Fragments, mosaics, patterns ...

For quite some time I seem to have been dwelling on fragments, fragments of lent and Advent. Bits and pieces, scraps of cloths, small quotes, kennings, beginnings of ideas, theology of fragments, an ecumenism of fragments ...
This evening I went out to supper with a friend and was given a very special box covered in tiny fragments of beautiful wood and precious mother of pearl. I couldn't stop running my hand over it, so pretty, so lovely, Not perfect but simply beautiful.
I talked about the fragments and my friend began to speak about the importance of mosaic in her culture, how it offers a different approach to melting pot multiculturalism. In the culture of the mosaic each shapely fragment is valued because it is used to make up part of the pattern. The fragments are part of a pattern.
In a way I cannot even really put into words I found this deeply meaningful today. It was both reassuring and grace filled as an idea for me. As I try somehow to gather up what I feel is shattered and put it together it is purposeful to feel that these shards of precious life-giving colour may actual produce pattern, pattern that may even be aesthetically pleasing or spiritually meaningful.
The fragments may yet come together in a new whole, that too may of course be shattered. Yet the patterning and the yearning for meaning and beauty will remain.
I realise I have been blessed.
Meanwhile I must try to find more of Henning Luther's writing in the theology of fragments.

Do no harm, leave a lingering trace ...

Bits and pieces of our lives interact in the living room piling system and the fragments of life made up of old newspapers, new books and things waiting hopefully for attention.
One of the reasons I still prefer real newspapers to the online variety is the serendipity of reading while (not) tidying up. So it was yesterday evening in my desultory attempt to look as if I might be cleaning up the sofa I got side tracked into reading Michael Billington's interview with Peter Brook. I found Brook's idea about a pared down Magic Flute which concentrates on the music, on character, story and situation rather wonderful. Even if I never get to see it, just reading about it inspired me to think about opera and also my own "performance art" liturgy in new ways.
However, what moved me and offered me some sense of meaning about my life was Brook saying this at the end of the article when asked about his legacy:

"What does touch me is when people come up to me in the street, as they sometimes do since they mistakenly think I've retired, and talk about some experience that has remained with them. That for me is the only real legacy: the idea that one has left a lingering trace in people's memories. In the end, that's all a director can hope to do."

Brook's humility of ambition - coupled with brilliant artistic vision- impressed me and moved me because it challenged me - I suspect that I would hope to leave rather more than a trace and yet I also know that at the end of my life probably the most I shall be able to say about my achievements is that I will have managed to offer grieving families meaningful funerals and joyful couples happy weddings. Fragmentary traces.
So I began pondering "impact" - our desire, my desire, to "make a difference" to "have a legacy" - and I thought about two women working in development I interviewed earlier this year. They were working according to the "do no harm" development principles - make a positive difference but don't just try to have impact for the sake of being seen to do something. "Do no harm" takes longer but tends to become the work of the people, of whole communities much more, and as a result of that it tends to be much more sustainable. In terms of providing rural communities with water say, that has to be a good thing. I have no idea whether it can be applied say to mission or ecumenism or church life but I like its conscious humility and desire to work with rather than dominate and impose. Yet I know how much, like Psalmist in Psalm 90, I am motivated by wanting my work to have a lasting result (Donne à nos travaux un résultat durable).
Meanwhile a further fragment of a lingering trace is Andrei Makine's latest book, (the entrance to my new place of work is framed by bookshops, this is not good and I succombed when visiting Paris this week) which beautifully evokes how even in a life of suffering brief eternal loves can be transformative.
So rather than having impact I shall hope to linger and to seek to be ambitious with my vision rahter than with my impact. Yet as I reflect on my carbon footprint and on the plastic bottles I will have used in my lifetime I shall also have to face up to the fact that be it impact or lingering, it will sadly not have been as sustainable or without harm as I might aspire to. So I shall focus on the hope of transformative eternal love.

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

Eschatology - some extracts from John Polkinghorne

On New Year's Day I started reading the chapter in the Polkinghorne Reader on eschatology ... my reading was in part triggered by our post-party new year's day brunch discussion with friends about faith and science.

I don't often quote large chunks of writing like this but reading this moved me - perhaps in part because this extract ends by quoting "Many waters cannot quench love" which was the theme for our marriage.

I like that things make sense for Polkinghorne - I don't entirely agree with him - about the active and powerful God. But reading what he says about the power and steadfastness of God's love made me realise that I feel a long way from such a sense at the moment - caught between desolation and the hope for perhaps unreasonable consolation.
Anyway it has been a joy to feed my mind by reading some of what Polkinghorne writes - now I shall have to read what Sarah Coakley writes about eschatology and see how it compares.

