When things are all right

It occurs to me that I tend to use this blog for down-beat moments. But what about those times when things are going all right? Is there something to say then? At the moment things are quite sunny here, both literally and metaphorically - and I'm grateful. I've written elsewhere about my cousin, Grace Sheppard, wife of the cricketing bishop, who even when she was suffering the same cancer as had killed her husband, maintained her attitude of gratitude to the end. She wrote a beautiful book about caring for her husband, David, called Living with Dying. It seems to me that if Grace could be full of thankfulness in such a hard situation, then when "the sun's shining down on me" there's no excuse for not saying, "Blessed be your Name!"

Ironically, I've just discovered from the lovely iBenedictine nuns that today Catholics remember Our Lady of Sorrows. That's of course Mary, the mother of Jesus, and recalls the prophecy of Simeon that a sword would pierce her soul - looking forward to the agony of seeing her Son tortured to death before her eyes. I cannot conceive of the depth of suffering that was for her. I am fairly sure that she'd have said what a friend once said to me: "I wish it had been me, not him." There's no comfort for that moment, just the company of "the beloved disciple". I can't imagine there was blessing in her mind at that point, just bewilderment. Maybe she thought back to her poem of praise when her Son was conceived and she said about the Almighty, "Holy is his name" - meaning that his nature is incomprehensibly different.

There were naturally huge questions for Mary throughout the lifetime of her Son, from being asked to be an unmarried mother to becoming a widowed single mother, from seeing her Son quitting home as an itinerant teacher to his ending up on a cross and then leaving her at the ascension. And yet the song which is her trademark was "My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour". Though we will certainly have major questions in life, may we have a prevailing attitude of gratitude because there have been moments when the shutters have been open and we have seen the goodness of God.

Birthday pearls of wisdom

This comes from the Facebook of Shape Arts, which a London Disability-led arts organisation working to improve access to culture for disabled people. The post was headed: "Wise words...".

“Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many - not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.” 

Happy 200th birthday, Charles Dickens.

Wise words for everyone, in my book.

Stone and sand

A friend sent me this fable in an email on Friday. It's an old chestnut, I gather, but I'd not read it before.

TWO FRIENDS WERE WALKING THROUGH THE DESERT.  DURING SOME POINT OF THE JOURNEY, THEY HAD AN ARGUMENT; AND ONE FRIEND SLAPPED THE OTHER ONE IN THE FACE. THE ONE WHO GOT SLAPPED WAS HURT, BUT WITHOUT SAYING ANYTHING, WROTE IN THE SAND, “TODAY MY BEST FRIEND SLAPPED ME IN THE FACE.”

THEY KEPT ON WALKING, UNTIL THEY FOUND AN OASIS, WHERE THEY DECIDED TO TAKE A BATH. THE ONE WHO HAD BEEN SLAPPED GOT STUCK IN THE MIRE AND STARTED DROWNING, BUT THE FRIEND SAVED HIM. AFTER HE RECOVERED FROM THE NEAR DROWNING, HE WROTE ON A STONE, “TODAY MY BEST FRIEND SAVED MY LIFE.”

THE FRIEND WHO HAD SLAPPED AND SAVED HIS BEST FRIEND ASKED HIM, “AFTER I HURT YOU, YOU WROTE IN THE SAND AND NOW, YOU WRITE ON A STONE - WHY?” 

THE FRIEND REPLIED, “WHEN SOMEONE HURTS US WE SHOULD WRITE IT DOWN IN SAND, WHERE WINDS OF FORGIVENESS CAN ERASE IT AWAY. BUT, WHEN SOMEONE DOES SOMETHING GOOD FOR US, WE MUST ENGRAVE IT IN STONE WHERE NO WIND CAN EVER ERASE IT.” 

I am sure that the fable wasn't around in Jesus' time. But I wonder whether he had something like the idea in mind when he wrote in the dust when faced with the woman taken in adultery. John doesn't tell us what he wrote with his finger, but no doubt it was erased within seconds as the wind blew and feet trampled over it. Perhaps he wrote her sin there. Certainly he forgave her - and taught us to pray, "Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us."

This morning our service ended with one of my favourite hymns, Before the throne of God, "I have a great High Priest who ever lives and pleads for me... My name is graven on His hands, My name is written on His heart..." (partly based on Isaiah 49.16). That's the best reason for engraving others' loving deeds indelibly, and erasing our grudges.  

