Thoughts from Nick...

What do you do with teenagers out of control? This poor mother’s two boys were making not only her life, but that of everyone in the neighbourhood, a misery. They were into drink and drugs, petty pilfering and antisocial behaviour of every sort and had as a result a reputation that brought shame on the whole family.

Maybe the Church could help? One Sunday she dragged the two bemused lads into the back pew of the local Saint Somebody’s, thinking it might teach them a little respect. What did she have to lose?

The vicar stood in the pulpit and began his sermon with a dramatic flourish.

‘Where is God?’ he asked the congregation, then pausing for effect he looked around and repeated the question ‘Where is God?’ Finally, a third time, summoning all his passion he cried out filling the church ‘Where is God?’

One of the boys nudged his brother in the ribs and hissed ‘They’ve lost God!’

His brother tugged at his sleeve ‘Quick let’s get out of here before they try and pin it on us!’

A medieval German mystic, Meister Eckhart said, rather enigmatically that ‘the best place to find God is where you left him.’

I wonder just what you make of that? Perhaps a lot of people feel they last had a glimpse of God in a church at Christmas. It seems a pretty good place to me to start looking if you never had looked before or if you haven’t for a long time.

Christmas certainly has an answer to the question of where God lives. The Gospel story names the town, if not the actual street; the wise men had a pretty accurate satellite navigation system, it seems.

But God, once, long ago limited by location has become in the person of Jesus ‘Emmanuel – God with us.’

The special times, the holy places exist to show us the potential every place and time has to be holy.

The time is now and always; the place is here.

Christmas joy and peace from us all at the Rectory

NOVEMBER 2007

Visitors often ask me ‘Do you get good congregations here?’ I try to keep a straight face when answering ‘No. They are all miserable sinners!’ The sensible and truthful answer to the question is that congregations in church on Sunday can be very low in numbers in deed. On that score it would be easy to lose heart, but there is another side to the story.

At least every other week I visit each of the village schools and here I have a congregation of over 200! The style of communication I adopt in that setting works tow ways. The questions and observations of children are always stimulating and frequently challenging.

In a class setting recently I had been asked to talk about church vestments. I took a selection of clothes I wear in church and invited a number of the children to model them. Some of them adopted interested postures, like joining hands in an attitude of prayer. That alone was interesting enough from children seen infrequently or not at all in church. I asked them to describe how they felt wearing these cloths. Answers included:

‘I should move calmly and quietly in this robe’

‘People will think I am important’

‘I feel I can do anything’

While their friends commented:

‘They look as if they are floating.’

‘He looks like an angel’

She doesn’t look her normal self’

We then discussed the reasons that the vestments are different colours. The children described the feelings they associated with each colour; I offered an explanation of when and an interpretation of why these colours are worn.

The changing colours highlighting season and occasions that reflect the life of Jesus and these connect with our own journey through life. So the gold of East and Christmas suits weddings and christenings. Red, which the children described as the colour of love and blood is worn to evoke the passion of Jesus and of those prepared to sacrifice themselves for faith in him.

Purple was the most expensive dye in the ancient world, worn by kings and judges and we see it worn in the season of Advent with its focus on the second coming of Jesus to judge the world. And at funerals where there is a gain a feeling of final weighing up under the scrutiny of a merciful king and judge.

Green is the colour of growth and being the colour of the village school uniform is naturally associated with learning. It is worn on the remaining ‘ordinary’ days of the year on which we learn of the extraordinary love of God.

October 2007

Over the last seven years, countless young [and not so young] readers have been avidly following the exploits of a boy trying to make sense of his destiny, and living with the discovery that his parents were killed by evil forces one dark Halloween when he was a baby.

Devotion to Harry Potter reached a thrilling climax back in the summer with the publication of the seventh and final book of his adventures by J K Rowling. In the opinion of some the author has done more than any in recent times to wean children away from the computer screen to the printed page, to others the subject matter of witches and magic is part of an unhealthy upsurge in the interest in superstitious old stories.

