Walk or cycle a route you would normally drive
OK - so this may be cheating, but I'm adding a twist...I will try to walk the route down to hurch without resenting the fact that I can't cycle it as normal. If I can achieve that I will really have got somewhere.
I suspect I may struggle a bit with LLLL this year - the actions are quite active on the whole & I dont think the idea is for me to half do tasks that depend on others for completion. We'll have to see
say something nice about someone beind their backThe Dufflepud rocks! If you have to fall over in your kitchen & break your arm , make sure he is there. I cant think of an way in which he could have been kinder, more patient & gentle. And this is a teenaged boy, remember. I am a very fortunate woman
Yesterday I should have
done a local prayer walk
but, it being Sunday, that was just not going to happen, was it? I do try and make my walk up to the church a prayer for that community, and as I was presiding it was, as always, a gathering of the life of CK , the joy and sadness and all else in between...so I guess I sort of complied, - but a prayer walk per se? No. Fraid not
Today I'm supposed to find out the names of my closest neighbours...Can't do that, because I know them already. I'd love to go visiting instead...there are 2 or 3 houses in Privet Drive where things aren't too easy right now, where a bit of support might be welcome. But I'm desperately trying to get myself sorted to leave for 4 days at Lee Abbey, learning about Messy Church....so will have to content myself with combining yesterday and today by praying for those homes I really ought to visit.
Isn't that sad? A parish priest too busy with her own agenda to go visiting...George Herbert would not be impressed. Actually, neither am I - but as G Herbert is one of the reasons that I can't leave the house right now, I'll just have to soldier on and do what I can in other ways.
Please, those who know me best, don't laugh at the idea of my needing to learn about Messy Church! I've thought of all those jokes already - but this is something different and I promise to tell all on my return.I'm taking the lap top and will blog if there's a connection...
In case of doubt, though
LLLL Tuesday - Find out about a local organisation or event you could support
Wednesday - Leave a thank you note for your postie
Thursday - Give a friend a home made gift
Friday - run an errand for someone in your locality.
I'll report on my success or failure later, all things being equal. Mind you take care while I'm gone...
Do a chore for someone
Oh dear - I think I could succumb to martyred mother syndrome. Doing chores for people seems much too much like the stuff of everyday...Today, Dillon kindly made it easier for me be deciding to spend the evening eating grass and throwing up...so I had a whole extra category of chore to indulge in, but given that I'd washed up and dealt with the recycling too, I didn't really feel the need.
I guess the issue here is that though my family are pretty good at helping with household tasks, and all of them will cook quite cheerfully if asked, it still feels as if the tasks are mostly mine. So it's quite hard to feel that doing them has relieved someone else. Perhaps I can find something unexpected to do for WonderfulVicar tomorrow, to recoup the martyr points. Hope so..or today's action will actually have had a negative impact all round.
Irony - today's action is
TV free evening and play games instead
clearly a move intended to increase family feelings and generally make things warm and fuzzy. However, in the interests of those very concerns, Hugger Steward, the Dufflepud and I did almost exactly the opposite, since we sat down together to watch Shrek 3 (rented from Amazon - oh, what a glorious scheme that is!)
We almost never watch a film together...and none of us watch much tv...so this felt like a very family-friendly thing to do (though I was sadly disappointed in the film...Where did the humour go?).
HS had cooked a very tasty supper too - so I think on the whole the spirit of the day was preserved, if not the letter.
Ask someone in your house about their day
not the most challenging task in itself, though I guess the hope was that this might inspire a conversation between busy people who are usually too pushed to observe these considerations.
I tend to remember to ask most days, and my own frustration is with the "maleness" of the resident Flemings, who will either tell me "OK" or alternatively take me through a detailed resume of the facts of the day
"Well, I had Physics, followed by German..." - but without any exploration of what made the day good or bad, or indeed any clue as to the feelings they've brought home.
Even with LLLL pushing me onwards, I couldn't actually manage to turn this into a conversation. Bother. That's the sort of thing that would have been really quite helpful in these parts.
Ah well. C'est la vie.
