sometimes a picture can say a thousand words and cause a big grin on your face!
The weekend …
1
The desert
It’s been an interesting week – in many ways a bit of a desert week which is quite fitting for the season of Lent.
This week I assisted at my first burial and I was surprised by how draining the experience actually was. The grief of those present was obviously natural, but also quite tangible. It is not often, I guess, that you go to a funeral of someone you do not know. So other funerals I have been to I have been sad and expected to be so; I guess it was a bit of a surprise to feel ‘grief’ with the family at the graveside.
The desert experience has also been added to this week with the need to produce a sermon for Sunday. A desert is quite a sparse place and creativity has been lacking from my week (as shown by a lack of blogging and a fairly empty faith book for this week).
During the week I have felt some resonance with, and enjoying thinking on Mechthild of Magdeburg’s The Desert Has Many Teachings I have particularly drawn from this due to the difficult deserty wilderness experiences that Mechthild of Magdeburg experienced as a result of writing such stuff.
In the desert,
Turn toward emptiness,
Fleeing the self.Stand alone,
Ask no one’s help,
And your being will quiet,
Free from the bondage of things.Those who cling to the world,
Endeavor to free them;
Those who are free, praise.Care for the sick,
But live alone,
Happy to drink from the waters of sorrow,
To kindle Love’s fire
With the twigs of a simple life.Thus you will live in the desert
The desert is an interesting space making environment.
Bread-less?
One of the good things about being based at the cathedral is that I get to start each day with morning prayer and we follow the lectionary bible readings for the day. The new testament reading for today is from John 6 and Jesus makes two statements:
‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ and then ‘I am the bread of life’
Two pretty radical statements in any context!
Throughout the day I have mulled this over and I had this thought or is it a question?:
If …
Jesus is the bread of life
How did the bread of life feel
Alone
In the desert
for 40 days
bread-less?
seeing differently
After reading Jonny’s Lent thought here I have been looking around me differently, looking to see what I will notice in the familiar.
I walk past this alley everyday but had never noticed it before until I took my camera on my prayer walk around Rochester. Things seem to become invisible in the everyday. I sometimes wonder if I have a massive blind spot of familiarity that needs healing.
Beauty
Following the beauty theme yesterday, I am thinking on this quote today from Kahlil Gibran:
‘Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.’
Do we decide when, if and how that light shines?
walk with poise
“For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.”
This quote from Audrey Hepburn has really resonated with me over the last few days. I’m finding during these early days of lent that as I look more to God I not only see the beauty in others but can walk with that poise that comes from knowing you are walking with God.
The Psalms tell me that I was fearfully and wonderfully made; one could say beautiful in a deep sense of the word. In some quarters the breed of Christianity today says a lot about grace, forgiveness, and how everything is up to God, how we need to allow God to work within us and so on.
I do agree with all that, although I think it can become an extreme that results in a mindset that tells us we do not need to put any real effort is as it is God that will do the work.
maybe its true that God made us beautiful, but our responsibility in maintaining that beauty is to ‘look for the good in others, speak only words of kindness and walk with that knowledge that we are never alone’
40 days of public solitude
40 days of public solitude goes live today.
’40 days, 40 people, 40 experiences. One glass box.’
I think this will be amazing and I look forward to seeing what will be created.
’40 days, 40 people, 40 experiences. One glass box.’
I think this will be amazing and I look forward to seeing what will be created.
Happy Birthday
it’s someone’s birthday today
she’s quite special to me
Happy Birthday
Archbishop Rowan’s Lent Reflections
Lent Unraveling
I read this at the Taize service last night:
Lent is the time set aside for unraveling.
We human beings are strange creatures, full, it seems, of deep complexities, complexities which stem from layers and layers of memories, lade down within us like layers and layers of rock in the earth, layers and layers of stratified memories which then solidify and become dense and heavy within us.These heavy layers of memory and history become such that they then govern who we are, they lock us into preconceptions and presuppositions, prejudices which determine our attitudes, our views of others, of the church, of our prospects, of what is going to happen as well as what is past. We become fearful, ungenerous people because we cannot escape from the layers of memory which calcify round our hearts.
Lent is a time for unraveling.
Sin derives from the fear of what will happen if your identity is undone.
Will you allow Christ to pull at the string and unravel your heart?
Melvyn Matthews Nearer than Breathing
(The photo is Kate’s)
The Shiny Headed Prophet 
