Abandoned?

I've recently come across an app of the Stations of the Cross produced by the Daughters of St Paul. This comes at the 13th, when Jesus is taken down from the cross. It reminds me of one of my favourite sculptures, The Pieta by Michelangelo. The meditation imagines God the Father speaking. “My only begotten Son, how my heart breaks for you. You perfectly accomplished my will. For love of me and love of humanity, you withheld nothing. You gave and gave and gave. With you I am well pleased. I sent you into the world as the very incarnation of my heart. You are heart of my heart. I could never forsake you, my Son, never. Though you did not feel my presence, I was there. I was with you in the garden, as you took upon yourself humanity’s sinfulness. I was there when you accepted the cross and fell on the road. I was there when the spikes pierced your body, and when you forgave those who brought you to the cross. I was there when you surrendered your life to me. I was there. And to your devoted disciples who have walked with you, I say I am with you as I was with my only begotten Son in his agony and death. When you can’t feel my presence, I am there. Grasp me through faith. That is how you grow – through faith. I could not and would not that forsake my Son; I will not and cannot forsake you, his disciples. I sent you my very own heart in my Son. I am with you always.”

God our Father, sometimes I feel like Jesus that I am all alone in my struggles. At those times you are closest to me, but my faith is weak. Faith is your gift to me. Help grow in faith and to remember that You are with me always.

The secret of grateful hearts

Here are three contributions I've received this week which I'd like to pass on.  The first is from Ann (to whom I'm also indebted for the seasonal - let's hope! - photo). "We learn to let our neighbour be, just as we learn to let God be. Not to manipulate our neighbour, but rather to reverence him, to reverence his importance, the wonder of his being. In other words, to love him" (John Main).

The second comes from Alice Tremaine's Prayers for Health website.

Gratitude changes everything.

"Time and time again I learn that having a grateful heart really does make all the difference in how we live, how we are able to cope with life's tragedies, and whether we are able to bless others. There have been numerous studies on the positive effects of gratitude to one's mental and physical health. Gratitude is often associated with greater happiness and sense of meaning, and even overall health. 

"I remember the first time my father was hospitalized after being diagnosed with ALS. He had fallen and had developed a blood clot in his brain. I traveled to Brazil (where he lives) to be with him and help care for him during that transition from hospital to home. 

"Those first few days after his hospital discharge were very stressful and difficult. In a short time, my father had suffered significant losses in his ability to care for himself. 

"I remember taking a few moments to be by myself during those difficult days. There was an enormous temptation to feel sorry for myself and for my family; why has this happened? How are we supposed to do this? 

"I realized quickly that, if I were to be any help to my father, I couldn't wallow in self-pity for long. Some lamenting and crying and protesting is normal and probably healthy, but I decided I couldn't let myself stay there. I had to find the small and big things that I could be grateful for, like the good care my father received in the hospital and the fact that I had the chance to spend some meaningful time with him. "Gratitude really does change everything, and there is always something to be grateful for. We just need to look. 

"Verbal prayer: Merciful God, thank you for the gift of Life. Thank you for the beauty of nature, and for the love of family and friends. Help me to have open eyes to see the ways in which you are blessing me, and to offer thanks in every circumstance. Amen." 

And last but by no means least from Leafyschroder. "This prayer of Cardinal Newman's called the 'Fragrance Prayer' means a great deal to me...
Prayer of Blessed John Henry Newman
Dear Jesus
Help me to spread Thy fragrance everywhere I go.
Flood my soul with Thy Spirit and Life.
Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly
That all my life may only be a radiance of Thine.
Shine through me,
And so be in me that every soul I come in contact with
May feel Thy presence in my soul.
Let them look up and see no longer me
But only Jesus.
Stay with me
And then I shall begin to shine
As Thou shinest,
So to shine as to be a light to others;
The light, O Jesus, will be all from Thee;
None of it will be mine;
It will be Thou shining on others through me.
Let me thus praise Thee in the way Thou dost love best
By shining on those around me.
Let me preach Thee without preaching,
Not by words but by my example,
By the catching force of the sympathetic influence
Of what I do,
The evident fullness of the love my heart bears to Thee.
Amen." 

I think Newman was echoing Paul in 2 Corinthians: "Thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumph, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere." Or maybe he's also thinking of Mary of Bethany in John's Gospel, "Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment." Whichever, they are both a heart response to Jesus' great love for us. May you receive that love tomorrow.

The Enduring Melody

Yesterday I received a letter which began:

"Dear Michael

As you have said on 'Room With A View' that you are going to be buying books, may I take the liberty of telling you about 2 more?

