Holy Week & Easter....in pictures

The high altar on Palm Sunday

The table set for Iona Eucharist

 Tenebrae

The altar of Repose at the Maundy Watch

The altar of Repose 

Nails in the cross on Good Friday

Walking the way of the cross...before foot washing at Good Friday family workshop

Preparing to take the cross to the Common

Easter Garden - made by Messy Church

Easter people?

Lent 2012 has been a Lent like no other for this family.

On the 1st Saturday of Lent my best beloved second mother, E, went home to God - so my personal journey through the 40 days took a very different direction from the one I'd planned, with less emphasis on personal holiness and considerably more on survival amid a deep ocean of grief.

A week after her funeral, on the first day when that grief was no longer the first thing of which I was conscious of on waking, my mother-in-law also took her leave of us....so my children lost two grandmothers in just three weeks. At the same time 14 parishioners also departed - so that this Lent was above all a season of farewells, some expected, some at the "proper" time, though no less sad for that....and some sudden, untimely, hard to negotiate.

Truly, a Lent unlike any other:so, fittingly, today's Easter celebrations were also unlike any other.

Though Holy Week I'd been very conscious of the burdens that some of my extended church family were carrying.Family struggles, harmful addictions, apparently irretrievably broken relationships.
They weighed heavier than usual this year and there were moments along the way when I caught myself grumbling that all these PEOPLE needed me when I ought to be worrying about the Liturgy - til God reminded me with great gentleness that there was no point in trying to worship his Son in the Eucharist if I had no time for Him among those people for whom I have a care.

After that things were fine - and the to-do list somehow got done at least sufficiently to pass muster...and the Triduum came and we were carried along on a river of worship as we shared in the events of the first Holy Week...and finally came to Easter morning.

And, of course, it was good - truly, more than good - but not a bit straightforward!

It was good that some of those with whom I'd walked the Way of the Cross over the past week were there to share in the joy of the Resurrection.
It was good that we welcomed baby H into the household of faith through baptism  - and I., baptised on Easter Sunday a year ago, came with his parents too.
There were friends from my title parish, a couple I will marry later this month, family from abroad, all sorts of wonderful people to love and rejoice with.
The whole of valley church was delightfully full and happy - when S., our no-longer-resident alcoholic, arrived.

He had already graced the 8.00 Communion with his presence, intermittently lucid and frantic, alarming us a little when he placed a sharp serrated potato peeler on the altar as part of his protest against the Church's failure to act to feed the starving during (I think!) the Irish potato famine, but quietening down as together we blessed the tree he has brought in memory of his friend J, whose funeral I'd conducted in January.
He spent quite a while demanding baptism rather loudly, - S does not have an "indoor voice" - before agreeing that I could baptise baby H. first, and departing for a while...

However as the 9.30 congregation erupted with joy into one more "HE IS RISEN INDEED! ALLELUIA!" before the final hymn, he was back - intent on conducting a conversation at full volume from one end of the church to the other.
No of course he didn't want baptism.
Everything was fine!
Life had never been better!
F****g great!
For a while we engaged in a slightly demented conversation by hand signals, me at the altar, S at the font - in which thumbs-ups figured largely...but he wanted everyone to know that he, Jesus, was alive...and that we ought to get out there and do some living ourselves.
Not a bad Easter message, I felt - though S did spoil things rather by throwing the liturgical dustbin lid (used for the loud noise at the end of Tenebrae, you know) about a bit...and striding down the aisle waving a glass of cider.
I began to suspect I was actually living in an episode of Rev once again - but was thrilled by how well the valley congregation absorbed him, with barely a raised eyebrow, and certainly no sense that he didn't belong there in the church.

It became a little more alarming when he announced his intention of joining us up the hill as well, - a much smaller building, with an older congregation and a generally more formal taste in worship. I tried to warn him that if he were noisy up there, it seemed inevitable that he would be asked to leave...but he was undeterred.
His first entrance, during the opening hymn, was full of poetic grace as he marched up the aisle bearing a branch of cherry blossom from the tree in the churchyard, which he placed on the altar - before leaving, blessing the congregation as he went with more thumbs-ups...though this time no response was forthcoming and he was asked to leave.
This happened several times in the course of the service.
I hated it...but could see, too, that in a smaller space his presence loomed large and somewhat threatening...and nobody should be frightened in church on Easter Sunday (or any other day).
How can I offer an embrace wide enough to encompass both the awkward and disturbed like S., with whom Jesus would spend much of his time, and the gentler souls who are part of the regular congregation?
If Resurrection means anything in the here and now, then it must have something to say to those who cling on to the edge of life and the edge of society...but it takes courage to open our hearts and our lives enough to include them.

I'm reasonably comfortable with S., but I know that if my children were small I might feel completely different about his presence in our churches...
and so many of the hill congregation, while clearly concerned about his situation and sad that life had clearly not treated him well, were anxious that I should learn from the tragic death of Fr. John Suddards, only a few miles away.
I'm keen to learn from it too - but I'm not sure that I want to learn the same lesson that my congregation wants for me..

So, amid the undoubted joy of today I'm asking myself how we live as Easter people, in a way that enables the flourishing of all?
What I might do differently to help my congregations fear less, when I'm sometimes fearful mysel?.
And I'm perversely proud of the signed inscription scrawled in OHP pen on my rear windscreen when I emerged from hill church at the end of the morning

"MY VICAR.COM."