For my part, I’ve found the culmination of the series the most Christian of them all.

Harry confronts the tragedy of his past, sees his parents’ grave for the first time on Christmas Eve and as light falls from within the church he comes a step closer to realising the purpose of his quest. The discovery is that, like the child worshipped in that church he has to die. It is the great Christian discovery that through death comes abundant life, and if we doubt it, we can experiment with our own tiny sacrifices as often as we will, to get a taste before we have to physically return to dust and ashes!

In the dark time of the year the memories that emerge from the mist are of the twisted and broken victims of war, remembered on November 11th. As well as the collective tragedy remembered, November has traditionally given expression to our individual sense of loss as loved ones are prayed for at All Souls and so from this month there will be a list in each church to which may be added any names you would like remembered.

They are remembered at other times too, of course, as our well cared for and much visited churchyard testifies.

The ancient Christian custom was for funerals to take place at night and the body to be accompanied to the grave with lighted candles; a symbolic expression that our faith confronts the darkness, marches forward into it with the light of hope and in the belief that Christ conquered and banished that darkness in all its forms, forever.

So, Halloween becomes All Saints; celebrating the end of all our exploring, the discovery of who we are meant to be - the final ‘Hallo’ of recognition and greeting.

September 2007 - PEACE

As I settle down to write, the sounds of wood splintering and tiles being smashed, accompanied by the whining of a power drill reaches me from a couple of rooms away. Mingled with the happy noise of children playing in the background it is naturally hard to concentrate.

But imagine a quiet evening in Rusper Church, the shared silence of two or three or more sitting for three quarters of an hour, the silent space they are deliberately making punctuated by a sprinkling of short prayers or meditative thoughts around which to gather their own conscious search for God. In fact there is never perfect silence even there. The road and air traffic sounds, birdsong, a convivial hum from the pub and so on, muffled by the thick walls are welcome, even comforting reminders of the world in which we are praying, and what I think gives these moments such power is the willingness, albeit of a few, to be open to the presence of God in a way of his choosing.

I believe we all have a contemplative side to our personality, that needs healthy expression. This kind of prayer is accessible to anyone, although truth to tell part of us is uncomfortable with silent inactivity. There is always something to be done, and strangely choosing not to do it immediately can take quite an effort. Silence too can feel like a void, an emptiness. The experience of Keep the Flame, our monthly gatherings in Rusper Church however suggests another way of looking at it than the merely negative sense of an absence of sound or activity.

I’m conscious too that there are plenty in our society, who feel isolated by the ‘silence’ of their own company, and who can be forgiven for feeling frustrated by the limits of what is available to them especially perhaps in illness or old age. Maybe setting time aside in our active phase of life for this kind of prayer may prepare us to cope with such limitations when, perhaps inevitably, they become our lot.

Keep the Flame is a monthly period of exploring this experience, and it takes place between 7.30 and 8.15pm as advertised in the magazine. The next one will be on the evening of September 11th. That date still resonates with the fears and hopes we share for the very future of our world and so it is specifically to include a meditation on the theme of ‘Peace’.

Sometimes it takes the shattering of our peace and security for us to rediscover something deeper. So, the coming of Roly the Clown will have something to teach us with a light touch. The normal predictable rhythm of our services on September 16th is guaranteed to be upset, but just as the noise in our kitchen has a positive purpose in view so out of holy anarchy the church in our parishes will undoubtedly be blessed.

Come and find rest and refreshment. A disturbance, an interruption, may prove a pleasant surprise.

