Walking in Holy Week

Well, it's been quite a week. I've been really impressed by Pope Francis and by Justin Welby, who seem to me to share a humility and a simplicity which are refreshing. It was a shame about all the establishment paraphernalia of the Inauguration of the Archbishop's Ministry (as he chose to call it rather than "enthronement" - as the media still insist on saying), but at the heart of it was a straightforward man, aware of his own limitations, talking straightforward language. The text of his sermon is not easy to track down, but it is here. His sermon touched on many things, but was based around the account of Peter getting out of the boat on the Sea of Galilee. He said, "The fear of the disciples was reasonable. People do not walk on water, but this person did. For us to trust and follow Christ is reasonable if He is what the disciples end up saying He is; 'truly you are the Son of God'. Each of us now needs to heed His voice calling to us, and to get out of the boat and go to Him. Because even when we fail, we find peace and hope and become more fully human than we can imagine: failure forgiven, courage liberated, hope persevering, love abounding."

Coincidentally on Friday night when Pete and Jane were round for a FOF (Fellowship of Failure - see this blog FOFOF a fortnight ago), Jane (not mine) brought something to encourage us, while Jane (mine) produced an amazing chicken and mushroom vol-au-vent. I say coincidentally because Jane hadn't heard the new Archbishop, but has been reading John Ortberg's book, If you want to walk on water, you've got to get out of the boat - not the most encouraging of titles for us mere mortals! However Jane read to us from the chapter called "Learning to wait", which talks about the often quoted verses from Isaiah 40:
Why do you say, O Jacob,
    and speak, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord,
    and my right is disregarded by my God”?
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
    the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
    his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
    and to him who has no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary,
    and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
    they shall soar with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
    they shall walk and not faint.

He wrote that "we must learn to live (the last three lines) - soaring, running, walking - one line at a time.

"Sometimes you will mount up and soar on wings of eagles. This is a beautiful picture. Ornithologists say birds have three methods of flight. The first is flapping - keeping their wings in constant motion to counteract gravity. Hummingbirds can flap up to seventy times per second. Flapping keeps you up in the air, but it is a lot of work...
"A second flight method is gliding. Here the bird builds up enough speed, then coasts downward a while. It is much more graceful than flapping, but unfortunately it does not get the bird very far. Reality in the form of gravity sets in quickly. Gliding is nice, but it does not last.
"Then there is the third way - soaring. Only a few birds, like eagles, are capable of this. Eagles' wings are so strong that they are capable of catching rising currents of warm air... and without moving a feather can soar up to great heights. eagles have been clocked up to 80 m.p.h. without flapping at all. They just soar on invisible columns of air.
"Isaiah says that for those who wait on the Lord, times will come when they soar. You catch a gust of the spirit - Jesus said, 'The wind blows wherever it pleases.... So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.'
"Sometimes in your life you will be in an era of spiritual soaring.... Be very grateful. Do all you can to stay in the Spirit's power....
"But there is another line in Isaiah's description. Sometimes we are not soaring, but we are able to run and not grow weary. If this is where you are, your life isn't feeling effortless. You do not see a lot of miracles. You have to do some flapping. But with persistence and determination you know you are running the race.... Do not try to manufacture spiritual ecstasy. Do not compare yourself with someone who is soaring right now. Your time will come. Just keep running.
"Then there is a third condition that Isaiah describes. Sometimes we will not be soaring, and we cannot run - because of doubt or pain or fatigue or failure. In those times all we can do is walk and not faint. This is not water-walking. It is just plain walking. All we can do is say, 'God, I'll hang on. I don't seem too fruitful or productive, and I don't feel very triumphant. But I won't let go. I will obey you. I'll just keep walking.'"

And as we noticed, according to Isaiah, the strength to soar, and to run, and to walk, all has the same source: God himself. As Justin Welby put it, "failure forgiven, courage liberated, hope persevering, love abounding." Holy Week is not about soaring or even running. It's about faithfully trudging the dusty road to the Cross with Jesus. It seems to me that we have to walk that way to get to the other end. 

FOFOF

FOFOF - not a misprint for BOGOF. It's an innovation we started on Friday with our friends, Pete and Jane. It stands for... No, first let me explain. We were having a meal together in the evening, and relaxing with Jane's (not my Jane) rather excellent cake and coffee. I'd said a bit about my sermon of the week before - they don't attend the same church as us. I'd been preaching about God the restorer and used the illustration of kintsukuroi. As someone said to me today, a picture speaks a thousand words. And this one did.

