Beauty for ashes

You might like to read my Diary of a Dancing Donkey blog, where I described what Julian of Norwich  called a "revelation of divine love". We spent last week at the New Wine Festival, a big gathering of Christians in Somerset, which led to my starting this blog a year ago.

Gorgeous Grace - Click for link

In the end it was an encouraging time for me. On the way I noted things which people said. Unfortunately I was just using my iPod on which I'm very slow, and so they may be approximate quotes. Anyway here's the first of them, from Karen Jones - who's recently published her first novel with the unlikely title of The Babe's Bible - Gorgeous Grace, which I am reliably informed is gripping. As I was saying, here's the quote:

"Our sufferings cost us too much to waste them."

It's true, isn't it? We can either nurse our pains and almost cherish them, clinging to them rather like Gollum and his "my precious" ring. Or we can release them and use them more like St Paul who used his afflictions "to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God." 

I think Karen was thinking not only of that, but also of our suffering being a seedbed for the growth of our own maturity and our relationship with God. We can regard suffering as entirely negative and destructive, or we can allow it to be turned to good. I say "allow" as I don't think it's merely a matter of the will. Paul talks about "the God of all comfort" who enables us to pass on the comfort we've received. That has to be the work of the Holy Spirit. And equally it's Him who turns our ashes into a crown of beauty and gives us a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair (Isaiah 61). It's certainly true that when we're going through suffering like depression or bereavement it doesn't lie in our power to drag ourselves into the light, not really. We may put on a brave face, but it always conceals a weeping heart. But God... "is able to do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine". YIPPEE! 

"Weeping may last through the night,    
but joy comes with the morning."   
So I wait for you....

Through the window

Among his many talents, Martin is a freelance photographer: http://martinart-photography.com/. He has a knack of seeing and capturing the unusual.  He brought some of his work to the MNDA Bake History coffee morning we had here on Saturday. I don't know how much he sold, but I liked this one called Window - so I ordered one of the limited edition. He brought it round today.

The sea and the sky really were that blue. Besides the interesting ruined walls (How many faces are hidden in the stones?), I love the fact that even through the small hole as well as through the roughcast "window" you can see the variety of life in the cliff-top flora and the sea breaking against the promontory. (By the way, any ideas of where the photo is?)

It's a sort of picture of the potential which still lies within human wreckage. You can still find beauty, and life and hope, even when all you yourself feel is a ruin. It's a matter of perspective. You can focus on the ruin or you can focus on the sun beyond.

Sometimes, however, even that view gets obscured by mist or rain. I've just heard today of an inexplicable grief. I have to confess that I have wept for those involved - and I don't understand it. Why does God allow hopes to be so sadly dashed? I don't get it. 

And yet, as I've written in My Donkeybody, I still believe that the sun shines behind the closed shutters. I just can't comprehend the total nature of that Love.

"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."

The vulnerable mind

Last Friday, the Evangelical Alliance published an article of mine in their Friday night theology series. The aim is to write about 500 words on something topical. I've written for them a number of times, but I think in the end I have been most pleased with this article. You can read it here: Friday Night Theology: The Vulnerable Mind.

It's very tempting for Christians to pretend life is a bed of roses for them. I think that has a number of causes. One is the habit that preachers used to have of saying something like, "Come to Jesus and all your problems will be sorted." As Anne said at Stanford's Festival Songs of Praise last Sunday, that certainly wasn't the message that Saul, later St Paul, was given at his conversion, as God tells the reluctant evangelist, Ananias, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” Not a great sales pitch! 


Another is the culture of "strength" fostered among the clergy. It's not done to admit weakness, either mistakes or mental fragility. I was very fortunate when I was an apprentice pastor to have an understanding boss - as within my first year I was plagued by panic attacks. Early intervention and counselling restored my equilibrium. Later on, I actually believe that my MND, which is such an obvious weakness, helped some in our church to feel free to admit to their vulnerabilities. It made us all more real with each other and with God. 


Depression is of course not at all obvious. It may creep up insidiously as MND does, but it's easier to conceal and has a public stigma which encourages concealment. However, to my mind, it's worse than any physical ailment, as is true for all mental unwellness. The truth is that people of faith have never been insulated from mental struggles. Look through the Old Testament and try to find heroes of faith who sailed untroubled through life.... Of course the example who is most often cited is Elijah, whose treatment begins with food and rest, but you can uncover questionings, doubts and tears all over the place. The psalms contain their fair share of complaints and honest misery. If you've suffered depression, you'll recognise the feeling of Psalm 55: 

“Oh, that I had wings like a dove!
    I would fly away and be at rest;
⁷ yes, I would wander far away;
    I would lodge in the wilderness;
⁸ I would hurry to find a shelter
    from the raging wind and tempest."

