Christian but sane

UNthinkable?

2011-06-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

Exploring away from the tourist trail while on holiday inthe Gambia, photographer David Forsyth, came across a community of refugeesliving in wretched conditions – rundown housing, scarce food and inadequatemedication, exploited by local employers – and claiming that for the past tenyears they had been denied help with basic needs by the local UN RefugeeCouncil office.

Although Geneva periodically sends representatives to the GambianUNHRC, when a group of refugees gathered outside the office hoping to meet themand explain their plight, local staff called police to disperse the ‘rabble’before the visitors arrived.

Over thirty refugees agreed to be interviewed on film, andthe community leaders have now presented Forsyth with a signed letter,requesting him to contact the UN in Geneva and make their case known.

The filmed interviews with those brave enough to speak out,taking the risk of local reprisals, can now be seen on YouTube: follow thislink

http://youtu.be/znwuzHT1B_0

UNtrustworthy?

2011-05-27T11:10:00.000-07:00

Exploring away from the tourist trail while on holiday in the Gambia, photographer David Forsyth, came across a community of refugees living in wretched conditions - rundown housing, scarce food and inadequate medication, exploited by local employers - and claiming that for the past ten years they had been denied help with basic needs by the local UN Refugee Council office.

Although Geneva periodically sends representatives to the Gambian UNHRC, when a group of refugees gathered outside the office hoping to meet them and explain their plight, local staff called police to disperse the ‘rabble’ before the visitors arrived.

Over thirty refugees agreed to be interviewed on film, and the community leaders have now presented Forsyth with a signed letter, requesting him to contact the UN in Geneva and make their case known.

The filmed interviews with those brave enough to speak out, taking the risk of local reprisals, can now be seen on YouTube: follow this link

http://youtu.be/znwuzHT1B_0

Why self-harm?

2011-01-28T07:03:00.001-08:00

Self-harm is a difficult subject to understand, but there's no way of helping the many people – mainly young people – who self-harm, without trying to overcome our natural aversion to the subject.

To help young people who self-harm, and to help others to understand the problem, a project was set up online in October 2010 and will have its national launch in March this year.

Have a look at selfharm.co.uk and pass the info on to others. It's a good place to start.

Double-dealing death

2011-01-26T09:13:00.000-08:00

Ohio prisoner Romell Broom, whose execution was halted in September 2009 after a two-hour ordeal during which 'death technicians' made 18 failed attempts to inject into a vein, has now spent 27 years living on Death Row.

That means that Romell, now 54, has spent half his life locked in a cage, not allowed to work, awaiting death any day.

Lawyers are arguing that two execution attempts on one man would be unconstitutional and unusually cruel. So far, the powers-that-be are not listening, or don't choose to let a bit of unusual cruelty bother them.

Romell Broom grew up as the eldest of 9 children in a poor neighbourhood where the only ambition for black kids, he says, was to escape poverty and the only option for doing so was to get involved in the 'night life' and become a pimp. Through the older generation of his family, he was introduced to this environment from the age of 12 though, mercifully, he didn't get drawn into becoming a pimp himself.

Convicted for a violent crime in 1984 and locked away under the tightest security ever since, this man is now hardly a threat to society. There seems no possible reason to kill him, other than to assure votes for pro-death politicians and satisfy a violent thirst for violent revenge for acts of violence – a pitiful double standard that means nobody wins and the cycle of violence continues.

Our society, which rightly abhors and condemns heartless crime, is still focusing attention on individuals who commit acts of violence, labelling them asmonsters.

Claiming to solve the problem of violence by rendering these individuals defenceless, strapping them down then cold-bloodedly killing them with lethal chemicals, conveys a monstrous double standard.

It is also naive – a childish a solution to crime, like trying to solve a fear of the dark by shouting at monsters under the bed rather than turning the light on.

Instead of condoning a criminal justice system which selects certain perpetrators of openly violent acts to be condemned as the Scary Monsters, and zapping them, we need to turn the spotlight on factors that cause children to grow up believing that evil is good and that violence, ambition and greed are prerequisites for success.

We need to help young people identify clearly which ways of thinking and living are sick and which are healthy. Undoubtedly, there are some very sick-minded people. Many of them support the death penalty. Many see themselves as good people, because society accepts them and because they are successful.

But to begin to end the cycle of violence that runs through every human heart and every strand of society, we need to stop silencing the real experts on the causes of violence and start listening to them.

People like Romell Broom, for instance.

Not just for Christmas

2010-12-25T01:46:00.000-08:00

Innocent child, born into a darkened world,
giving out kindness in exchange for hate,
heal our fractured integrity,
sweeten our cynical bitterness,
remind us of who we were -
children of God,
light of the world,
lovers and givers of life -
and, following Jesus Christ,
return us to that place
of innocent birth
and fresh footsteps into the light.

The ultimate put-down

2010-12-13T11:04:00.001-08:00

Animal lovers would be horrified if they thought their aged or ill pets would be 'put to sleep' in a way that caused them pain and trauma.

Yet the rights of human beings on Death Row do not yet equal the rights of animals.

Ohio Supreme Court has just ruled that Death Row inmates in Ohio will continue to have no right under State law to challenge the lethal injection process or to require that the process is conducted in a way that does not inflict pain and trauma.

Considering the horribly botched execution attempt on prisoner Romell Broom in September 2009, in which 18 attempts were made to inject him to death, over a two-hour period, the court ruling is doubly shocking.

You can't help wondering if there would be more of an international outcry if an animal was subjected to this.

Executing justice

2010-11-01T09:57:00.001-07:00

I was encouraged to read that Hospira, the US pharmaceutical company which manufactures sodium thiopental, has stated that it does not want its product used any more in executions by lethal injection.

The designated purpose of the drug is anaesthesis in operations to cure patients, not assisting in killing people society doesn't know what to do with.

So it's horrifying to read now that an un-named British company has taken advantage of this ethical objection, and of the general shortage of the drug in the States, and sold some of this drug to Arizona to enable an execution to be carried out there.

European laws forbid the sale of any products for use in capital punishment. So it is to be hoped that the law will be enforced, and that no other profiteers will attempt to take advantage of the situation.

Do we really still live in a world where murdering murderers makes any sense to anybody? Let alone condoning companies making money out of this sick business, or politicians canvassing votes by promoting it?

Clare Nonhebel two-minute introduction to 'Finding Oasis'

2010-09-06T03:48:00.000-07:00

Lamb chop

2010-04-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

This poem was read out by an inmate at a prison chapel service, who agreed to let me nick it.

Mary had a little lamb

Mary had a little lamb
His fleece was white as snow
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.
He followed her to school one day
'Twasn't even in the rule.
He made the children laugh and play
To have a lamb at school
And then the rules all changed one day:
Illegal it became
To bring the Lamb of God to school
Or even speak His name.
Every day got worse and worse
And days turned into years.
Instead of hearing children laugh
We heard gunshots and tears.
What must we do to stop the crime
That's in our schools today?
Let's let the Lamb come back to school
And teach our kids to play.

If you agree, feel free to nick this too and pass it on!

Civilized crime

2010-03-10T02:39:00.000-08:00

Another prisoner on Death Row in the States has attempted to take his own life rather than face the barbaric execution process. A 'strap-down team', instructed not to show any emotion, straps the prisoner to a bench and a needle is inserted into a vein, in a macabre parody of medical procedure, to administer lethal poison.
By the time a prisoner is subjected to this process, he has been kept in a cage on Death Row for up to 30 years. His crime may be no worse than those of the prisoners who were given life sentences without parole.
But statistically, his legal representation will have been of a lesser quality, his background will have been one of poverty and social deprivation, and his life will have been a mess.
He will have had a couple of decades to reflect – every day – on the lifestyle, events and mental state that led to him committing that crime. He is not likely to be unchanged by this.
By the time he is executed, he is harmless to society. He has less freedom than an animal in a zoo. He is no longer a threat to anyone.
He is, however, not an animal but a human being.
He is not only locked away but is tortured, every day for years, by the thought of impending execution and by witnessing fellow inmates – human beings - being taken away and destroyed.
It is hard to comprehend a system that imprisons a man for killing a defenceless human being – then kills him when he is defenceless.
And it's hard to accept that a country that sanctions this barbarism, and considers executions a vote-winner for politicians and 'justice' for the victim, is regarded as civilized.
There are just not the same outcries about the US killing its human offenders as there are about other – less 'advanced' – countries doing the same thing.
Sister Helen Prejean, author of 'Dead Man Walking' and spiritual advisor to many of the Death Row victims, says, 'I resist this with every fibre of my being.'
Me too.

Surviving Amin

2010-03-04T03:50:00.000-08:00

Mica Kiribedda believed he was serving his country when he joined the army in his native Uganda. It was a shock when the new leader who seemed to be putting the country to rights began killing Mica's tribe.
For an insight into the torn loyalties and tribalism of Africa and especially Uganda, I'd recommend reading Mica's book, Uganda's Political Turmoil Post-Idi Amin, which is available online from AuthorHouse
How does a good man, who wants the good of his country, cope with finding himself in a situation where everyone he has trusted turns out to be the enemy?

Hitting 'Delete'

2010-01-19T09:01:00.000-08:00

I don't like to criticise my Creator but I have a design fault.
It's not a big problem, God. You could easily fix it by adding a simple device - so simple that even my email inbox has one. A box beside each item of my life that I can tick with one click and then press the Delete key and - whadya-know - it disappears.
Another option allows me to Select All - Delete All.
I would like one of those, please God, fitted to my life.
If I could just hit Select All Mistakes and then Delete, most of my unpremeditated funny remarks that were heard as deeply unfunny by somebody would disappear instantly, along with their simmering resentment and hurt feelings.
(But many of the meals I cooked would also count as Mistakes and cease to have existed, and that would leave my husband very much thinner than he is).
Being able to Select All Painful Memories and Delete, would be delectable.
I'd give a far more impressive impression of a joyful - even jolly - Christian, if I didn't get twinges of nasty past experiences hobbling my pace as I stride into the future. Deleting them would leave me free to stride with a positive attitude and a spring in my step - a much better witness to the joy of faith in God than hobbling, or sobbing, at inappropriate moments.
(Though it might make me stride, relentlessly cheerful, past people going through current painful experiences and not even notice).
Deleting all the criticisms fired at me would be good (unless they were constructive and character-forming and had prevented me from becoming a homicidal maniac).
Delete all the gossip? Fantastic. It was never very interesting.
Delete all my own opinionated assessments of situations I knew nothing about? Very good idea.
Delete my prejudices, naive generalisations, getting-the-wrong-end-of-the-stick-isms? Ditto.
See, God, you wouldn't be wasting your time. If you could see your way to refining my software and activating my keyboard and giving me a Delete key, I really would use it very frequently.
No?
But why not? It's a perfectly reasonable ....
Oh.
You want me to use another key?
Instead of hitting Delete, every time I screw up or trip up or get knocked down, you want me to hit ..... Divine?

Zapping the Scary Monsters

2010-01-15T08:15:00.000-08:00

Death Row prisoners in the States may spend decades awaiting death any day.
That means half their lifetime is spent locked in a cage, unable to work, for a crime they may have committed half a lifetime ago.
The crimes they are accused of are unspeakable. Yet whenever the prisoner’s name is recalled, the crime is the only thing the public or the media speak about.
Society identifies the person with the offence, to the extent of ceasing to see the offender as a person at all.
Because all violence is monstrous, the person who stands accused of it is considered a monster. His or her human attributes arouse no interest.
The common factor among Death Row prisoners is not a higher level of crime than those who were sentenced to life without parole.
It is often hard to see why one offender has been sentenced to life and another to death.
Some researchers claim that the common factors among Death Row inmates are poverty, deprivation, poor legal representation in the early stages of their process, and politicians' and prosecutors' reliance on ‘successful’ death sentencing rates for their career advancement.
One Death Row prisoner, whose background is far from untypical, grew up in a neighbourhood where the only escape from poverty for black kids was to get involved in the 'night life' world and become a pimp.
Following older members of his family, he was drawn into this environment from the age of 12.
Convicted for a violent crime in the early 1980s and locked away under the tightest security ever since, this man is now hardly a threat to society.
There seems to be no possible reason to kill him, other than to satisfy a violent thirst for violent revenge for acts of violence – a pitiful cycle that benefits nobody.
Our society, which rightly abhors and condemns heartless crime, is still focusing attention on individuals who commit open and obvious acts of violence and labels them as the Scary Monsters of our ‘civilized’ society.
Claiming to solve the problem of violence by rendering these individuals defenceless, then coldbloodedly killing them, conveys a double standard that is truly monstrous.
It is also naive – as childish a solution to crime as shouting at the monsters under the bed is a solution to a child's fear of darkness. As grown-up members of society, we need to turn on the lights.
We need to stop tacitly condoning a system which selects certain perpetrators of violent acts to be the Scary Monsters, accuses them of being the source of violence in our world, and locks them in cages before zapping them to death.
And we need to turn the spotlight on the factors that cause children to grow up believing that evil is good and that violent pimps, drug dealers and gangsters – or compassionless political career-hunters – are role models for adulthood.
We could make a start at ending the cycle of violence by listening to the real experts on our failure to rescue potential victims of crime and the potential offenders.
Experts like the Death Row prisoners.

Eliminating evil

2009-12-14T11:01:00.000-08:00

Recent press articles about death row executions in Ohio and Texas and measures to make the process more 'humane,' equal, legal, or even to abolish the barbaric practice altogether, have elicited a flood of vituperative comments from the 'respectable' public on newspaper websites and blogs.
Rage, hatred and cold callousness are directed against the prisoners - people who have proved unable to cope with these feelings within themselves without turning them on other people, and who certainly will not soften by being loaded with everyone else's.
Some commentators even quote the bible (selected lines taken way out of context) to claim that their lust for retribution is divine – rather than that divine retribution is the prerogative of the divine, i.e. God, and not to be taken into human hands, whose fingers tend to point at everyone except themselves.
We live in a violent society. It's easy to spot the people who express that reality openly, committing violent crimes.
Identifying hidden acts of violence is harder: the politician exploiting his or her status for personal gain at the expense of the poor, or the mother pressuring her pregnant teenage daughter to have the 'discreet' abortion she pleads not to be forced into ….
Getting to the roots of violence means coming dangerously close to home. We occasionally glimpse the violence in our own heart - it surfaces sometimes – and we don't know how far it could go, how extreme we could be under extreme circumstances or emotional dysfunction.
It's a frightening thought – that the roots of society's violence, as well as of society's health, could be within us. Easier to punish or execute random 'violent people' who act out their violence openly and in ways guaranteed to forfeit the right to sympathy.
More reassuring to fantasize separate categories of good people and bad people, than to accept being part of a planet-load of good-bad people who reflect the best and worst of human nature in different ways at different times.
Nobel prizewinner Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who was tortured, imprisoned and exiled for speaking his mind, said famously:
'If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them! But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?'
Unless we are willing to allow divine surgery on our own diseased hearts and minds, we stay imprisoned in the violent rejection of reality that creates random victims to affirm our own 'righteousness' and keeps us spiritually on death row.

Anti-Christmas time again

2009-12-14T04:05:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from an item by Ben Stein on CBS Sunday Morning Commentary:

My confession: I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish.
And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful, lit up, bejeweled trees, Christmas trees. I don't feel threatened. I don't feel discriminated against. That's what they are. Christmas trees.

It doesn't bother me a bit when people say, 'Merry Christmas' to me. I don't think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year.

It doesn't bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display …. it's just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

I don't like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don't think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period.

Or may be I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship celebrities and we aren't allowed to worship God as we understand Him?

Death penalty

2009-11-25T00:27:00.000-08:00

Ron McAndrews, who worked as a prison governor in the US and oversaw State-condoned executions of prisoners on death row, now campaigns against the death penalty. Interviewed recently in the Church Times, he made these telling comments:

- The death penalty is but one thing and one thing only: it’s a political toy that’s played for votes

- I’ve worked electrocutions and lethal injections. There are no humane executions. None

- Killing a murderer is like killing a human being that’s not trying to kill me or anyone else — because I have him locked in a tiny six-by-nine-foot concrete-and-steel cell

More chillingly, he adds that many Christians - even those who count abortion as murder - support the death penalty.

This man doesn't ignore the agony of the family of victims. His own family has experienced this. But he still believes it's wrong to kill the murderer, just to make the point that it's wrong to kill. All it does, he says, is buy votes and tell our children that it's ok to kill.

I think we have to listen to him.

Self-harm: a silent addiction

2009-11-08T06:58:00.000-08:00

Young artist Bella Schilling has chosen a subject close to her heart – self-harm – to depict in powerful graphic images and words.

Show this to anyone you know who may be taking refuge in what 19-year old Bella calls 'a silent addiction'.

Self-harm is a silent addiction.
Personally, I feel it's like any other compulsion – the need to drink alcohol, the need to limit your food intake – you need to feel in control.
You feel like you can't talk to or trust anyone around you, and so digging a blade into your legs or pressing lit cigarettes to your arms feels like the only coping mechanisms you have.
Whatever you're trying to deal with, punishing yourself is not the answer.
You may feel like you deserve to hurt yourself, but in the long run you will cause even more damage.
From a personal experience, talking to somebody really does help, because then you're not bottling all the anguish up inside.
If you find it difficult expressing yourself through words, perhaps try some drawing or painting, or even write a poem.
Anything is better than self-destruction.

Some statistics:

Rates of self-harm in the UK are among the highest in Europe, at 400 per 100,000 per year

Approximately 1 in 10 teenagers self injure

The group with the highest rates of self-harm are young women aged 15-19 years. In all age groups, females are more likely to self-harm than males

Women are more likely than men to self-harm, however whereas women once showed two or three times the male rate, recent increases in self-harm by men have changed the female to male ratio to 1.6:1

Several studies have shown that approximately one out of every 100 people who are seen at hospital for self-harm will die by suicide within a year of the self-harm. This is a suicide risk approximately 100 times that of the general population.

Moral issues?

2009-10-26T15:22:00.000-07:00

Standing behind me in the supermarket queue today, an elderly lady was berating her 40-something son for adding a Mars bar to the shopping trolley. He was unrepentant so she decided to involve me. 'He shouldn't be eating Mars bars! Should he?'

When I said politely there were worse things, she poked him in the stomach and said, 'I thought you'd side with me! Look how fat he is!'

The poor bloke looked so humiliated that I lost the politeness and told her that eating Mars bars wasn't a moral issue, whereupon she turned her back on me.

It made me reflect, again, on how far our society has complicated the simple do's and don'ts of God-given morality, and replaced it with pseudo-morality dictated by culture and fashionable guilt.

In the UK, perceptions of morality have got so muddled that people may feel more guilty for failing to eat their five-a-day fruit and veg than for failing the hungry two-thirds of the world who eat little or nothing at all.

But Christians, at least, should escape this confusion about what is or is not a moral issue - surely? The gospel of Jesus is, literally, 'good news for the poor', hope for the despairing and inclusion of the marginalised. I'm privileged to attend churches where this simple good news of God's love for human beings is preached lucidly and unequivocally. From the front, that is.

But among the congregation, even inside the church, other 'gospels' are preached as though they were gospel truth, and are presented as moral issues.

Hot topics expounded with missionary zeal include: fundraising for the church (who is 'good' and who is just not doing their bit); diet ('good' equals low calorie, 'sinful' equals chocolate); practices and expressions of personal spirituality (good, bad or just different?); willingness to conform; whether old hymns are holier than contemporary worship music; compliance with other people's preferences; agreement on what constitutes 'fun' or 'fellowship' and whether people who come from traditional church backgrounds are less 'in the Spirit' than liberals.

No wonder there's so much confusion about moral values outside the church, and no wonder Christians are perceived as hypocritical, judgemental, prejudiced, superstitious or out of focus.

If the gospel is going to be clearly understood in a world that confuses a moral with a Mars bar, it needs to be clear to those who preach it first - nothing added and nothing taken away.

Otherwise, what's being presented as God's truth is yet another set of man-made rules - a very poor substitute for his perfect law.

Dodgy Dad

2009-09-15T23:52:00.000-07:00

Children who love their dad but clearly see his moral failures sometimes do a cover-up job.
They pretend that their dad is not absent, when he is, or that he always provides for their needs and meets their requests for help, when he doesn't, or even that he doesn't abuse and frighten them and others.
Family members may not only pretend to outsiders that Dad is good, but pretend to each other: his lapses in compassion or integrity are glossed over as they assure each other 'How lucky we are to have such a great Dad!'
At its worst, the cover-up goes deeper: a person pretends to himself or herself that nothing is wrong with the way Dad rules the family's life and crushes its happiness.
But at some point the evidence demolishes the pretences, and at that point the family member has a range of choices.
- He/she can consciously try even harder to cover up Dad's failure to be a good dad;
- he can go silent and hope the other children manage to keep believing Dad cares about them really;
- he can rebel and throw Dad out of his life;
- or, he can sit down with him and see if Dad will listen to his concerns, share his heart, and explain why he acts as he does.
Some people become cynical about God. They suspect that all the happy Christians who claim to love him and get so fired up about singing his praises are doing a cover-up job for this 'good Dad' who seems to turn a blind eye to the fact that babies die, people develop diseases and deformities, and the innocent and vulnerable seem to bear all the brunt of the world's aggression.
On the evidence available, some throw him out without a qualm.
Others wrestle silently with their doubts, not wanting to challenge other people's faith in God but deciding privately it's not valid.
But others go to the trouble of trying to get to know him, not on the previous level, but questioning him honestly about their perception of what he's doing in the world.
If faith is based on forcing yourself to believe, when inwardly you doubt God's integrity or even his existence, it's not faith: it's a cover-up job for someone you see as needing the protection of human beings.
If God is God, if his ways are not the same as our ways but are - as he claims - 'as far above your ways as the heavens are above the earth' - then he doesn't need us to cover up for what we see as his deficiencies.
At this time of year, all over the country, Alpha courses are starting, as a forum for people to bring their honest experience and their awkward questions and painful doubts to a place where they won't be covered up or thrown out. It's a step towards meeting with God himself, not in a human family that fights to defend the indefensible, but in the individual human heart, in total honesty.

