Category Archives: faith

It’s how you believe …

Aside

A challenge from Richard Rohr’s meditation today: Wimagehy is it that Mother Teresa could stand up before crowds of thousands and repeat simple New Testament phrases and seemingly pious clichés, and still blow people away?!

She didn’t say anything new: “Jesus loves you,” she assured us. “We’re all sons and daughters of God, and we have to love Jesus’ poor.” Yet people walked out renewed, transformed, and converted.

She wasn’t a priest or minister. She wasn’t well educated. Her authority came from her lifestyle, her solidarity with human suffering, and thus her pure goodness.

Loving servanthood and foundational surrender are the true basis for teaching authority in the Church, much more than title, vestment, role, or office. Such lives have the living authority of Jesus himself, and need no special ordination or public validation. Jesus says to Simon Peter that he, and we ourselves, must first “be sifted like wheat,” and only then are we in a position “to recover and in turn strengthen others” (Luke 22:31-32). Such undergoing is the seminary that finally matters and that changes others’ lives. It was Jesus’ essential and first “recovery program.”

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20130212-075037.jpgToday’s thought from Richard Rohr has got me thinking … sometimes in life you need to sound a little ‘off balance’ to be in the right place.

In finding your True Self, you will have found an absolute reference point that is both utterly within you and utterly beyond you at the very same time. This grounds the soul in big and reliable Truth. “My deepest me is God!” St. Catherine of Genoa shouted as she ran through the streets of town, just as Colossians had already shouted to both Jews and pagans, “The mystery is Christ within you—your hope of Glory!” (1:27).

The healthy inner authority of the True Self can now be balanced by a more objective outer authority of Scripture and mature Tradition. In other words, your experience is not just your experience. That’s what tells you that you are not crazy. That God is both utterly beyond me and yet totally within me at the same time is the exquisite balance that most religion seldom achieves, in my opinion. Now the law is written on both tablets of stone (Exodus 31:18) and within your heart too (Deuteronomy 29:12-14), and the old covenant has rightly morphed into the new (Jeremiah 31:31-34).

the real thing ….

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urlPart of my role of being Priest Missioner of the Deanery means that I get around a few churches. Last week I was snowballed in St Mark’s while this week I presided and preached at the Eucharist and Healing service at St Mary Magdalene. 

My sermon came from the lectionary test for the day of Luke 4 : 14 – 21. As I have mulled this over during the week I think something new hit me, mainly that Christ seemed to be saying in these words that to receive from God you need to be aware that you have a need. If you believe you are all sorted and together and ‘near perfect’ then God cannot help.

I suggested that people outside church were not aware God was ‘for’ them because they had an idea that God, and church, was only for sorted and perfect and good people. I wondered whether this might be because quite a lot of us in church pretend that we are together and all right, rather than being honest about our fears, our struggles and our failings.

I wondered whether if we could be more real about the reality of our lives that people might be more genuinely interested in the God we follow? A God, that Jesus suggests in these words, are the underdogs, the struggling, the needy. I suggested the words of Jesus demanded this honesty and vulnerability and realness from us.

As I think about going out this week and meeting people again …. I simply continue to wonder as I try to be real with God, myself and others

continuing the journey …

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BAgAPwiCQAA-dzEthe gathering got together today for what has become a bit of a tradition for our first service in the new year. A tradition that sees us consider the Christian Journey and wonder where we are with God and ourselves at this particular time.

If you have not seen or experienced ‘the journey’ I have blogged about it before here and in other blogs. Essentially the journey is an exercise where we get to think about where we currently are in our Christian life. The Christian life, we believe, is full of different experiences that happen over and over again. In our particular journey we have:

the mountain top : experiences where the air is clear and where you feel close to God with renewed vision, lots of energy and stuff. Mountain top experiences are great, you can see the rest of the journey before you and have a great sense of where everything is heading, but you can’t live here for long, nothing grows and the air is then so soon you have to come down.
the valley: this path often follows a mountain top experience. The sides of the valley are high, the valley is narrow and dark and sometimes you need to trust what you sw from the mountain and keep walking.
rivers cross the path unexpectedly. These can be times of refeshment or simply playing the water. You can choose to take a bridge over them or play or drink from them awhile.
the desert … a place where often you can feek disconnected from God, or disorientated. This is not really an enjoyable place and sometimes we can feel we may even be losing faith. The deset is a harsh place, but from scripture we also know it can be a place of preparation.
lakes are places where we can wallow, rest, and simply chill with God. AS we chill sometimes we find our vision develops.
the sea …. a place where you can walk out, beyond your depth, and simply let the sea of God take you where it will. This can often involve  a step of faith of varying magnitude.

The image shows what our journey looked like today. After a brief introduction people of the gathering took glass beads and placed them where they thought they were on the journey today. Many of us felt that elements of our lives were in different places on the journey and so we placed a number of bead around different locations. Personally I felt I was in the rocky desert and in the shallows of the sea. Others were on mountain tops, in valleys, in lakes, deserts ….. members of the gathering were scattered around the whole journey. The exiting thing I find about the journey each time I do it with a group of people is that we are all at different places at different times, but we are all on a journey. Each of these places is valid and correct, there is no wrong place to be … all is sacred because all is with God! Often we fall into the trap at looking at where others are and wishing we could be with them or be like them, when, actually, we are where we are with God and that is the right place.