 

 

August 2007 - Looking ahead

The church was packed to hear the new vicar’s first sermon, and they were not disappointed.. He preached on the arrest of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. His listeners found themselves drawn into the events as if they were there. They felt the Lord’s agony, they recoiled at the bullying of the soldiers, they were silenced by the injustice and savagery faced by Jesus. He dwelt somewhat on that incident where Peter drew his sword and cut off the ear of a servant of the High Priest, bringing that moment and its significance to life. The following Sunday the new vicar began by saying ‘I would like us to think of that incident in John’s Gospel when the servant of the High Priest had his ear cut off by Peter’, and immediately launched into the previous week’s sermon word for word! Nobody mentioned it afterwards. It had been a busy week, they understood; settling into the parish not leaving much time to prepare a fresh sermon. However the following week to everyone’s consternation precisely the same sermon was preached! The churchwardens decided they would have to have a quiet word. Very diplomatically they suggested that as the coming Sunday was Harvest Thanksgiving they were sure that the sermon would reflect this. Understanding dawned in the vicar’s eyes he smiled and gave them every reassurance….

Harvest arrived and the vicar beamed from the pulpit at the congregation. ‘My text, ‘ he said, is Mark Chapter 4 verse 28 ‘The earth produces of itself, first the blade and then the ear’ which, curiously reminds me of that incident in the Garden of Gethsemane…’

The repetitive nature of things is reassuring, the rhythm of times and seasons has a soothing effect, surely never more so than at Harvest with its nostalgia for a lost idyllic rural existence, which I doubt ever really existed quite as we imagine it, even in our villages. I am sure it is not by accident that it was at the peak of 19th Century technological achievement that harvest services as we know them, first began.

 

The harvest parables in the New Testament are not about things going on as they always have. They are not looking back, but looking forward to the end of history.

Since Victorian times change has been accelerating. This fact is the source of many fears about where we are going, and the parables address these very fears with their message that ‘the end’ is not just an ending but will reveal the purpose and meaning of existence itself, and that this purpose and meaning is not being reserved for some far off event in the future, but is to be found in the most ordinary and natural circumstances of each moment of every day.

For those taking holidays in August, may it be a relaxed, happy and safe time. September promises to be an exciting month with the visit of Roly the Clown Vicar.

There will be a traditional festival service of evensong at on the 30th, with the visiting choir of the parish of West Grinstead.

July 2007 - To be sneezed at

'Simple things please simple minds' they say and one of my innocent pleasures over the years I've been ordained has been when out and about to say 'Bless you!' in a loud voice when I hear someone in a crowd or passing in the street sneeze. Almost always they turn round to say thank you then catch a glimpse of the clerical collar. The moment of eye contact on such occasions is priceless. I like to imagine them sometime later telling a possibly sceptical friend 'No, it really was a vicar'.

More than ever our society needs the gift of moments of comic timing. We hurry about, heads down, religiously sticking to our routine funny ways of doing things, afraid of being interrupted when deep down what we know we need is a suprise, ar evelation to prick the balloon of our seriousness.

A shared joke, a glimpse of nature, an intoxicating fragrance, the caring touch of a friend, stops us in our tracks and reminds us what really matters. God is ever present longing for us to recieve his blessing in these and countless ways personal to us. These simple blessings are infectious. We instinctively want someone to join us in seeing a rainbow, a sunset or whatever it may be.

Benedict was a young man who knew that such basic human experiences were what the Church should be nuturing. It was one of those times in history when religion had become an end in itself. A sense of dull duty kept the monasteries going... but what for? They had in many cases lost their vision. It can happen so easily without us noticing. We all fall down from time to time.

History has preserved next to nothing of biographical interest concerning Saint Benedict. All we know is of his modestly expressed ambition 'to establish a school of the Lord's service'. It was to be a simple place where the goodness of God would be rediscovered in the simple things. The monasteries that embraced this calling transformed society, bringing order out of the decaing Roman Empire and shaping the Western world we know today.

The very name Benedict means blessing or literally 'good word'. Good words have a simple but profound effect when we choose to utter them. Try it on your friends! ou will be amazed at how it really works. With practice you might even becme brave enough to take Jesus at his word and 'bless those who hate you'.