If I had to choose something to take with me to a Desert Island, after the Bible, I would choose The Enduring Melody. It is full of wisdom, courage, humour, culture, huge spiritual stature, a truly grace filled book. I’d also like a PC to look up all the wonderful references."

The other book Ann recommended was Learning to Dance. I ought really to have both books as they were written by Michael Mayne, who was Dean of Westminster Abbey when I was appointed to be vicar at Stanford in the Vale. I was interviewed for the job in the Jerusalem Chamber in the Abbey, as the Dean and Chapter had their turn as patrons, and in those days patrons really did the appointing. I don't think it was the Dean who interviewed me, but two of the Canons.

Michael Mayne had two bouts of debilitating ME, but The Enduring Melody was written at the time when he had terminal cancer of the jaw.

Here are three extracts from the attachments that Ann sent to whet my appetite.

"From that icy moment of diagnosis, when you know that everything has changed, I recognised two things. First that this would prove an unwanted but important test of the integrity of what I most deeply believed, both as a human being and as a priest: a kind of inquest on all those words spilled out of pulpits or in counselling others or at hospital bedsides. A few months earlier I had attempted to tease out what I had come to think of as ‘the enduring melody' of my life. This was the time to see how well it would stand up to the fiercest scrutiny.
"Secondly I felt the need in whatever lay ahead not to waste the experience, but to write about it as honestly and as I could day by day, both as a form of therapy and (hopefully) to bring something creative and redemptive out of an inevitably dark time."

"No-one has ever claimed that praying is easy. I may try to carve a few moments out of the day, or I may join others in worship, but very often my attention level is low and at once the distractions come: all kinds of trivia are washing round at the surface level of my mind and one thought leads to another, and I come to with a guilty jolt. It doesn’t improve with age. I take comfort from the fact that in our prayer life what matters is that a bit of me knows that there is deep within, deeper than all the occasional doubts and constant distractions, a Cantus Firmus, an awareness of and longing for the love of God as I have glimpsed it in those rare life affirming moments ( and will again). I guess that’s how it will continue to be, and that’s alright, for my desire is to recall the melody, knowing at the deepest level, that I am His, loved beyond my imagining and held by His grace."

 He reflects on the figure of Christ, standing out luminous against the prevailing night,

"That solitary figure stands at the heart of my own cantus firmus. If the atheists are proved right and I am proved wrong, if my deepest beliefs are what many dismiss as mere fairy tales; if there is nothing at the end but Prospero's 'such stuff / as dreams are made on, and our little life / is rounded with a sleep'; then I shall still not wish to have based this one precious life on other facts and allowed them to define and motivate all I have done. For, despite all the darkness, they have not only brought much persisting joy, but I can think of nothing that would have so satisfied my deepest and most haunting human desires, convictions and hopes."

And finally this comment from a piece written a few days after his death, which appealed to me for obvious reasons! His wife was Michael’s angel in human form. “What transforms such a time”, he writes, “is having someone beside you with whom you can share the journey, but it’s easy to downplay the cost to them. Theirs is a more difficult role, demanding patience and courage."

Thank you so much, Ann. You have succeeded in provoking me to read them!

Divine Mercy

I wouldn't have known if my good friend, Mary, hadn't told me that today is the Feast of Divine Mercy.  (Hitherto I'd known it as Low Sunday, which seems a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy both of mood and attendance in church. Much better having a feast to reflect on the heart of the Holy Week story.)  I'd downloaded an app which I looked at before this morning's service, since we'd got to church early so that Jane could set up crèche. In the Litany for today there's this lovely line, "Divine Mercy, astonishment for Angels, incomprehensible by Saints - I trust in You". We see God's mercy personified in our Lord Jesus himself. It reminds me of the lines in Charles Wesley's And can it be:
"Tis mystery all: the Immortal dies! Who can explore his strange design?
In vain the first-born seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine.
'Tis mercy all. Let earth adore, let angel minds enquire no more." Sadly that verse isn't on my favourite version, by Lou Fellingham and Phatfish, though the new Archbishop had it near the end of his service (Justin Welby's inaugural service, 25+min in).

At the end of the Litany comes this prayer, "Eternal God, in whom mercy is endless and the treasury of compassion inexhaustible, look kindly upon us and increase Your mercy in us, that in difficult moments we might not despair nor become despondent, but with great confidence submit ourselves to Your holy will, which is Love and Mercy itself. Amen."

I'm chuffed to bits that my original hope for this blog, that others would contribute their own insights, has begun to happen with comments like those of Leafyschroder and others that have been sent direct to me - of which more tomorrow or soon!