Easter Sunday homily Yr A

And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it.

Just before we moved here, my son Giles and I spent three days staying in Rekjavik. It was February, there was snow everywhere and our hopes of seeing the northern lights were dashed because of the extensive cloud cover each night....Nonetheless, it was a wonderful and memorable visit – not largely because the peculiar geology of the place, based as it is on a series of volcanoes, make its presence felt in many ways...There were the plumes of steam that shot unexpectedly out of the ground, even out of the pavement, at regular intervals; there was the inescapable smell of sulphur whenever we had a shower, reminding us that the water on the island is heated geothermically...and of course there were the famous geysirs – hot springs named after the father and mother of them all, at Geysir itself. But the thing that made the greatest impression on me was, quite simply, a crack in the ground...You see, Iceland lies on the geologic rift between the Eurasian plate and the North American plate...and só, at a place called Tingvelir (close to where the world's first parliament was ever held) you can see one end of the fault that runs beneath the Atlantic and across America, emerging thousands of miles away in California as the San Andreas fault. I was fascinated to actually see this evidence of the shifting nature of the earth...and slightly disappointed that we didn't actually feel its influence directly, in the form of an earthquake.

Remember, this was three years ago. In the light of recent events in Haiti, New Zealand and Japan, I can instead be wholeheartedly thankful that we escaped direct experience of what happens when the plates of the earth shift or collide. The raw power unleashed in those events is incredible...changing lives and landscapes in a few moments, for all time.

Matthew is the only gospel writer who mentions an earthquake on Easter morning. Matthew tends to include the big things like that – he’s the one who tells us about the star and the magi coming to Bethlehem too. Matthew understands that Jesus’ presence in the world is a cosmic event, after which nothing will ever be the same. And so he tells us about an earthquake.
Earthquakes are measured by seismographs and studied by seismologists. Both of those words come from the Greek verb seismo. And that verb, which means to shake or to quake is all over the place in the end of Matthew’s gospel. Last week, we had the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem in Matthew 21:10 and heard that the whole city was in uproar, or in the Greek, the whole city was shaking Then again, on Good Friday as Jesus gave up his spirit, the earth shook. And now, in today's short gospel, it happens twice. The earth shakes while an angel rolls back the stone.  And then the Romans guards shake and become like dead men.

What’s all the shaking about? The world has changed. Just as an physical earthquake releases the tension built up beneath the earth's crust, só the tension between God's way and that chosen by fallen humanity has built up over centuries....The pressure mounts as Jesus both lives and preaches another route – challenging the powers that be, personally, socially, politically, religiously. Small wonder that they need to silence him...That's the story of Good Friday. The powerful take on and defeat the powerless...The vulnerable are wounded...Might trumps right.

That's Friday – the day when the sky turns black and hope seems lost forever....but on Sunday comes another earthquake – God's way of rearranging things, restoring the fullness of life to his world.

In the resurrection, God says Yes to Jesus and No to the powers who killed him.

God says Yes to the way of loving self sacrifice and No to a world set on domination, hierarchy, exploitation and greed.

That earthquake is the force of God's love, changing everything forever. It is the fault line running through history and through our lives, altering the landscape of both beyond recognition. We can't be sure that we'll stay safe – if by safe you mean, comfortable, secure, in an environment that you can control. I don't think that has ever been part of the deal when, through baptism, you begin to share Christ's risen life...

Not for nothing do the angels of the resurrection greet the women

“Do not be afraid”.

This is scary stuff, not a picnic in the park, or a quiet visit to a cherished monument.

This is an encounter with the life changing God, breaking into his world with all his recreative power – power enough to bring down the mighty, power that can, and does, make all things new....

This Easter we meet to celebrate a world turned upside down ...Can we, as we do só, invite the risen Christ to turn our lives upside down too.

Of course it is a risk.

It involves giving up control, shifting out of the driving seat forever.

Nonetheless, do not be afraid...

This is the God who transforms death to life, not just for his own beloved Son but for all who put their trust in Him.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Sermon for the Third Sunday before Advent, Yr C

With my thanks to my dear friend Songbird, and the contributers to the "Desperate Preacher" site...This week I surely qualified there!

November with dark nights and dreary mornings, with fallen leaves and bare branches, is a fitting season to contemplate life, death and the hereafter – and the church provides many opportunities to do so. Last Sunday, All Saints, we reflected on our calling to be saints here and now – filled with and transformed by God's presence in our lives...then on Tuesday, All Souls, I read aloud 241 names – the beloved dead that we remembered before God in that most moving of services. Next week we'll think especially of those who die in war...Wherever we look at this time of year, questions of life and death are there...Death, the elephant in the room, is shifting around, refusing to be quiet só that we can ignore it.

I'll never forget taking a funeral for an elderly lady in the early months of my ministry...Her grand-daughters, a few years younger than me, were the chief mourners and we celebrated their grandmother's life, the gift she had been to them and the difference she had made to the world, and stood together as we entrusted her into God's care. They laughed and cried and the service was a wonderful mix of honesty and idealism, as funerals só often are.

But afterwards, as we sat over a glass of wine, the younger sister turned to me and said

“I know that God is looking after Gran – but what I want to know is.......where is she now”

And that, of course, for all my training, I simply could not answer.