I quoted Vesey in Developing Consciousness last year, and his writing is apt following our gathering today:

You are always in exactly the right place to be able to take the next step.
It is an amazing realisation, that you are, right now, in exactly the right place to begin this journey.
Your whole life has brought you to this point. Everything you have ever done has brought you to the point of reading these words now. And everything has conspired for you to be in exactly the right place. You could not be in a better place.
And that is true for every single moment of your life.
You are never in the wrong place. All you can do is to not recognise you are in the right place, and then automatically you miss the point and opportunity of that moment.
To be in the right place at the right time you simply have to acknowledge  the rightness of the moment, and thus the moment become yours.
Do it now, without qualification.
Whatever our circumstances, wherever you are. Trust this moment as being one that is right. One that has meaning. One that is setting you on a journey outside the box, and it will be so. And what is the next step? Well … ask yourself that …. what is the next step? What do you do right now as the next step?

The gathering then concluded our time together by sharing communion and saying the Methodist Covenant Prayer together …. if you don’t know it go and have a read, it’s a pretty amazing thing to pray.

Thank you people of the gathering fro making today a pretty special experience …. her’s to continuing the journey …

are we ready to … Ask Seek Knock

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ask-seek-and-knockAsk …. seek …. knock.
Ask and it will be given to you.
Seek and you will find.
Knock and the door will be opened.

These words of Christ that have been both a comfort and a challenge to me over the years. It would seem that now, though, they are becoming increasingly more of a challenge than a comfort. It is easy to run these words off to ourselves and others as an indication of a warm comfortable promise but, on both a personal and ministry level, I am finding the warm comfort has shifted to allow more of the hot prodding poker of a challenge.

As I think around, and reflect upon, these words of Christ I am discovering that these words of Christ demand a certain level of authenticity from me. They demand an authenticity in understanding that there is no point in asking if you think you already know the answer. An authenticity that refuses to seek or search for something  if you are not prepared to accept, and act upon, what you find. An authenticity that will not knock on the door until you are willing to step inside, and stay awhile, should you be invited.

I have come across quite a few people, over the last few months, who are struggling with faith, truth and life. They are experiencing stuff that is not compatible with their current belief system or developed faith. I wonder, though, whether they are actually struggling with faith as such, or whether they are struggling more with their discoveries from their asking, their seeking and their knocking.

You see, this lifestyle of question (ask), explore (seek) and introduction (knock) can cause us problems. Only the other day a Christian friend asked me about some issue that they feel they cannot raise in their church because the very raising, or asking, would bring a negative reaction. I believe this is why pub theology, a safe and accepting place to question and explore, has worked so well.

If what we believe is the truth then it will, stand up to re-analysis in light of experience. I don’t think with the the ask, seek, knock thing that was Jesus suggesting that this was supposed to be a one off event, but more of a lifestyle choice? I can’t be sure, and maybe others can argue for the one off event thing … but I’m going to go with the lifestyle choice one …

To do that we must be prepared to change depending on what we may find as we question, explore and introduce ourselves. God is not in a tidy little box and neither can the love and pain of Gods creation be squeezed. Every time we encounter God we are changed … it’s inevitable …. God IS never-changing …. but as we ask seek knock maybe our understanding changes

So … Ask … seek … knock …. and see what happens!

I am enough!

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Following from yesterdays vulnerability post I stumbled across this TED talk from Brene Brown. It’s around 20 minutes in length and an amazing thought provoking talk.

The basis of her talk is that connection is what life is all about. She says. ‘connection gives purpose and meaning to our lives’. That simple statement echoes, for us, the words of God in the Genesis creation account, ‘it is not good for human to be alone’. She goes on to say that we all suffer shame, a fear of disconnection. The only way to avoid this disconnection, says Brown, is to be vulnerable …. to allow ourselves to be fully seen.

But, and this is a massive but, she concludes that many feel unworthy, unvalued, unloved and so we numb our vulnerability, and that as we numb that we numb other senses.

That is not the whole talk … so go listen! (and that will explain the title of this post!)

in the right place

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The blog has been quiet, not this time due to business necessarily, but rather due to the reading, contemplation and the need for space to mull, think and reflect.

I have completed a lot of reading recently. I recently started Nicholas Vesey’s Developing  Consciousness and am enjoying the reflection this forces me into. Nicholas has set up the Norwich Christian Meditation Centre. I like what they are doing and it grabs me in a way that has caused me to part with money to but this book that contains some of the journey and lessons from that journey that these people have been on.