Prejudiced? Moi?

2009-09-12T14:48:00.000-07:00

It's salutary but never comfortable to be confronted with your own hypocrisy.
I hate it when anyone looks down their nose at someone who breaches some man-made rule of etiquette or, in their view, lacks social skills.
It's trivial, superficial and unfair.
Also illogical: how can you blame someone for not knowing what they don't know? Or - if someone does know it's considered unacceptable to, for instance, pick their nose in public, interrupt a conversation or ask a stranger for a loan - blame them for making a free decision that the issue isn't important enough for them change their way of doing things?
But I have double standards. I'm not bothered if anyone mispronounces a word or lays a table with the knives and forks back to front, but I'm far less tolerant of people's attitudes when those people come from an apparently privileged, financially secure or socially sheltered background.
My hackles rise when (to use some recent examples) someone designates all prison inmates as 'awful people' - assuming the people outside are the 'good people' - or regards it as a social outrage that they have lost interest on their investments, or considers that doing your best for your children means giving your children the best of everything, leaving only the small change to spare for children who are starving.
But that's equally unfair and illogical of me. I'm blaming people for not knowing what they don't know, holding them responsible for something I find unacceptable, and blaming them for making a free decision that the issue isn't important enough for them to change their way of doing things.
And I'm assuming that because they have education, money and social status, these things should confer on them insight, compassion and sensitivity - which means I'm putting far too much faith in educational, financial and social privileges, which don't confer any such things.
God rescue us from the prejudices we don't know we have, and from the hypocrisy of not caring about the ones we do know we have but won't change.

Are you qualified for God to use you?

2009-09-09T05:27:00.000-07:00

A lady came for prayer but was nervous about trusting anyone, having had a terrible history of abuse by people she thought she could trust.
To reassure her about my suitability to pray with people in vulnerable situations, I laid out my credentials.
I have all seven of the deadly sins.
I have probably every psychological problem in the book.
I have done just about everything wrong that you can think of.
I am not unshockable; hearing about evil is always a terrible shock to me.
I am not, although I have been offered opportunities to train as such, a spiritual director, psychologist or counsellor, either Christian or secular.
I am no good at all at resolving my own problems and have to run to God for help with every crisis, major or minor.
I am not a hundred percent trustworthy, because no human being is, and in fact I have trouble trusting myself, let alone expecting anyone else to.
And yet, God uses me. I'm not sure why or how, but sometimes he works through me to heal people. Sometimes he works around me. And sometimes he works despite me and my misdirected efforts to tell him what to do. And uses even my failures to lead to something good.
So if this poor young courageous wounded and hurting soul was willing to take the risk of allowing someone so ill-equipped and unqualified to pray for Jesus to help her now, I was willing to do it.
She was willing, and went home feeling at peace, thanks to Jesus who used her bravery and even her vulnerability to accomplish what she couldn't achieve on her own.
He doesn't need us to be in a usable state, to use us for good. He just needs us to say yes, and let him do what only he can do.

Custody of the Eyes (Part 2)

2009-09-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

I found myself sitting next to the Abbot at a school event last week, and couldn't resist asking him what he thought about 'custody of the eyes' as I'd been blogging about it only two days before. For those who didn't read the blog, custody of the eyes is the practice of some contemplative religious orders of keeping their gaze averted from people and their surroundings, as a means of avoiding distractions from contemplating God.
Now this Abbot's monastery is not a contemplative but an active order, which means the monks spend their days or part of the day working in the school or parish and have fewer times of community prayer per day (and none in the middle of the night) than contemplative orders. They have times of silence (when the hoods are up, don't chat to them!) but are not a silent order.
I mentioned to the Abbot that I'd stayed in an enclosed convent for two days, was OK with the silence but found 'custody of the eyes' unnerving.
'Oh, totally!' he said. 'All that sidling past and averting the eyes! We don't do that. We do people.'
The nuns also, I said, locked all the doors, even internal ones when they went from one room to another, and I caused consternation by trying to break my way out to walk in the garden.
'Weird,' said the Abbot cheerfully. He tucked into cheese and biscuits and added, 'I stayed in a Japanese Zen monastery for five weeks once. It was terrible. I nearly starved - lost a stone. We don't do that either.'
'You do get up very early in the morning,' I commented. It was getting late and I didn't want him staying chatting out of politeness when he had to get up at 5 a.m.
'Saturday tomorrow,' he said. 'We get a lie-in.'
'Till?'
'Six.'
Even with eye contact, food and conversation, it's still a very different lifestyle.

Custody of the eyes (pic)

2009-08-30T15:43:00.001-07:00

Custody of the eyes

2009-08-30T15:11:00.000-07:00

One of the more bizarre experiences of my life was doing a healing service for contemplative nuns in an enclosed order in a rural area. Many of the sisters hadn't been out, except to the dentist, for thirty or forty years.

It was a privilege to share in their life for a couple of days, but disorienting; I'd anticipated the silence but was unnerved by the lack of eye contact: why did nobody look up and smile as they passed one another - or me, as a visitor?

In the one hour they were allowed to talk to me, they crammed in a fortnight's worth of questions and information.

The avoidance of eye contact was deliberate, they explained: a discipline called 'custody of the eyes'. Keeping the eyes down had the effect of keeping the attention from wandering - from God, and from one's own prayer and work. I suggested that the outside world might interpret it as unfriendly. They suggested the outside world could do with more of it: 'Basically, it means minding your own business!'

I've been thinking about that recently. At times, there are more distractions in the church than opportunities for focusing on God. There's religious politics, factions, lobbying, and the temptation of someone only too willing to share with me that little morsel of gossip that I seem to be the last person not to have heard.

Custody of the eyes is shorthand for custody of the ears (some things are better not listened to) and custody of the tongue (time to shut up) and custody of the heart and mind and soul.

The lifestyle of contemplative nuns would drive me insane. A couple of days there seemed a very long time and I was really glad to get home and be among people who chatted and smiled and travelled around freely.

But they had a point.

True confession, dentists and epidemics

2009-08-28T10:57:00.001-07:00

As a Catholic I regarded going to confession as the spiritual equivalent of going to the dentist: a necessary ordeal exposing your flaws and getting them dealt with so they didn't grow into major problems.
When other Christians said they didn't need to go to an intermediary because they could confess their sins directly to Jesus, I could see their point but personally found something horribly effective about admitting my moral failures aloud to another flawed human being. Admitting them silently and alone, even in prayer, seemed to me like trying to do your own dental repairs - hard to see what you're doing, liable to miss the real problem, and tempting to try and avoid the pain.
The letter from Jesus' disciple James, in the New Testament, advised: 'Confess your sins to one another and pray for each other so that you may be healed.' As you can't be made whole (healed) in isolation from human society, so you can't be entirely honest and open in private. Integrity involves accountability.
Epidemics go round groups of people. So do spiritual viruses. A whole community at a time can be subjected to the same temptation, the same doubts or despondency. Confessing to one another that you're struggling with some destructive impulse can bring the unexpected bonus of realising that it's not just yours: it's doing the rounds.
Temptation (as the nuns at school used to assure us repeatedly) is not sin. It only becomes your fault if you choose to give in to it. But a temptation that won't go away easily but niggles away like toothache becomes easier to deal with if you acknowledge to another person or trusted group of people that you're being afflicted. They can pray for you to be strong, and you can remember you're not alone.
Confession doesn't make you immune to temptation, but the same old same old boringly familiar temptations do tend to lose their grip in time if you keep dragging them into the light and making yourself accountable to someone.
It's the unfamiliar temptations, like a new virus strain you haven't built up much immunity to, that can get a stranglehold on your freedom before you're aware of the risk. For some reason, few women admit to lust and few men admit to gossip!
There's a value in having some uncomfortably outspoken friends (or spiritual director or priest) pointing out the gaps in your spiritual defences when you think they're intact.
And being that outspoken friend to someone else is equally uncomfortable. Telling somebody something they don't want to hear takes courage and love: you know they're going to regard you like the dentist with the drill!
But James' letter concludes: 'If you know people who have wandered from God's truth ... bring them back, and you will have rescued precious lives from destruction and prevented an epidemic of wandering away from God.'

Occult Christians

2009-08-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

Christians don't believe in or trust the occult. You can't put your faith in two opposite influences without completely losing it. So 'Christian spiritualism', for example, is a contradiction in terms, as is a Christian who espouses tarot, astrology or any other form of occultism.

But ... given that the word 'occult' means hidden or secret knowledge, it's undeniable that many Christians indulge in some covert priorities and sources of influence that may be hidden even from their own conscious awareness.

If God insists that the only health is to love him with all we have - heart, soul, mind and strength - but concepts that are perfectly innocent in themselves start to take over chunks of our mind or heart, then they are - hidden and secretly - taking up space in our lives that was meant for God. And that means that faith in him will not be diluted, but superseded.

Ironically, the 'idols' may be things that God gives, and likes and approves.

Some examples of hidden motivating forces for good Christians' actions and attitudes might be: medicine, science, weight loss, psychology, health, romance, theology, fitness regimes, relationships, family, work, success, poverty, victims, pets, technology, marriage, education, death, approval, popularity, love, sport, politics, the environment, religion.

When they become a primary factor in someone's thinking, reasoning, behaviour or decision-making, they become god of that person's life. It's possible to believe you're still worshipping God when in fact he has slipped, unnoticed, into second place - which is how an occult influence works.

Sex and gardening

2009-08-22T02:22:00.001-07:00

Our garden has weathered harsh winters, icy patches, freezing fog, drought, heatwaves, flood, disease, pernicious pests and persistent weeds.

Now, in summer approaching autumn, it's in full fling, with exuberant foliage and flowering plants, some planned, some blown in on the wind, loads of fruit, and some unexpected wildlife. Some hoped-for plants have died but the gaps have been filled, and some experiments have failed and been quietly put down to experience.

To uncritical gardeners, the garden is a success, the product of sun, wind, rain, blood, sweat, toil and a lot of labouring to understand what will thrive in this particular soil and what to give up on.

To the perfectionist or the professional designer, it's a disaster: unplanned and chaotic, with violent clashes in the planting scheme, failure to balance the various elements, fuzzy boundaries, lack of variety and a surfeit of overblown raspberries - generally, a garden that should have been handed over to the next generation of experts a long time ago.

Very similar to a young person's view of their parents' sexuality really.

Or the media view of long-term faithful marital relationships.

Or society's view of the sex life of the elderly, the disabled or anyone less than perfectly symmetrical.

(Note: comments on this blog are welcome, but obscenities and Latin plant names will be deleted)

Superfoods and Yuckiberries

2009-08-20T16:01:00.000-07:00

Every week some food seems to be hailed as a 'superfood' - Goji berries, oojiberries, Jerusalem artichoke, balsamic sundried ginseng.
The superfood's wondrousness lies in its high levels of antioxidants, anticholestorols, trace elements that exist in no other food on the planet, and free radicals (or are those the things they're meant to be combatting?) which guarantee freedom from disease, ageing, obesity, wrinkles and all other social solecisms.
At the beginning of the year, a broadsheet newspaper was offering free trials of seed for a new fruit, developed by crossing a gooseberry with a blackcurrant, ensuring huge quantities of beneficial vitamins, minerals and thingies that prevent you from succumbing to myriad forms of lurgy, including some not yet discovered.
How could I resist? I love growing new things, so growing a new superfood was a temptation too far.
And they grew wonderfully! Dozens of wonderberries germinated and thrived and looked incredibly healthy. I gave seedlings away to neighbours, friends, relatives and people I hardly knew. The seedlings, transplanted into the soil, grew to great heights and amazing bushiness. They shouldered out all the old-hat superfruits like raspberries and blackcurrants and elbowed their way into the common-or-garden runner beans. They produced massive quantities of tiny hard green berries which, deceptively, ripened from the base of the bush upwards, hiding quantities of already ripened round black fruits.
So we picked. And ate. And they tasted ...... disgusting!
Which made sense, when I thought about it.
Because if gooseberries and blackcurrants were compatible flavours, wise women and earth-mothers would have been making gooseberry-and-blackcurrant pie for centuries.
I don't regret the experiment. The bushes are now enriching the compost bins and no doubt shedding masses of antioxidants and vitamins and free-floating whatsits into the grass clippings which will really improve the soil next year, when I will use the compost to grow ordinary old foods that taste good.
Just because something's theoretically beneficial doesn't mean it fulfils its purpose.
Like, lots of good works sound good, look good, but don't always do good because they taste of busyness and self-importance and make the recipient feel like a social project, which is really hard to swallow.
And lots of religious practices look spiritual and give a warm glow of satisfaction to the practiser but seem to sour the personality rather than achieve the desired wholesomeness.
Whereas God (as God, rather than as a bless-me-and-make-me-feel-good concept) has been quietly feeding and nourishing people since the dawn of time, has repeatedly been called an anachronism, boring and irrelevant, and has been supposedly superseded by science, psychology and alternative spiritualities, and yet he works. Like blackberry and apple pie, people are sometimes ashamed of being so uncool as to admit that they like it and even eat it. It's unfashionable, uncool, unscientific, and taboo for too many reasons to tabulate.
But people continue to feed on it, century after century, because it's truly superlatively perfectly wonderful news to the hungry soul.
God is not new, and not news.
But he is good, always and still.
Taste and see.

Cellulite as a spiritual gift

2009-08-18T14:23:00.000-07:00

I firmly believe that anything, however bad, can be a positive if only you trust God to use it for good.

But I have to admit to getting stumped by cellulite.

Everyone I know, especially in these beach-body months, is either on a diet - and morose because they're hungry - or on ice-cream and chips, and depressed when they're in swimming gear because they wobble unless they move really slowly.

But for those of us who lack that perfectly toned outline in bikini or swimming shorts, I have good news: I have now discovered a purpose for cellulite as a useful aid to spiritual discernment. If, like me, you're sometimes unsure somebody is really a trustworthy friend or not, cellulite can help you decide.

Try this simple exercise:

Imagine you are sunbathing on the beach in minimal clothing and maximum flesh, and in the middle distance you see the person in question walking towards you, fully clothed.

On catching sight of them, do you unhesitatingly:

a) wave cheerily, in the hope of a friendly chat, or ....

b) dive under the nearest sunbed, completely encased in your beachtowel?

See?

Thank God for cellulite, then. As well as for everything else.

Butterflies

2009-08-17T22:52:00.000-07:00

For the past week, a corner of the garden has had so many butterflies that there's constant movement around the flowers and bushes.

There are Cabbage Whites, Red Admirals, Tortoiseshells, Peacocks and Painted Ladies in their hordes, with the odd Grayling (I think) and tiny blues and yellows as well.

From being happy to see just one or two butterflies in the garden I've moved to wondering why there are so few if I see less than five at a time, or if I can walk past the buddleia bush without having several fly into my face or if I can put my foot down without almost treading on one on the ground.

As with all the amazing works of God, it's easy to move from awe at seeing one extraordinary event, to getting used to his spectacular interventions and then taking them for granted, or even finding people's accounts of them a bit of a disruption to my thought process.

When God is really moving in a place, it's fantastic to hear one person after another recounting their experience of him becoming a reality to them, and to see people's lives unfold into something more vibrant and full of colour.

But it's human nature to tend towards getting cynical and jaded, and even the most spectacular interventions of the Creator can be ignored or brushed away or trodden on by cold logic if they risk obstructing the regular route of ideas.

I just hope I don't get used to the butterflies before the weather turns colder and they no longer fly in my face.

Myers-Briggs For Misfits

2009-08-15T10:03:00.000-07:00

Those familiar with Myers-Briggs personality testing, or the Enneagram, or other 'psychology-based' assessments of character types, might be relieved to know there are alternatives.

So if you have tried this and don't seem to fit the categories, or fit all the categories, or simply suspect that God made you unique, you may be interested in new research which proves conclusively that when the experts drew up the system, some of their categories went missing.

Here they are. Now do you fit in???

Question 1

Do you like public speaking?
a) yes b) no, would rather be boiled in oil c) only at Magic Circle seminars d) don't understand the question

Key: If you answered a) you are Extrovert (E); b) you are Introvert (I); c) you are Hogworts (H) d) you are a DilBert (B)

Question 2

Do you assess situations by:
a) using your senses (sight, hearing etc)? b) using your instincts? c) going on Facebook and asking what everyone thinks? d) no

Key:
If a) you are a Sensing type (S); b) you are iNtuitive (N); c) you are a coMmittee (Mm) ; d) keep up, Bert (KUB)

Question 3

How do you regard people whose convictions may not always match your own, or even their own, eg vegetarians who eat fish as long as it hasn't got fins on, atheists who blame God for everything, TV football viewers who know the little men running round on screen can't hear but still yell at them?
a) nutters b) I may not agree with them but I understand where they're coming from and empathise totally c) they obviously had a very disturbed childhood d) what are you asking me for? what are you suggesting?

Key:
a) you are a Thinker (T); b) you are a Feeler (possibly with previous convictions); c) you are a Surmiser (Hm!); d) you are Deeply Suspicious of Everything (UGH!)

Question 4 (and the final one so answer carefully; your destiny depends on it)

Is the leading influence in your life someone who:
a) has a track record of solid achievements? b) has a good spirit? c) cares for the environment and loves all creatures especially little fluffy ones? d) gets a football team into the Premier division in one season?

Key:
a) you are a Judging type (J) (and may in fact be a judge); b) you are a Perceiving type (P) (but may be deceived); c) you are grEEn (EE); d) you are Beyond Hope (BYEEE)

Once you have proved beyond doubt who you are, from this expert-designed survey, why not tell the world? Otherwise, how would they know?

MegaChurch

2009-08-14T13:56:00.000-07:00

Last week I visited a city church whose pastor is something of a media figure with a high-profile ministry, so I was expecting his church to be a megachurch: something like the glossy auditoriums seen on American-God TV.
Instead, it was on the small side and, despite some interesting artwork around the place, a bit shabby round the edges. It was user-friendly, though, as witnessed by the people sitting around chatting and eating their lunch in the pews.
My favourite churches have a tendency to be scruffy and on the margins of acceptable churchiness. One in West London, with a heart for the homeless, has its back rows more or less permanently filled with very drunk people either too incoherent to join in a service or stridently vocal enough to interrupt it. The carpet smells of pee and the porch smells worse. But the prayer is real, and so is the community.
Another favourite church has a dress code that embraces everything from suit to don't-give-a-hoot: cycle shorts, body piercings, leopardskin lycra leggings, and formal Sunday hats and dresses.
And another has people of every ethnicity, colour and even creed, all praying and singing in every language all at the same time, intelligible only to themselves and God.
Another has no premises of its own so holds its services at unorthodox times in another denomination's church.
None of these church buildings are impressive or perfectly maintained. But to the people who go there, both the fitters-in and the misfits, those churches are mega.

Rebel without applause

2009-08-06T15:18:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to find another word for 'rebellion,' one that doesn't have the negative connotations of immature petulance or mindless violence.
A word that expresses the pure rage-against-injustice and courage-to-stand-against-cultural-abuses type of rebellion of the Old Testament prophets: people like Daniel who got thrown to the lions rather than worship the current celebrity, or Nehemiah who insisted on rebuilding the vandalised city into a sanctuary while the vandals were still attacking and the so-called people of faith were betting on them to win.
Rebellion doesn't have to be negative; it can be an amazing force for transformation.
But the word has very negative connotations. It's applied to people who throw their integrity to the winds in their desire to win, and kick up a storm against people who are not the real enemy at all but flawed people just like themselves, full of fears and prejudices.
Every human is capable of the real kind of rebellion, the stand-up-and-be-counted loneliness of fighting for goodness and justice, but it costs so much: swallowing our pride, working as a team with people we don't like, forgiving the unforgivable, loving the unlovely, even ultimately being prepared to lay down our lives.
It's understandably easier to settle for the other kind of rebellion, the Harry Enfield Kevin-the-teenager petulance against parents, government or any authority that won't execute or persecute for disagreeing rudely and loudly. It's not about life or death issues and doesn't involve confronting real enemies. It's about conforming to peer group pressure from the long tradition of rebels who kick sand in the eyes of rival castle-builders and demand their rights, rather than stand together with those they despise and fight for the rights of those who have no rights.
So what other word for rebellion can I find to express the real fight - the kind of rebellious rage for justice that is capable of wiping out poverty, human trafficking, war, rape, exploitation and sheer human petty selfishness?
The only term that comes to mind, that I could apply to the whole lonely, unpopular, costly and humble rebellion of people like Daniel, Gandhi, Nehemiah, Mandela, John the Baptist and Jesus Christ, is 'single-heartedness.'
A refusal to get sidetracked by anger, self-interest or self-righteousness.
A total focus on love, at all costs to oneself and no cost to the imperfect people you're trying to help.
And a willingness to lose the image and glamour of seeing yourself as a rebel.