Every generation and every culture has wondered about what happens when life as we know it ends and there have been all sorts of attempts to make the unknown bearable...from the ancient Egyptians, filling their tombs with every possible physical essential, só that the dead will be fully provided for as they continue on their journey...to those who see life as cycle of death and rebirth, until finally we reach the freedom of nirvana. The Saducees, questioning Jesus, have no concept of resurrection, of life after death....so their question is at best mischievous. They don't really want to know what is going to happen to that poor, much married woman.

But I think that we often try to domesticate eternity by envisaging it according to the world that we do know, the experiences that are our daily lot. We imagine it as a sort of upgraded earth, where all the things we wish were different will indeed be put right.

But, as we are reminded in Scripture, "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him"--

in other words, - we just don't have a clue!

Heaven is completely different so the two big pillars of the argument -marriage and death- make no sense at all in heaven's terms. Marriage is for now – not for later. Death is for now as well– there is no dying then.

This is something that Moses understood as he recognised that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were alive with God – só he chose to call the Lord the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. He could simply have described him as “my God”, but that would have been to limit himself to the present....Instead he widens his horizon, bringing the past into the present and asserting that ancestors who are dead are alive with God.

Alive – but not in a way that simply continues and improves upon the existence we know right now.

We are not the same after this life. Resurrection is not the same as ressucitation.

Jesus was nothing if not honest with us. He assures us of a resurrection, but not of a repetition of our earthly lives. For some of us that’s a loss. But in many ways, and for many people, it may be a relief, too. Christ's own life, as it came to a human end, contained disappointment and betrayal, being let down by his friends and cruelly killed by his enemies.Jesus understood the pain of being human and he understood too the pain of dying.

“Now God is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive.

Jesus calls us to trust in the God of the living, and focus on our life here and now... and let God look after the next life. The how remains beyond us, as it did for Job when he proclaimed his confidence in the paradox that asserts

“For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;

and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God”

That doesn't make any sense, from our time-limited, material frame of reference – but imagine those words as set by Handel...and you will, I'm certain, understand their deep and lasting truth. For the moment it may be only through the lens of great art that we can have an inkling of what is to come...só i'm afraid I would still have no helpful answer for Victoria and her sister – but I hope that i would be slightly less embarassed by this failing.

I know that my Redeemer lives......and that God is the God not of the dead but of the living.......so I can, ultimately, trust him not just with my own life and destiny but, even more, with that of those whom I love most...both living and departed.....for to God all of them are alive.

Stepping Stones

Jesus says “I am the resurrection and the life”

Though I may sometimes wander from the straight and narrow of Common Worship, when I lead the bearers into church or crematorium chapel at the start of a funeral service, I always begin with these words. For me, it matters hugely that as we enter that space, with that particular task ahead of us, the first word that I speak is Christ's name.

Whatever may happen in the next half hour, for me this has the effect of planting a standard...It balances the moment when, in the baptism service, I anoint the candidate with the sign of the cross and claim her for Christ. It is, I suppose, a moment when we all need to know that God is a God who keeps promises.

But recently I was part of a discussion which included a priest whom I know, love and trust deeply. Our topic was resurrection...those resurrection moments when the world seems transformed (the morning after the Berlin Wall fell was one example, the day Mandela was freed another)...and trying We tried among ourselves to decide whether these were really resurrections – doorways into a new kind of life – or epiphanies – moments of recognition of underlying hidden truth. The conversation ranged far and wide, along many and fascinating roads...and I threw in to the mix that certainty that I always feel when I speak those words at a funeral service, that here is something quite different, quite, quite new...

My friend said that she no longer uses those words, because of their insistence on belief...which makes them, potentially, too harsh a measure against which to judge the eternal destiny of a much loved relative.

“What does it say,” she wondered “to those who feel themselves to be without belief?”

“Those who believe in me, though they die shall live and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die”

I guess that could indeed sound harsh, exclusive to mourners struggling with the painful reality of loss and I have sometimes curtailed the reading from John 14 which is so often chosen, because, I suspect, of it's cosiness, it's soothing reassurance that we are on a journey home...

“Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life...”.

I stop before the final sentence:

“No one comes to the Father except through me”

Is that dishonest?

Am I selling the gospel short?

Should I be handing in my license with immediate effect?

I really don't think so.

Do I, then, believe Christ's words?

Yes, absolutely....but I DO NOT believe that this means that those who never commit themselves to Christ are lost.

God loves us far too much for that.

Yes, Jesus opened the one and only gateway through death...He IS the Way...and it is only in him that we can see what it means to live a life fully in God's presence...only in him that we understand what humanity should look like...

But I'm confident that when people seem to reject Him, it's because we've failed to present the Truth in all its Beauty. They aren't rejecting God, but the limited imperfect version of God that we, whether in the Church or outside it, have offered to them.

Sometimes, wonderfully, God finds a way through the cracks...and people come to recognize God despite our inept presentations, our inadequate lives, our leaky theology.

I've written before of the impact that C.S. Lewis had on my world view in childhood – and those influences are as strong as ever.

I know, as far as I know anything, that there will be many who, like the Calormene soldier in The Last Battle, find themselves bemused and startled that their lifelong quest has brought them to a destination that they had never imagined.

I imagine countless souls gasping in wonder, and saying

“Now I understand. I never realized it was like this...”

But funerals are not the time for theology...for deep discussions and persuasive arguments.