"Hope is the negation both of the Promethean presumption, which supposes that fulfilment is always potentially there, ready for human grasping, and also of despair, which supposes that there will never be fulfilment, but only a succession of broken dreams. Hope is quite distinct also from a utopian myth of progress, which privileges the future over the past, seeing the ills and frustrations of earlier generations as being no more than necessary stepping stones to better things in prospect.
If eschatology is to make sense, all the generations of history must attain their ultimate and individual meaning. Christianity takes the reality of evil seriously, with all the perplexities that entails. It 'refuses the premature consolation that pre-empts grief, the facile optimism which cannot recognize evil for what it is.' As part of its unflinching engagement with history, Christianity will recognize that episodes like the Holocaust deny to it any shallow conception of what hope for the future might mean, as if it could be divorced from acknowledgement of the horror of the past.
Holding in mind such a clear-eyed view of the woes and disappointment of history, one must ask what could then be the ground of a true hope beyond history? There is only one possible source: the eternal faithfulness of the God who is the Creator and Redeemer of history. Here Christianity relies heavily upon its Jewish roots. It is only God who can bring new life and raise the dead, whose Spirit breathes life into dry bones and makes them live (Ezekiel 37.9-10). Hope lies in the divine chesed, God's steadfast love, and not in some Hellenistic belief in an unchanging realm of ideas or an intrinsic immortality of the human soul. Christian trust in divine faithfulness is reinforced by teh knowledge that God is the One who raised Jesus from the dead. Only such a God could be the ground for that hope against hope that transcends the limits of any natural expectation.
This means that a credible eschatology must find its basis in a 'thick' and developed theology. A kind of minimalist account of deity, which sees God as not much more than the Mind behind cosmic order, will not be adequate. Nor will a kind of minimalist Christology, which sees Jesus as no more than an inspired teacher, pointing humanity to new possibilities for self-realisation and with his message living on in the minds of his followers, provide a sufficient insight into the divine purposes for creation beyond its death to be the ground of an everlasting hope. These concepts are too weak to bear so great a weight of expectation. To sustain true hope it must be possible to speak of a God who is powerful and active, not simply holding creation in being but also interacting with its history, the one who 'gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist' (Romans 4.17). This same God must be the one whose loving concern for individual creatures is such that the divine power will be brought into play to bring about these creatures' everlasting good. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is just such a God. To be persuasive, eschatological hope requires more than a general intuition that something must survive death. The problems that beset the realistic hope of a post mortem destiny are complex and demanding. They call for a corresponding richness and depth in our understanding of the power and steadfast love of God.
The question of eschatological hope is also the question of the fundamental meaningfulness of human life within creation. Are those moments of our deep experience when we glimpse that reality is trustworthy and that all will be well, intimations of our ultimate destinay or merely fleeting and illusory consolations in a world of actual and absolute transience? Moltmann says, 'Our question about life, consequently, is not whether our existence might possibly be immortal, and if so what part of it; the question is: will love endure, the love out of which we receive ourselves, and which makes us living when we ourselves offer it.' If God is, as Christians believe, the God of love, then love will indeed endure. 'Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it' (Song of Solomon 8.7) - not even the waters of cosmic chaos nor the tumultuous breakers of human evil."

On being a midwife - are women really that subversive

I had a wonderful and powerful conversation with a good friend today. We talked of midwifery and the pain of our roles, trying to birth something into being and being hindered and held back, sometimes by not daring enough to be ourselves, to take on what my friend calls "our grace-filled subversive role as women". She pointed to the five women cited in Christ's genealogy in Matthew's gospel as being powerful subversive models in different sorts of ways:
Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and "Miriam of Nazareth" - as my friend always calls her.

These women, inscribed through grace into the history of a male saviour, bear the future subversively, carry children in their bellies and give birth to the future despite everything - being seen as prostitutes, foreigners, wife of the wrong man, single mothers ...
Of course even the men God chooses to write salvation history through are hardly the handsome hero types - Moses has a speech impediment, David is the youngest son (and becomes more than just a bit of a philanderer), Abraham is such a man's man that he pretends his wife is his sister to get himself out of a sticky situation ... Cain kills his brother, Jacob steals his brother's blessing...