Summer pudding church

2009-07-19T06:45:00.000-07:00

I had this great idea about growing our own summer pudding: okay, not the bread or sugar but all the fruit for it.
So now we've got blackcurrants, redcurrants and whitecurrants in the veg bed, blueberries in pots covered in netting, raspberry canes which seem to be marching across the garden, an official blackberry (thornless) winding its way along a wire support and a (much tastier) thorny one escaping from behind a neighbour's shed. There are cultivated strawberries in window boxes and tiny wild strawberries in a raised bed. There's even a new variety - the wonderberry, a cross between gooseberries and blackcurrants - shouldering out all the other varieties.
Guaranteed perfect summer pudding ingredients, you might think.
Except.
Except that they don't all ripen at the same time or perform as intended.
So the blackcurrants are finishing while the reds and whites are still teeth-achingly sour.
The thorny blackberries are green and hard, and the thornless one's heavily-fruiting branches are turning brown and dying.
The marching raspberry canes are sturdy and healthy-looking but have hardly produced a single flower.
The strawberries get eaten as soon as they appear, either by visiting children, snails, birds or us, so don't hang around long enough to go into pudding.
The wild strawberries are growing prolifically but you need about thirty for a mouthful and they don't seem to taste of anything.
The wonderberries are producing a multitude of flowers but haven't so far got around to converting them into anything with a food value.
And the blueberries got invaded yesterday by a blackbird who was very thin when he got in through the birdproof netting and very fat when he got liberated, reluctantly, by my husband.
So what has this got to do with church?
Well, ours seems to have all the ingredients for a God-worshipping, neighbour-loving, life-affirming community - potentially the perfect summer-pudding church.
Except.
Except that some of its people-ingredients are ripe for action - evangelism, mission, social action projects, out-there and up-there worship - and want it all happening right now and will go into brown-squishy-mould format if made to wait till all the other fruit is ripe.
At the same time, others are flowering but still maturing, pondering on God and waiting for the right time to produce their crop, and knowing it can't be hurried.
Others are letting their fruit get scavenged, filling gaps on demand and not saving anything for sharing in the longer-term.
Others are eaten up with impatience with those varieties whose fruit doesn't seem to complement their own, who don't produce the required results on time or who are invading their territory.
Still others are trying to hold on to an earlier time in their development and not move on to the next stage of growth.
And others are prematurely losing their zest and, just at the time when their crops are ripe for harvesting, are fading out of the garden's life.
So what do you do with the summer pudding church?
Persevere with the ideal of all these ingredients blending harmoniously into one fantastic dessert, ripe or unripe?
Treat them all as separate fruits, each delicious in their own right, but too hard to try and combine?
Compromise - use some together, some separately, and cut your losses on the ones that miss the moment?
I'm glad it's God's problem, not mine. He's the only one who can possibly make it work out, and the decision of how to treat all these amazing ingredients and combine them into something greater than their individual flavours, has to remain in his hands.
I'm also glad that his ways are not like ours.
Otherwise he'd do with us what we've done with the fruit in the garden, which is to cut down the fruiting but dying blackberry in its prime, before it spreads its discouragement to the surrounding plants; to eat the sparse raspberries as and when they appear; to give up on the strawberries, both cultivated and wild; to tighten the netting around the blueberries while consigning the outside branches to scavenging birds; to freeze the blackcurrants till the reds and whites are ready to join them, and to make a note not to grow wonderberries so close to the others again, and not at all if they don't produce fruit by the end of summertime.
We might still get a pudding at the end of this season. But a lot of my plans are going to end up as compost. And I don't want that happening to my life, or to our church.
So I'm more than happy that God knows the plans he has for us, plans for our fruitfulness and not for chucking on the compost, and I'll go along with whatever he has in mind.

Silenced

2009-05-25T03:35:00.000-07:00

A friend, a lifelong neo-Marxist humanist, was in hospital with cancer, and one night it all got too much for him. He was crying quietly, trying not to disturb the others in the ward, when a nurse came in, noticed his distress and listened to his fears about life and death and suffering.
She suggested he needed Jesus in his life, and gave him a prayer to say at any time if he chose to hand his life over to the one who had already given up his life for him.
He thought he had nothing to lose and, later that night, decided to invite Jesus into his life.
He said a total peace enveloped him and he slept till morning.
The next day the peace remained.
He could have reported the nurse. She could have been disciplined, cautioned not to speak again about her faith, or even have lost her job.
He knew this, and knew that she knew it too. The fact that she had taken this risk for him, he said, gave her action value and made him more inclined to listen.
It worries me that another nurse has been sacked this week, not for mentioning the God-word to a patient but for mentioning – in a training role-play exercise – that he wouldn't rule out this possibility in certain circumstances.
It worries me that Christians in Eritrea are being imprisoned in shipping containers and beaten for refusing to renounce their faith.
It worries me that public organisations in the UK are countenancing a superstitious taboo against mentioning the name of God to anyone who appears to hold different beliefs or doesn't know what to believe.
And it worries me most that ardent human rights activists are nonchalent about defending a person's right to vote for God with their life.
Surely it has to count for as much as the right to campaign and vote for a fallible politician?

Offensive

2009-05-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

I’m bemused by news items about Christian people suspended from their jobs for offering to pray for their patients, colleagues or clients, or even for asking their own church members to pray about a personal situation involving their work.

Who are these people who claim to be offended by someone praying? Or, more often, claiming not to be offended themselves but afraid that ‘other people might be’?

Surely, in a country supporting free speech and freedom of belief, this is hardly a disciplinary issue, let alone a sacking offence?

As long as the person to whom the prayer is offered is free to say no, why would anyone find it offensive that someone offers them the best they have to give, whatever it is?

As a Christian, I’ve sometimes been a bit taken aback when someone who knows I believe in the God of Jesus Christ has offered me crystals, astrology charts, ‘psychic healing’ or invited me to follow the latest personality claiming to have all the answers to the mystery of life.

But I’m not actually offended by it, and I try not to offend them when I refuse.

If anything, it seems a good sign that people are searching for truth and meaning, even if takes them on some rather odd - to my mind - routes.

So if anyone finds it eccentric that in this day and age, as in every other, people believe in Jesus Christ and find it worthwhile to pray to a God who listens and cares and has been known to provide solutions to problems that appear beyond human remedy, I quite understand if they don’t want me praying with them.

But being forced to not speak about what I genuinely believe to be good, or being told that offering to pray for someone is offensive, seems to me an abuse of authority and a form of fundamentalism.

Broad canvas

2009-05-05T05:02:00.000-07:00

Most people are familiar with famous paintings without ever going to an art gallery. The really well-known ones, like the Mona Lisa, or Monet's waterlilies, are everywhere in print, from postcards to biscuit tins.
But it's only by going to see the original that you realise the scale of the painting. It's surprising to find that the Mona Lisa is quite small, while Monet's waterlilies fill an entire wall of a Paris gallery.
Spiritually, people seem to be designed on different-sized canvases.
Looking at people's lives superficially is like looking at prints of paintings side by side: in the same format, all poster or postcard size, you can't see the scale of their character or the brush-strokes the Artist used.
Some seem more accurately defined and others may look a bit slapdash. The talent in some is more obvious than in others. The faults in some are more hidden, while in others they hit you in the eye.
Attempting to see someone through God's eyes, as happens when you pray for a person rather than judge them by your own impression or by comparison with somebody else alongside, is like going from seeing a print to seeing the original.
One person may be designed on a small canvas with such delicate brushstrokes that their whole life escapes notice by casual observers. This person doesn't appear to achieve great things or fill their life with events.
But on closer examination their life is full of exquisite detail, unobserved kindnesses, deepening character, shades of meaning and understanding.
There will be faults in there too, but on such a small scale they may escape detection except by someone who really takes the trouble to see the whole picture.
This is the kind of person who may get away with claiming they've never really done anything wrong in their life. Their faults are not of the spectacular variety.
Another person may be designed on a broader canvas. You can't miss seeing them. Their achievements attract attention. And so do their misdemeanours.
With a large, open character, a person's range of talents and depth of heart are easy to discern. But when this person makes a mistake, it's big-time. Casual viewers are more likely to condemn them. They can't get away with their failures: everyone sees.
It just doesn't work, somehow, comparing people's lives with each other's. It's like looking at postcard prints when you could go to the gallery, see the original and even, if it's contemporary, meet the artist.
A person with big talents and big emotions is going to be subject to a wider range of temptations.
A person who is sensitively designed will have more of their life affected by the same suffering that a larger-scale person would to confine to one corner of their life and ignore.
Only the Artist knows how he designed each of us.
Perhaps that's why he reserves the right to be the only Judge of humankind.

Under the microscope

2009-03-21T07:48:00.000-07:00

My cousin who is a scientist started a new job which involved examining an unfamiliar set of samples under the microscope and found it took time to ‘get her eye in’ and be able to discern what she was looking at.

Although she had many years’ experience of microscope work, looking for the first time at new material meant that at first, quite literally, she couldn’t see for looking.

A true story is also told of remote tribespeople who were filmed by a visiting Westerner, who then showed them the film. All they could see were shadows moving across a white screen.

After a long time of staring at the shadows, one man distinguished the shape of a chicken.

Once several people followed his pointing and identified the chicken, they began to see other things - houses in the background, then faces they could recognise.

They were amazed - both by seeing their lives on screen and by the fact that they hadn’t been able to see any of it in the beginning.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time with quite a lot of people who, for most of their lives, thought religion was pie-in-the-sky and faith was for people with too much imagination who needed to get a life.

Some of those people then came to believe in a historically documented person called Jesus Christ, and in a God who has got a life but isn’t content to stay up in the sky enjoying the perks of divinity, who chooses to walk alongside us unlovable human creatures in order to show us we’re loved, and who chooses to do it through that same person Jesus Christ today, tomorrow, the next day and into infinity.

And, seeing the reaction of those people who believed it was all just shadows and misconceptions, I can’t help wondering if there is a parallel: that at first, however hard they looked at the evidence and heard other people’s accounts of what they had seen and experienced, they couldn’t see anything in it themselves.

Even if they were trying sincerely to examine what it was that people believed, they ‘couldn’t see for looking’ - until suddenly they got their eye in, the shadows shifted, the microscope focused, and they were faced with an undeniable reality.

Awarded the CDM

2009-03-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

An old marketing campaign for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate bars went: ‘Award yourself the CDM.’
Innocuous enough, except that CDM might just as well have stood for ‘Children Damaged for Merchandise’ - the cocoa industry being among the worst offenders for exploiting trafficked children.
Children are still routinely abducted from home or kidnapped from the streets, with poor and vulnerable children prime targets, and forced to work long hours on the cocoa plantations for little or no pay.
Fairtrade chocolate is therefore about far more than ensuring a fair price for local producers: it is about banning child slavery in the chocolate industry.
Cadbury’s has now announced that its most popular chocolate bar - the CDM - has gone Fairtrade.
The news is fantastic and hopefully will mean that children who have been secreted on plantations can be traced and returned to their families, or accommodated and educated in places where they are finally allowed to have a childhood.
Working to banish child exploitation (and, indirectly, child trafficking to feed the demand) on plantations where it has been normal practice for so long, has taken time, resources and effort on the part of Cadbury’s and they should indeed be awarded a CDM for persevering.
And of course what can be achieved for one chocolate bar can be achieved for all its other chocolate products.
And what can be achieved by one chocolate manufacturer can be achieved equally by all the others.
It would be great if our next generation of chocolate-munching schoolchildren were horrified to learn about the bad old days when chocolate was confected out of the misery of stolen children.
Because by then, we hope, all chocolate will be Fairtrade.

Tears of the Desert

2009-02-10T05:57:00.001-08:00

Completely wowed by Halima Bashir's book 'Tears of the Desert'.
Halima Bashir grew up in a village community in a peaceful place whose name has since become synonymous with genocide – the Sudanese region of Darfur.
A happy child and a bright student, she qualified as a medical doctor and worked diligently for her patients, treating Arabs and Africans alike. For this 'crime' she was abducted, tortured and gang-raped. Returning home, she shared in the experience of a savage attack on her village which left all the adult males dead, and she was forced to flee for her life.
Selling everything she had to come to a safe country, she arrived in the UK as an asylum seeker – only to be disbelieved, told she had insufficient documentation to prove her status, and informed that Sudan was safe.
Her appeal was turned down but when advocates took up her cause, an appeal was made to the House of Lords to declare Darfur still an unsafe place to return victims of hate and torture, while the same authorities remained in power.
In the days before the bill was passed, Darfuri refugees were rounded up and forcibly deported back to the Sudan. Several were captured and tortured again.
Halima Bashan remained to tell the story – her own and that of her compatriots who either didn't survive the racism in their own country, or who didn't survive the UK's attempt to reduce its immigrant statistics at all costs.
It's an amazing book written by a person with amazing courage.

The safest investment

2009-02-08T02:21:00.000-08:00

One effect of the credit collapse, and the problems caused by 'virtual money' not having been backed up the real stuff, is that people and organisations, having lost real money, are understandably reluctant to invest in anything else. Even the 'safest' investment is now seen as 'virtual' – looking and sounding real and attractive on the surface but with nothing behind it.
Sadly, that reluctance to invest any cash in anything at all is having a disastrous effect on charities whose work involves the poorest of the poor.
Whereas it was difficult before for smaller charities to ensure funding for the next stage of a vital project – or even to pay next month's modest salaries – now they are finding it impossible.
It's a tragedy not only for the people who need to benefit from the charities' aid in order to survive, but for the potential donors.
Investing in people's lives, enabling them to rise from hopelessness and abject poverty to confidence and the ability to survive, is not virtual reality or an attractive concept but real and – when you see it happen – enlivening.
Organisations like Oasis India which is transforming the lives of hidden and overlooked people in Mumbai slums, or women and children rescued from the human trafficking trade, are a fantastic investment. For very small sums of money, the life of human being with nothing to live for or hope for, day to day, can be completely turned around.
What investment could possibly yield richer dividends, short-term or long-term?

Slumdog and/or millionaire?

2009-02-06T02:54:00.000-08:00

Having seen the film

'Slumdog Millionaire' I'm now reading some of the reviews and accolades, and the allegations against its creators by Indian and rest-of-the-world's critics and audiences.

UK director Danny Boyle is being accused of exploiting the Mumbai slum children who played the roles of slum children in the film, by paying them very much less than other actors.

The film's distributors are pointing out that the children's salaries are equivalent to three times the annual salary of an adult living in the slum. I'm not sure why that's relevant. If a company calculated an employee's salary in terms of ratio to their dad's wages or the average income of their home neighbourhood, there would be serious questions, not least about its sanity.

Residents of Dharavi slum, where the child actors live, are understandably ambivalent about wealthy foreigners coming in and filming their daily lives and environment for a fictional rags-to-riches film. The Times of India points out that Indian film-makers have always made films about poverty and that there wouldn't be the same objections if this was a documentary.

Perhaps one point is that documentaries tend to get taken seriously and sometimes result in action to change the situation they comment on. But fictional films may actually have more impact on people's understanding and compassion, and make a wider audience aware of a previously unknown reality.

The question is, what do people do with their new awareness of that particular community's suffering? 'Slumdog Millionaire' has been described as 'a feel-good film', an extraordinary comment that suggests the reviewer has somehow screened out the poverty, torture, serial rape of little children, violence and exploitation which are real-life features of vulnerable slum communities, and convinced him/herself that they are simply gritty urban wallpaper to the romantic plot.

There are no easy answers, I think, to the ethics of filming or viewing people's lives and making art or commentary of them, and I'm saying that from the point of view of someone who has spent time in a Mumbai slum for the purpose of describing its residents' lives in my book, about stress and how people survive it.

I was appreciative when people agreed to be interviewed, happy they saw it as an opportunity to have a voice, and not surprised when others regarded it as an intrusion on their privacy.

But in all these recent discussion about ethics aroused by the 'Slumdog' film, it'sinteresting that Danny Boyle has been accused of the wealthy Western film-maker's sin of 'peddling poverty porn,' but no one seems to be accusing the Western film industry of its far more common trend of 'advocating affluence addiction.'

Perhaps we're too busy living it to notice it any more?

Life or death

2009-01-12T06:52:00.000-08:00

Religious freedom is a hot potato for politicians, perhaps because it's not always easy to see where religious belief gives way to political agendas.
But it's worrying that so few Western politicians seem to be making a stand on Islamic apostasy law, which is allowing Muslims who choose to change to another faith to be put to death, imprisoned or tortured, have their marriages forcibly annulled and lose all rights to their children, to have property confiscated and lose inheritance rights and citizenship.
While many liberal Muslims oppose apostasy law and claim it is a misinterpretation or misuse of Islam, in every country where shari'a law operates, courts still uphold the right to kill anyone who converts away from Islam. Where this right is waived, the person who chooses to change their faith is still legally liable to severe persecution and confiscation of basic human rights.
Since 2008, shari'a courts in the UK have the force of law, currently in matters of divorce, domestic abuse and financial disputes.
Many people hold the view that all religion is basically the same, and argue the case for a one-world religion, saying that religious differences are mere quibbling.
Many believe that faith in God is irrelevant or trivial.
But when the official policy of any group - whether religious, ethnic or political – is to legalise killing anyone who chooses to change the way they perceive and worship God, this is neither trivial nor irrelevant to any human being. And objecting to it is not religious quibbling but a serious human rights issue.
So why aren't more politicians calling for apostasy law to be outlawed?

Unholy Land?

2009-01-06T09:41:00.000-08:00

An ITN reporter on last night's news made the poignant comment that the only thing Israel and Hamas seem to agree on is that the violence should continue.
Watching the tragic footage of bleeding, torn and dismembered human beings makes you wonder if any 'just cause' exists that could possibly justify such appalling suffering.
It seems that people of every nation and belief are capable of turning this 'holy land' - the planet that all humans being share custody of, and nobody really owns – into an unholy mess. And in the process, doing the same kind of damage to their own integrity.
The only highlights were those people risking their own safety to pull wounded children and adults out of the bombed wreckage of their homes, the medical staff who carried on operating way past their point of exhaustion, and the orphaned children trying to shelter and care for even younger ones.
For love to survive amid that grim and relentless carnage is a testimony that human nature is capable of real heroism – not the kind that calls itself heroic while bombing the life out of fellow enemies.

Bugging me

2008-12-09T00:26:00.000-08:00

Do you ever get bugged by a phrase that just sticks in your mind and won't let go?
Can't think where it came from or why it's clogging up your brain space, but can't get any peace till you find out?
I knew it was from somewhere in the Old Testament so that narrows down the search a bit - to needle-in-the-haystack proportions!
And I thought it was something to do with Jacob (or was it Joseph?)
But it wasn't the bit about Jacob wrestling with the angel, because I checked that out, in the book of Genesis.
So I asked Warren at church on Sunday morning. He's training to be assistant pastor so he'll have to get used to people expecting him to know all the answers!
Jacob, he said. (Umm, I think. Yes, definitely Jacob.) But not the bit where he wrestles with the angel. Because the quote wouldn't make sense then, because Jacob definitely knew that God had been with him then. So it was some time before then. Definitely in Genesis. Somewhere near the front.
Getting warmer, then.
He grabbed a bible and started flipping pages. Now I'd got somebody else bugged.
(Aagh! I know it! I'll find it!
Nope. Can't get it.)
Joan overheard. Definitely the book of Genesis, she said. Definitely Jacob.
She took a large-print bible out of the cupboard and started flipping pages back and forth.
I'll get it, she said. Hang on a bit.
I have to go, I said. Husband, lunch, sorry and all that.
I'm halfway out of the door and Joan calls me.
Got it, she says. Jacob's ladder. Genesis 28.
The part where Jacob, on a journey to an unknown land far from home, has been overtaken by darkness and lies down and sleeps and in a dream sees a ladder reaching from earth to heaven. Angels are going up and down between heaven and earth, and God promises Jacob he will give him the territory where he's lying and will extend his influence far and wide, will take care of him wherever he goes and bring him back safely to this very spot.
And Jacob wakes up and says .... (and YES! this is the quote that's been bugging me all this week and last .... ) ...."Truly, God is in this place and I never knew it!"
Fantastic, huh? It fits every circumstance, but especially when you're far from home and out of your comfort zone, and doesn't wait till you're perfect (Jacob was, at that time, very much a work in progress.)
Truly, God is in this place.
And I never knew it.
But now I've got it firmly fixed in my head.
Still don't know where it's taking me, but at least I now know where it's come from!

Britain at war

2008-11-28T04:16:00.000-08:00

Britain could be described as a nation at peace, as there is no war going on within its shores.
But it could hardly be described as a peaceful nation.
The UK is one of the most aggressive arms-traders in the world, supplying lethal weapons to countries with deplorable histories of corruption and victimisation of the poor by official and rogue militias.
In the circumstances, any involvement by the UK in global peace initiatives can only lack credibility, till it puts its money where its mouth is and stops equipping the rest of the world for terrorism and war.