They are a time to assert with all the faith and conviction that can be mustered that all is well, that nothing is lost, that love is truly stronger than death.

What matters more than anything is that as the priest leading the service I can believe for everyone there...that when I say

“Confident of Christ's victory and claiming his promises, we entrust X to your mercy...” I do indeed have perfect confidence in that victory, those promises.

So, for me, those sentences that begin the service are important...They are beacons of hope that shine through the maelstrom of emotions...stepping stones that we can rest on, fixed and firm amid the sinking sand of doubt and despair...

Like so much of the liturgy they are truly words of power, transforming people and situations so that the heartsick battered little group that gathers in a crematorium chapel becomes, as it needs to, a community of faith...clinging with desperate conviction to the promise of the cross and empty tomb.

Reflection for All Souls

Whenever we gather around the altar in obedience to Our Lord's instruction to share bread and wine it seems to me that the veil between earth and heaven is very thin.

When we join in the song of the angels in heaven “Holy, holy, holy...” I'm certain that if we cannot hear the angel voices, it is only because we aren't listening hard enough....but today, as we gather to remember our own beloved dead that great community is closer than ever.

Odilo, abbot of Cluny, gave us this feast of All Souls and fixed November 2 as a commemoration of “all the dead who have existed from the beginning of the world to the end of time.” So we pray for them, for ourselves and our children, and our children's children.

From the perspective of eternity, that barrier which we call death is non- existent. Where there is no time, no past, present or future, then there can be no endings or beginnings...as the hymn would have it

“All are one in thee, for all are thine”

We pause to remember and to pray for those whom we love but see no longer, knowing that the ties that connected us in life, that made us pray for them and they for us, remain un-broken.

Standing in God's closer presence, I know they are still praying for us...as we for them.

We pray not to rescue them from the bonds of hell – our God offers unconditional love, welcome and forgiveness and our 1^st reading spoke truth

" The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God and there shall no torment touch them”

Rather we pray with thanksgiving for lives that have enriched our own and with confidence in the God whose Son destroyed death forever, and showed to the world that there is nothing in all creation that can separate us from God's love.

Friends on earth and friends above...all one in Christ Jesus.

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening
  into the house and gate of heaven,
to enter into that gate and dwell in that house,
where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light;
no noise nor silence, but one equal music;
no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession;
no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity;
in the habitations of thy glory and dominion,
world without end.

Music for All Souls

The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them.

They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us, utter destruction. But they are in peace.

There are no easy words

My beloved friend, whose parish is only 15 miles from here, finds herself conducting untimely funerals, for babes and children, far too often. Given the economic profile of parish in the valley, I'd expected to find myself in a similar position when I moved here from my affluent title post - but though there is a collection of tiny graves in the valley church yard, it wasn't until last week that I found myself standing at the head of the nave while a tiny white coffin was carried lovingly in by the little one's father.

I was worried that, having lost too many babes myself, I might be too emotional to function well - a worry that escalated when the family decided to use Coldplay's "Fix You" as the central item in the service. For various reasons, that's a song that makes me rather weepy at the best of times, but having asked pretty much everyone I know to pray, it wasn't surprising that all was well.

I did a lot of tinkering with the Common Worship service to make it feel less oppressively wordy...because, after all, there are few words that help in this situation. I found some resources that seemed right - so am posting them here for anyone else who is trying desperately to get out of God's way in this sort of situation. I found much to draw on from Dorothy McRae McMahon, and from the New Zealand Prayer Book - as well as little book that Sr Frances Dominica of Helen House put together as a resource for parents...In the end, of course, words can do little - but they do give you some comforting purpose as you stand alongside parents in their pain.

Here's what I said in the address, following 1 Corinthians 13, quite beautifully read.

These three remain, faith, hope and love...and the greatest of these is love”

There are no easy words today.

We come with hearts full of the pain of grief and with minds numb, or filled with one insistent question

“WHY?”

And to that I have no answer.

O. has been loved and longed for over so smany weeks and we are rightly appalled that the joy of birth should be transformed sunexpectedly to the sorrow of parting.

There ARE no easy words.

At times of great suffering, people of faith look to their God for some meaning, and when that is hard to come by may at first turn away, defeated.

But we are here in church, and behind me stands the cross.

In the agony of his own death Jesus cried out

“My God, my God why have you abandoned me?”

As he voiced his own suffering he quoted too from the book of psalms, the ancient prayer book of the Jewish people. Here again and again men and women faced with situations that made no sense poured out their anger and misery in passionate lament.

To do was, and is, an act of faith.

These outpourings at least keep the conversation, the relationship with God alive, and God has broad shoulders that can hold us through the storms until the worst of the heartbreak and anger have passed.

Perhaps this might be the route for us today?

God, we are told you are compassionate:

today this is hard to believe.

God, we are told that you love us:

today we do not feel loved.

God, we are told that we should offer you our praise and thanksgivings,

today all we have to offer is anger and confusion.

God, despite these feelings we turn to you,

today there is no one else to turn to.

God, hold us until we can believe again.

God, love us until we can feel your love again.

God, accept our anger and confusion until we can offer you praise and thanksgiving again.

God, our lives and our feelings rise and fall but you remain constant.

Help us to rest in your eternal changelessness.

(Michael D. Smith, cit. Just My Reflection Frances Dominica ASSP)

Faith, then, has nothing to do with glib answers: it is, rather, the force that drives our questions.