Thank you

It has been quite a year! Punctuated in the middle with my fall in July with its surprisingly long-lasting effects, and more dramatically with Jane's fall a couple of weeks ago, and yet, as the album of our year which Apple kindly assembled for me bears witness, also with a great deal of merriment and sadness, and above all love.

I've found that Jane's accident (from which she is marvellously recovering) has knocked me out of my accustomed pattern of Bible reading and prayer. Not that I've stopped praying. Indeed I'm often thinking prayerful thoughts as I sit here - and remember people's situations. But - and maybe it's also the effect of the festive season - I've lost that pattern and habit that was part of each day. And so today's Three Minute Retreat has focused things again for me.

It's based on Psalm 96.3.

"There are days when we feel God's presence and want to sing God's praise. And there are days when our hearts feel dark and we wonder if God is really near. We can get busy and miss the blessings God offers us. One way to recognize these everyday blessings is through personal reflection. By making a habit of noticing God's action in our lives, we can let God's light shine into any darkness we experience. Then we, like the psalmist, can proclaim God's glory." 

One of the questions which follows is "How can I make a little time in my life for daily personal reflection?" I'm thinking about my answers and praying for grace to act on them in 2012.

God, help me to slow down

and notice the many ways you bless each day

so that I may grow in the practice of gratitude.

Amen

Bathing in kindness and grace

Didn't Cleopatra have baths of asses' milk? Well, I've found something better. It's the milk of human kindness and the grace of God - both of which we've experienced in buckets these past few days. It began on Tuesday...

I was dozing in my chair before our annual mulled wine and mince pies party, when all our end of the close get together. Jane was busy preparing canapés, sausage rolls, mince pies, drinks and glasses - and things for the kids to do. Suddenly, I was roused by a tumbling crashing followed by a heavy thump - and silence! On the other side of the door. Unable to move, I shouted. It wasn't long before Jane said, "I'm all right." Somehow, I didn't believe her. She didn't sound all right. Amazingly, she staggered in to the sitting room and sat on the sofa next to me. Her face was a pale shade of putty. She'd been on the loft ladder bringing down some games, and had fallen halfway down the stairs. Her first self-diagnosis was severe bruising; then something worse... like a dislocated collar-bone. It didn't take a genius to tell it was serious. There was nothing I could do, confined to my chair, except gibberingly ring Rachel who drove seven miles in not many more minutes (the road was unusually clear), and then a bit later our next door neighbour who also came round pronto.

Rachel is fantastically clear-thinking in an emergency. She contacted a first responder friend of ours, who told us we had to have an ambulance as it was a left-shoulder injury. So she did that, rang round those who needed to know, took instructions for the party, while our neighbour did a round of the houses to postpone the gathering till the ambulance had taken Jane away. Well, it would have been a shame to have wasted all her creative hard work.

The ambulance was here in no time, and the paramedics were excellent. Jane had gone by the time the neighbours poured in. And we didn't remember everything - like the canapés - but people didn't mind. They helped Rachel with mulling the wine and washing up (thanks - Astrid and Naomi) and at the end, when the news came in that it was a serious fracture and that she would stay in hospital until an operation, possibly on the Thursday, everyone offered any help we could use. Rachel rang her brothers who began to change their schedules to come and help. By Wednesday afternoon Stephen (on holiday) and Bryan (his boss having said, "Go!") were here. On Facebook next morning I wrote that Jane had fallen and we were in for an interesting Christmas, and was flooded by offers of help and prayer. My overwhelming feeling was how full of kindness people are, which shows when they have an opportunity. I love that.

Later that evening I emailed a few of our close praying friends, briefly. As I wrote to one of them today: "We visited Jane yesterday afternoon, and she's counting her blessings. The way things happened after she'd fallen was amazing, like the ambulance was already in the area and was diverted here as a priority, her friend from Stanford got here just in time to go with her, leaving Rachel with me; the driver was INCREDIBLY gentle going from here to Oxford; because it was a suspected dislocation she went to the front of the queue which became five hours long behind her; the xray revealed this severely fractured collar-bone, which needed to be seen by a consultant, who just happened to be walking past at that moment. There was a possibility of an operation before the weekend, otherwise she'd have been sent home with a 3-4 week wait. There was a bed in the Trauma unit - in her own room - available. 
   "The fall was steep and twisty and long enough, and she could easily have broken her neck, or concussed herself - neither happened. In fact she was able to get to where I was sitting and could see we needed help. We've been in touch this morning. The main man (who used to patch people up in Afghanistan) hopes to operate and put a plate in this afternoon, and to get her home for Christmas. We're praying for no emergencies before then...