My day? (since nobody else here is following the project, I'm going to tell you)
It was pretty good really. Morning Prayer was very focussed and just a joy...I do tremble at the thought of having no-one around who is automatically going to say the Office with me in the new parishes...I'll have to appeal for praying companions very early on, as I really do so much better when I'm sharing these bookends of my day.
Little Fishes went well too. I was slightly bemused as to how to explain Lent to the under 3s...Ended up using the felt "frontal" we produced for OpenHouse which shows the Genesis story of creation, explaining how good things were when God made the world, and then tearing newspaper up and scattering the pieces so that you could no longer see the beauty for the mess. I explained that the mess was so huge that we couldn't sort it out ourselves, and God had to come and do it for us...and the children helped to pick up the paper and put it in the bin. I told them that though Jesus had done the really big tidy up for us, we still made a mess ourselves (a few bits of paper were fluttered onto the scene) and we need time to think about that and to ask God to help us tidy up again.
What worked really well was the sheer shock value of the noise of a Church Times being torn across - it made even the little babies react and the toddlers were transfixed. I doubt if they'll remember what I was talking about - but the sound of ripping newspaper...well....
After Little Fishes, there was a family outing to view a possible school for the Dufflepud's 6th form, and, as we now have a set of keys for the future vicarage, a trip to show the house to the boys and do some measuring and planning.
This is my 2nd trip to the house since it's been completed, and it really is rather a joy, - specially the kitchen/family room, which is something we've really missed at Privet Drive. We've rescued the kitchen table from purdah and LCM has given in a fresh coat of varnish so it looks like new...I bought it for my first flat, the year my mother died, and it has lived with me in Sussex, in two London addresses and then in the Cotswolds - it's rather fun to think of it moving to a new house and becoming part of life there. Not quite as much fun as having a door we can shut to protect the parish from the harsh realities of Fleming family life and so preserve the illusion that their priest-in-charge is in charge of her own home....
Evening Prayer, then a baptism prep evening - for a giant baptism on Sunday week....1 set of twins and their big brother from Little Fishes, plus their twin cousins from out of town. The parents report that there will be a large number of children among their supporters - so it could be quite a hoolie! I'll let you know.
That's about it for my day. Oh, I've heeded my own warnings against over activisim, and abandoned attempts to follow the TearFund Carbon Fast. The new vicarage is apparently very green - with low energy light fittings, under floor heating and all sorts of other environmentalists' delights, so I'm not going to beat myself up about the unlikelihood of doing a proper job of improving things here - there truly isn't time.
Oh - and while on the subject of doing - and as further incentive to avoid manic busyness, what about these words of Thomas Cullinane, OSB? They were included in the diocesan Praying through Lent material for today
"The heart of the Christian message is that the most salvific moment in the history of the world was when one man was pinned to the cross, unable to do anything for anyone about anything."
It does rather make you think...
Say sorry to someone
the booklet suggested, with apparent absence of guile...but in the event, this turned out to be a real stinker. All through the day I hoped that I'd do or discover something characteristically dotty which needed an apology - but nothing happened.
The trouble is that I'm not very good at being bad when it comes to other people (with one huge and painful exception) and on the whole I'm so apt to take responsibility for all the ills of the universe that a day set aside to say sorry seemed faintly farcical. But what to do? It seemed to me that saying sorry for something when the injured party is blissfully oblivious that they might be injured at all (most of my nastiness is of the internal variety - of thought rather than word or deed) would actually be compounding the issue...I might feel better for having offered an apology, but my "apologee" could well feel substantially worse.
So in the end I left it....
Except, of course, that I didn't - for today has been Ash Wednesday. How better could I express my sorrow and those habits of mind and will which I most regret?
I started the day by presiding at a lovely, intimate Eucharist - with the unspeakably humbling imposition of ashes on those familiar foreheads.
"Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ"
I have a friend who substitutes comforting words from Jesus for these intimations of mortality. The penitents kneeling at his altar rail will be reassured that
"You are my friend" "I am with you always"...
One of our youth told me this evening that she really struggles with Ash Wednesday, with its doom and gloom and death - and I can quite see that this might be how it appears. For me, though, there is no foreboding in the words - simply a declaration of our common humanity, of solidarity in the face of time.