But Hope too seems strained and broken by disappointment today.

Through the weeks since his conception, O carried many hopes - for his parents, of course, - but for each of you here in some measure. Now we are asked to lay those hopes gently down and it hurts, terribly.

But, X & Y, the very act of being here, of getting up each morning, of preparing meals even when you don't much want to eat them, of managing somehow the ordinary everyday things of life is itself an act of hope.

It says "I will not turn my face to the wall. I will carry on. However hard it may be, tomorrow matters

And love? Oh, that's both the easiest and the hardest part.

Conceived in love, carried and born in love, O knew nothing but love through every precious minute of his life, and it is in that love that he will live all your lives long.

But even beyond that, I am certain that with God nothing is ever lost or wasted.

The love the brought Jesus through the darkness of death into the dawn of everlasting life holds O secure and reaches out to each of us today.

It's hard to feel it as we struggle with grief but, like the sun behind clouds, God's love exists as an objective reality...

In a moment we'll listen to Coldplay's "Fix You.." with its overarching themes of loss and redemption.

If care and love could have helped O to live, we know he'd be with us...but now hear God's promise that O HAS been guided home, to the place where we all truly belong.

Listen and try to believe that, amid all this pain and confusion, God is still there, still saying quietly

“I will try my best to fix you”

“now these three remain, faith, hope and love...and the greatest of these is love”

Music : Fix You

Let us, in silence, give thanks for the life of this child.

Each moment of our journey with this life is precious to us.

Even as our thankfulness is overwhelmed with grief

sthat our joy is misted in pain,

we give thanks for this life and for all life. 

(Space for reflection)

Lord Jesus Christ

Your took children into your arms and blessed them.

Keep O in your loving care

And bring us all to the heavenly kingdom

Where you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and forever

Amen.

God our Creator, from whom all life comes

Comfort this family,

Grieving for the loss of their hoped-for child.

Help them to find assurance

That with you nothing is wasted or incomplete

And uphold them with your love

Through Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen.

X, Y, you are not alone.

We are here together, ordinary human beings

who travel through life's pain and possibility,

holding on to one another with surprising courage and strength,

facing each day and each moment, whatever it may hold.

In your grieving we are with you

In these next days we will be beside you.

You are surrounded and held by us all

And by the tender love of God.

Receive our love.

In memoriam Jonny Leonard

Remembering with gratitude a wonderful musician (he played at my wedding 25 years ago) and a lovely man, who died yesterday in South Africa. He was organ scholar at University College Durham when I was a post-grad there, and we continued to cross paths for a good few years afterwards, losing touch when I moved from London, but reconnecting last year via FB. 
I'm glad to have known him, gladder still to have sung for him - and saddened that his music is stilled.


Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening
  into the house and gate of heaven,
to enter into that gate and dwell in that house,
where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light;
no noise nor silence, but one equal music;
no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession;
no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity;
in the habitations of thy glory and dominion,
world without end.

So many gifts

are given, unlooked for, in ministry.

Over the past few weeks, I've been ministered to again and again by V., as she and her husband together looked honestly at her cancer, shared longings, griefs, hopes and fears...Bless them, they included me unconditionally on this journey, and whenever I visited I came away refreshed, encouraged. They trusted me with so much, affirmed my priesthood in countless ways, blessed me whenever I encountered them.

I visited with Communion yesterday, but V didn't feel up to receiving, so instead I left her a holding cross I'd bought for her in Bath last week, and that lovely prayer of Augustine's that gets me through even the most anxious nights. We agreed that we'd pray it together sometime around 10.00 most evenings, but tonight it wasn't even 9.30 when I answered the phone to hear that V had gone quietly home to God two hours ago. I wish I had been able to pray with her one more time. In her dying, as in her life, she gave a great deal and I thank God that I knew her.

These words by the ever wonderful Stewart Henderson are not mine to post, but I hope I'll be forgiven as they say so much of what I'm feeling tonight.

Go well, V....to eternal rest and light perpetual.

this day in paradise
new feet are treading through
high halls of gold

this day in paradise
new legs are striding over jewelled fields in which
the diamond
is considered ordinary

this day in paradise
new eyes have glimpsed the deep fire ready
to flame the stale earth pure

this day in paradise
new blood, the rose red juice that gushed at golgotha
now ripples and races down the pure veins
of a recently arrived beloved

this day in paradise
a new heart pounds in praise
a new body shaped by sacrifice

this day in paradise
the daunting dart of death
has no point
no place
and no meaning

and whilst we mourn and weep
through these human hours
this day in paradise
the blazing embrace
between saviour and son goes on and on and on...

(by stewart henderson)

Rites of Remembering

Today's All Souls Eucharist & Commemoration of the Departed draws a line for me, I think, under the recent tide of death-beds and funerals. I know that at least one more funeral will fall into my diary sometime very soon, since dear I., who fought so long and hard, finally went safely home to God on Saturday, and I know too that others in my church community are engaged in life and death battles of their own, that there will be the need to explore the deepest issues, the four last things before too many weeks are past.

But for the moment, I seem to be standing in a clearing - and that feels good.

Don't mistake me - I love and value this aspect of ministry hugely; sometimes, when fabric and finance seem to be demanding most of my time, I catch myself thinking "I badly need a funeral to remind me of what I'm really for..." but even so, officiating at 12 in 15 working days felt somewhat overwhelming.