Then of course there is Joseph. If he had dared perhaps Shakespeare would have said Joseph was cuckolded by God. Earlier this week my friend challenged we female midwives to think about Joseph as a midwife, certainly as a birth attendant, at Jesus's birth. So many male partners are the only ones there to help new life into the world, to tend to the women they love at this most critical of times. Just as there are female doctors so there are also male midwives.
As we trangress and bend gender roles all of us take on some of the power of the subversives.
That subversive power is graced by God.
Happy Advent, happ waiting.

Powerlessness and grieving for the future ...

Reading again about Henning Luther's theology of fragments and his idea that we all have some fragment of the future, a hope for future development, a longing (I bet the German word he used would have been the glorious "Sehnsucht") to go beyond what we are in the present, made me realise that part of my problem in recent months has been grieving for a future that will never take place.
Grief doesn't always make for clear sightedness - blinded by tears it is not easy to see either within or without. But just because one version of the future is no longer possible does not mean that there is no future. Anyway what right do I have to grieve for a future which never "belonged" to me anyway?
As I have been thinking about grieving and fragments, tears and trying to see both myself and the future more clearly I've also been thinking about power and powerlessness. People who know and experience me would probably be surprised to hear me talk about feeling powerless. Sometimes I wonder whether claiming to feel powerless isn't a bit of a cop out, a way of trying to be a victim or perhaps another way of avoiding taking responsibibilty for "things". Perhaps deep within I also recognise that claiming to be powerless can often be a way of denying the power I do have.
From the perspective of feminist theology where the image both of a God who weeps and of celebrating a God who is vulnerable and powerless has been important to my theological formation, I fin it then challenging to be the weeping person experiencing some powerlessness. Perhaps what I'm trying to say is that despite wanting to celebrate these more vulnerable, less almighty images of God I still have problems integrating them into my deeper spiritual understanding. Deep within me resides the judging God of my childhood; the weeping, vulnerable, alongside God I preach of and beleive in, and seem able to convince others of, is often absent for me. The integration of what I believe and what is going on within me is certainly still fragmentary at the best, and I realise that I am even here only partially able to name it.
Then as I was writing this, a gift from a friend came to mind. She sent me this quote:
"When I dare to be powerful--to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid." It's by Audre Lorde.
So perhaps as I wipe away my tears and remember my sense of powerlessness I must also dare to name and own that power I do have and simply move forwards. It may be painful, but I am sure it will also be joyful, for I have always known laughter and humour and that is a profound blessing.

More fragments ...

I have been re-reading an interesting article by Sören Asmus I am more than you think - Fragments and Diversity within. The essay explores identity and how the idea of fragments can actually help to put identity together. I was particularly struck by reference to Henning Luther's theology of fragments as formative for identity - fragments of the the past, fragments of the future and fragments of relationships to others. Asmus writes about interesting elements from on how we construct modern identity citing Anthony Giddens, Bonhoeffer and Amin Maalouf amongst others, but I think what I like is how he ends by pointing to the idea of developing a pilgrimage identity as a way of holding things together in a tension of movement. It's not easy for me to explain why I find this so moving and meaningful at the moment but I do. Here's how the essay ends, with a prayer from Jan Comenius:

As we are called to live our lives as being on our way to an aim which we will not fulfil, but which is promised to us, we might as well learn to develop the identity of a pilgrim people: the awareness that we do not “hold an identity”, but we are called to become what we are not yet. The theologian, pedagogue and reformer, Jan Amos KOMENSKY (COMENIUS), being a migrant for most of his life, expressed this attitude:
“I thank my God, Who has wanted that I shall be a man of longing for all my life. I praise Thee, my saviour, that You have given me on Earth no native country and no home. Thereby You saved me from the folly to mistake the accidental for the substantial, the way for the aim, the striving for the peace, the shelter for the home, the wandering for the native country.”

Between the past, present and the future at feminist theology

It is nearly two weeks since our feminist theology evening with the excellent Anne Claire Rivolet.
We are this year looking at "Between the past and the future, living in the present" at our encounters this year and Anne Claire invited us to have both a personal and biblical approach to the question of "living in the present"
She began by asking whether "living in the present" or "living the present" (the French is Vivre le présent) is the same as "consuming the present, building the present, suffering or being subjected to the present". What is the present that the God of Jesus Christ gives us to live?
She ended this introduction with the brilliant phrase "my faith inscribes me in a different time to my watch!"
She then asked us to think about the kingdom, God's commonwealth which calls us to be actors in the present. We then spent some time thinking personally about an image from our own lives that brought this idea together for us. Anne Claire also encouraged us to think of a gospel or biblical passage which heléped us see this more clearly.
As always we came up with come wonderful examples - livign in the present is looking at the wheat rather than the tares, to not look at the speck in others eyes or even the beam in our own but to focus on what is growing and good. some spoke of the joy of simple Christmas pleasures; of the joy of recognizing that one's church is outside the church and being in the present of unconditional welcome of the other...