In the eye of the beholder

2008-11-27T06:06:00.001-08:00

I was interviewing a man with learning difficulties and he told me he had to have help with some things because he was mentally handicapped.
I asked him to tell me what that meant.
He said, ‘It means people stare at you in the street and say horrible things in shops.’
It made me wonder how other groups might be defined, in terms of how they get treated by other people.
There was a blind man in the street collecting for a blind welfare charity. I guess his definition of being blind might be something along the lines of: ‘It means people think you won’t notice them walking past pretending they haven't seen you.’
Foreign visitor? ‘Means people raise their voices as though you’re deaf and think you’re stupid if you don’t understand the first time.’
Deaf? ‘Means people think you’re stupid if you don’t understand the first time.’
Christian?
Sadly, in many countries: ‘Means you get arrested on false pretexts, thrown in prison, lose your job or are evicted from your home and no lawyer will represent you.’

Criminal

2008-11-17T09:03:00.001-08:00

Once in a while someone says something that sticks in your mind and won’t go away.
I was talking to a committed Christian whose brother is involved in petty – or actually, not so petty – crime.
I commented that it must be hard, seeing your brother go down that path.
He said it was no harder than seeing him in a nine-to-five job and living in a three-bed semi, if he didn’t know God.
And that keeps niggling away at me: why assume that outward respectability makes a person any closer to God than outward criminality?
After all, if I’m not living God’s will for my life, then he is not my God – even if I believe I believe he is!
Even if I was doing lots of stuff that looked good, felt good and even did people good –apparently – if it wasn’t what God was asking me to do, I’d be no closer to him than if I was selling drugs or stolen goods or cheating defenceless people.
I’d be cheating on a God who chooses to be defenceless against my free choice.
And that surely would be a terrible waste of life.
Criminal, even.

Secular God

2008-11-13T08:16:00.000-08:00

Following yesterday's blog about Christmas stamps (Embarrassed by God) I received the following comment from a blog-reader:

You've got this story back to front.
Royal Mail have many years issued secular and religious Christmas stamps on alternate years. This year was due to be a secular year. (2006 stamps featured Santa Claus in the snow, 2007 featured the Madonna stamps etc). For 2008 last year's religious stamps are being re-issued as an optional choice.
So rather than asking why they're only available "under the counter" (which is a bit of an exaggeration given the media attention), you should be asking if secular stamps will also be available in parallel next year for the non-religious.

So, in reply, I'd like to add:

On the other hand …. Christmas is an annual festival to commemorate the birth of Christ.
Not just on alternate years, or taking turns with Peter Pan, or just as long as it doesn't offend anyone.
If people want to celebrate December 25 as a bank holiday with pantomime stamps (or inflatable Santas, luminous reindeer, binge-eating, credit card debt or any other form of jollity) no one's stopping them
But insisting that Jesus Christ has nothing to do with Christmas for the 'non-religious' is odd.
As is stopping shopkeepers (including our local Hindus) from displaying nativity scenes in their shop window.
And insisting on rebranding Christmas as 'Winterfest' or some other title that omits the word 'Christ'.
And allowing schoolchildren to perform plays about fairies and witches, or dances commemorating goddesses, but not plays and songs retelling the birth of Jesus.
Jesus Christ never came for the religious (including the secular humanists) who had their belief systems all sorted out. They didn't like him or his followers, and still don't.
He came for people who were sick to death of superficiality and hypocrisy, especially in themselves, and wanted a different way to live life. He was born a homeless baby and was tortured and executed for offending both religious and secular establishments.
That truth can't be summed up in Madonna and Child stamps or Bethlehem-stable Christmas cards, but for me it comes nearer than Mother Goose or Frosty the Snowman, and I'd like the option of a Christmas image including Christ to be available, openly, publicly, on show, over the counter, in the windows, on the streets, once a year at Christmas – every year – regardless of whether it's considered to be politically correct or internationally inoffensive.

Embarrassed by God?

2008-11-12T10:22:00.000-08:00

It seems to be only in the 'sophisticated' West that people regard belief in God as an embarrassing social solecism – tolerated in people from other cultures and religions but seen as an under-the-counter commodity in home-grown Christians.
Literally.
The latest eccentricity is the Christmas stamps. Apparently there are two sets of designs: one featuring more or less grotesque pantomime figures, and one featuring the Madonna and child – the Virgin Mary and her son, Jesus Christ.
One set is offered for sale by post office and shop staff. The other is kept under the counter and only produced (if the outlet stocks it at all) on request. Guess which one is the poor relation? Yup, you got it: the one featuring the child whose arrival into the world is the whole point of the Christmas celebration.
The irony is, of course, that you have to know about the 'alternative' stamps in order to request them. Why are they not offered openly for sale, along with the pantomime crowd? Because 'there is no demand'!
I live in an area which is richly multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual, multi-accepting, and I love the local shopkeepers for their happy display of Hindu icons, Christian images, Muslim symbols, and cards for every festival – Eid, Diwali, Christmas, Rosh Hashanah ….
Our neighbours from the East don't have a problem with belief in God. They don't find it embarrassing to admit to their own beliefs and they don't expect Westerners to apologise because some of them are Christian.
They accept that not everyone has the same beliefs but on the whole our neighbours seem relieved to find that we're Christian – that we believe in a God beyond our own human limitations – rather than atheist. Especially our neighbours from Eastern countries find secularism cold, alien and self-seeking.
The UK government, on national and local levels, is – rightly – careful not to offend anyone of any religion.
Except, it seems, Christians.
No one apologises for Eid being a Muslim feast, or insists that Diwali be devoid of lights and images in case the worship of Hindu gods offends people who don't accept them as divine.
So why does Christmas have to be sanitised and desanctified, stripped of every connotation and hint of Jesus, just in case it offends someone to be reminded that Christmas commemorates the birth of Christ?
We don't believe in an under-the-counter God but one who claimed to be the light of the world, making himself freely available to anyone overwhelmed by this dark and inhuman world.
Christmas is coming.
Shine on, Jesus Christ.

Sweet ‘n’ Sour

2008-10-11T01:44:00.000-07:00

Anyone who loves chocolate knows there are times when nothing else will do. And unless you live in rural isolation, it’s easy to pop into any local shop anywhere and buy a bar of your favourite version of the chocolate fix.
Except that … it now transpires that the chocolate industry is a major supporter of child trafficking. Children are kidnapped from home or sold into the lucrative trade and forced to work on cocoa plantations, and all of us who buy bars of chocolate are unwittingly aiding and abetting child slavery.
Fairtrade chocolate is the obvious answer – as long as the chocoholic has the time and patience to postpone the chocolate craving long enough to go on a prolonged hunt for it. Unless you have an Oxfam shop or Co-op supermarket on your doorstep, you’re likely to draw a blank. It’s not in sweetshops, kiosks or newsagents. It’s rare and hidden in most supermarkets.
And why, when you do find a bar of Fairtrade choc, is it three times the size anyone wants to carry round in their pocket or eat in one go, as well as three times the price?
The thought of promoting or supporting child slavery is enough to leave anyone with a bad taste in the mouth.
But if consumers are seriously going to embrace the ethical alternative, surely it’s the manufacturers of the already popular brands of chocolate who have to clean up their act, salve their reputation, and put pressure on their suppliers to end this horrendous practice of child labour?
In the meantime, Fairtraders and retailers need to meet in the middle and agree to provide and supply some products that your average chocolate-bar-muncher can access, afford and find appetising, without going round the block to find them.

Deer may safely graze

2008-09-04T02:41:00.000-07:00

Saw huge numbers of deer yesterday, grazing safely in a nature reserve, an idyllic location. Most were in herds, some keeping close together, others in groups spread wider afield. Some were alert to every sound and movement while others ignored us watching them and taking photos.
Walking on, we came across a solitary deer by the waterside who, though keeping a wary eye on us, allowed us to get quite close, till a man with a dog approached and at the sight of the dog the deer bolted.
But still further on, a young deer with antlers was peacefully hoovering up dropped berried from the path and allowed us to move really near, and then nearer. It was only when I was close enough to have reached out a hand and touched him that he raised his head and looked directly at me, with a trace of fear.
What makes some animals, and some people, more trusting than others or more fearful? What makes some young children rush up to people, ask their names and chat to them straight away, while others hide and get shy even with people they know well?
On the face of it, all those deer were from the same herd, living in the same protected area, safe from predators, but some were clearly expecting trouble and fearing the worst and others hadn't a care in the world.

Slugs and sloworms

2008-09-04T02:30:00.000-07:00

Went to pick up a fallen apple and recoiled on finding a giant slug munching on it. YUK!
Was gingerly picking caterpillars off a plant, and jumped when something slithered under my heel - thought it was a caterpillar; was relieved to find it was only a sloworm.
Why? Don't like snakes or caterpillars but find sloworms beautiful.
What kind of God creates everything, from slugs to sloworms to crocodiles, and finds it beautiful?
Most of the time I'd prefer a universe without creatures that are (a) slimy (b) life-threatening or (c) eat things I grow.
But on my slug days, when I feel I'm just slithering around contributing nothing useful or decorative to the universe, I'm glad to be a creature of the Creator who loves even slugs.
And on my crocodile days, I'm relieved he doesn't demolish me for snapping at somebody.
And on my tarantula days .... No, I don't even want to go there .....

Beyond faith

2008-08-28T02:52:00.000-07:00

Losing a much-loved nephew before he reaches old age and while he still has dependent children has tested the limits of my faith.
It hasn’t helped that the family has been offered, along with the sympathy and willing help, more clichés than anyone needs.
Some are universal comfort-bites: ‘He’s out of pain at last.’ It’s true. His heart was strong and the agony of body, mind and soul could have continued for months more. I can wholeheartedly thank God that it did not.
Other clichés (sadly, offered by Christians, though maybe believed by others too) are more disturbing, such as: ‘He must have had some unforgiven sin in his life.’
We all fall short of the standards of God’s goodness. We wouldn’t need the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus’ life if we were sinless. But Jesus clearly rejected the view that a person’s suffering is a God-sent punishment for sin.
To suggest that someone has cancer because he’s offended God says more about the person making the accusation: Jesus gave the title of ‘the accuser’ to Satan, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be spokesman for him. Only God can judge.
And some other clichés sound true, and are classic responses by Christians and not-sure believers too, but need questioning. ‘He’s gone to a better place,’ is no consolation to Andrew’s wife and children, whom he had no intention of leaving. And, ‘He’s with the Lord now,’ also fudges the truth that he actually always was with the Lord: he was one of the most genuine Christians I’ve known.
So, standing back from the clichéd comforting, is there truly any good news – any gospel – of Jesus Christ, in these heartrending circumstances? Can relentless pain, emotional turmoil, mental confusion and spiritual darkness produce anything of lasting value either in this life or beyond death?
I believe so. I know so. Because, in all the agony, there were glimpses of something else going on, something more like a birth than a death – not only for Andrew but for all the many people connected with him, even people praying for him who never got to meet him.
It’s as though life has shifted to a deeper dimension, both for him – going beyond death – and for the rest of us – still living behind that line.
And for those who were close to him, coming back from that edge-of-the-world looking-out-on-eternity feeling and having to get on with everyday life again, life has changed and deepened. There’s no going back to the way we were, or who we were, before Andrew’s death.
And I can thank God for that.

No crying

2008-08-06T02:13:00.000-07:00

Long break from blogging.
Having spent a couple of weeks in a cancer hospital, as a visitor, one thing that struck me was how alien to our culture crying is.
Every visitor leaving the centre had a fixed stare and red-rimmed eyes. Every patient was battling fear and despair. If ever there was a place where people should be allowed to cry, this was it. But if people did it, they hid it - drew curtains around the bed, hid in the loo, dashed for the security of their car in the car park. Or they suppressed it - made loud jokes, too loud sometimes for the other patients, or huddled outside in the wind and rain smoking cigarettes.
Why can't we cry in public?
Is it fear of upsetting other people who seem to be coping?
Or fear of being seen as not coping?
Or is it just habit, so firmly ingrained since childhood, that we no longer know how to cry without guilt or shame and treat it like a secret vice, worse than smoking or joking or choking down hidden distress?
And if so, could this history of choked back tears be a kind of cancer in itself, or even an element of the disease?
I think we should change.
Maybe in a generation or two, we will.
In the meantime, I hid in the loo, waited till night and howled under the duvet, and phoned friends from secluded corners of the hospital premises where no one would see or hear tears.
And kidded myself I was doing it out of consideration for everyone else.

Swansong

2008-06-25T09:55:00.000-07:00

Visited Abbotsbury Swannery in Dorset while the cygnets were hatching. As far as the eye could see, there were pairs of swans nesting, the female perched on a heap of reeds with the cygnets peeping out under her wings, and the male standing guard over his little family.
Some of the nests were within a few metres of each other, and though some were separated by man-made fences, most were out in the open.
These are not tame, pet swans kept in a zoo-swannery, but wild swans who have chosen to fly in to the site and make their home there.
They are immigrants from many parts of the globe, attracted by the unique benefits of this beautiful part of the UK.
An information board explained that the site – near the sea but sheltered behind the long bank of stones that makes up Chesil Beach - was ideal for swans, an open, safe location with ample food supply.
For this reason, the swans had modified their natural behaviour
Although male swans are by nature territorial and become aggressive when other males approach, at Abbotsbury there were few fights. The terrain provided everything the swans needed. It was in their interests to benefit from the environment and to co-exist peacefully, sharing the resources and refraining from attacking each other.
If swans can do it ……………………….!

Swimming in reflections

2008-06-19T12:50:00.000-07:00

Visited gardens with a shallow lake full of goldfish, overlooked by tall trees and subtropical plants that were reflected so clearly in the water that the goldfish appeared to be swimming in a forest.
As forests are obviously outside a goldfish’s normal environment, their awareness of living must have been simply that they were swimming in water, perhaps with occasional awareness of shifting patterns of light and shade across its surface.
It set me thinking about the two worlds we live in, knowingly or unknowingly, as creatures of a God who made us in his own image and likeness – as his reflections, each person reflecting him differently.
While we’re living in our solid material world, doing all our daily to-ing and fro-ing in our familiar environment, we’re doing it all in the context of the Creator, living out our lives in his reflection.
Like the fish, who can’t see the whole picture of the tree-reflections they’re swimming in, we can’t see the God-dimension we’re living in, only shifting patterns of light and shade, sadness and joy.
People doubt the existence of a God they can’t see, who has no identifiable form or shape or evidence within their environment.
But he is the environment we’re swimming in.

Snail’s pace

2008-05-13T02:03:00.001-07:00

Snails are not the highest form of life. Nor are they universally loved, especially when they eat all the new growth in the garden. Most people regard them as little more than animated slime.
I was trying to be humane about killing them (to give the ambitious new seedlings a chance to thrive). So I followed the recommended way of picking them off by hand and drowning them.
I dropped them into a dustbin I was using as a water butt, which had a rock in the bottom to stop it from blowing away when it hadn’t rained for a while.
The water was deep enough, but the snails didn’t want to drown. They scrambled on to the rock and clung to it. They hid in its crevices. They scaled the shiny plastic sides of the dustbin and some of them – disturbingly – let out an audible scream when I prised them off.
For such a primitive form of life, they had a very strong will to live. I suppose all living creatures have the same.
Who decides when a human is human enough to deserve human rights?
When an embryo qualifies for a right to live - before or after a number of weeks of life?
Who calculates their life as not yet human, a clump of living cells, undifferentiated, unable to experience anguish …. animated slime?
I’m not sure about this.
What I do feel sure of is that we shouldn’t stop asking the questions.
And shouldn’t stop anyone else asking those questions either.
The will to live and the desire to think for ourselves, to ask uncomfortable questions and not always to trust the official answers is surely what makes us humans who have all grown from tiny forms of life to bigger, more complex structures but who have always – surely? – been human and alive.

Lourdes

2008-05-08T08:05:00.000-07:00

Someone emailed my website to ask about Lourdes, the Catholic shrine in France. For background on how it became a focal point of prayer and pilgrimage, check out the following website - http://www.catholic.org/clife/mary/lourdes1.php
For me, Lourdes was somewhere I’d heard about but had no desire to go. It sounded tacky to me, with its miracles and its desperately ill pilgrims and the grot-shops selling plastic Virgin Marys with screw-cap heads so people could take a bottle of holy water home. My mother and my sister encouraged me to see past the tackiness and go there.
I became very sick and a lady from church invited me to join her group going to Lourdes, but I refused. I believed I would be healed, but that God was telling me I’d be healed at home. I could go to Lourdes afterwards, as a thanksgiving.
Against the odds, I got well. (A detailed account is in my book, ‘Don’t Ask Me To Believe’). I thanked God, got on with life, and became drawn to praying with people for healing. After a couple of years, and some lifechanging experiences of how God works, I became really weak. It wasn’t a recognisable physical illness, and in many ways was a gift, but was very restricting.
When it reached the stage that a phone call or a walk to the end of garden left me shaking with exhaustion, I prayed for some specific direction from God, and that’s when it came to mind that I hadn’t made the thanksgiving for my healing. I needed to go to Lourdes.
A friend believed I could get there, and came with me. There were delays on the journey, it was February and freezing cold, and we arrived late and worn out and in desperate need of rest. But I suddenly felt that, if I was going to feel this tired for the rest of the week we’d booked to be there, I wanted at least one glimpse of the grotto (where Mary had appeared to Bernadette), so I might as well go straight away.
We walked through the town to the grotto, and I’ve never felt so disappointed. The grotto I’d heard so much about consisted of a battered statue perched on a bit of rock. People wandered about in the rain, looking as aimless as I felt.
I noticed a woman praying, on her knees, in a puddle, her face rapt. She was obviously experiencing something I wasn’t.
For the sake of doing something, I prayed. And something happened. I was filled with rage. I felt robbed. I got enraged, not with Lourdes but with Mary, mother of Jesus, mother of God. In my heart I found myself yelling at her, ‘Call yourself a mother? Given to all of us by Jesus, at the foot of the cross? And you handed me over to the care of a mother who clearly was in no state to take care of herself, let alone a newborn baby?’
And quickly and very clearly I heard a voice, ‘I didn’t hand you over. I was there all the time. Don’t you remember me?’
And I did remember her. She had stood beside my mother every time I was put into my cot and left. She would stay there after my mother went out of the room, until I slept. When I was about four, I realised I hadn’t seen her for a while. I asked my mother where ‘my other mother’ had gone, but she didn’t know what I was talking about.
I stood in front of the rock, in the pouring rain, and wept. I felt cared for, mothered and loved. For the rest of the week, my energy never ran out. I went to Masses in every language, prayed the rosary, walked the Stations of the Cross, had confession, and was immersed in the waters three times as a symbol of dying to sin and death and rising in Christ. Since then I’ve seen God as mother as well as Father, and understood that both men and women are made in his likeness, because he contains the image of both.

15 things I hate about God

2008-04-30T07:24:00.000-07:00

15 things I hate about God
You’re not predictable. You can’t be relied on to do the same thing every time. You don’t let sleeping dogs lie. You don’t do what we expect. You don’t meet our needs as we perceive them. You don’t flatter our ego. You don’t consult us on every detail. You don’t defer to our judgement. You don’t let us take turns at being God. You don’t always back our opinions, laugh at our jokes or confirm our prejudices. You don’t prove we are right. You don’t care if we’re right or wrong. Even when we don’t want you near us, you keep loving us, like it or not. You are indefinable, unforgettable, immeasurable and can’t be put in a box. You are God.
15 things I like about God
All of the above.

Back to Basra

2008-04-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

I read in the paper that immigration authorities who reject the applications of asylum seekers from Basra are no longer sending the refugees back to a safer area of north or south Iraq, but back to Basra.
I thought this country didn't practise the death penalty?
Let alone for people who are innocent of any crime.
Unless wanting to escape being bombed, shot or raped is now a crime?
How can we be so proud of British justice and allow something like this?

Call that a prayer??

2008-04-25T07:14:00.000-07:00

Got woken up in the middle of one of those very lucid dreams, in which I was praying.
In case you think this sounds holy, the prayer I caught myself saying was, 'Lord, in my opinion ....!' I think I was about to give God some advice on how he should be managing my life. Just as well I got woken up.
The trouble is, I suspect it may not be just in dreams that I pray like that. My subconscious may very well be praying along those lines in my waking time. And as real prayer comes from the guts, I'm making it fairly impossible for God to answer my prayers, because he wouldn't be God if ran the world on my opinions.
And thank God for that one!