Always, as I mark those foreheads, I think of the people who knelt in their place a year ago, but are now dust themselves...and today we celebrated the life of one such, and committed him to God's care. The sun shone as the coffin was lowered into the ground, and the air was redolent with resurrection hope.
At the end of this morning's Eucharist, as I consumed the remaining wafers I had the sudden thought that each of these represented someone who would have chosen to be there if they could...so I made the act of consuming them into a prayer for each person in turn...L in New Zealand, E sick at home, M working out of town. Perhaps I'd been dim in not recognising this opportunity before - but the atmosphere in the chapel this morning made prayer (like penitence) easy.
Tonight I preached, suggesting that though taking on good projects was surely valuable, we must not hide behind Lenten projects to protect us from the interior work of facing and owning our own mess, repenting of it and then rejoicing in God's forgiveness.
After all, I think I did manage to "say sorry".
Today's directive was to
Invite your neighbours and friends to a pancake party.
I guess that was a bit easy - as we had a parish Pancake Party arranged already...at which friends and neighbours were undeniably present.
The evening suffered a tad from competitive partner syndrome, but Marcella's husband and mine had fun outsmarting each other while M and I giggled gently, and the final glasses of wine and tastes of chocolate were enjoyed too.
Marcella remarked that, unusually, this year Lent doesn't look quite long enough - and I have to say that as I contemplate those things which I have not done, and realise that I have only the weeks before Easter in which to achieve them, I couldn't agree more. Very very scary.
Earlier in the day I'd had a more productive look at the weeks ahead, via the Bishop's Quiet Day in the (rather frozen) Cathedral. This year the addresses were given by wonderful Vivienne Faull, who rather a long time ago was an unconscious participant in one of those occasions when God grabs you by the scruff of the neck and speaks slowly and clearly, so that even Kathryns cannot fail to understand. The occasion was the 1994 ordinations of the first women priests in Gloucester Cathedral, and Vivienne (then Chaplain at the Cathedral) was distributing Communion...I moved in line to her station, and as she gave me the host she looked at me and God said, quite unmistakeably
"That's where I want you next, Kathryn".
To sit in that same Cathedral and listen to her (very helpful) words today - conscious that I'm just 8 weeks away from my first responsibility post gave the whole thing a pleasing symmetry.
"Thy firmnesse drawes my circle just
and makes me end where I begunne".
Apologies, first of all, to those who read the title and were gripped with panic that Lent, already ridiculously early, had somehow started without them. The LLLL campaign this year clearly assumes that most people will be given the booklet by their churches on the Sunday before Lent, so yesterday was day 1...and the activity was to hear the story of the Good Samaritan (something I managed via Open House...where I was delighted to discover that in a staw-poll of congregation, most of the under 5s were happy to expect that Postman Pat, Revd Timms AND the scary skateboarder with hoodie and spray paint would all be good friends to the unfortunate traveller - oh to see the world through such hopeful eyes).
This year's focus is on "being a good neighbour" and once again we have 50 actions to lead us through a positive Lent...
Today were are invited to
contact a family member whom you haven't seen for a while...
Leaving aside my own nuclear family, I'm actually distinctly short of other relatives, so I was happy to substitute a good friend - someone, in fact, whom I've known since my post-grad year at Durham, 25+ years ago.
He has had an interesting time over the years, and at one stage our home was, I think, quite a needful bolthole for him, when things were tough. The last time I saw him was when I was made Deacon, 4 years ago. Recently life has cheered up substantially for him...He's getting married, and en route to that committment wanted and needed to make another committment, through Baptism. An email a couple of weeks ago was followed by a phonecall...
Would I be willing to baptize him?
Would I?!?!?
So he and his fiancee travelled down from London by train, arriving in Cheltenham early this evening. We had a wonderful hour in the study, discussing his baptism, my priesthood and all the difference that faith can make, then we went up to church together and he took this huge and wonderful step. There were just the 3 of us there in the building - but the presence of God with us was quite overwhelming.
This was a first for me - to baptize someone I know well, whose journey has intertwined with my own...to know some of what he is leaving behind, and to be conscious of the many people whose influence had brought him to today.
As I gave him the lighted candle, the whole building seemed flooded with light and joy.
It was, quite simply, awe-inspiring.