My favourite story was of the heavily pregnant 42 year old single woman who distributes communion in her local Catholic church. Living in God's present, included fully by her church, carrying the future and knowing it will be her baby and God's child, offering a present taste of the kingdom to those receiving the host from her hands.

In this time of exchange I realised and was able to speak about some of my own recent pain and sense of hopelessness. The biblical image I chose to focus on was of the grain growing in secret from Mark 4:26 - to focus on what is growing now almost unnoticed until suddenly it is time for the harvest.
I spoke about how in recent months I had discovered how destructive of the present it is to live without any sense of the future, or any sense of having a role in making that future. As I said that with a heavy heart I also recognized how much this is the case for so many, perhaps even the majority of the world's population. Subjected to the adversity of the present without being given any real stake in the future.
I was also able to say though that in my personal depression something had broken through the previous evening, a kindly offer to take me home, an attempt to rebuild trust. Strangely it was only as I began to see the future again that I realised how much I had been missing it and weeping for it. Yet somehow the seed of it had been sown and was busy growing, I sense there is a long way yet to go until harvest yet I can see that perhaps the fields may turn green and then gold again.

As our discussion moved forwards looking at how the present is the time of revelation, God is revealed in the here and now. Given to us in our own time. Our human time when it is penetrated by the time of God becomes an incarnation.
Much of what Anne Claire shared with us and encouraged us to share together showed how it is spiritual understanding, the work of wisdom and spirituality which help us piece together understanding and commitment to God's future-filled present. this made me think of the work of Sarah Coakley and Grace Jantzen, both working in the area of feminist theology and both insisting on the insights of mysticism and spirituality for theological understanding. A great shaem that neither of them have been translated into French.

Anne Claire is about to move from her responsibilities at the Ecumencial Centre for Catechism here in Geneva to become part of the Swiss religious broadcasting work based in Lausanne. She'll begin on December 1 so we wish her well with this new professional challenge and with her recent marriage. Our thanks to her for imbuing our present with a sense of God's ongoing future. That's what helps us go on living and find meaning in the here and now.

Knock knock - is God there?

Our wonderfully upbeat and authentic colleague Faautu Talapusi gave a bravura performance at worship this morning. It was a beautifully simply crafted service with readings from Psalm 121 and Luke 11:5-13. The idea of the neighbour knocking at night time on the door is what set Faautu writing her poetic sermon which was very much also performance art with each knock knock accompanied by knocking on the lectern:

Knock, knock…
Knock, knock…
The times I am facing are rough
The times I am facing times are tough

What I noticed now re-reading the sermon is that somehow as the poem progresses it is no longer an individual in distress knocking but somehow God knocking - hey notice I'm here, see how I try somehow to hold things together for you.

Knock, knock
Knock, knock…
God’s love is ever persistent and unconditional…for you and me

Read the full text here.

Thanks Faautu

Henning Mankell's Italian shoes and the gentle hand of love and meaning

"There are two sorts of truth: trvialities, where the opposite is obviously impossible, and deep truths, which are characterised by their opposite also being a deep truth." Niels Bohr

We are on the train from Berlin back to Switzerland. I've just finished reading Henning Mankell's wonderful book Italian Shoes. It's always a little embarassing to be reading on a train and find yourself moved to tears, but by the time the book ended with a satisfying new beginning my eyes were streaming, somehow thought my heart was smiling.

I'm used to reading Mankell's detective fiction which is great if a little bloody, but have been a bit disapointed with a couple of the other novels by him which I've read. Italian Shoes is different.
I'm not going to give the plot away - in some ways there is no plot but it is very deeply about the threads of life being picked up again. Not without extreme pain, not without violence, not without wrong moves and death but there is a powerful sense of future and meaning by the time the written story ends and the future starts to open up.
I've been wanting to find a really good book that would satisfy me in the way only a good novel can and as so often happens I found it in the railway station book shop and didn't know I had fallen on treasure when I bought it. I just thought "Ah a Mankell I haven't read yet ..."
It is deeply life-affirming book but not at all in an easy or trite way. Hope comes in the form of Italian shoes but not in some kind of consumerist way. The book charts the freezing and thawing of the Swedish island landscape, the painful thawing and flowering of rebuilt relationships.
One of my theology professors used to say - read novels to understand theology. As with all good fiction Mankell's book is not only about one theme but about complexities woven together in the compelling stories of human beings and their interchange with each other and the natural world.
Three quotes begin the book - one is that at the beginning of this post from the physicist Niels Bohr the final one is from Swedish writer Sigfrid Siwertz and goes "Love is a gentle hand which slowly pushes fate to one side." A wonderful idea beautifully expressed - if only it could be more true!