Sweatshop

2008-04-23T09:48:00.000-07:00

Brightly coloured garments hanging limply on rails –
glowing colours –
painstakingly embellished –
bargain priced

Sari-clad ladies
in beautiful glowing cloths
hanging limply in rows
sapped by heat and tiredness –
painfully exploited –
cut-price wages

Buying and selling exhaustion –
lifeless clothes -
lifeless lives -
days too long -
life too short –
eyes strained –
fingers sore

I can’t wear this pain
any more

The band that never was

2008-04-20T10:59:00.000-07:00

I was in the kitchen making stewed apple, listening to my husband performing a duet (he was on the piano) with the plumber (on the gas fire, with vocals) and thinking about the great bands that never came to be, because the people who would have created great sounds together never got the opportunity to meet.
Which led naturally to thinking about the people called by Jesus who became his followers, some of whom had absolutely nothing in common with each other and would never have met except for him; in fact, some of them would have naturally hated each other – local working men like Simon Peter, and tax collectors working for the occupying Roman government, like Matthew.
Which led naturally again to thinking about churches and the disparate (and sometimes desperate) collection of people in them, who would never meet or get to know each other under any other circumstances, who have nothing in common except their humanity and their desire to follow Jesus, and who sometimes – not surprisingly – find it really difficult to get on with each other.
A few of us visited a friend of a friend’s church in another area on Wednesday, and the young man leading the meeting included a prayer for some members who were working on resolving a ‘minor falling out’ with each other.
We found this encouraging – that it was actually mentioned and acknowledged that, yes, this does happen in churches and yes, it does need to be sorted out pretty promptly, and because it is difficult and sometimes painful to do this, the church needs to pray for the people concerned to be willing and enabled to forgive.
By the time I’d finished musing over all this (and the apples were cooked) the duet from the sitting room had degenerated into a ‘yes, but I bet you can’t guess who first recorded this one,’ contest.
Perhaps the fact that my husband and the plumber never met earlier and formed a band was not such a loss to musical and social harmony after all ….

Privileged

2008-04-07T15:26:00.000-07:00

Talking to people who have lived and worked in the Gulf, many have a mixed view of the privileged/exploited divide among workers there.
Even those who made a hefty profit from their tax-free years working there are vocal in criticising the system for blatant favouritism towards nationals and the rich.
A main attraction for workers there, whether high-living expats or struggling migrants, is the absence of income tax. Yet the cost of living has risen steeply, and wages for the lowest-paid have not, so for them the deal is not as good as it looks.
One taxi driver, during our visit, said that he used to work long hours and could only afford to live in one room. Now his employer has insisted he works even longer hours, there is no overtime rate, and he can only afford to live in a room shared with seven others. From an Indian background, he was born in Dubai but will never gain citizenship or equal rights there.
Trade unions are not a reality, and migrant workers have no bargaining power. Some building workers recently were driven to throwing objects off the top of buildings to attract attention to their unsafe working conditions, such as being made to work through the intense midday heat, with the risk of fainting while perched on high scaffolding without safety harnesses.
Meantime, the world’s rich and spoilt are buying not only their own private mansions in and around Dubai but their own private islands.
It would be easy to moralise about the rags-to-riches countries of the oil-rich Gulf (Dubai was a tiny settlement of pearl fishermen and nomads as recently as forty years ago) and the failure to reach the standards of employment and justice that other countries have fought and bargained for through centuries of exploitation and injustice.
But the Western world has its own long history of bullying the poor and only becoming ‘moral’ under pressure, and its treatment of immigrants now doesn’t bear examining too closely.
Not only that, but claiming privilege, taking the best for ourselves and leaving the leftovers for others is so programmed into the human psyche that probably no one – apart from Jesus Christ – could say they have never ‘done a Dubai’ in this respect.
That point is brought home to me when I’m on the way home. We call in to see my brother- and sister-in-law, who give us a lovely meal with one of my favourite puddings. When the dish is passed to me, I find I have carefully examined it to find the crispiest bit and have helped myself generously, before noticing that two other people haven’t yet had any.
Between that, and greedy employers creaming off profits that should be shared with their fellow human beings, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of difference, except in degree.
It’s a handy visual aid, Dubai and other countries conveniently far away, for illustrating the extremes of injustice in the world towards the privileged and the neglected.
But I guess I need to start nearer home. Like, with me.

Virtual reality

2008-04-06T02:22:00.000-07:00

Just back from a visit to Dubai, which is full of amazing buildings: high towers with reflective surfaces and curved or triangular walls, one in the shape of a sail, many of them over a hundred storeys tall - hotels and multinational companies competing to make their mark on the skyline.
There are man-made islands, one in the shape of a palm-tree, with curved banks arching out into the sea, and others representing different countries of the world – created for no other purpose than to wow the tourists, attract investment and provide property for the rich and spoilt.
Buildings of another class, equally tall, are hastily assembled from concrete on sites dominated by cranes and patrolled by dust-storms, where scant attention is paid to security for the migrant workers – some without harnesses or safety helmets – who balance on single planks laid across scaffolding, passing materials from one to another high above the ambitious streets.
Far from home, they labour to survive the heat of the day, the clouds of dust which they inhale, the expansive working hours and tight pay, and the cramped accommodation they share at night with strangers. And the emptiness of life with family far away, and love that’s expressed by sweat and pay cheques sent home, but not by company and contact and time to play with the children and visit elderly parents and lie down at night with their wife.
We cruised up the creek which divides one bank of palaces, mosques and businesses from another bank of hotels and centres of tourism. Apart from the water, the stars in the sky and the people everything was man-made – a fact which made even the natural elements feel artificial.
We ventured into the desert – the part which has been tamed to attract the tourists. Along the smooth tarmac road, between tidy stretches of sand where vegetation survives, are two-dimensional representations of various places around the world on painted boards like film sets, to attract the eye and save the visitor from getting bored by unbroken expanses of desert.
The road leads to a man-made oasis, a beautifully designed replica homestead in the traditional style, with arches and alcoves, the walls lined with long couches and draped with heavy textiles, and a roof terrace where a band plays electronic synthesisers reproducing genuine Arabic tunes as the sun sets photogenically behind them.
The palm trees wave gracefully around the building, as they should, irrigated with water pipes concealed in the clean sand. The camels exist to give rides to the tourists, the falcon’s role is to perch on the visitors’ wrists and offer photo opportunities, and the water of the oasis is confined to the blue-tiled swimming pools. A sprinkler-watered croquet lawn and outdoor cinema screen complete the fantasy.
It’s a perfect oasis for those who want to escape reality – as long as you don’t look below the surface.
Once you do, the desert appears – the real desert as we saw it from the plane on the way home: mile upon mile of mountains and valleys and ridges which looked as solid as any other landscape but were made of sand. No vegetation to hold the landscape in place. No habitation, with foundations built on sand.
It would only take one sandstorm for the whole geography to shift – for yesterday’s mountain ranges to become rifts and for even the most impressive landmarks to disappear without trace and transform themselves into something quite different.
And the whole of our civilization, whether as new as Dubai or as old as Pompeii, could be seen in the same way – as virtual security, impressive and solidly built and providing comfort and shelter from harsh reality, but able to be swept away in an instant because it’s only built on sand, only man-made.
So what survives, when reality hits and the storms sweep away everything from our lives that we’ve ever relied on?
Only what’s built on love will survive - only the real love that comes from God: the kind that outlasts the doubt-storms, the confusion-clouds and the callous collapse of every man-made security, including our own integrity.
Only God is real and his work, built on love, survives eternity.
We can gloss over that love, deny it, escape it, hide it and switch it off – but to do that reduces life to a screensaver, beautiful, familiar, comforting, but with nothing behind it except virtual reality made to our own design – okay till it crashes or fades, leaving the screen of our life blank again.

Distraction!

2008-03-21T14:47:00.000-07:00

I was driving down the kind of three-lane A-road that requires you to concentrate, when my attention was distracted by the very grimy white van in front of me, on which someone had scrawled the words: Cleaned by the NHS!

Prayer power

2008-03-16T02:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at a day of prayer I met a man who had had an amazing experience of Jesus Christ.
He was an alcoholic who had tried many times to give up drink, and was depressed by the constant failing. Out of desperation he went to a local Catholic church where two people prayed with him and told him to invite Jesus to show him if he was real.
He said Jesus revealed himself to him, healed him of the desire to drink, and showed him every person in his life who had prayed for him and helped him come to this point.
His mother, he knew about. The others were a complete surprise.
One was a Salvation Army lady who had been singing with a band in Soho when he was going into a club once. He had shouted at her to shut up because she was ruining his evening out, and she had laughed and said, ‘Praise God that we are ruining your evening out!’
The other was a six-year old girl.
He was doing casual work, painting and decorating, and a team of them were painting a church. A group of children came by and this little girl left her friends outside and went into the church and prayed. Among others, she prayed ‘for the painters’.
Interestingly, once this man encountered the reality of Jesus Christ and was healed of his addiction, some family members found it harder to accept him than when his life had been ruled by alcoholism.
He had been the ‘bad one’ of the family; the rest of the family were ‘good’. They were churchgoers, they were not drunks, and for years they had put up with him. Now he had upset the family dynamics. His face lit up as he talked about the power of Jesus to heal, and the need for a personal relationship with him, to allow him to be effective in each person’s life.
Some of the ‘good’ ones didn’t want to hear it. Their relationship with God was decently distant and that’s how they thought it should stay. What was this man, who had wasted his life and exhausted everyone’s forgiveness, doing – telling them about God’s goodness?
He went on to tell me about a nephew of his, who was angry and violent, vindictive against his own family. He was intimidating all of them.
I suggested praying for him so we did, there and then. And out of it came a sense that this boy was wounded and couldn’t get anyone to listen to him.
The man said he knew what the wound was; the boy had confided in him and he did believe his allegations against the family; he never lied.
I asked him if he thought the boy was like him – the ‘bad one’ of the family - because it’s often the ‘bad one’ who loves the family most and takes on all their problems and brings them to light.
He said if this was the case, it could be more serious than he had thought. The boy had sisters, who might also have been affected, though they had never said anything. He might be trying to defend them all, rather than attack them, as it appeared.
He is going to go home and try to get his nephew to talk to him, and really listen.
I said I would pray for them both.
Please, if you pray, join in.
And if you don’t pray, maybe you’d consider asking Jesus to show you, in some way, whether he’s real and alive. You might be in for a surprise.

New every morning

2008-03-13T03:04:00.000-07:00

My mother suffered from Alzheimer’s. Sometimes she recognized my sister and me as her daughters; sometimes she thought either or both of us were her sister; other times she met us as people who seemed nice enough but she couldn’t quite recall if she knew.
One positive aspect of this terribly confusing and bewildering mental territory she found herself inhabiting was that every experience was new.
And one thing that brought her enjoyment every morning was the discovery of a delicious food. Her face would light up when she tasted it – a new delicacy, new every morning. She would ask the carers what it was called.
‘Toast,’ they would tell her, every day without fail. ‘Toast and marmalade. Nice and crisp, how you like it, Joan.’
‘Do I?’ She would search the jumbled closet of her memory. ‘Oh yes! I do!’
Next day there would be a new delicacy on the menu. Again, she would be delighted. What was it? Toast? And marmalade! Of course she liked it; she knew she did.
New every morning.
Taste and see that the Lord is good. Always new.
I wish I didn’t forget, but I do. I get spiritual Alzheimer’s about his goodness, his honesty, his reliability. I start thinking as though I have never experienced his help in difficult times and my life depends on my own successes or on favourable circumstances.
Then he gives me a taste of his reality again, in some little detail of daily life, and my tastebuds jog my memory.
God is good. It’s true. I knew I knew it, and now I know it again.
Every morning, new.

Language problems

2008-02-29T12:12:00.000-08:00

I was standing in the Post Office queue for what seemed like most of the morning, and two boys in school uniform came in and stood behind me. I didn’t mean to listen in to their conversation but there wasn’t much else going on except two toddlers raiding the boxes of crisps stacked on the floor, watched with indifference by their mother/childminder and with hostility by the man behind the sweet counter.
There are definitely language problems in our society. I mean, there are so many words for ‘good’ – including ‘wicked’, ‘bad’, ‘gay’, ‘fat’, ‘mega’ and ‘cool’ – that previously had other meanings. But I thought I’d learned them.
But the taller of these two boys kept saying, ‘It’s live, man!’ in a way that clearly meant he thought it was good.
Quite a good word to use, when you think about it. Jesus said he had come so we might have life. So if something’s good, it’s …yes, ‘live’!
Though it was a bit strange in the context the boys were using it. Their conversation covered applying for a driving licence (‘I filled in the form all legit except for that one bit, man’) to having extensions built on their homes (‘Though we can’t fill in the alleyway cos it, like, belongs to someone else as well and it’s got a sofa in it that you got to jump over to get to our back garden’) to donating body parts.
How did they get on to that? I think it was connected to filling in forms and they just naturally progressed on from driving licence applications to donating organs.
The smaller boy said, ‘I ain’t donating no body parts, no way. They ain’t cutting me up when I’m dead and giving bits of me away.’
And the taller one said …. you guessed it …. ‘Well, I’m gonna do it. It’s live, innit?’
I went home, got on the computer and tried to sign up for a new directory site. It asked me if I wanted to ping. And advised me not to adjust my Atom feed.
I don’t know what they’re talking about.
I was very tempted to rush back to the Post Office and see if the schoolboys were still there and could translate for me.
But actually, I love the way language evolves. People own it and sculpt it and adapt it into new forms, like plasticine, changing it almost daily.
It’s an art.
It’s live. Innit?

All in a day’s work

2008-02-27T02:02:00.001-08:00

How does God keep track of everyone?

I had one of those days last Thursday when I wondered if I was autistic. Or agoraphobic. Or terminally unable to get anything done. I ended up drifting around doing bits of this and that. There were people to contact but somehow it could wait till tomorrow. Shopping to get, but hey, there were eggs in the fridge and science may prove tomorrow that mouldy bread’s good for you. The house needed cleaning and the washing basket was filling up. The builder was coming later to fix a leak in the roof, so if I was going to go out it had better be now.

The weather was good and I normally hate to see sunshine and not be out in it, but I ended up staying in, writing a song and making cake.

Eventually, when the cake was almost cool, it occurred to me to phone an old lady whose husband was ill in hospital and see if she’d like some. She hadn’t been eating cake while he was at home, because he wasn’t well enough to eat it and she’d said, ‘You can’t eat cake on your own.’

Today I persuaded her that I’m living proof that you can, and she changed her mind and said she would like some, so I took it round।

The builder came, the roof was fixed, I texted a friend who had spent her day journeying to a favourite uncle’s funeral and was just home, a couple of people phoned, and I had supper and went to my church home-group, where everyone seemed a bit sleepy and unfocused and we didn’t get round to praying till the evening was over.

I hadn’t done much with the day, hadn’t gone anywhere apart from up the road, but a number of other people’s days were intertwined. My friend, at the funeral, had joined her day with family members who rarely came together and didn’t see their lives as connected with each other’s, most of the time.

The builder and his mate had spent their day going to several jobs where work needed finishing off, and were due at one more after our house.

And the old lady would later receive a phone call saying her husband was dying, and she would call a good friend from church who would drive her to the hospital and help her into a wheelchair from the car to her husband’s bedside, where she would talk to him about happier times, not sure if he could hear her. And then she would go home, and wait. And the phone call would come before midnight to say he had died.

How does God keep track of all those lives – all those people’s days lived out, alone or entwined or alongside - when just one ordinary day holds so many people’s days, and one person’s life, whether successful, traumatic or uneventful, touches so many other lives?

Dangerous prayer

2008-02-27T02:02:00.000-08:00

Prayer, when it’s genuine and from the heart, can be life-changing stuff. I’m not surprised when people hesitate before asking to be prayed with – it’s a sign they take it seriously.
God will never harm anyone. But he does say clearly that his ways are not our ways.
He can only heal. But the process of healing, making people whole, may feel destructive. He can destroy illusions and false securities in an instant, and that can feel overwhelming. Even if I know I’m clinging to something unreliable, it’s still a wrench to let go.
I prayed with someone who seemed to have the word ‘unacceptable’ hanging over her life. Her eyesight’s failing and yet her inner vision seems to be growing all the time. This insight and intuition sets her apart from people. She’s surrounded by people a lot of the time, constantly helping and very involved in their lives, and yet one thing I was led to pray for with her was companionship and teamwork, an end to isolation.
And for good health. And surely a good and comprehensively healing God must include her eyesight in that?
Yet, in the time since we prayed, her eyes have not improved and in fact she has been diagnosed with another condition.
It’s tempting to accuse God of a cruel joke. Or to avoid like the plague the person who prayed.
But what if God knows what he’s doing? What if he’s saying, ‘I haven’t finished yet?’ and the healing he’s set in process is deeper and wider than we can imagine? What if he has no intention of leaving the work half-finished, but we run away?
When prayer is deeply disturbing, when it seems to throw up more problems than it solves, when it’s so disorientating that the person feels they’d rather be stuck with the sickness or disability than go near God or the person who prays again, what is the answer?
My choice would be to keep praying, not one-to-one, but with the person surrounded by people they know, love and trust. My feeling is that God doesn’t want to heal us into healthy isolation but into a community of love.
And even when someone is part of such a community, people can get so busy ministering, working and helping, that the infirmity of one person seems like just another incident in a suffering world. They pray, but if there’s no tangible result, they move on. And that may be the right thing to do at times. God has his own reasons, they say, and his own timing.
But sometimes I feel God wants to stop the world, to say that he finds the suffering of one of his children simply unacceptable or too much, and to call us to drop everything and focus on that one person. If we agree – and they agree to be the focus of such unaccustomed and maybe uncomfortable attention – then we may find he’s healing more than the need we can see, and more than one person.
He may be healing everybody who participates, of their striving to be useful to him, of their determination to keep going and not bother anyone with their suffering – and of our tendency to forget how deeply it grieves him when one of his children is suffering and everyone, including the sufferer, is trying to accept it and move on.

Sparrow

2008-02-17T14:03:00.000-08:00

I could never get very interested in birds. I like seeing them flying around, but mainly for the atmosphere – seagulls are part of the seaside; flocks of birds swooping around following a tractor are part of the ploughing season, and so on. But I wasn’t terribly motivated to learn the names of different kinds of birds, especially when most of them were brown and rather similar.
Someone gave us a bird feeder and we dutifully filled it with peanuts and put it up in the garden and felt mildly gratified when it attracted finches as well as the ordinary old starlings and sparrows.
Then, a month or so ago, a fantastic bird arrived, with a black and white striped head and little zingy bits of colour, and white dots on its tail. It turned out to be a Greater Spotted Woodpecker.
And shortly before that, a bird with hooded eyes like an eagle, only much smaller, was perched on the arm of one of our plastic garden chairs. That one was a kestrel.
It felt quite an honour to have these exotic visitors. I wanted to encourage them to come again. I didn’t know how, but more food seemed a good idea. So when I was in town I bought a fat ball (apparently loved by birds in winter) and my husband hung it up, along with a second feeder of nuts, so we now had a more generous feeding station.
And it worked, in that the more interesting birds that were getting pushed off the feeder by assertive starlings and sparrows now just flitted to the next food source and stayed around.
I started using the binoculars to see them in more detail, and even the bird book to check their identity – chaffinches, green finches, a wren, a mistle thrush, a garden warbler. Not bad!
Then, just as I was getting hooked on watched the various occupants of the feeders, my eye was caught by a sparrow. He had perched on the roof of next door’s shed and was eyeing the feeding station but instead of flying over to take his chances, he drew himself up to full height, opened his beak and let out a surprising volume of sound, followed by a lot of energetic hopping around, not moving much from the spot but jumping and landing facing in different directions.
I was struck by the sheer vitality of this tiny bird. So much energy and life emanating from something the size of a ping pong ball! So much confidence! He just radiated self-esteem and joy of living.
This was a bird who didn’t know he was ordinary and brown, or small. He was a herald of good tidings – food, garden, sunshine, morning – to the entire neighbourhood. He puffed out his chest, thrust his head forward, and sang his heart out, followed by what looked like an exuberant dance.
All that power. All that life.
Why do we think we’re powerless?
If so much can be contained in a creature that size – one of the most ordinary little examples of British birdlife – surely we contain more? Jesus said, ‘Not a single sparrow falls without the Father – God – knowing about it. And you are worth more than any number of sparrows.’
So – world poverty? War? Injustice? What makes us so sure we can’t do anything about it? Let’s go for it. It can’t hold out against us. And let’s make a song and dance about it.

