the question in relationship with Jesus Christ. Allow Him in His timing to reveal himself as the answer. He will also reveal to you the new things he is calling you to.  

JIM WALLIS - advice to new ministers

Friday highlights - top 7

1. Jonathan Iddon is pictured in the Church Times, Dom Jones is interviewed and I am sure that that is the head of Diane Cooksey (St John's) on the first page of the Petertide pull-out supplement. Take a look at the downloadable Petertide Pdf here if you are a subscriber. I finally got closure - they had said they would interview me - interesting for being involved in the Indaba process allegedly- but they didn't have room. Oh well - never mind. 
2. Lesley Fellows is back from her honeymoon and sounding chipper. She reflects on life with a new husband and the God she finds 'beyond anything I can describe, but I seek ‘God’.. whatever ‘God’ is and ‘God’ transforms me and it is this that my life revolves around ...'
3. The Biblioblogs Top 50 is reorganising itself and competition is fierce for places in the Top 50 with Gentle Wisdom charging forward and determined on recognition. 293 blogs have been organised and archived. It is proving to be a great resource. RevisingReform is at number 23 but Peter Kirk has really landed with 1730 views. 
4. There is mixed reaction to the launch of AMiE. The three priests in the Kenyan ordinations would need permission from the A B of C to officiate here. It would seem that the GAFCON element are getting themselves organised in all sorts of ways and we can only watch to see how it unfolds. I am in the process of reading Charles Raven's 'Shadow Gospel' - I have never covered a book in so many notes and underlinings. I will blog on this soon. Is anybody else reading it?
5. Nick Baines explains why Rebekkah Brookes is guilty on both counts.
6. Jane Stranz writes reflectively asking whether we are pregnant with God or God pregnant with us?
7. There is an interesting blogosphere discussion going on between David Ould, Ian Paul and Peter Carrell about women bishops - interesting to see these three thrashing things out together. Check out the comments

Ordination pictures

Derby's bishop has a great sense of humour