And the third quote which actually opens the book is all about shoes ...
"When the shoe fits, you don't think about the foot" Chuang Chou.

This book really fitted me at the moment, its concerns, its tone and the surprising theme of hope ... quite simply a good read, what a blessing.

Coffee in the garden of Eden

Today there was sad news of a death in the family of a friend; stories of destruction and suffering in the Philipines following the typhoon; prayers for Srilanka and Pakistan ... sometimes the world is too big, pain too great to comprehend or even begin to uphold in something like prayer. Or so it would seem ...
And then there was also a beautiful invitation following a friend's morning meditation prayer ritual with her daughter. Drink coffee with me, find time for some "Eden" time together. And so three of us have promised that tomorrow we will try to find time for coffee, or tea or a glass of water and a tiny little bit of paradise time in Eden.
Thinking of the beauty of the invitation I realise too that even if we never get to actually drink our coffee together tomorrow or the next day, just the invitation to a moment of collaboration in the Eden of coffee is in itself a foretaste of communion and fellowship.
So it is across the world where grief and pain strike, folk meet support one another and projects of new futures are born. We are natal not mortal.

Robben Island, the Lausanne Movement and telling stories

Several of my colleagues are attending the Lausanne Conference on World Evangelism in Cape Town at the moment. One is John Baxter Brown who's blogging about it in his occasional spare moments over on his blog Evangelism is in you Comfort Zone. JBB (as he is affectionately known) was fortunate enough to be able to visit Robben Island as part of his travels.

John writes about how the WCC helped to sponsor learning and teaching for some of the prisoners on Robben Island once restrictions were lifted in 1967. Although this knowledge makes him proud he also reflects while attending the evangelism conference:

But it was also the time that the perception changed of the WCC’s understanding of mission and evangelism, particularly within some evangelical circles. In ’68, at the WCC Assembly in Uppsala, controversial things were said which led some evangelical missiologists to question the WCC’s understanding of evangelism. Mutual mistrust set in, the echoes of which can still be heard today by those with ears to hear. In recent years, however, relationships have started to grow again and there is the potential, in my view at least, for there to be a renewed engagement between the ecumenical and evangelical wings of the Christian community. This engagement must be established primarily by working together in mission for the sake of a loving God and to serve a desperately needy world.

His post has triggered an interesting comment by Ian Chisnall which includes this:

However evangelicalism based on my understanding is intended to enrich and strengthen the whole church, even the parts which do not do things like evangelicals. So to the parts of the church which are not evangelical in definition. It is fantastic that the WCC today has many evangelicals at its heart (although some evangelicals today would not be aware of this).

Meanwhile the WCC's general secretary Olav Fykse Tveit has also been in Cape Town - in itself quite historic, the first time a WCC GS has been invited. In bringing greetings, Tveit made his evengelical and ecumenical background clear, and spoke clearly about the need for reconciliation as part of our unity and mission:

Ever since I read the Lausanne covenant for the first time when I was 15 years old, I was struck by the clarity of its vision: We are called to share the gospel of reconciliation with all. I have seen how this is exactly what happens in all our member churches every Sunday.

No regular reader of this blog needs to be told that I'm not an evangelical. Yet I do believe essentially in the power of the story of Jesus to change people's lives and to continually change and challenge my life. And of course the word "évangélique" has several tones of meaning in French - it can simply mean gospel-like but it can also mean evangelical. I've been thinking about this very much today after speaking with a fellow interpreter currently working in Guatemala. As I was interviewing her Karla Koll kept on saying that her theological work with pastors and lay people in the church was how to respond to being followers of Jesus in the continuing atmosphere of violence in that country.

One of the liberations and transformations the whole church needs to experience is surely to learn to follow Jesus more surely and not to suspect and accuse our fellow Christian brothers and sisters of doing it so much more imperfectly than we are. There is a not very Christian knee-jerk reaction against the "other" on the so-called liberal and the so-called evangelical "wings". We all need to really rediscover that ministry of reconciliation for ourselves, part of which will be to confess that we have not always loved our Christian neighbours as ourselves. The way forwards calls for some humility and some real translation and interpretation skills.