Love unknown

"Faith is not a thing of the mind; it is not an intellectual certainty or a felt conviction of the heart. It is a sustained decision to take God with utter seriousness as the God of my life. It is to live out each hour in a practical, concrete affirmation that God is Father and he is 'in heaven'. It is a decision to shift the centre of our lives from ourselves to him, to forego self-interest and make his interests, his will, our sole concern. This is what it means to hallow his name as Father in heaven." Sister Ruth Burrows, O.C.D.

I am indebted to "Leafyschroder" who comments on this blog for introducing me to Ruth Burrows, a Carmelite nun, who wrote the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent book last year. In particular she recommended Before the Living God. I found this in an on-line review: "Her other books demonstrate the way God used even her worst experiences in the convent for her (and other's) spiritual benefit. It seems one purpose of the book might have been to encourage the reader to realize that God will take the most traumatic, or unfair circumstances if we turn to Him and transform it into one of our greatest blessings that brings spiritual peace and personal intimacy with God." 

Leafyschroder then sent me this beautiful extract from a review of Ruth Burrows' latest book, Love Unknown:

"She has been trying to pray as a nun for 65 years. And what has she to show for it? Darkness, by her own account, and the feeling that God does not exist. As a young woman, when she prayed, nothing 'happened', and she soon realised it would always be like this. 'It is impossible to understand my life unless it is seen all the time against the background of black depression,' she wrote 36 years ago, in one of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century, Before the Living God.


"Her depression did not stem from any 'Dark Night of the Soul'. It came not from her vocation as a nun, but happened to be something that she brought to it with her, as part of her disposition. Those who have met her find her a sharp, intelligent, amusing interlocutor, but things are no easier for her in her spiritual life today. The difference is that now she is 'happy to be poor'. This attitude of poverty is the underlying, human theme of Love Unknown. The two themes go together: the objective reality of a loving God, and on the other side a radical human poverty on the part of the Christian loved by him.

"In this lies the answer to the person who finds that he or she is 'not getting anywhere' with prayer. Ruth Burrows challenges any such judgement based on subjective experience. Since it is God who prays in us, what would we expect to see and feel? Only by focusing on what is revealed by the risen Christ can we be sure that our God is real and not just a projection. We can only know the true, living God through his incarnate image."


Forgive me if you've already read my conversation with Leafyschroder, but I thought that last quotation really merited being a main blog entry. I'm ordering some of Ruth Burrows' books.

Easter light

We are still in the season of Easter. So let me share this quotation which I learned today from my translator friend, Sarah. "Mother Teresa once said, ‘Let nothing so fill you with sorrow that you forget the joy of the resurrection.’ However wintry it may be, whatever uncertainties, losses or bad news we are facing, may we have our eyes and hearts open to the living hope that Jesus offers us this Easter."  

Here's another one from C S Lewis, via the admirable Marijke Hoek. "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." I suppose I might say, "I believe in Jesus...."

I think this is how the reading for today begins, and it always sends a tingle down my spine. "Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb." Although it was dark, He had risen. Although she did not recognise Him, He called her by name. As Dick Douglas said in his sermon on Sunday, He meets each of us in our pain, to transform it.

Beautiful Battlefields

I always think it must be harder for the carer than for the sufferer in a case like mine. There is so little you can do, except be there. I have a good friend in Australia who's called Liz. She lost her husband to MND a few years back. Today she sent me Easter blessings and told me about a new book by a lady named Bo Stern, Beautiful Battlefields. Her husband was diagnosed with ALS/MND in 2011. I'd love to meet her. She's a young (well, she looks young to me!) pastor in Oregon. She has a blog called The Difference of Day, and she writes well. I hope she won't mind my quoting her Good Friday post, which is a lovely counter-balance to my rather dour one.
The Best Friday

It’s interesting to me that we call the worst day in all of history “Good Friday.”  Maybe we intuitively understand that the best thing in our lives came out of the darkest moment in His.

I think Paul got it exactly right with this bold statement:   “I want to know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His suffering…”

I don’t like suffering, but I keep running into evidence that it’s important.  Suffering sets the stage for victory, making all things possible.

Unless a seed falls and dies, it cannot bear fruit.

When our seeds of hope are buried in the soil of suffering, everything falls away from them except real, true life.   And it feels like all is lost and all is winter.

Then bursting forth in glorious day…

I love this Beautiful Friday.

Happy Easter.
Bo.

I shall be getting hold of Beautiful Battlefields.

This is the song from which she quotes: In Christ alone. Brilliant! I find it hard singing the last verse; I believe it so much. Easter has never ended!