The most dangerous drug

2008-02-11T11:32:00.000-08:00

The relationship between Christian healing and the medical profession is an uneasy one.
Some Christians claim to have no conflict: they believe God heals but when they have physical symptoms they go to the doctor and, if the symptoms don’t clear up easily, they ask the church to pray for them.
Others believe that Jesus’ way of healing doesn’t need medical intervention. They reason that Jesus healed through prayer alone, and that although his followers included physicians, he didn’t send people to them for medicine.
Most of us don’t know.
Sometimes we experience a strong prompting to pray for someone’s healing, and the prayer seems to go way beyond the known need or the obvious symptoms of sickness. Day after day, the prayer for that person to be well evolves into praying for whole areas of their life, relationships and personal history that we – and possibly they – never considered relevant. God’s healing seems to be deepening and widening far beyond the original diagnosis. It becomes clear that he’s healing the person, not a sickness or a bunch of physical symptoms. And that healing seems to extend to all the people praying for them or trying to help them as well.
In such a case, if the person had simply gone to the doctor, they would have missed out on this deeper healing.
But sometimes the original symptoms don’t shift till the person does go to the doctor as well and accept some physical remedy.
I’m inclined to think, if a problem won’t clear up easily, either by prayer or by a medical remedy, then the best thing to do is to hit it from every angle - spiritual, physical and emotional – and keep persevering until the person is strong: either cured or able to cope.
I’ve known people who couldn’t be healed, who responded eventually to a balance of counselling, medication, prayer, friendship, help with the shopping, home-made cake, a change of scene, and opportunities for helping someone worse off than themselves – when none of those things, individually, would have solved the problem.
I think the most dangerous drug that can be administered to a person is arrogance.
If someone claims to have the only answer to a problem, even when that answer clearly doesn’t meet the person’s need, they are demanding recognition from the patient for their own expertise, status or remedy, rather than asking God for help to listen to the patient’s real and deepest need.
In the same way, if a patient will only accept help in a certain way or through a certain person or type or status of person, they are also demanding recognition for their own remedy, rather than inviting God to minister to them in his own way.
Recently, a man went to his local GP who told him that the only cure for his symptoms was a radical, painful and disfiguring operation. The patient told the GP this didn’t sound to him like a loving God’s first choice and he believed God would heal him directly. The doctor accused him of being in denial of the reality of his sickness.
The man underwent extensive prayer ministry, which highlighted a number of issues in his present-day life and his history which would probably never have come to his attention had he not gone for prayer because he was ill.
When the physical symptoms of illness didn’t subside, he also went on the internet and discovered there was a more recent, and far less barbaric, surgical alternative for the problem and eventually asked the doctor to refer him for it.
The hospital consultant was helpful, the operation was successful – but the man was discharged from hospital at a moment’s notice, feeling very unwell, not having eaten for days, with a long journey home ahead of him, and with painkillers wholly inadequate for the level of pain he was experiencing.
The agony that ensued had to be ministered to by prompt prescription of some more appropriate pain relief by his GP, focused and intense prayer by the people interceding for him, the removal of some responsibilities, and his own willingness to address some causes of emotional distress that he’d tried to shrug off.
Perhaps we need to take the focus off the form of healing. Both Christians who pray, and doctors who administer medical intervention, may need to stop demanding faith from the patient in what they are doing, and focus on the person in their pain.
Some pain won’t go away. It’s not a rebuke to the person praying, a lack of faith in God, a ‘low threshold of pain’, or a slight to the medical profession. It’s just pain. And if it can’t be banished, it may be that it needs to be listened to. We have to care enough about the person who is in pain to listen to them on a physical, spiritual and emotional level, and not demand that they get healed.
Their inability to respond to our efforts by getting well may mean there is a deeper pain below the pain we, and they, perceive.
God alone knows what that is.
And, whether we are the person who needs to be healed, the person praying for them to be healed, or the doctor, therapist or healer administering their own form of expertise, we’ll get nowhere unless we ban the drug of arrogance from our bag of remedies and listen to the God who created the person and who alone knows where the healing is.

Close-up viewing

2008-01-31T07:14:00.000-08:00

I’ve been experimenting with macro photography.
It sounds simple. You press a button on the camera (with a green flower on it, in my version) and then you can get really close up to the object you want to photograph and see all the detail, without it being blurred.
I can do all of it except the last bit. It’s blurred.
I’m trying to take pictures of a growing seedling. The seedling is growing obligingly; it’s noticeably bigger and leggier every day and the leaves are unfurling nicely and turning green.
The trouble is, it’s in a tray with a lot of other seedlings and they seem to all want to be in the picture, and I can’t focus on the chosen one without flattening a couple of others in the process. That’s the downside of getting the camera so close in.
Also, the brick wall of the conservatory where the seedlings are being nurtured isn’t noticeable – at least, I didn’t notice it, being used to seeing it there – until I start taking the picture, when it seems to leap into focus.
Blurred seedling, glaringly visible brick. Great.
So I shift around a bit, find another angle, make sure it’s the seedling that’s the focal point of the picture, not the other seedlings and not the wall.
Better. The seedling’s still a bit hazy but the wall’s out of shot now. Except – what’s that pink blur in the corner of the photo?
It’s our local authority’s new reusable garden rubbish bag. I didn’t actually want a picture of that.
I know what I’ll do. I’ll stop trying to take the photo from the side, showing the height of the plant and incidentally getting the background in view, and I’ll take it from the top, showing all the little seedlings reaching up towards the camera lens. That’ll look good. Aspirational morning glories. What could be better?
And then I’ll put the photos on the computer and crop them to show one particular shoot with its leaves just opening.
So I do it.
It looks okay, once you know what the picture is – all these wavy little pale green blobs on spindly legs, all slightly out of focus. It might be all right with a title. Nothing vague: something like Morning Glory Seedlings Emerging From Compost might give the viewer a clue.
Now I come to look more closely, there is one part of the picture that is absolutely, totally clearly in focus, in glorious macro detail, and so beautiful I’m surprised I never noticed it before, because it’s there just as clearly in every other shot too.
It’s the compost.
Compost With Indeterminate Unfocused Seedlings Emerging describes the shot much more accurately.
I’m not joking about the beauty, actually. You can see every grain of the soil.
Without the macro, the soil is just a brown backdrop to the obvious attraction of seedlings pushing their way through the mud and out of it into the light.
Okay, so the growth is a miracle. But so is the soil.
Those crumbly little particles, with absolutely no beauty of their own, partnered only by air and water and a little bit of light, have enabled all those tight little black pips of dormant seeds to sigh and release their hard shell and let one tender shoot emerge and stretch and push its way through the darkness to the surface and then put on a spurt of growth and reach for the light. Morning glories can grow six feet high.
Maybe, despite my lack of expertise with photography, the macro facility got the focus right.
I have a fantastic close-up of the earth which gave birth to life.

Happy ending

2008-01-25T14:35:00.000-08:00

A funeral is a great occasion to get to know the person who’s died. However well you think you knew them, there’s always some detail that that reveals the person to you in a new light.
A friend’s funeral last year made it clearer to me why she, as a fellow Christian, struggled with some of the things I believed in effortlessly. She had planned the service herself and I was surprised that although she wasn’t that much older than me, the hymns she had chosen were very traditional.
I knew she belonged to a particular church group: I’d been along to one of its meetings with her and found a bit austere, not my style. And she’d come with me to a charismatic prayer group and found it alarmingly lively – not for her. But it wasn’t until her funeral service that it struck me how different our ways of approaching God were. It’s amazing we found so much in common for twenty-odd years!
This morning I went to another funeral and was equally surprised, though for the opposite reason.
Mary was a neighbour, where we used to live, and I’d known her for years. Like my friend, she was wary of free singing and spontaneous worship and anything not unanimously approved by the more rule-conscious elements of the church hierarchy. She could never quite bring herself to come to prayer meetings at our house but she used come to services there as long as they were led by a member of clergy, and she asked to host them in her own home and was happy to invite the whole prayer group.
I knew she belonged to a community – not a live-in community but one of a network of groups that tried to live and worship much as the original disciples of Jesus did, sharing their hearts and resources and gifts, and being accountable and supportive of one another in the trials and temptations they suffered.
I went to some of the community’s services and enjoyed it even though they were very structured, the opposite of the spontaneous kind of worship I preferred. The Holy Spirit was there, as tangibly in the carefully prepared and lengthy liturgies of the community as in the unplanned but somehow orderly outpourings of prayer in the charismatic groups.
So I was expecting, at Mary’s funeral, that some of her community members would be there, along with family, neighbours and friends, some Christian, some not.
And I assumed that the service would be structured and traditional. Which it was, up to a point. And that it would include some of the age-old hymns Mary usually requested in the home services. Which it didn’t. It did have the Ave Maria and Panis Angelicus and The Lord is My
Shepherd, sung beautifully by a professional singer.
But it also had an exuberant Italian guy (who told us after the service that he was a trainee priest) with a flamboyant style of strumming his guitar and a megawatt, megadecibel voice, singing choruses nobody knew but wished they did and somehow got drawn to join in.
And it had an unexpected final part of the funeral, when the standard, recognizable service was drawing to a close and the undertakers were discreetly moving forwards and hovering behind the pillars.
Out of the congregation, from all areas of the large church, individuals walked silently from their pews and gathered round the coffin at the front. These were members of Mary’s community. Some were elderly, several walked with difficulty, some were younger.
They stood together quietly and comfortably, obviously well used to standing together, in harmony with each other although they were silent.
Then suddenly Paolo struck a few chords and they began to sing the Creed – ‘We believe in God ….’
The words were well-worn …. ‘the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth … and Jesus Christ his son … and we believe in the Holy Spirit … in the resurrection of the body … life everlasting ….’
But it didn’t sound like the old familiar creed; it sounded like a group of people passionately and seriously declaring the beliefs they lived. It was incredibly moving.
As the last notes faded, there was a stillness in the church that hadn’t been there during the rest of the service. And the people who had been keeping a stiff upper lip, coping stoically with their grief at losing Mary, now lost it.
The bearers moved forward to carry the coffin out of the church. The saddest and most final moment of any funeral service.
And suddenly the community broke into song again, with renewed passion but this time without the solemnity. The joy erupted.
They sang, ‘Take me to heaven.’
The words went, ‘Take me to heaven, take me to heaven, O Lord! For me to die, for me to die, would be better by far, would be better by far, to be with you, to be with you!’
And with that, Mary’s body was carried out of the church.
I don’t think even the most hardened atheist would have had any trouble believing that heaven was where she was headed – even if they had never met her and hadn’t had the privilege of knowing her unswerving humility, unfailing hardworking kindness, and smiling acceptance of both joy and suffering.
Nice to have known you, Mary.
Fantastic finale!
And I'm sure they’ve got the champagne on ice in heaven for you.

Nudged by God

2008-01-24T14:03:00.000-08:00

It’s easy – or comparatively easy – to believe that God may talk to us about things of global importance, but hard to listen and take seriously those illogical inner promptings that are sometimes just odd thoughts but sometimes are a genuine nudge from God to do, or not do, something.
I’ve had a walking-through-treacle week – the end of a virus, combined with some uphill circumstances – and have felt disinclined to do more than absolutely necessary.
That was ok because my diary was fairly empty and the things that were in it weren’t of world-shattering importance, for instance having my hair cut on Monday morning. So I decided to phone up as soon as the salon opened and postpone the appointment till next week.
I don’t like having my hair done, at the best of times. It’s better than going to the dentist, but only marginally so. It’s only made bearable by the fact that I’ve known my hairdresser for years and she has become a friend. She and her family came here from Afghanistan as asylum seekers when Taliban terrorists shot and injured her husband and murdered her brother-in-law in front of his children.
In the nine or ten years they’ve been in England, their lives have not been in danger and some circumstances have improved, but one crisis after another has befallen the family. Every time I see her, I hope something nice will have happened – because surely there are no tragedies left in the book. They’ve been through them all.
But …. Monday morning, I was about to pick up the phone and explain my germ-ridden status as a reason for not dragging myself out of the house to the hair salon, when I felt one of those nudges from God.
I ignored it. As you do. The world was not going to end if I rang up and cancelled a hair appointment.
I was going to pick up the phone.
Only, somehow, I couldn’t. It felt wrong.
It didn’t seem worth praying about such a minor thing.
On the other hand …. I sat down and prayed for a minute. And really felt God – or something – telling me to go ahead with the appointment. It wasn’t me. I didn’t want to.
But why would God tell someone to get a haircut?
That would be nonsense.
Surely?
I didn’t make the phone call and cancel the appointment. I went to the salon, and the minute I saw her it was clear there was something very wrong.
However bad she’s feeling, when I say ‘How are you?’ she always says, professionally, ‘I’m fine.’ The truth comes out later, when she’s halfway through the fringe and the boss isn’t listening.
This time she just said, ‘I’m glad it’s you,’ put her arms round me and cried. ‘My mum died.’
It was her first day back at work after the funeral. And I was her first appointment.
An appointment I nearly cancelled because I couldn’t be bothered to go and couldn’t believe that something so trivial would matter to God.
Thank God it did.

More weeds among the wheat

2008-01-22T05:39:00.000-08:00

Thinking more about the weeds in the wheatfield image.
If Jesus is the truth, and Christians believe in Jesus, then how come Christians who believe the truth can also believe lies? Isn’t that also like weeds growing up alongside the wheat?
For instance, Christians believe that God made every single person on earth and that, as he said himself (quoted in the first book of the Bible, Genesis), everything he makes is good.
But I know a lot of Christians who think they, as a person, are not worth very much. They feel inadequate, don’t have the courage to do things they probably could do very well if they tried, and they feel that just about everybody in the world is better, nicer, more …well, more everything … than they are.
They know, and believe, that God made them and that what God made is not rubbish.
But they feel like rubbish.
Sometimes their faith wins. Sometimes the feelings win.
Sometimes the wheat grows stronger, puts down deeper roots, gets a better grip on the soil. Sometimes the weed plumps itself out, elbowing the wheat aside.
The weeds aren’t going to be removed, we’re told, till the end of time. That means we have to live with the lies taking up space in our mind, niggling away at us in weak moments – like the middle of the night.
Maybe all our lives there will be that nagging lie – ‘you’re useless’.
And the only defence against it is to put down deeper roots in the truth, to listen more attentively to Jesus – the truth – than to the lies, and to feed our faith rather than feeding on our feelings.
Because the truth is, God made you, Jesus loves you – and he made you good. And will keep on making you good, for as long as you live. As long as you accept his love and don’t put your faith in the lie that tells you you’re useless.

Weeds among the wheat

2008-01-18T14:35:00.000-08:00

Spent the last two and a half days trying to convert the typescript of a previously published novel – written on our last-but-one computer using now outdated software – into a usable format for putting on my website as an e-book.
It seemed like a bright idea at the time, and a friend had a computer that could read it and was confident we could convert it into the right kind of file.
But somehow the original text had got peppered with blocks of html – supposedly intelligible language for computers but gobbledegook to humans – and was randomly scattered with symbols borrowed from other keyboards, letters from Scandinavian languages, and Spanish punctuation marks.
It turned out to be a marathon of proofreading, line justifying, and generally trying to get it to look like a book written in English – which is what it was originally in its published version.
Every time I thought it was okay now, either Judy or I would spot a square or a dot or a letter with a circle above it or a squiggle beneath it, or an archaic diphthong or two in the middle of a word.
It made me think of Jesus’ story about the weeds in the wheat: a farmer sowed a field full of healthy wheat seed in clean soil, but when it sprouted he saw that his arch-rival had played a malicious trick. Under cover of darkness, he had come and sown quantities of weed seeds in the same field.
Now the wheat was growing but so were the weeds.
The farm labourers were going to go in and pull up the weeds, to give the wheat space to grow, but the farmer stopped them. He said, ‘If you pull up the weeds before the wheat is mature, you’ll uproot the wheat as well. Leave it till harvest time, then you can pull up the weeds and burn them, and harvest the wheat safely.’
The moral of the story?
Don’t know.
The original one meant ‘don’t judge too soon’, probably. Human beings are all a mixture of good and bad. Rooting out the bad elements in the world would mean uprooting everybody. Let everyone mature: the bad will become worse, the good will grow stronger, and it’ll become far more obvious who is growing fruitfully and who’s just taking up space in the soil and becoming ever more prickly and hard to live alongside.
I hope my book is intelligible to human readers now, though I suspect I’ve missed a few blips and hieroglyphs along the way and reading it as an e-book may require the practice of some forgiveness.
If so, it will sort the readers into two categories: the ones who have faith that the original seed was good and it’s worth persevering in order to enjoy the story through to its fulfilment, and the ones who get put off by the presence of word-weeds in the text and don’t hang around till harvest time but give up on the field and miss the crop.
The weeding took me a long time.
I hope the result is worth the effort.
But if there’s going to be a next time, I’m praying for new technology or better skills. Proofreading is always concentrated work – but it’d be nice to work in a wheatfield with fewer weeds!

Finding your voice

2008-01-14T08:44:00.000-08:00

Went on local radio on Friday, which was quite an experience. It was a community radio station, so very local – in fact, I’m not sure anyone apart from the producer’s immediate family was listening! But that made it a bit less nerve-racking, anyway.
I went along with another member of our church, and we tiptoed into the studio as the programme’s first interview was under way. The interviewee was a TV producer, talking about her new series on Channel 5 called ‘Make Your Child Brilliant’, which I must watch next week because it sounded really interesting.
The producer was very articulate and spoke fluently about the project, with very little prompting from the presenter.
Waiting to follow her was not confidence-inspiring. She had obviously done a lot of speaking in public before. She was GOOD!
I was there to talk about my new book (‘Finding Oasis’, published as an e-book on the website clarenonhebel.com – there, a free plug, without any of the anxiety of having to go on radio) and Rob was there to talk about his personal journey to God.
As Sophie was speaking, he leaned over and whispered, ‘I want to go home now!’
So did I.
But the moment came to talk, and we managed to talk, despite a few unforeseen hazards.
I had to adjust my mike a couple of times because the presenter could hear tap-tapping sounds coming from somewhere while I was talking. It took a couple of handwaving signals plus a verbal prompt before I worked out that she was asking me to move the mike.
Then, when that still didn’t make any difference, it took her another couple of minutes to work out where the odd tapping noise was coming from: Rob. He’s a talented drummer, a fantastic asset in the worship band he plays in, but a bit of a liability in a radio studio waiting nervously for his cue to speak and unconsciously drumming out soothing rhythms on his leather-jacketed arms and denim legs!
Then there was a phone-in call to the studio – at least, an overhead light was flashing to signal a phone call, and the light on one of the phones was flashing, but when the co-presenter picked it up, there was no response.
So the main presenter gestured to him to pick up the other phone, and he did but there was still no reply. So she waved at me to ask Rob a few questions myself while she went to help sort out the phantom phone call … and that’s how the interviewees ended up interviewing each other, which was interesting.
With hindsight, it was fun, although a bit unnerving at the time.
Rob felt he hadn’t done as well as the other two interviewees, ‘because you both had something to talk about – your book and Sophie’s programme – and I was only rabbiting on about myself.’
But I had been struck by the opposite impression.
Both Sophie the TV producer and I, the author, only had to talk about our work.
It’s close to the heart but doesn’t make you as vulnerable as baring your soul and talking about something as intensely personal as your individual walk with God, especially when it has involved a struggle with terrible obstructions before the eventual triumph of God’s grace in him. We two women were talking about our artwork.
Rob was talking about God’s work of art – himself.He took more of a risk than anyone else on the programme - and took more of a step, I’d say, towards the Creator of that artwork that day.

Faces of God

2008-01-13T10:42:00.000-08:00

We had an amaryllis bulb as a Christmas present and it’s come into flower. You know the one? The flower with a long straight stem and four buds at the top of it facing in different directions like a weathervane or one of those loudspeakers they use at outdoor events.
It takes a while to do anything except grow taller, but when the buds start opening they do it suddenly and spectacularly. You go to bed one night and there’s nothing; get up next morning and there’s one huge blaring flower … you can almost hearing it blowing its own trumpet: ‘Da-DAAA!’
And in the days to follow the other three pop out, similarly OTT and in-your-face flamboyant.
If you’re lucky, which we were this time, the fourth and final bud comes into flower before the first one has died so you get all four faces of the amaryllis in flower at the same time.
But here’s the tantalising thing: you can view the amaryllis from all four angles if you walk round it or turn it round, and each view is beautiful: each face of the flower is slightly different.
But you can never see all of it at one time.
People have different views of God. I’m always fascinated to hear or read people’s accounts of how they have experienced God, how they ‘met’ Jesus, and how they see and know him.
Every person’s view is different.
Everyone who has a relationship of some kind with God has a unique relationship, never quite the same as anyone else’s.
If the amaryllis has four faces at once, God must have an infinite number of faces.
All of them equally beautiful, heartstopping and amazing.
To see what you, personally, individually, see of God is a fantastic privilege, and if you take it to heart then that vision you have is life-changing.
To know there is so much more that you can’t see is both fascinating and frustrating, especially when other people obviously see aspects of God that you have – so far, at least – never glimpsed.
Some people claim that their view of God is the only one.
Some feel that other people always see and receive and experience more than they can.
But when you’ve had even a glimpse of one of the faces of God you know he is real.
You never doubt what you’ve seen.
Whether or not you have the same belief in what other people claim to see, from a different angle or the opposite direction, one thing is indisputable.
No one can see all of God from where they’re standing, in life.
If you want to see more of him, either he has to move to change your view of him, or you have to move around him and start seeing life from a new perspective.