I wondered, in the course of that run, whether I was quite mad to offer both "Journey On", and the full All Souls Requiem...Many of the same people would come to both, I thought, but the services work in very different ways. "Journey On" is, really, church for the un-churched. Very early in my curacy I spoke with a widower who told me that the hardest experience of the first few months after his wife's death was the moment when he heard her name remembered among the departed at the Sunday Mass...It seems to me that to ask people who are not habitually at home in church to deal with that extra emotional burden may not always be kind - even leaving aside the question of whether we manage, as I profoundly hope that we do, to make it clear that everyone really IS welcome at the feast. Hence, "Journey On", which gives them the opportunity to do their remembering in silence, or through the comfortable familiarity of lighting a tea- light.

This morning's Requiem for All Souls, on the other hand, has the sharing of Communion at its heart. In my homily I spoke a little about the continuity of love and prayer that allows us to say, like Thomas More
"Pray for me as I will for thee, that we may merrily meet in heaven", and about the presence of the whole church, living and departed in the Lord Jesus, as we break bread and share wine as He commands. It was good to stand before the altar and proclaim Resurrection hope, to offer the Gospel promise
"This is the will of the one who sent me, that I should lose nothing that has been given to me, but raise it up on the last day".
The congregation that appeared was too large for the Lady Chapel, so we moved into the quire and my voice sounded loud to me as I read the long list of names, allowing each one to rest on the air before gathering them all up, with so many countless others, as I prayed the Kontakion with its surprising moment of joy

"weeping o'er the grave we make our song
ALLELUIA!
Give rest, O Lord, to thy servants with thy saints
Where sorrow and pain are no more
Neither sighing, but life everlasting"

So, I'm glad we offer both routes to remembering...but above all I am thankful that as we stand at the altar we are, all together, the Body of Christ - taken, blessed, broken...

A seed is an act of faith...Address for Journey On

A seed is an act of faith…

If I knew I was going to die tomorrow, I should plant a tree today..
So Martin Luther King summed up the faith and hope that is represented by each seed consigned to the earth.

When we look at a single seed it is so ridiculously tiny…really not much to go on to represent the future. Last spring I dropped a seed packet in my kitchen and many individual seeds were quite simply lost, among the dust on the floor –but within themselves, each and every one of them was replete with potential.

We recognise this whenever we place a seed in the soil.
We trust that, though most of us probably don’t understand quite how it works, given a bit of care and reasonable conditions, that seed will germinate and grow to provide new life where there was none before. And we are able to believe this because we’ve seen it happen for us, year after year…but nonetheless, each planting is, truly, an act of faith.

Paul would have us think quite a lot about what happens to the seed as it lies in the ground…but I’m not sure that his analogy is too helpful for us today, any more than when it appears among the suggested readings for use at a funeral or memorial service. After all at that time, most of us are completely focussed on the reality of saying Goodbye to the beloved body that has been put aside by the person we love, the remains we are just then putting into the ground. We don’t need anything else to remind us of just how perishable, how fragile that precious shell the body can be. We wouldn’t be here at a service like this if we weren’t each of us having to live with the consequences of that fragility, day after day after day.

So Paul’s clever analogy with gardening doesn’t necessarily make things much better. We know the science but translating it to another context is a different matter. It can be so hard to visualise any sort of bodily resurrection. Even if we’re sure that we’ll see our loved ones again, it’s very difficult for us, this side of the divide, to imagine quite how that will turn out. Sometimes, not understanding makes it seem simply impossible to believe: I’m afraid I don’t have any sure-fire answers to that one, because, of course faith is never the same as knowledge, and we can’t use the same objective reasoning to confirm our hopes for eternity. It just doesn’t work that way.
It’s one of those times when we can only trust to faith- if we have it - or to the instinct that confirms for us that something, someone we have loved so much cannot simply vanish as if they had never been.
I believe that…
I believe it from my own experience of the death of my parents and other dear dear people…
I believe it because I have Jesus’s own promise that it is so…but I cannot, in all honesty, tell you exactly how it will come to pass in God’s economy, in which nothing and no-one is ever wasted.
So, though I want you to think about seeds I’m not going to explore Paul’s words too much at the moment.
Who can really understand the Resurrection?
But he’s right that we all understand gardening.

I want to think, though, about other seeds…the seeds of faith and hope that lie in each one of you, the seeds that have enabled you to carry on even when grief is sharpest, on the days when the separation is almost too much to endure.
Sometimes, I know, they seem so fragile that you doubt that they will actually grow at all…but each day you get up and engage with life and remember to have breakfast you are saying
“It IS worth it…Death shall have no dominion over me
Writing earlier in this same letter to the Corinthians, Paul reminds us that we carry within us seeds that can bloom and flower in our relationships, the seeds that make us fully human.
“These three remain - faith, hope and love
When we are grieving the loss of someone dear to us, it’s tempting to say
“I’ll give up on love – because that way lies only hurt and desolation…”
but even if we no longer feel ourselves able to give or receive love, love nonetheless surrounds us. The love of our families and friends is a huge comfort – but it’s not something that we are all blessed to enjoy. The love of a community feels rather different – sometimes a little impersonal…but it’s still worth having…And even if we feel ourselves cut off from all these everyday experiences of human love – even then, we are still shaped and held by love…endless love, which is stronger than anything in the whole of creation.