"That they may all be one."

With Christ we continue to pray ...

You can read Karla's letters from Guatemala here. And you can follow the Cape Town conference on their great twitter feed here.

In praise of nothing ...

Well tomorrow the holiday begins in earnest. Pictured here are just some of the books we thought we ought to bring with us ... shame to leave them at home when they might like to visit the Languedoc too I suppose! Some of these have been read by one but not by both of us. Really though they took up an obscene amount of space in the car and will mean that we won't be able to fit enough wine in the boot on the way back!
So tomorrow I may have to decide - do I begin with Pain, Evil or the Alexandrian Quartet? hmm ...
Meanwhile this evening I have both begun and finished my first book of the holiday. Now in some ways this is cheating becaue the book is by Christian Bobin and called Eloge du rien. I don't think Bobin has written a single book of much more than100 pages and many of his books are around about the length of a longish written sermon. They are beautifully produced and printed, so feel like reading books. It's right for them to be produced like this because the density and poetry of his prose means it would be hard to cope with too many words on a page. You need to have pages to turn to have time to think. Not quite sure how this would work if you were reading him on a kindle. I think miniatures of literature might not work so well in that format.
Reading Bobin this evening I gave thanks with a wry smile for the fact that I would not have to find an entirely inadequate translation for this glorious half sentence:
"seul l'amour donne un sens à ma vie, en la rendant à elle-même insensée."
The thoughts in his "excurse" are triggered by a letter asking him to write about what gives meaning to his life. He passes through his dislike of such exam-like questions, remembers how the only way he got through school was by learning everything by heart and so ruining his memory and somehow in the middle he chances upon love.
Towards the end he says that love could never fit within the narrowness of meaning (ne saurait se tenir dans l'étroitesse du sens) and then he continues:

"L'amour est liberté. La liberté ne va pas avec le bonheur. Elle va avec la joie. La joie est comme une échelle de lumière dans notre coeur. Elle mène à bien plus haut qu'elle: là où plus rien n'est à saisir, sinon l'insaissisable. Bien sûr, je ne réponds plus vraiment: je chante. Mais v-t-on demander à l'oiseau la raison de son chant?"

Tears before bedtime or actually just after waking ...

My friend, colleague and fellow editor of the Ecumenical Review Theodore Gill has been leading morning prayers this week. As ever the 15-20 minutes he invites us to start the morning with are spiritually uplifting and intellectually stimulating. I try to help as I can with leading any singing that might be needed - though as ever early in the morning this rather depends on whether my voice agrees to behave and whether I know what has been chosen!

On Wednesday morning we had some wry smiles as we listened to the passage from Proverbs 31 on the character of the noble woman! You can find our order of service here.

As we moved into the prayers of intercession I found that tears were splashing down my face. For once I was in the chapel without my bag and so no access to a hanky - it's not really the done thing to wipe your face with the hem of your skirt - certainly not when you have legs like mine! The prayers of reconciliation from Eastern Europe moved me, I can't say too much here about why but they did - it felt to me as if they had been written with my concerns in mind and I felt very much not cut out to live up to such an ideal of forgiveness and newness of life.
I wish I could say that the tears refreshed me but they didn't really. However my early morning chapel tears which sprang from a doubtless deep source of guilt and incompleteness within me were quickly over. For that I am greatful. I have wept too often in recent weeks, indulging in a daydreaming of grief, losing myself in pointless (though it seemed to me very real) pain and sensing no way out or forwards. So perhaps sudden and brief tears are some kind of progress ... I hope so. Not exactly refreshment but getting there.

Daydreaming - Simone Weil

I believe that the root of evil, in everybody perhaps,

but certainly in those whom affliction has touched, is daydreaming.

It is the sole consolation, the unique resource of the afflicted;

the one solace that helps them bear the fearful burden of time;

and a very innocent one, besides being indispensable.

So how could it be possible to renounce it?

It has only one disadvantaage, which is that it is unreal.

To renounce it for the love of truth is really to abandon all one's possessions in a mad excess of love and to follow Him who is the personification of Truth.

And it is really to bear the cross;

because time is the cross.

In all its forms, without exception,

daydreaming is falsehood.

It excludes love. Love is real.

Power pleasure or meaning?

So this evening I've been wondering which of the three schools of Vienese pyschotherapy I would rather follow ... Adler's Nietzschean doctrine of the will to power, Freud's will to pleasure, or Frankl's existentialist analysis that focuses on a will to meaning?

Ah well probably a mixture of the three ... in the face of chocolate I'll go for pleasure; in the face of suffering I'll keep on searching for meaning.