The point was fairly straightforward. It's like what God can do with the broken bits of our lives - if we'll let him. I found this rather apt quote from the website of the Japanese kintsukuroi artist, Hirasawa Hakusui, "Please feel richness and the tender-heartedness of the mind that oneself has in repairing the container by all means." I had pointed out that it wasn't talking about instant miracle cures but about painstaking bit-by-bit life-long restoration. The sad thing is that often we don't recognise the beauty in the finished product.

Anyway, going back to Friday (and kintsukuroi is sort of connected), a few weeks back we had determined to pray more regularly for other people. And so we compared notes - the conclusion of which, in brief, was that we all totally failed. Hence the start of FOFOF - the Fellowship of Failure (on Fridays): FOF for short. We reckoned it might not be hopeless, remembering that Jesus said something like, "I've not come for the successes, but for the failures in life. I've not come to mend the undamaged but the shattered, " and he seemed to be more at home with the drop-outs than with the people who'd made it. 

So, if you're down this way on a Friday, and feel you might fit might the description (and hungry), you're welcome to come to FOF - just give us a call (01235 760094)! And if you're not down this way, it's still true: Jesus loves the failures.

No hands but ours?

"Transformation is nearer than temptation."

This was again a watchword of Alan Scott's. I took it as a reminder that God is constantly proactive and creative, whereas the devil is just opportunistic. Sometimes we are overwhelmed by a sense of failure or of facing overwhelming odds. However, it's not true.

Healing of lame man (St Peter's, Rome)

The truth is that "God is for us", i.e. on our side, or as Jesus put it, "He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world." And the point is this: that we are the means through which God wants to transform the world. It's not just about our transformation. God wants to transform the world He made and we keep spoiling. He wants to restore it to His original intention, through us, His Church - which means we can't retreat behind closed doors. Like the Pentecost Church we have to spill out on to the streets. However, doing so under our own steam, because we've "got the idea", isn't transformative. The apostles are told to "wait... until you are clothed with power from on high", i.e. until they receive God's Spirit.

God's life-giving touch (Sistine Chapel)

Ironically, it is our emptiness, our feeling of failure and inadequacy, which best forms a channel for God's love to flow to others. That is utterly counter-intuitive and incredible. But it's true because He is even keener and more able to transform His creation than evil is to thwart Him. He wants to fill us to bring His glory to the world. I have a feeling that this is what St Paul meant by "Christ in you, the hope of glory". I always thought it meant the hope of our glory; now I think it means "Jesus in us is the hope of the creation's restored glory". The reassuring truth remains that it's not through our best laid plans and efforts but through our being who we are in Christ and letting His Spirit have a say that God's transformation happens.  

Come, Holy Spirit!

"I'm a failure"

I can do no better than copy this post from the iBenedictines' blog  today.

The Prayer of Incompetence and Failure

by Digitalnun on July 1, 2012
From time to time someone will ask how to pray ‘better’. When we tease out what is troubling the questioner, it usually turns out that he or she expects something to ‘happen’ in prayer; and when it doesn’t, feels a failure. Of course, something always does ‘happen’ in prayer, but not always what we were expecting or hoping for. Remember Naaman and his indignation at being told to wash seven times in the Jordan when he was expecting Elisha to come out and perform some quasi-magical ceremony for him? We can be like that in prayer. We want things to go according to our notions, but God has his own ideas and they are rarely the same as ours.

One of the first lessons any of us has to learn is to pray as we can. We need to keep in mind that God is in charge and rather keener on this prayer business than we are. Our enthusiasm tends to come by fits and starts. Not so God’s. He has been planning this moment of closeness with us from all eternity. That can be an encouraging thought when prayer seems dry and pointless, when all we experience is incompetence and failure. The secret is to keep at it, to go on trustingly with our prayer times. One of the lovely phrases George Herbert used to describe prayer was ‘the heart in pilgrimage’. Anyone who has undertaken a real pilgrimage, walked the Camino de Santiago, for example, will know that temptations to give up crowd in when one is tired and footsore, but one just goes on. So it is with prayer. Incompetence, failure, what do they matter when God has promised us his very self?
Note
There are some simple guidelines for prayer on our main website, here.

Jane tells me the guidelines on the website are very helpful.

I find it consoling that nuns, who I imagine are in the premier league of pray-ers, understand the sense of being a failure at praying. My father, I think it was, had a saying: "Pray, pray - and peg away."