   "Rachel, Stephen and Bryan have moved in and the three of them are looking after me and getting ready for Christmas - it will carry on as normal, we trust, with Jane's parents coming on Saturday and our friend Margaret for Christmas lunch. :) They're a super-competent team.

   "Meanwhile I'm going to have to arrange some care cover for when they're all back at work." I reckon that's all God's grace.

So now I'm writing this as Jane's in theatre or the recovery room and the sounds and smells of cooking emerge from the kitchen, and I'm reflecting that if even stubborn donkeys like me can be in receipt of God's grace and the kindness of friends and family, it's good news for everyone. Maybe the traditional presence of the ass in the Christmas stable means a bit more than it happened to have carried Mary there. I think it means that rather than squeezing our juice out until our pips squeak God wants us to enjoy his love which, if we look out for it, appears in the most unlikely of places and improbable of circumstances:

In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
A breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Blessings and breast cancer

A friend of mine today put this on Facebook: "It's been a long hard week....but it's been a week where I've lost count of the blessings in my life......thank you, God, for each and every one of them!!..." 

On our neighbours' roof, too many starlings to count!

You'd better believe it when I say that her life is tough at the best of times. Her father has Alzheimers and she herself seems to have an as-yet undiagnosed condition like mine. He was rushed into hospital for a heart operation last weekend. The shock and disorientation for someone already confused cannot be imagined. Neither can be the distress for his loved ones. And yet she writes about losing count of her blessings this week!


It put me in mind of a remarkable article I read this week, Exquisite and Excruciating: The Life of Married Love. Before those of you who are single switch off, please don't, because it's a remarkable article in itself and says a lot about God's love and suffering. It begins like this:

"Like many survivors of breast cancer, I have some serious battle scars. My un-bandaged body after breast cancer certainly made for some interesting pillow talk between my husband and myself.

"Going into the crisis long ago, we barely considered what it would mean for our love. But when I was done with all the treatment, the question lingered unspoken in the air—what would our marriage look like? Stranger still, what would it feel like?

"I knew he loved me before all the surgeries. Fourteen happy years and three children assured me of that. But we had never really, really been tested by the experience of heartache, loss, and fear that a cancer diagnosis brings.

"In the aftermath, I could not begin to fathom what our intimate moments might be like, now that I had been surgically taken apart and permanently altered.

"My husband just smiled and kissed the boo-boos. And he never stopped.

"The miraculous healing power of lips to scars transformed the broken hearts and the marriage that cancer had tried to lay to waste, better than life-saving surgery ever could...." 

Marc Chagall, Wedding

Pat Cohn's article is as inspiring as it is beautifully written, and I recommend reading it all, because the truth is, as St Paul tells us, that married love is just a picture of Christ's love for the Church; that means you and me. I hope I'm not being irreverent if I say he wants to kiss our painful scars and heal our broken hearts.

You'll not be surprised that I picked this bit out too:

"Our marriage is a vowed life until death. We know one of us will get there first. We just don't know how or when.

"So when headlines shout to us about making physician-assisted suicide legal, or whether or not it is ethical for a "healthy" spouse to divorce a "sick" spouse because the illness has robbed the marriage of its protracted happiness, we know that we have to redouble our efforts to affirm life and love."

She ended her article like this: "This is the truth of laying one's life down for the sake of the friend, the spouse. It is how we, mere mortals, live Eucharistic lives: "This is my body, given up for you" (Lk. 22:19).

"Loving someone until death is as hard as it is beautiful. It will mean sacrifice. It will also be a well of deep, refreshing joy.

"You will have battle scars over time from the hardships that life throws at your marriage. But when we invite Christ into our marriage, he sends graces to heal every scar that our fingers can trace, as his love magnifies and lingers in every embrace."