Yesterday and tomorrow

2008-01-10T05:38:00.001-08:00

Our neighbour was taken into hospital on Boxing Day and was found to have cancer.
Not knowing her very well and not knowing the best way to pray for her, I started reading the bible and stopped at Jesus’ ‘Sermon on the Mount’ when he was talking about not worrying about tomorrow, because today has enough troubles of its own.
It made me think that maybe the worst part of what she was suffering was not the pain, which was being well controlled while she was in hospital, but the worry about tomorrow – her own tomorrows or possibly the lack of them, and the family’s.
So when I wrote a card for her husband to take in to her, that’s what I ended up writing: rest and get well and don’t worry about tomorrow.
She didn’t have many tomorrows; she died the day before yesterday. Mercifully quick for her; a terrible shock for the family, who had had only a day or two to adjust to the probable outcome of her illness, so recently diagnosed.
One of her daughters said a friend of theirs has been watching his wife die, inch by inch, for six months and admits he wishes she would go because it’s so unbearable, for her and him watching and suffering with her.
Maybe for him too, it’s not today he can’t cope with but the thought of going through more of the same tomorrow.
Today does certainly have enough struggles of its own and God gives enough grace to cope with today but it’s hard to persuade him to worry with us about tomorrow.
The neighbour’s family, facing tomorrow without her, are spending much of their time talking and thinking about yesterday, remembering all the ‘todays’ they spent together.
Her younger daughter said, ‘I was trying to think what my last conversation with Mum was about. What was the last thing I said to her, or she said to me?’
She wanted it to be something meaningful, something she’d always treasure.
‘Then I remembered,’ she said. ‘It was about Johnny Depp!’
Just an ordinary conversation about films and celebrities and the kind of things you discuss in a leisurely way when today is all you face, not thinking that the todays will not be there forever.
Then suddenly the todays stop, there are no tomorrows to spend with her, and the family’s left thinking about things they want to tell her today, and she’s not here today. So they think about things they said yesterday, or wish they’d said yesterday.
And however hard that is, it’s still easier than thinking about tomorrow.
And really, it is enough just to get through today.

Making space

2008-01-07T14:17:00.000-08:00

We had a really good praise and healing service last night. One of the messages God seemed to be telling us was this:
‘I’ve told you to ask and you’ll receive, and I’ve promised to hear you when you cry from the heart. When I don’t seem to, then take one more risk. Ask one more time, from the heart. Risk trusting me, one more time.
‘When I take away from you the thing most dear to you, or the person dearest to you, don’t say as the world does that God is cruel or indifferent or doesn’t exist. I’m making space around you, space for you to grow into. I’m asking you to be you, to become who you are, more and more. I know the size and shape of space you need to grow into. Try and trust me with this.
‘There are areas of darkness in your life that I want to dispel – not necessarily bad or evil things, but heavy – things that take up space in your life that you need. Ask me to show you what things in your life need to go, and then ask me to deal with them for you.’

I suppose no one would ever claim to hear God infallibly: the best we can do is listen and try to hear, and hope we get better at listening and hearing and understanding and, most of all, acting on what we believe he’s asking us to do.
The start of a new year seems to be a natural time for change, for chucking out what we don’t need, cleaning and decluttering and making way for new opportunities. So maybe it makes sense to have a go at doing the same kind of thing spiritually too.
I did try and act on this prayer and ask God to show me what dark areas of my life might need to be dealt with now and the answer that came to me was ‘timidity’. I guess a spirit of timidity is not very consistent with the kind of courage and focus Jesus showed. So I guess it has to go!

Marriage

2008-01-04T08:24:00.000-08:00

January brings a rash of statistics: last year’s average temperatures compared with previous years, rates of inflation, economic figures and – inevitably, perennially - marriage break-up statistics.
According to the newspapers, this time of year is divorce season. People reviewing their lives, in the bleak light of January sleet and post-Christmas overdrafts and overweight, don’t like what they see. Then they shift their gaze to their partners and think there at least is one thing that they could change.
Or so the newspapers would have us believe. And January is cynicism season for newspapers (or more-than-usual cynicism season) so the portrayal of human nature and relationships is as bleak as the climate.
In the past year, three couples we know personally have broken up, in different circumstances – two after long years of marriage and one young couple after only a few.
It seems to confirm the testimony of the doomsayers who believe that marriage has lost its staying power – that young couples don’t try hard enough to ride out the storms and older couples are no more secure in their perseverance and loyalty.
But one statistic that I’ve never read – and that would be hard to quantify – is the number of people who have relied on marriage in the wrong way, who have turned the lifetime vows into a life sentence and inflicted them on each other as a form of abuse.
The generation who married during or after the Second World War, for example, had an excellent overall record in remaining married for a lifetime.
They had known young men and women slaughtered in battle and bombing raids.
Those who survived counted themselves blessed to find partners with whom to settle down and raise a new generation, after all the carnage.
So many were bereaved – of husbands and wives, and of potential future partners – that this was a generation that believed marriage was a privilege, worth any effort to preserve, worth putting up with imperfections and inconveniences, and even with far more serious issues such as drunkenness, adultery, domestic violence or abuse of children.
The marriage statistics for that generation look good. Older people often quote them as the ideal and compare present-day statistics unfavourably.
But no statistics are available for the people who tormented their partners, day after day, year after year, with their righteous certainty that marriage should be for life – no matter what.
There was an unspoken (‘For better, for worse, remember?’) relentlessness behind each unkind comment, unfunny joke, refusal to forgive, rigid resistance to change, unpleasant habit and refusal to compromise. Over the years, indifference became contempt – a stifling atmosphere in which one partner struggled to breathe and the other one closed all the windows and doors and bolted them.
On paper, and maybe even to other people around them, those long-term, faithful marriages looked good. They certainly made good statistics. And some of them, thank God, relaxed and relented into good marriages over time, after ten or 20 or 30 years.
But the ones that survived but strangled the life out of love so frightened the next generation, and the one after it, that they were prepared to sacrifice statistics and their own standards of success, and run a mile when they saw those first telltale signs of contempt in their partner’s eyes, or voice, or vocabulary, or actions.
Some undoubtedly ran too soon, and lived to regret not staying to fight for their right to respect.
Others left, blaming their partner, and lived to learn from their own lack of respect and self-respect when they found the same problems challenged them in subsequent relationships, or the lack of them.
Some stayed, and increasingly lost confidence, security and sanity.
Some stayed, and witnessed a bad relationship mature and suffer and eventually turn into something that strengthened them.
I’m inclined to think that all of them required courage, because marriage demands that. The very nature of the marriage relationship challenges every person who engages in it, in the most intimate and personal aspects of their lives – their security, identity, integrity and maturity - every day, in ways that no other relationship does.
Staying or leaving, learning from mistakes or repeating the same ones over and over again, standing up for your rights or quietly suffering and praying for a better day – it all deserves to be recognised as an achievement and, I think, celebrated.
It doesn’t translate easily into statistics – succeeded or failed, positive or negative, sadness or joy.
But it’s real and it’s live and it’s brave.
A toast to every husband and wife, and to every would-be and wannabe and afraid-I-may-never-be husband or wife, and to every used-to-be and tried-to-be and got-too-tired or got-too-afraid-to-be husband or wife, this January.
May God bless every one of us in 2008, with comfort and with courage and with hope. And with the kind of love that only God can supply when all else fails.

New home

2007-12-27T04:23:00.000-08:00

The prospect of an old year closing and a new one beginning seems to make people think about possible change in the future, in the light of the past.
Some friends called round on Boxing Day and got talking about where they might move if they decide not to go on living where they live now, and that kind of led backwards to talking about where they lived before they decided to move to live here.
They mentioned that when they were trying to sell their house there was a murder on the picturesque green opposite, and a family who had viewed the house twice and were seriously considering buying it had changed their minds. They didn’t want to live in a neighbourhood where there had been a vile crime so close to their prospective new home. How could they ever look out on the beauty spot, the lush green with its mature trees that was such a selling point for the area, without thinking about the poor dismembered woman who had been found there?
I had been thinking recently – because Christmas is a difficult time for people who have been through difficult times in the past, and a lot of people I know have – about adults who have survived physical and sexual abuse in childhood.
It’s natural for a family to decide they don’t want to move into a house – or even a neighbourhood – where there has been a gruesome, violent crime.
When a child is abused, it’s his or her own body that is the crime scene. And the child can’t make a choice – either as a child or later in life as an adult – to live somewhere else. The crime scene is in them; it is them and it goes with them wherever they go. They have to live with the memories. The scars can heal over or get covered up – but they don’t go.
People who advise them to ‘forget all about it; it was a long time ago’ would find it hard, I don’t doubt, to live in a murder scene all their lives. They could forget for a while, then something would come up to remind them – often when they were planning some change in their life.
Maybe they would go into the room in their home where the crime had taken place and notice that the walls needed painting again, and just as they were planning a fresh new colour for the room they would remember those blood stains on those same walls – even if they didn’t actually show any more.
Child abuse is murder - the murder of a person’s childhood, which is meant to prepare and equip them for adult life.
And child abuse is always a gruesome, violent crime - especially when it’s sweetened with bribes and favours and nice ‘kind’ treatment.
In those cases, childhood ends in violent confusion between who’s bad and what’s good, who’s nice and what is so evil that people who do those terribly confusing things need to be kept away from children – the crime scene they’ve made of an area of natural beauty – for the rest of their lives.
I know many survivors of abuse to their child-body ‘home’ who have been tempted to try and do away with the scene of the crime, destroying their bodies and minds with drugs, violence, mind-numbing routines or soul-destroying relationships.
They do well to avoid suicide.
But this year I’m praying that every person in this horrible situation finds new ways to work at healing the scars, recent or old, so the crime scene can be cleared and used for something so good that the memory of what happened there before can be replaced by loads of happier experiences.
It’s nearly the start of a new year. And God is still good.

Christmas passed

2007-12-27T03:39:00.000-08:00

Commercial Christmas - ‘the season to be jolly’, ‘the time for spoiling yourself’, ‘the season for overindulging’ - is over, to be replaced by commercial post-Christmas sales, then commercial New Year drinking binge.
People all over the UK have celebrated God’s intervention on earth - his birth as a homeless baby who would live through the stages of toddlerhood, childhood, teenage and young manhood and face an early midlife crisis in being tortured and murdered – in different ways.
I liked ours. We had a relaxed meal and spent time with some of the people we love most - and the house feels a bit empty now they’ve left – and helped with the final stages of the church Christmas dinner for people who couldn’t be with friends or family on the day.
My favourite Christmas gift was from my sister, who listened and took me seriously when I asked for something to be sent, via the brilliant Oxfam Unwrapped scheme, to someone who needed it, and gave a contribution to an irrigation scheme in Malawi.
My least favourite Christmas gift was a cold – not sure who gave me that one – closely followed by a small chunk of door-shaped wood with a card explaining it was a ‘fairy door’. It didn’t open. It can only be opened by the fairies apparently.
Given my aversion to anything superstitious or whimsical, the donor either doesn’t know me (after 30 years), has a grudge, or is off with the fairies herself; I’m not sure. I do know where it’s going, though.

Homeless

2007-12-21T16:27:00.001-08:00

Went round to pray with a friend who was ill today. Once we start praying, the agenda seems to wander and we end up praying for all kinds of other things as well.
Today we found ourselves praying for the homeless at Christmas. Not so much for the people on the streets – who are uniquely qualified to celebrate the real Christmas, the birth of a homeless baby to a family far from home – but for the people who have homes but aren’t at home in them, because they aren’t at home in themselves.
It’s a terrible kind of rootlessness that makes people with adequate – even luxurious – homes, feel dissatisfied with them, continually feeling their home isn’t good enough and planning purchases and improvements, and still not really feeling content once those things are achieved.
Thank God, most people in this country will have some kind of roof over their heads this Christmas, whether it’s a permanent place or a temporary shelter for the homeless.
But if we can’t really, genuinely, thank God for that privilege, it will never feel like home, no matter what we do to make it a desirable residence for the time that we’re in it.

The visitor

2007-12-16T04:01:00.001-08:00

A lady turned up on our doorstep yesterday and asked if she could come in for a cup of tea.
I know her slightly; she lives locally and suffers from schizophrenia and a number of other conditions that make her unpredictable, often confused and usually physically unwell too. Emotionally and physically, her balance is precarious. Her face and legs are scarred from a fall last week.
She’s deeply religious, in the sense of being very preoccupied with thoughts of God, but those thoughts are inextricably linked with judgement and guilt.
Her God doesn’t make her happy or relaxed.
She’s also prone to outbursts of profanity, alone and in public, and can give way to shouting blasphemous comments, followed by extreme distress and regret about what she’s said.
If this sounds terribly abnormal, you have to take into account that my husband – who ticks all the boxes for ‘normal’ - was doing his own profane muttering next door in the lounge where he was trying to watch the sport on TV while this lady was talking insistently and loudly in the kitchen over a sandwich and a cup of tea.
Except that he doesn’t do the distress, regret and guilt bit afterwards and thinks his comments are entirely justified when someone disturbs his Saturday afternoon viewing.
For someone who lives with such constant mental turmoil, this woman has an incredible memory. She recites complex facts and statistics she has read, accurately, and can meet someone once and remember every detail of their story.
She also has a real empathy with anyone down on their luck and knows every homeless person in a wide local area.
She can’t walk past without asking if they need something to eat. If they do, she’ll refuse to give them money but will take them to a café and pay for their tea and food and listen while they talk. And people do talk to her.
Then she’ll go home and pray for them.
For weeks.
She’s also concerned for people’s souls. She carries round piles of leaflets in different languages giving information about Jesus, and can recite Bible verses word for word to suit every occasion.
She offers them to people at bus stops, on tube trains and anywhere she meets them.
She encounters a lot of rejection, as well as some unexpectedly positive response. But negative or positive, she keeps offering to share what she knows about God.
At her best, she’s a witness to what’s best about humanity and an example of God’s willingness to use anyone willing to serve, however broken their life might be.
At her worst, she’s a nightmare.
At times you can clearly see Christ in her.
At times you see something that nobody wants to see. Especially not in themselves.
She veers between totally focused attention – eyes wide open, drinking in every word that’s spoken to her - and total shutdown, eyes averted, attention disengaged, turned inwards on her own mental world, talking with relentless harshness.
One moment she is uncomfortably perceptive, asking piercing questions that people are normally reticent about asking, and the next moment she’s floundering in a morass of misconceptions that have no connection with reality.
She’s a difficult person to be with, even for half an hour over a cup of tea in the kitchen.
But that’s a minor issue.
The major one is that day in, day out, week after month after year after half a lifetime, she is a difficult person to be.
And I can relate to that.
Reluctantly.

Stepping out of line

2007-12-16T01:43:00.000-08:00

I had lunch in a pub with a young woman who had met Jesus in a pub.
She didn’t mean to; she had gone along with her friend who for a long time had bored, embarrassed and irritated her by talking about her faith.
It wasn’t that her friend had finally managed to interest her; it was that another girl, overhearing, asked if she could come to church too, and she was so incensed by this – because it was her friend and she should go first! – that she decided to go along with both of them.
The church was in the downstairs bar of a pub.
She said this was a bit of a surprise but it helped. It felt more normal than walking into a church, certainly. She could get a drink at the bar and have a smoke and chat to people, which was what she usually did on a Sunday evening.
A woman gave a 15-minute talk and, okay, it was about the Jesus person but she said something the girl hadn’t heard before – that Jesus is the lens through which we look at God, and that’s what he meant when he said no one could come to the Father (God) except through him. Without Jesus, the lens, we just can’t see who God is.
That struck her as a different view, and when a man sat down next to her and asked how she felt about the evening, she found herself pouring out all her frustration about what her friend believed and she just couldn’t believe and sometimes wished she could.
He suggested she might come to Alpha, a forum where she could ask all the questions she wanted and wouldn’t be fed stock answers.
She was hesitant, but the other girl agreed to go if she went, so both of them went along – still to the pub – for weekly short talks and long discussions.
She said that the sessions were interesting, but every week on the way home the two of them stopped in the street and looked at each other and wondered, ‘What are we doing?’
They were afraid their friends would find out, or that something would happen to change them and their families would have to be told, and then everyone would think they were weird or sad. When she said this, I realized how much I’d forgotten how difficult it is to step out of line with people you know and who know you – who have known you for ever, in the case of family – and do something you know they won’t see the point of and may even view as losing touch with reality, and with them personally, and rejecting their values. Almost a betrayal.
For ten weeks, the two girls persevered with the Alpha course, which culminated in a weekend away.
During the weekend some people experienced something, some presence of God, some feeling or indication that he was real. Her friend was one of them.
But she herself felt nothing.
Then in the evening, in chapel, it was suggested that everyone put a hand on the shoulder of the person next to them and prayed for them.
So she put her hand on the shoulder of the young man next to her and prayed for something she knew was close to his heart – his engagement and his fiancée. And at the same time her friend, who was sitting next to her, prayed for her. She prayed for her with her whole heart, her friend told her afterwards.
And something happened.
From being someone she wished – or kind of wished – she believed in, Jesus was suddenly real. One moment it didn’t make sense to her, the next moment it all did.
It was hard to explain, she said. But something changed in her. Everything changed, from that moment.
Eventually, she had to tell her friends – who reacted with amazement, but didn’t disown her.
And she had to tell her family, and that was harder.
From being a family who hardly mentioned religion and were simply not interested, they suddenly became impassioned atheists, firmly and vocally opposed to what she believed - or to what they perceived her beliefs to be!
It was hard, but she survived it. At least it got everyone thinking, and talking about things they’d previously thought too unimportant to consider.
She seems very confident now, secure in her faith and open to new ways of expressing and celebrating Christian living.
She’s refreshingly free of ‘churcheology’, having grown up with none of the jargon or inflexible traditions.
She has clearly stayed in touch with the difficulties of shifting from a ‘normal’ world view acceptable in our society to step out of line and view everything through the lens of Jesus.
She’s now involved in work that helps Christians old and new to expand their views of the world and church and God and who Jesus is and how people can come to meet him.
Amazing who you can meet in a pub.

What not to ask for

2007-12-16T00:46:00.000-08:00

I spent the evening with two women who are dedicated Christians. They’re from different generations but get on well, and both are incredibly generous with their spare time, very involved in church mission, and part of a team that prays with people who are sick or going through crises.
They wanted to talk about healing, which they were finding a frustrating issue.
Recently a member of the church, an elderly and radiantly good lady, had died. She had cancer and wasn’t healed, though everyone had sincerely prayed for her. But that wasn’t the worst part: she had died ‘a horrible death’, as the older woman - her close friend - put it, in hospital.
The nursing care had been perfunctory; her basic needs were neglected and her pain was not alleviated. She had suffered a very difficult final week of her life.
‘Not peaceful at all,’ her friend said.
Unsurprisingly, her friends had found the episode very distressing, the faith of both of them had been shaken and they wanted some answers.
Jesus said clearly, ‘Ask and you’ll receive,’ and he didn’t mess about.
God loved this lady more than her friends did, she was a person of unusual kindness, everyone had asked for her healing or at least for peace – so why the painful death?
Granted, Jesus also said, ‘In this world, you’ll have suffering – but be brave; I’ve overcome the world.’
And she had been brave, in a world where the people who should have loved and prayed for her did so faithfully but the people who should have taken care of her practical human needs failed her abysmally.
Like a spotlight, she had kept shining in dark circumstances, refusing to blame or resort to anger – and had brought to light some serious abuses in the system of care and the caring professionals in charge of her and her fellow patients on the ward.
But she didn’t deserve to die like that, did she?
Certainly she didn’t. Nobody does; it’s inhuman and not God’s desire for any of us.
I asked if any of the people praying with her had complained about the lack of nursing care or deficiencies in providing pain relief.
They hadn’t seen it as their place, not being relatives, or had been too distressed or too focused on simply being with her, keeping her company in her suffering.
I didn’t know the answers to this, and it seemed pointless to pursue it and cause more anguish; the lady had died, was now at peace with her saviour, and no good would come of her friends blaming themselves or wondering if they should have done more.
But the conversation then took an interesting turn, as both women confided that each of them had a different health condition, deemed incurable and believed to be inherited or due to circumstances at birth.
They not only believed that nothing could be done about this – though God could and did, and they had seen him, heal other illnesses and injuries. They also believed they should not ask for it: it was simply the way they were, and their family had been; it was their genetic inheritance.
I wondered if asking for it to go would seem like disowning their family, or even rejecting their own identity.
I asked if they would have a problem with asking for prayer for themselves, and they both said yes.
They don’t have a problem with praying – they pray. They pray for and with people, and people pray for and with them, regularly.
So – what if we prayed, not for healing for them, not for any specified outcome, but just prayed for them – with their conditions – and asked God to have a free hand and do whatever he wanted with those conditions, as in the rest of their lives?
They were still uneasy with this.
After a while it seemed best to end the discussion and leave everyone time to think, with the option of meeting up again at some future time if they wanted.
So we prayed briefly then went our separate ways.
It was a good meeting. Everyone was very honest. And it highlighted how sensitive the issue of healing is and how, handled roughly or forced on somebody who isn’t sure they want it, people can feel they’re being ‘healed’ of being themselves, the person whom God created with such love.
No wonder the first question Jesus asked a leper or blind person who came to him for healing was, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’
Wasn’t it obvious?
It was to everyone around them, seeing them as marginalized and disadvantaged – and keen to be witnesses to more miracles too!
But until the person who actually had the condition said, loudly and clearly and in front of the crowds, ‘I want to see,’ or ‘I want you to cleanse me of this disease,’ he didn’t move.
And that refusal to move was healing too.