We may not be able to say that we understand what happens next, but we can continue to nurture the seeds of faith, and trust that all shall be well, that the God whose who nature is love did not create anything to be destroyed or wasted.
We can hold onto those split-second reminders of his greater reality, the moments when an unexpected kindness, a child’s smile turns the world bright again for us, however briefly…We can cherish those seeds and keep them warm and close to our hearts, the place where they most need to grow. That growth may take a long time, for after all we’re not planting for the short term, something to spring up and die back in a season, but looking for something to sustain us each day.
So, no quick fixes,no short cuts, but I promise that as we journey on in faith, the glimpses of hope, the hints of love will slowly grow and come to fruition until we can each own for ourselves the promise
'Love is not changed by death and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest'

Journey On

Is the annual "service of remembrance & thanksgiving" we offer to those families with whom we have had contact through funeral ministry in the course of the past two years...
In format it is pretty much identical to the service I produced for my training parish, but while their service occupied the Evensong slot at 6.30 on a Sunday night, and was followed by strong drink, ours, reflecting a rather different social context, is an afternoon event - with tea to follow.

This year there were over 80 families on my invitation list, but in the eventabout half that smaller number gathered - whom I devoutly hope were the people who really needed to be there...We sang, we prayed, we lit candles and I talked about the seeds of faith and hope that we carry within us, the seeds that make us carry on, even when it seems an almost insurmountable struggle. I'm never sure if the candle lighting or the tea is the most important aspect of this service; there were some deep and significant conversations as we tried our best to do justice to a bewildering array of cakes...but when I locked the church this evening, it was the cross of tea-lights that nearly undid me.

Always when I invite the congregation to come forward to light a candle, I make it clear that they can use the opportunity to place ANY bereavement, - a broken dream, a lost hope - within the circle of God's healing love. Many chose to light more than one candle, and as I stood in the darkened church, alone at last after such a busy time, those lights shouted to me of untold, unknown stories. But, after all, I don't need to know...Each light stands both as a silent prayer and as a statement of intent. In this place, for these people, death SHALL have no dominion..."It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness"

All Saints

Of course we didn't forget All Saints, though it felt slightly squeezed by the two All Souls tide commemorations...
Because it was a first Sunday, the service in the valley was an All Age Communion, where some children I'd worked with at school led lovely prayers based on the random selection of saints they had chosen and though it wasn't exactly a high solemnity, as it will have been in my former stamping ground, there was still alot of joy about the place and, using our revised liturgy for the second time, the pace was good and a straw poll of children and parents suggests that the format works for them. Hallelujah!
In the afternoon we celebrated Church on the Hill's Patronal Festival with a Songs of Praise, plus guest preacher - the Archdeacon of Gloucester. As in the valley, patronal festivals had been neglected in recent years so the turn-out wasn't amazing but the choir included singers from both churches and there was some almost hearty singing, to compensate for the absence of heating (I'm beginning to wonder if there's some malevolent power at work to ensure I am well and truly frozen this autumn). It would have been lovely to have a whizzy SATB double choir to sing an anthem, but that is currently the stuff of dreams...
So instead, here's what I would have loved them to sing, had they actually existed


The music is William Harris, the words Edmund Spenser - and I've loved them both since I first sang them at Cambridge, far too long ago. If there are enough singers around, I'd love this sung at my funeral.
I hope and believe that this is truly how it will be - and the perfection of the music "as to the highest they approach more near, yet is that highest farre beyond all telling" seems to me to express an echo of the beauty it describes. Utter bliss.

Faire is the heaven where happy soules have place
In full enjoyment of felicitie;
Whence they do still behold the glorious face
Of the Divine, Eternall Majestie;

Yet farre more faire be those bright Cherubins
Which all with golden wings are overdight.
And those eternall burning Seraphins
Which from their faces dart out fiery light;

Yet fairer than they both and much more bright
Be the Angels and Archangels
Which attend on God's owne person without rest or end.
These then in faire each other farre excelling
As to the Highest they approach more neare,
Yet is that Highest farre beyond all telling

Fairer than all the rest which there appeare
Though all their beauties joynd together were;
How then can mortal tongue hope to expresse
The image of such endlesse perfectnesse?

All Souls

"All below and all above
One in joy and light and love"

That was the message that I had hoped to convey with this morning's service, the Eucharist for All Souls, with Commemoration of the Faithful Departed.
For no particular reason I'd not presided at this during my curacy, but had the feeling that it might very easily stray into the mournful and morbid. St M's, for example, even had a set of black vestments for the occasion (though I'm not sure they were actually used in recent years).
In contrast, I wanted to remind those present of their membership of the Communion of Saints, the great body of the Church stretching through time and space. I wanted to pick up the thought that, when we gather to share the Sacrament we are feasting with all those whom we have loved who are now in glory.
We had an enormous list of names to remember - well over 80 - and a congregation large enough to need extra chairs in the Lady Chapel. Very few of those present today had come on Saturday - reinforcing my feeling that there was value in offering both sorts of commemoration.- and almost everyone there came up to receive Communion.
As Common Worship suggests, we had the commemoration of the departed after Communion.M. the Reader and I shared this, reading name after name...some I had known and loved, some I'd accompanied in their final hours but most of them were "just names" to me.
But each one had been placed on the lists with love, regret and hope and as the names went on I had a growing sense of all of them crowding around the table...
At the end of the commemoration, I read the Russian Kontakion and felt the deep reality that means that Alleluia is part of our grieving, that we do sing even while we mourn, because in the end we can trust that no-one will be lost, that everyone is held secure in the endless love of God.
It was incredibly, unexpectedly joyful.