Sailing between the stars and reaching for hope ...

Kurk Gayle's father is reaching the end of his life - it is a wrenching terrible time and and yet he is caring for his family and loved ones by reading to them ... in a whisper but with such strong words.

Tonight as I read what he had shared I felt ministered to by a man at the end of his life whom I have never met. He is caring for his family right to the end.

In recent weeks I have felt ministered to by many who have received terrible news, of death, of illness, of redundancy, of divorce, of miscarriage ... Yet I continued to weep for my own loss, the loss of a dream, the loss perhaps of love, the loss of a sense of the future. So very selfish, so very self-obsessed, so very petty.

Reading this helped me a little to at least know that hope will return and I shall one day be in a place where the tears do not fall unbidden every day.

There aren’t any easy answers to the big questions that haunt us and hunt us down. Friends commit suicide. Grandparents die awkwardly and alone in nursing homes. We get fired. We have affairs. Our kids get hooked on drugs. Time and gravity wear us down as we travel across this vale of tears.

Yet when we have hope, we have a refuge. I like how Paul put it: “We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day”. Or, as … Peterson paraphrases it …, “We’re not giving up. How could we! Even though on the outside it looks like things are falling apart, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace.” And grace is always stronger than my circumstances.

Every day we’re both wasting away and being renewed. When God’s Spirit moves, joy is reborn, and our lives, once new, can continually be renewed through faith and the promises of faith.

Here’s what I have to keep reminding myself: pain is real, but so is joy. Every moment, hope is available. Even now, peace can be mine. And the sparkling moments of joy that make life worth living are just as much a part of our world as the speeding tickets and funerals. When you take the time to look at both sides of the equation, you realize that life is both more depressing and more delightful than you thought.

I think it’s significant that the Bible never says Jesus enjoyed suffering. Pain is no fun — at least now for healthy, emotionally stable people. Hebrews 12:2 says we should keep our lives focused on Jesus, “who for the joy set before him endured the cross.” Jesus didn’t enjoy the cross; he endured it. If you meet a Christian who acts happy all the time — that shallow, plastic kind of happiness — avoid him like the dentist after Halloween. He has one eye closed to reality.

Jesus never acted artificially happy. And despite what you may have heard from some well-meaning preacher, Jesus did not like being tortured to death. He didn’t delight in it; he put up with it. To enjoy pain isn’t Christianity; it’s masochism. But to willingly endure suffering because you love something more than your own comfort level, well, that’s getting closer to the heart of the divine.

Joy is often wedded to sorrow, peace often accentuated through pain. Christianity isn’t just about putting up with hardships or dealing with problems or handling suffering. One of the paradoxes of faith is embracing those things voluntarily as a way of expressing devotion to God. Christianity is a journey that takes you everywhere you’ve always wanted to go but never by the route you’d expect. Or choose.

This voluntary aspect of love (and in some cases the willing acceptance of pain because of it) is one of the features of Christianity that sets it apart from other religions. Obligation and duty are not the same as love. Love offers itself. It actually volunteers for the cross.

…i want to untangle the future
…but for now i’ll let
…the riddle of
…your love for me
…take me along the current
…of this moment
…as i whisper
……my yes
…and strive to live out
……my thanks.

From Steven James’s book Sailing Between the Stars

Dreaming dreams ...

This morning walking to the bus and then sitting in the chapel I had, not exactly an epiphany, but in quiet and from pain I arrived at a moment of perception and groped towards wordless understanding of what my rational mind says is intractable.

Then of course the day took over, but even now at the end of the day I still remember the physical feeling of what that groping glimpse of perception gave me.

Others would call it just a day dream.

Fragments and unjoined up thoughts on this and that

So today I started an idle thought on Facebook "Wondering whether a 'theology of fragments' might be one useful starting point in thinking about the ecumenical movement" and was surprised about where it led.
Dr B pointed me to David Tracy's fragments as a theological category:

Fragments show the need to shatter any reigning totality system, such as the "white" understanding of modernity and culture. At the very same ... time fragments embody quite a positive meaning: a break out of totality into infinity by discovering one's own routes and one's own traditions. In this process, one discovers all the others and the different, in the very same way, as possible disclosures of infinity.

My friend Simon Oxley pointed to Duncan Forrester's "Theological Fragments: Explorations in Unsystematic Theology" which was not what I had been thinking about - my own thoughts had been more a half remembered musing on Henning Luther's theology of fragments and the idea of Christ's own life as a fragment. Luther seems to have developed his thoughts in part as a pastoral theology to find meaning in situations of palliative care, particularly for younger patients with AIDS or cancer.

