Giving thanks ...

Un mariage heureux est un plus grand miracle de Dieu que le partage de la mer rouge.
A happy marriage is a greater mircale by God than the separation of the Red Sea.
Jüdisches Sprcichwort
Phrase de la Sagesse Juive

Aimer quelqu'un s'appel porter sur lui le même regard de Dieu quand il l'a créé.
To love someone is to look at them in the same way God did when creating them.
Dostoïevski

I offer these little quotes not at all from any sense of self satisfaction but from a very deep sense of gratitude to God. And of course also to Stephen. We have had a lovely day and were even blessed with a rainbow over the opera house as we ate our supper. Twenty years is of course nothing ... but it has been great fun for the most part and interesting craziness for the rest.
I shall not apologise for feeling happy and blessed, as I give thanks I realise how fragile all things are and therefore also how precious.

Greetings also to Janet and Bob who are also celebrating 20 years today

The garden at home ...

Over the past weekend I have been in Redditch, actually even in Astwood Bank, to spend a bit of quality time with my Mum and Martin to talk through wedding preparations. This is not really something they train you for at theological college - taking your mother's wedding. The event will take place at Emmanuel Church in Redditch - my home congregation and will be followed by a cream tea in the church hall and then fish and chips or curry for over 50 folk back at the house.
It is going to be fun and we all hope that this view will be part of it, however even if it rains we will have glorious day.
This view from the back step at my childhood home is one I can simply drink in for hours, these photos don't give you the full extent - this was a cloudy day. Often you can see all the way to the Malvern hills and on clear days even as far as the Black Mountains in Wales. I love the sense of space and the amazing sunsets.
Martin has been living in the house for just over 2 and half years. (When my mum announced his arrival in her life by telephone she said: "I have an added complication in my life" "ah" I replied you mean a man" .... in the ensuing conversation I said something daughterly like "Well just take things slowly" and Mum replied "it's a bit late for that!" hmmm ...) He is tenaciously transforming the garden - which is no easy task. Throughout my childhood the right hand border of the garden was lined with ancient rotting willow trees, all now coppiced or removed - as a result whole new horizons and views have been opened up.
My brother's bedroom at home overlooks this view - it was the room he was born in. My bedroom overlooked the main road and that is still the one I choose when I go home on my own. But the view out the back is part of me. I realised this last year when thinking about the view inspired me to write this sermon on the Mother tongue of ecumenism - a sermon that came almost fully formed in one of those rare moments of inspiration.
The view is perfect but changing, ancient but part of a very human landscape. Twenty years ago we put a big blue and white tent up at the bottom of the garden for our marriage. At the end of the day I was wandering barefoot around the garden hand in hand with Stephen. Very, very happy.
When I was a child the garden was much wilder than it is now, a place of great adventure, stinging nettles, ancient pigsties, treehouses and gooseberries, balckberries and apples to be picked.
Anyway for those who are interested here's the beginning to the sermon - quite fun to re-read it 18 months on ...

A room with a view
There is a wonderful view from the back bedroom of my parents' house. It was the room where my mother gave birth to my brother, less than a mile from where her own mother had given birth to her.
The view is of rolling fields and greenery, trees and hedges; in the distance 40 miles away are the Malvern Hills (not quite Mont Blanc or the Alps but beautiful nevertheless). Further away still and only to be seen on a clear day is a glimpse of another country the outline of the black mountains in Wales, and a reminder of a different and more ancient Celtic language, which the English language has pushed to the margins – just as the English language is pushing so many other languages to the margins these days.
This is the view my brother and I still sit on the back step to drink in on our rare visits home.
That view has hardly changed in our lifetime. It speaks to us of childhood and beauty. It is also a landscape we have simply always known, a landscape that seems to know and welcome us back into its beauty and our memories.
The view I love so much would probably still be recognisable to William Shakespeare who was born just 10 miles away. When I think of where I come from that greenery and stretching view come to mind straight away. I understand that landscape like I understand my mother tongue.
And yet …
These days when I think about "home" it's often an exercise in cognitive dissonance
Home is not just a long way away, though not as far as for many of you, but “home” is also to some extent a long time ago.
These days when I go back I often feel as if I'm in a foreign land - even though people all around speak the same language as me. I feel caught between Babel and Pentecost, which is why I've chosen those texts this morning.