I’m really enjoying the book and the way it is challenging me to think and slow down and wonder. A flavour of the book can be summed up in this quote from page 4:

You are always in exactly the right place to be able to take the next step.
It is an amazing realisation, that you are, right now, in exactly the right place to begin this journey.
Your whole life has brought you to this point. Everything you have ever done has brought you to the point of reading these words now. And everything has conspired for you to be in exactly the right place. You could not be in a better place.
And that is true for every single moment of your life.
You are never in the wrong place. All you can do is to not recognise you are in the right place, and then automatically you miss the point and opportunity of that moment.
To be in the right place at the right time you simply have to acknowledge  the rightness of the moment, and thus the moment become yours.
Do it now, without qualification.
Whatever our circumstances, wherever you are. Trust this moment as being one that is right. One that has meaning. One that is setting you on a journey outside the box, and it will be so. And what is the next step? Well … ask yourself that …. what is the next step? What do you do right now as the next step?

There is a liberation in being free to recognise that I am in exactly the right place, where I should be, right now … this very minute. Sometimes I have struggled to accept that, and over the last 5 or 6 days I have wrestled with that thought. But, I have come to realisation that I may need to embrace and accept this so that I can claim the moment, rather than miss the opportunity before me.

In that embracing of the moment, I am discovering a freedom to move forward. This seems to echo well with much of the stuff that has challenged me over the last few months, such as being rooted, Chardin’s trust in the slowness of God, Taylor’s total presence.
Accepting the moment … seems to be the way forward!

a sign of promise?

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The time away in Cornwall was great … the scenery stunning and the company simply beautiful. I find there are few places I can truly relax and be myself, but as we drove south I could feel stress floating away from me the closer we got to the Cornish coastline and our friends.

There was lots of space in Cornwall to rest and relax and think and pray …. my photo shows the amazing scene we woke up to one morning. I don’t think I have ever seen a complete rainbow before – it was a special and stunning start to the day with a timely reminder for me personally that God keeps promises.

It was a beautiful sight, it was an encouraging sight …. a sight that reminds us, as people, that all is not lost … that God is still clearly visible in the beauty that is at the heart of his creation.

the paschal mystery

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Todays meditation from Richard Rohr .. a good way to enter whatever the Tuesday of Holy Week may have for us:

Christians speak of the “paschal mystery,” the process of loss and renewal that was lived and personified in the death and raising up of Jesus. We can affirm that belief in ritual and song, as we do in the Eucharist. However, until we have lost our foundation and ground, and then experience God upholding us so that we come out even more alive on the other side, the expression “paschal mystery” is little understood and not essentially transformative.

Paschal mystery is a doctrine that we Christians would probably intellectually assent to, but it is not yet the very cornerstone of our life philosophy. That is the difference between belief systems and living faith. We move from one to the other only through encounter, surrender, trust and an inner experience of presence and power.

In other words … we need to live it out in our normal everyday lives!

a bench of bishops

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One of the highlights of being on placement at St Stephens over Lent ans been the Lent course planned by the Chatham Deanery of churches. On 5 successive Wednesday evenings they managed to get a bishop to speak as follows:

Bishop James Rochester: empowering mission relevant to our society and culture
Bishop Stephen Venner: how does war enable or disable mission?
Bishop Brian Tonbridge: What can we learn about mission from other countries?
Bishop Michael Nazir Ali: Mission to those with other faiths and none
Bishop Michael Turnbull: A Church of England kind of mission.

In that collection we have two former bishops of Rochester, the current and Suffragen bishops of Rochester and the Bishop for the Armed Forces … the deanery did well at getting them together! A you would expect the quality of the speaking has been excellent and thought provoking.  If there was one bishop missing, I would have liked to see Bishop Graham Cray with some title like ‘mission for new times’ … but in a way many of them approached that from their individual perspectives.

Rather than write after each bishop I have decided to wait and pull out one thought from each as I look back over Lent:

Bishop James took the text of Jeremiah 29 and challenges us to settle in the places we are called to. He implied many long to be moved from where they are and hold back … but we are encouraged by Jeremiah’s words to the exiles to put down roots and really become parts of our communities.
Bishop Stephen  took a line on warfare now being very complicated and so ministry and mission being complicated to; with Jesus demanding we love our enemies as well as our friends. This could demand that Christians could be in places and positions that could be both dangerous geographically and unpopular sociologically.
Bishop Brian got us thinking about worship and mission being two sides of the same coin, asking ‘is worship mission?’ and ‘is mission worship?’ It’s a great question as many seem to concentrate on one to the detriment of others.
Bishop Michael Nazir Ali  challenged us in how we balance the hospitality and embassy sides of our faith; that is how we welcome people and how we go out to people.he underlined this by reminding us that the Abrahamic call to be a blessing to others still stood! In response to some comments he reminded us that on this earth there is no God vacuum – God is everywhere and can be found everywhere!
Bishop Michael Turnbull finished the series by talking about the importance of people and their stories and that our beliefs should be seen as a framework om which our faith grows, using a plant growing on a trellis as an image. I liked this image as it showed that the plant (faith) grows around the framework (belief) in different ways and even beyond the framework leaving loose ends. To hear a mature and respected bishop say he still had ‘loose ends of faith’ or doubt but still had  firm faith is pretty encouraging!

As I said it has been a good 6 Wednesday evenings which has given us loads to think about. They all challenge me but I guess most are those thoughts to put down roots, to be a blessing, and notice God is all situations are the things that spoke to me the most.