Over-packaging

2007-12-10T09:20:00.000-08:00

Until recently, layers of packaging on manufactured items were considered a sign that the goods inside were of superior quality, whereas cheap goods had minimal packaging.
Now supermarkets are being encouraged to use less packaging because all that superfluous wrapping around the product ends up in landfill sites, and that’s unfriendly to the environment.
After last Sunday morning’s church service, I think the same principle should be applied to sermons.
Too much packaging is bad for the church environment.
Less is more.
We had a guest speaker, who arrived with a message that was tailor-made – in fact, God-made – for this particular church, which has gone through some tough times in the past year.
For the first five minutes, you could feel everyone thinking this man was a Godsend. And I’m sure he was.
For five minutes he talked about waiting patiently for God while you’re in the pits and not thinking he has forgotten you, because he has good things in store.
He repeated it a few times in different ways. That took five minutes more.
The allocated sermon time was twenty-five minutes, so there was plenty of time for the bible reading he used to illustrate his point.
The bible reading took about another five minutes.
Fifteen minutes’worth of good stuff, worth listening to.
But he took forty.
Some of the people were elderly and not well, and it was an effort for them to sit still, on hard chairs, for that long.
Others had children next door in the children’s group and couldn’t go out to fetch them, so the children’s workers all had to stay twenty minutes extra.
Some people had dinner in the oven and family arriving.
I had a husband at home packing last minute items and waiting for me to come home because we had a three-hour drive to do as soon as the service was over.
For a really essential message from God, we would all have stayed willingly for however long it took. It’s that kind of church.
But the message had been delivered within fifteen minutes of the speaker beginning to talk.
So what was the other twenty-five minutes about?
Some of it, prefacing the bible reading, was an unnecessary diatribe about Christians not bringing bibles to church with them - unnecessary because our church has skilled technicians who locate every bible reference on the computer and have it on the overhead screen almost before the preacher has mentioned the verse number. So we don’t need to carry bibles and rustle the pages over the talk.
Then he did multiple choice responses – choice of two answers to an easy question, one of them obviously right and one obviously wrong.
When people shouted out the right answer, he pretended to be hard of hearing and made everyone shout louder.
When he finally acknowledged the right answer, he told us all why the wrong one would have been wrong.
This happened several times.
He also did repeat-after-me a few times, making people twice his age chant catchphrases after him. Old people are resilient, and humoured him. The children would not have done so, not after the age of five, anyway.
Several times he went into a digression about what he would say to an atheist if one was in the room. Then what he would say to a specific atheist, Richard Dawkins, if Richard Dawkins had been in the room – or, I suspect, if he had been a fellow guest star on television with him.
Then he told jokes. And people at our church are generally kind, so they laughed at them. Before the punchline, even, because we’d heard them all before.
And he came out with slogans and quotes and soundbites we’d heard many times before too.
Finally, he went into a diatribe about how old hymns are so much better than contemporary worship songs because they contain so many more words of theology.
And they rhyme. And they scan. And apparently that’s a good thing in worshipping God, though I’m not sure why.
He recited the lyrics of several old hymns, at length, and demonstrated to us their wordiness and rhyminess, and his prodigious memory.
Then he launched another diatribe about contemporary songwriters whom he described as 19-year olds scribbling songs on the back of an envelope.
I wasn’t clear why he thought God would find that offensive.
The preacher elucidated. Those so-called songwriters, he said, don’t use iambic pentameters like the old hymn-writers.
In fact, he said, today’s song-scribblers wouldn’t even know what an iambic pentameter was.
At this point, our kindly and tolerant congregation began to grow restive – half because they didn’t know what an iambic pentameter was either, and half because the preacher’s acerbic comments were getting increasingly opinionated and divorced from God’s message – unless he intended to make us really feel the point about being in the pits and longing to be rescued by God.
For five minutes of the sermon, and ten minutes of reading from Genesis, this speaker made a good point well and was worth hearing. God spoke through him.
The rest of the time, he wasn’t preaching God’s message at all but some other agenda of his own.
It wasn’t enough being guest preacher in a small church on an ordinary Sunday morning. He was also being stand-up comic, literary critic, primary school teacher, nostalgic fan of the good ol’ days, TV antagonist, defender of the faith, and guest star on Grumpy Old Men.
I can still remember what he preached about, and I’m sure it was what God wanted him to say to us that morning, which is the main thing. But the essence of the message so nearly risked getting swamped by all the other roles he assigned himself.
Too much packaging.

More Christmas slogans

2007-12-09T10:48:00.000-08:00

Adding to the list of silliest slogans about the real meaning of Christmas, I have to add two that are sad rather than silly.
One, from the Co-Op magazine, reads: Christmas is about being with people you love.
Sounds good - certainly better than Christmas is the season of overindulgence - until you think of all the people who can't be with people they love.
Not to mention all the people who think of Christmas with a sinking heart because their loved ones, whom they do really love, are difficult to be with, spend the day picking fault or resurrecting old grievances or having rows with other 'loved ones', and make Christmas a misery.
The second slogan, in an article in Saturday's paper written by an atheist, claims that Christmas is a holiday about money ... How much you spend shows how much you love that person.
Thank God, there are many people - I'm one of them - who are looking forward to spending Christmas with people they love and who love them, and who don't need to prove it by spending a lot of money on presents but will just enjoy being together.
But the slogans are a timely reminder that this isn't the reality for everybody. If you're into praying, this might be a good time to pray for anyone who's just praying for it to be January.

Miracles

2007-12-09T10:45:00.001-08:00

Got talking to a woman in church this morning. I’ve known her six years and she’s a determined prayer junkie. If you ask her to pray for anything, she keeps praying until the situation is remedied – whether it takes weeks or years.
This morning she told me about one of her nieces who has just had a baby.
Two weeks after her niece found out she was pregnant, her partner left her.
Then she found the baby was very weak, with a major heart condition, unlikely to live.
The pregnancy continued, the baby seemed to be surviving, but the prognosis was still very poor. The best case scenario, the consultant said, was that the baby might be born alive but would immediately have to have an operation and be fitted with a tiny pacemaker.
The family prayed for the best for the baby and for the mother, in these very distressing circumstances. It was hardly a time of happy expectation for a happy event.
Late in her pregnancy, the mother experienced possible first signs of labour, but the baby’s heart stopped.
She was rushed to the operating theatre for an emergency Caesarean delivery.
The baby was born alive.
And its heart is perfect.
Thank God – not just for the miracle of a happy end of the story, but for the series of less dramatic miracles that led up to it.
The miracle of a mother still ready to go ahead with the birth of her baby even when the father had left her alone.
The miracle of a family who supported her.
The miracle of this very special aunt who believes in a God who can do the impossible, and who still loves that God though he didn’t answer her anguished prayer for her husband when he was dying.
The miracle that she didn’t turn her back on him then and was able to turn towards him with a new request when her niece was facing tragedy and nothing but God could change that prospect.
Having experienced a number of miracles, I’m beginning to think that’s the way it always is – that a miracle is never one event, even when it seems instant, unprecedented and out-of-the-blue.
With hindsight, it seems to turn out to be one step in a series of events, involving incidents and people that open the pathway for God to come through.
And it never seems to be the last step. Even when people receive astonishing blessings that change their lives for good, and then walk away from God and forget they ever met him, what happened to them affects other people who witnessed the event. And some of them never forget, and it changes their lives too.I’d welcome comments, from other people’s experience. If you’re reading this, and God has ever done something amazing for you or for someone you know, click the comment tag under this blog and let everyone know.

Under water

2007-12-04T10:46:00.001-08:00

Fantastic day out to an ocean aquarium. On a weekday. A friend and I skyved off and went looking at fish, turtles, and other amazing creatures of the deep.
The centre was a maze of darkened corridors with dramatically lit tanks in which swam, slept, drifted, breathed, ate, and waved languorous fins, tentacles and legs, a whole world of beautiful, ugly and verging-on-mythical beings.
It was strange, gazing in on them, living their private lives. Like Big Brother for marine life.
We live in parallel worlds, human society and the undersea community, in elements in which the other couldn’t survive.
In water of the depth they’re happiest in, we couldn’t survive without diving equipment, and then only for a limited time.
In the air that we need to breathe, they would die.
But here, we were separated only by a wall of glass.
Were they observing us, as we were observing them?
As we passed from one room to the next we noticed a woman leaning against the wall, looking down, not seeming to look at the fish. I thought perhaps she was tired and taking a break.
It was dark, if you weren’t looking towards the light.
A bit further on, while we were heading for the ‘ocean bed’ deep-water section, she approached us.
‘Can you help me? Only I’m having a really bad panic attack and I can’t find a member of staff …’
She was trembling and sweating. Out of her element, as surely as a fish out of water. For someone suddenly afflicted with claustrophobia, the place was a nightmare.
‘I’ve been trying to find the way out but I’m going round in circles.’
Thank God, the centre was designed so that visitors could go out the same way they had come in, and it only took a few minutes, linking arms with her, to find the route out of the dark.
Immediately we reached an open light area, above a flight of stairs down to the exit, she was all right and insisted she didn’t need us to go with her any further.
I guess everyone has times in their life when everyone else seems to be in the light, enjoying themselves, in their element – and you are in the dark, afraid, disoriented, and seemingly without help.
And it’s not easy to ask for help, for exactly that reason – that everyone else seems to be okay.
That’s not the reality, of course. There isn’t a human being on the planet who doesn’t know what fear is – come to that, there isn’t a fish or a creature of the deep, however scary-looking or apparently invincible, that doesn’t find itself at some time pushed out or at risk.
We went into an area where there was a huge open tank with sharks and stingrays and mega-size eels swimming around with coloured fish and giant turtles. They had obviously been selected for their compatibility – nothing was eating its fellow residents.
But the stingrays – fatal to human beings as well as to fish, if their tail-sting touches them – had to be specially fed, at feeding time, with scraps of fish held right up to their mouths on the end of a pole.
Lethal though they can be if disturbed or threatened, they would starve to death if they were left to take their chance with the food thrown on the surface of the pool. They are too gentle, too graceful, we were told, to compete with the determined lunges of the other creatures.
It’s incredible to think God knows the element every living creature needs to live in, in order to survive. Some fish live near the surface, some deep, some on the ocean bed, and they couldn’t take living at each other’s depth.
And he knows what each of us human beings needs - what we need in our unique individual life and in our communal life.
He knows what makes us panic, what feeds our spirit, what starves us, what threatens our stability, when we would be bullied or overlooked. He knows when we can’t cope, even in an environment that suits all the people around us.
He knows us. And even if everyone else was doing swimmingly, and you were in some dark place and nobody knew what the problem was and you couldn’t get out by yourself – he would know it, and the minute you asked for help, a lifeline would be held out.
We’re so safe, in his environment. We just can’t survive outside it.

More Christmas slogans

2007-11-30T08:39:00.000-08:00

Another front-runner in the Silliest Slogans about the ‘real meaning of Christmas’ has to be the ad for chocolate mints, which poses the challenging question: ‘Who could imagine Christmas without Bendicks Mint Collection?’
Umm …. maybe the Three Wise Men?
Bringing the baby Jesus the symbolic gifts that showed they recognized his kingship and his destiny, they offered gold for a king, frankincense for divinity, myrrh for death and burial …. and chocolate mints? Symbolizing what - the lavish lifestyle Jesus was never going to live? The obesity crisis he avoided by working so hard he hardly paused to eat?
Yup, I think it is possible to imagine Christmas without mints.

Death and life

2007-11-28T10:52:00.000-08:00

Was going for a last walk of the day yesterday, following a good visit with a lot of talk, and wanting to clear my head and get some air before calling in to see a friend.
It had got dark really, and there weren’t many people around except a few dog-walkers.
An Alsatian bounded past, running towards a smaller dog, with both owners calling them and neither dog taking much notice. They romped around excitedly, then without warning the Alsatian suddenly ran off at a tangent, towards the road.
The owner shouted, a car screeched to a halt, then there was a terrible series of yelps as the dog was thrown to the side of the road and lay squirming in the gutter.
I ran, the owner ran, the woman driving the car got out and stood there, horrified, repeating over and over again, ‘I couldn’t stop in time!’
The owner – a woman of about thirty - fell to her knees, holding the dog, shouting his name and crying, her distress and panic matching the poor animal’s.
All I could think of was to lay hands on the animal and pray for peace. I asked the woman if she wanted to call someone, handed her my phone and began to pray over the dog.
I asked God to bring peace, and thankfully the dog stopped squealing immediately. He stopped thrashing about and lay still, panting a little but calm.
A couple of other dog-walkers came up. One man said the dog’s front leg should be moved; it was doubled under at an awkward angle, but another man said he was a first-aider and recommended that the dog shouldn’t be moved.
As the woman tried to contact someone at home, the driver phoned the police, and someone else tried to contact the local vet, the dog stayed calm but its breaths were slowing down.
Was this the only way it could have peace? I hoped it would live. It was terrible for the owner. But it had been hit so hard, and the leg looked broken and the dog’s back had been twisted into an arc as it was thrown into the gutter. And it had been so horrible to hear its terrified yelping and see its panic-stricken movements. At least now it seemed to be at peace, lying docile and allowing its head to be stroked.
Finally, one of the men said, ‘I think he’s stopped breathing.’ The first-aider checked for a pulse and didn’t find one.
So they lifted the dog between them on to the pavement, where it lay lifeless. Someone offered to drive the owner home to fetch help, as she couldn’t get any answer on the phone, and another man and the car’s driver said they would stay with the dog till the owner returned.
I gave my name and phone number as a witness, in case they needed one, and went to call in on my friend.
Shortly after I got home, the phone rang and it was an old lady I know well, whose husband is just out of hospital. She said she felt he wasn’t going to get well; he was in bed all the time and she couldn’t see him getting up again.
She didn’t want me to do anything, just to know the situation and share the worry, and pray.
What should I pray for? I saw him the other day and he looked so tired, as though he’d had enough. The couple are both in their late eighties and not in the best of health. I’d said to my husband I thought he might be just trying to hang on to life for the sake of his wife. And now, it seemed, she was aware that he might have reached his limit and be on his way out of this life.
Was it his time to go? Or would he rally, as he has done before, and stay with her a little bit longer?
Again, the only thing seemed to be to pray for peace, for them both, and to leave God to administer it in whichever way was most gentle.
Life or death? I didn’t know.
This morning I phoned her. How was he?
He had had a peaceful night, she said, and she had slept as well. The doctor was coming later to check on him.
The panic had gone out of her voice.
Life, then, for him – at least for the time being.
Death, for the dog.
Peace for both, in different ways, in different circumstances.
I don’t understand it, however much I attempt to – just feel sure that God knows best and something as fundamental as life and death has to be left in his hands.

Silliest Christmas slogans, cont'd

2007-11-26T10:43:00.000-08:00

Update on the silliest Christmas slogans competition.
Celebrating the birth of the homeless Son of Man, Somerfield Magazine (Christmas edition)claims: "'Tis the season to over-indulge."

Happy family Christmas, with dog and sofa

2007-11-25T09:06:00.000-08:00

I'm collecting the silliest slogans about Christmas.
Bearing in mind that Christmas commemorates the birth of the Son of God and Son of Man as a homeless child without even a bed to lie in, my favourite so far is the DFS furniture store ad urging us to buy a new sofa - because 'Christmas is about spoiling yourself.'
A close second is the slogan in an ad by a dog charity, depicting a mother dog and her puppies, urging donations because 'Christmas is about family.' Aaaah!
Is it, though?
It's certainly the time when people with no family, or ruptured family, feel the loss most.
When children of divorced and separated families have to spend the important day with either one or the other parent but not both.
The first Christmas was certainly about a family - of sorts.
The mother was a young girl in disgrace, giving birth to a child conceived before she was married to a man who wasn't the father - a scandal that in that nation, that religion, at that time, could have got her stoned to death, or at the very least ostracized by the community for the whole of the rest of her whole life.
The father was a man who found out, by supernatural communication from God, that his fiancee had not conceived her child by another man, but by God's Holy Spirit, and who then decided to protect her and bring up the child as his own and share whatever stigma the local critics handed out.
And the child was the Son of God, about whose arrival on earth countless prophets over hundreds of years had prophesied.
Okay, so Christmas is about that family.
And that family's lack of normality should be cause for celebration for all other similarly motley and marginalized groups of people who are thrown together by life, or by birth, or who adopt each other or neighbour each other or choose to take care of one another's interests.
But I don't quite get the connection with the dogs and the sofa and spoiling yourself, somehow.
Anyone else got any good Christmas slogans to share?

The great mission

2007-11-25T08:56:00.000-08:00

Was hanging out the washing in the garden, thinking that the past week had been a bit mundane, when a movement in the tree in the next garden caught my eye and I saw a green parakeet preening itself. Lime green, a matt, powdery colour, like lichen.
I know there are colonies of parakeets living in London; had seen them once before in the local park, from a distance, but never as close as this.
Why does it give such a sense of privilege, when some rare creature chooses to grace your own ordinary territory?
It flew slowly overhead so I had a good view of its exotic colouring, and disappeared behind the dome of next-door-the-other-side’s conservatory.
Then yesterday, looking out on another garden, I saw a dramatically handsome black and white striped bird hammering away at the nuts in the bird feeder, with a determination that would have given any normal bird a headache. Surely a woodpecker? Rushed for the bird book and found it was not any old woodpecker (rarely enough seen anyway) but a Great Spotted!
Again, there was this sense of something exotic suddenly breaking into the routine that is most days' reality.
For years, as a Christian, I wondered when the Great Mission was going to begin. I’d been taught that we’re all here on a mission, sent by God, and that nothing is accidental or without some purpose and meaning. But during years of normal days with small opportunities to do something kind or help out in some minor way, I thought surely the training period must be nearing completion? When was the real stuff going to begin?
It took me some time to realize that this is The Mission, actually. Even people in recognizable mission projects can only live day by day, doing the best they can with the circumstances, opportunities and obstacles they’re given.
Sure, there are certain things we can do to make things happen, involving getting out of the comfort zone and doing something different (and usually frightening). And we can also waste time and energy rushing out on self-styled missions that we're not really suited to and that God doesn't want.
But a lot of the real work of serving God is the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other stuff of every day - encouraging people who lose heart, persevering with people who are bitter and turn everyone away, improving our various skills, building relationships … doing the washing ….
None of it seems to change the world, which goes on turning much as before. Sometimes it all seems a bit pointless.
Then, just as you think that God isn’t in it – he must be off with those real missionaries founding groundbreaking projects in inner cities or in war-torn regions of the world – a flash of grace illuminates the dry routine and shows he chooses to be present with you too, just where you happen to be.
Artists attempting to depict the Holy Spirit of God appearing to ordinary mortals in a tangible form have often chosen the images of flames of fire, or a white dove. You can see why – the lightness, life, freedom and grace.
But maybe he also comes into the grey days of life with a flash of wings as a green parakeet, or the bold demeanour of a woodpecker, or as sun suddenly breaking through cloud, or ….. you tell me.

Raining in my house

2007-11-19T02:30:00.000-08:00

Thinking about anger, and especially about two people – both angry men – who have told me that as a loving Christian I should accept them as they are at any time. Including when they’re angry.
And that if I can’t cope with that, I need to grow up and learn, because when they’re angry – well, that’s how they are. And Jesus takes me as I am.
Is that right? I’ve been pondering that in my heart for a while now.
And while I’m sitting here this morning pondering again, I can’t help noticing that it’s raining very heavily and water is pouring down the windows. Which would be okay except … isn’t it meant to rain outside the windows, not inside? We had a quote for replacing some window frames but the guy can’t do it till January.
Another digression, while I’m pondering this right-to-be-angry theme, is that I’m remembering the last house we lived in, which was bigger and had a spare room (with leaky windows as well) and from time to time we used to have people staying with us.
We had this system for doing the washing: if I was putting a half load in the washing machine I would let the guest know and he/she could add theirs in, and if they happened to be doing washing of their own and didn’t have enough to fill the machine, they’d let me know and I’d add ours.
This worked well, except for the odd occasion (guest forgetting to mention red t-shirt in machine and my husband’s shirts getting dyed pink; that kind of thing).
But one time, the person staying was busy and kept leaving the washing and when I offered to do it said, ‘Oh, it’s okay, I’ll have more tomorrow so I’ll do a load then.’
Only, the tomorrows were piling up and so was his washing, till we couldn’t help noticing an odd aroma every time he opened the door to his room.
I mentioned this.
He was amazed at my persistence in repeating the same theme.
‘I’ve said I’ll do it!’
But he didn’t.
So finally, when he was out, I went in and opened the windows and collected the washing and put it in the machine and when it was done hung it out – or in, as it was raining outside.
When he came home, every radiator in the house, and the banister rail on the landing, was festooned with his t-shirts, sweaters and underwear, and he was very annoyed at this invasion of his privacy.
Which brings me back to the anger issue.
I don’t mind people getting angry.
I get angry.
I’m quite good at it.
And if no one ever got angry, injustices and abuse would abound, the person with the strongest will and loudest voice would intimidate employees, bully families and oppress nations, and no one would show any resistance, which wouldn’t be good.
But if – as happened with these two particular angry people – someone gets angry and chooses to stay angry and doesn’t accept any help to deal with the causes, isn’t it like the guest piling up dirty washing, not doing it and not letting me do it?
Of course he has a right to stockpile his own dirty washing if he chooses.
He also has a right to complain at my pointing out that he’s emitting noxious fumes. Very rude of me.
And he’s certainly not obliged to accept my offers of help to shift the backlog of stuff he hasn’t got round to dealing with.
But after a certain point, my tolerance of either bad odours or bad-tempered outbursts reaches its limit, and I reserve the right to apply water and detergent, or direct the person towards the nearest launderette or psychiatrist.
If that means I’m immature, unloving, or a bad Christian, they are free to tell me so.
But not in my house.