An alternative St Valentine's Day - savour dialogue

My friend Evelyne Colongo-Oberson and her husband Christian spend time in their local Roman Catholic parish on mariage preparation. They have three young children and busy professional, personal and social lives but they still take time to talk with couples preparing to take the plunge into wedded bliss.
This year together with "La Maison du Couple" in Lausanne they are taking things a step further and encouraging couples to come to a romantic candelit supper for St Valentine's Day. The supper will encourage savouring dialogue as well as savouring the meal itself. I think it's a great idea.

So maybe for St Valentine's Day you should offer your significant other the joy of a conversation, savour the taste and texture of speaking and listening to one another

21 years ago tonight ...

Tonight we have been dining at 330 metres above Liverpool at the Panoramic.
It was simply wonderful, the views stunning the food utterly ambrosial and exquisite, the staff brilliant. We particularly enjoyed the French waiter who told us "Zay are all Scousers in the ze kitchen you know ... very good".
It was only when we came back to our room that I reminded Dr B that today was the anniversary of us deciding to get married.
Late in the night of the 17-18 August in 1989 we finally had a conversation that sort of ended (this of course is my version Dr B's would be a bit different) with me saying "if you're asking me to marry you ththe anen swer is yes:" and him replying something along the lines of "you could at least wait for me to actually ask!"
So tonight we drank champagne looking out over the amazing skyline of Liverpool, watching the sun set and the lights come on, and we thought back to Berlin 21 years ago. A wall was there and its existence led to us knowing we would be apart for the upcoming 12 months - Dr B's activities in the peace movement meant he had been banned from entering the former GDR. That day he had been escorted by GDR border police at Friedrichstrasse back to the West Berlin underground ...
Perhaps without this encoruagement he would never have half got around to almost asking the question!
Anyway 21 years later here we are watching the sunset and contemplating what the future may or may not hold ... it has been a good day whatever the future may hold.

A beloved wife's name, a labyrinth of love, a scroll of peace and so much more besides

Anger, rage and pain in terms of finding your voice

Some years ago a friend died from cancer. She was not ready to die and she was angry at the disease taking her life, her energy, her creativity, her future. She was an extraordinarily talented artist.
In the end she managed to say good bye to those nearest to her, and months before the end she asked me to take her funeral. I was still in parish ministry at that time and when I didn't spend my Mondays off at calligraphy class I would spend Monday with her.
On the day that I came back from my neurologist with the confirmation that I had my second MS incident - and therefore had MS - she turned up bringing with her the most perfectly arranged posy of flowers I have ever received and took me out to the lakeside to have ice-cream. I suppose my ministry to her was that I allowed her to be angry, and she knew how to be angry - not only at God but also at others. At the end of some of those Mondays I would sometimes be exhausted, partly because of the energy and integrity of her anger. It was her way of finding her voice in a desperate situation.
At her funeral one of the hymns we sang was Now the Green Blade Rises to Noël Nouvelet, it's a hymn I hope people might sing at my own funeral, it speaks deeply of resurrection and new life. However, there are also other words to this tune where one verse begins "Jesus Christ is raging, raging in the streets ..." Elemental anger is so rarely part of our spirituality and yet any reading of the Psalms whould help us see how important "imprecation" and expressing prayerful anger in pretty colourful language can be.
I've been thinking about my friend and her brilliant and frightening anger and also about the challenge of the this year's theme at our feminist theology group - finding your voice, finding your way. How do we find our voice when we are angry and raging? It's a particular challenge for women I think. Our societies find it hard enough as it is to listen to women, to treat our input as of equal value; we are immediately seen as "aggressive" when we challenge people or issues (when a man would be seen as "tough").
So what does this mean for finding our voice, for me finding my voice? I've revistied an old post on anger and on Lytta Basset's Holy Anger and in many ways I almost feel I have nothing to add - and I would still use as my starting point the great quote from Brecht: "Even anger against injustice makes the voice grow harsh. Alas we who wished to lay the foundations of kindness could not ourselves be kind." As I consider my own anger and rage - which is different from that of my friend in her illness, but no less elemental - I wonder about how I can possibly speak in a way that can be heard given the passion of emotion. I wonder too about whether given strong emotions I am even able to listen to myself and hear my own voice or know what it might be?
My friend in her pain at her situationi did not question her right to be angry, perhaps I too as an angry and passionate person need to accept this about myself and learn to find my voice.
Meanwhile I give thanks that at my friend's funeral I preached about beauty and creativity, and that anger was part of that.