Today fragments of my day would include:
A conversation about biblical archeology with a Palestinian Muslim and a surprising conversation about Thomas L Thompson in which I was definitely the person on the learning curve.
Thoughts exchanged in French about Unitarianism within Protestantism as an important yet often unexpressed part of our tradition.
Sadness at the realisation that my own life is also just a fragment and wondering if Jesus may have felt something of that as he faced death so young - then wondering whether the struggle with meaningless was ever part of earlier cultures. Yet my life being just a fragment is also oddly quite reassuring. Not sure I can quite explain that just yet.
And now at the end of the day as I return to the idea of a fragmentary theology of ecumenism, I suppose I wonder whether we need both an unsystematic theology of ecumenism and also a deep understanding of the ecumenical movement as a fragment - a humble fragment. Can't take this much further than that for now but maybe one day in heaven or in the other place I will have time to ponder some more.
Fragments of the day also included coping with the welling up of tears and being surprised when laughter and ideas drove away my current deep sadness.
Fragmentarily, I look back at the day and remember the morning dew, the heavy late afternoon rain, the humility of getting it wrong when interpreting, the pleasures of translating well written German, the joys of editing, the grind of grief, the stunning light of sun through crowd, a great conversation with an Arabic translator and the support of friends.
All as weighty as dust, yet part of the pathetic yet essential struggle against meaninglessness in my fragmented life.
For tonight fragmentary ambiguity is where I'm at.
Tomorrow as they say, is another day. Thank God.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God - solidarity in depression

A good friend phoned me on my mobile, she's never phoned me before, I didn't recognise the number but as soon as I heard her voice I knew she was getting in touch to offer consolation. I have been crying in recent days, feeling sad and as if the future has drifted out of my grasp. I'm normally rather noisy and upbeat, I suppose people get worried when this British woman can't control her tears.
My friend is a wiser woman than I am, she listened to my as usual incoherent pain and then warned me she was going to be unfair, "this is mean what I'm going to say you know, but really Jane, nobody has died and you know even if they had we believe that death will not conquer or have the last word."
My friend did not offer this tritely, I know her story and the death and loss she continues to bear. But she offered it out of deep compassion, her way of calling me back to life. It reminded me of the words I have read next to countless graves:

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:37-38

Meanwhile as I return to blogging and reading I also came across this prayer on Steve Taylor's blog and found it quietly inspiring and reassuring.

Father God,
it is hard to hope each morning,
to look forward to new treasures and mercies,
discovered when we are alive to your presence in all that we encounter.

Open our minds to the endless possibilities of life and power and thought.
Help us to meet you in our everyday life, in our anxieties and difficulties,
for you are there with us in our pain and sorrow.

Lift us from despair to new hope. Restore and renew us each returning day,
so that we may find joy in our journey with you.

Amen

A prayer from the Mozarabic Sacramentary (10th century) (Hat tip)

Train journey with myself

I am writing this on a glorious train ride across Switzerland - it is raining but the views and skies are still splendidly dramatic. It is wonderful to be on the train, to listen in to one side of other people's phone conversations and try to build up some kind of plot around their lives and what on earth it is that might be happening.
I've had a wonderfully desultory time thinking up half baked ideas for novels that I shall never write, doing some proof reading and planning for the busy days ahead at the Ecumenical Kirchentag. I've been enjoying the lovely late Spring countryside, the cows in the fresh green fields which have an extra lovely covering of daisies dandelions and buttercups. Just a shame that from the train you can't actually hear the cow bells ringing.
I like longish train journeys like this, they give me time to be with myself to pootle with my thoughts, to not have to finish ideas and to catch up with being me.
As I type this we're going round lake Constance - Switzerland, Austria Germany - by sms I'm getting updates from Dr B on how the lib-con talks are going in the UK and how the FDP-CDU coalition has been defeated in Nord-Rhein Westphalen. And that Munich airport is closed due to volcanic ash - take the train folks!
But mainly I just look at the looming grey clouds, the wonderful lake and the true green of springtime and my thoughts potter forwards. We've just arrived in Lindau. One day I may even have time to spend a night here, it's a lovely spot for a weekend away.
So I'm not sure whether travel broadens or narrows the mind but late on a wet springtime Sunday it's certainly good for the soul
And of course when I've had a really brilliant idea for a blockbuster thriller I'll be sure to let you know - on the other hand I might just go and have a beer in the restaurant carriage!