Give rest, O Christ, to thy servants with thy Saints,
where sorrow and pain are no more; neither sighing
but life everlasting.
Thou only art immortal, the Creator and Maker of man,
and we are mortal, formed of the earth
and unto earth we shall return.
For so thou didst ordain, when thou createdst me, saying:
Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
All we go down to the dust, and, weeping o'er the grave,we make our song;
alleluya, alleluya, alleluya.

Journey On

Four years ago, as a newish curate at St M's, WonderfulVicar encouraged me to devise a service of remembrance and thanksgiving for those with whom we'd had contact via funeral ministry...I appealed for help in naming it on this very blog and it was John, I believe, who came up with the title "Journey On".
Fast forward to autumn 08 and I find myself responsible once again for deciding how best to mark this season of rememberings. Past custom here had included lists of names read out, but that seems to me to place an extra burden on the bereaved...to sit there, in an unfamiliar environment, nerving yourself for the one name which you both long and dread to hear, the name that has lead to your being there in church at all...I don't think I could stomach it, and I'm an insider.
So, I decided that we would do a proper Eucharist and Commemoration of the Departed on Monday, All Souls day itself, (a service aimed at the more comfortably "churchy"), and also a list-free alternative, with candles, space and silence for those who wouldn't normally turn to the church for comfort and consolation. I decided that, as I'd produced the St M's original, if there were any copyright it was probably mine, so I lifted title and content pretty much unchanged. The plan was to write to all those with whom we'd had contact through funerals, though this proved quite challenging in itself, as during the vacancy a wide variety of clergy had provided funeral cover, so that it proved possible only to track down those families who had actually had a service in church...Those which were crematorium only (a high percentage, if recent months are a guide) seemed to be untraceable. However, I sent out several dozen letters, smiled as sweetly as I could at the wonderful cake-making ladies of the social committee and then left it all with God, having no idea how it might work here.
In percentage terms, I guess the turn-out was not wonderful.
In terms of needs met and appreciation expressed, this afternoon's service was remarkable.
Around 30 people appeared, sang, prayed, cried and lit candles.
The choir, bless them, had agreed to turn out to lead the singing and their presence provided something even more important - a sense that these families and their loss mattered to the whole church family.
Over tea afterwards, one lady told me that "she wouldn't have missed it for the world" and two or three said that they used to be part of the church family and weren't quite sure why they had stayed away for so long.
Maybe, just maybe, a positive experience this afternoon will encourage them to visit again sometime. If nothing else, they know that we're still here for them...that the church goes on caring...that dark winter evenings need not always be lonely.

Before I die...

Talking to a good friend this afternoon, we shared our feelings of shock and sadness at Tom's death, and she observed that we are maybe at the stage in life when friends will begin to leave us suddenly, "before their time..."
What, we wondered, should we do in the next few years, to ensure that we avoided too many "if only"s when our time is done.

Then, fortuitously I presume, Jonny posted a link to this project
Hundreds of people are photographed together with with a sentence "Before I die I want to...."
Interesting, poignant and occasionally surprising reading.

In this vein, I always remember the words of the much-missed Mike Yaconelli
(another who went too soon)

If I were to have a heart attack right at this moment, I hope I would have just enough air in my lungs and just enough strength in me to utter one last sentence as I fell to the floor: "What a ride!" My life has been up and down, careening left then right, full of mistakes and bad decisions, and if I died right now, even though I would love to live longer, I could say from the depths of my soul, "What a ride!"

I want a lifetime of holy moments. Every day I want to be in dangerous proximity to Jesus. I long for a life that explodes with meaning and is filled with adventure, wonder, risk, and danger.

So...here are some of my "Before I die" wishes...

• to return to India with my children and swim once again in the Indian ocean
  
• to see the Northern Lights
• to visit Africa and see the places that mean so much to Hugger Steward
• to see my children happy and beloved
  
• to open my home to those who need a loving refuge
• to write something I am really pleased with
• to mend or let go of broken relationships
• to relish here and now, wherever they may be

What about you?

Too many deaths

this week.
A., in his 20s, the son of the Dufflepud's Explorer leader from CK, killed by a mud slide while at work (a victim of this mad and dreadful weather)
D., a colleague who had retired from her NSM ministry in the parish next to mine in July on the advice of her doctor but continued to be one of those who hold a community together by her prayerful presence, dead on Sunday after a huge heart attack.
And now, checking bloglines, my heart lifted as I saw that Tom had posted...only to discover that the post came from his daughter, telling readers of her father's sadly early departure. I only knew Tom through his remarkable blog. We repeatedly failed to meet, and kept saying "next year at Greenbelt", - but now I'll have to wait for heaven. I stumbled across him in the early days of this blog, and his was one of my "must reads"...His grounded wisdom, his creativity and kindness will have inspired many. He was surely a great priest, and I will never forget an email he sent me after I had lamented my lack of courage at a chapter meeting in the wake of the Windsor Report.
I'm thankful for his life and so very sad for his friends and family.

So many losses - it all feels a bit much right now.
A., D, T - rest in peace, and rise in glory.