Jesus himself was not immune from doubts (in the temptations) or from the sense of God having abandoned him. When he said, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" I can't believe he was pretending, or merely reciting poetry. I believe he was using the closest words he could find to describe his experience. "This is what I'm going through - and it hurts even more than the nails." The sheer cliffs of the mind are dreadful places to hang.

My article was inspired, oddly enough, by the transparent honesty of four MPs in a recent debate. When, I wondered, did I last hear a prominent church leader talking about his struggle with mental health? Would someone who admitted the vulnerability even be considered for ministry in the church? And if not, what sort of message does that send to other Christians? The wrong sort. The Church is not the domain of the strong and satisfied; it's the haven for the hurting and the hungry. It's not the resort of the successful, but of the lost and limping. It has good news not for the righteous, but for washed-up sinners. It's meant to be a ragbag of mixed-up, messed-up men and women, not there in the first place because they need mending, but there because they need loving - and they are loved. And because Christ loves every member of his motley Church and gave himself for them, so they in turn are meant to accept and love each other in the same way, without conditions and without reservations.

Blessings

I owe a lot to my friends Miles and Sarah, who now live in posh London. They used to live in Stanford in the Vale where I was vicar. Sarah has a lovely voice and used to lead worship for us. Every now and then she makes a comment on Facebook about a singer whom she's discovered. When I've found them on YouTube, she invariably proves a great talent spotter. One was Alison Krauss. Yesterday she posted, "Just discovered the amazingly beautiful voice and lyrics of Laura Story - loving Blessings." So I followed it up, and of course she's right! Blessings on YouTube

On her website, I found this account by Laura Story, which I reckoned was very helpful and rather good theology.

"The album that I did three to four years ago happened right after my husband went through surgery for a brain tumor. So a lot of the ideas that I was writing about then were just very fresh, about how do we worship in the midst of trials. So fast forwarding a few years later, a lot of things have changed. A lot of things have gotten better with his health, and a lot of things have not. We pray for God to bless us, but what does it look like when I spend four or so years praying for healing for my husband that never comes? I feel like we’ve kind of gotten to a place of having to make a choice. Are we going to judge God based on our circumstances that we don’t understand, or are we going to choose to judge our circumstances based on what we know to be true about God? Not that I choose the right thing every day, but I’m learning that every morning when I wake up to choose to trust God.

"And that’s what 'Blessings' is about. It’s just considering that maybe the blessing is actually found in the absence of the thing that I’m praying for. No one wants a brain tumor, and no one wants a severed marriage and these things that we pray that God will reconcile. But even though this situation is definitely nothing that we ever would have asked for or prayed for, there has been a depth of intimacy with the Lord that I’m not sure I would have known apart from such a hard road that we’ve walked. And in the end, if I’ve learned to cling to that old rugged cross all the more, I truly can say that I’m a blessed person."

http://laurastorymusic.com/2011/09/story-behind-the-song-“blessings”/

Isn't that a paradoxical insight: "maybe the blessing is actually found in the absence of the thing that I’m praying for"? I wonder what Laura means by learning "to cling to that old rugged cross". (It was a favourite funeral hymn among Stanford villagers, which always fascinated me...!) I suspect it's to do with learning to trust the love of the crucified God in the teeth of everything. 

Don't miss out

I enjoyed Saturday. It was dry, which helped. We'd arranged to meet my college pal, let's call him Murgatroyd, and his partner, I'll call her Annie, in Oxford. It's a long time since I've spent time with him and we'd never met her. We arranged to meet at the Ashmolean Museum. They're architects and he had not seen it since its £ multi-million rebuild. It is a most impressive, if confusing, building. They spotted, before following us to Brown's for a meal, the Vermeer painting on loan there.

Jane and I went to see it after lunch. It's the only painting by the Dutch master in private ownership, Young Woman seated at a virginal, and it's quite small (10 x 8 inches); but it stands out from all the others on the wall. It's very simple, but beautiful. It's in Oxford only until September, when it returns presumably to the wall of a very wealthy and lucky person in New York. You might easily miss it.

Opportunities to renew old friendships and make new ones are precious, and it's easy to miss them. That meal in Brown's was a quite simple sharing of good food and talk. Which is what "companionship" meant originally. But it was more. It was the seizing of a moment. It's all too easy to dwell in the past and so to miss what God may have in store. We've all made mistakes we regret, leaving behind hurts. And yet, it seems to me, that Jesus didn't hold such things against people. He invited himself to their homes for a meal. We've all had experiences which have scarred us. And yet he didn't allow such things to keep a stranglehold on people. He restored them to live life again in the future.

I'm sad to see yet another programme is scheduled on Channel 4 about Tony Nicklinson, trapped by a stroke in an unresponding body. Its title tells us that it will be an emotional tract advocating euthanasia: "Let our dad die". I'm sad because I believe he is actually missing out on what fellow-sufferer, Bram Harrison, said, "I enjoy my rather limited life"- see Bram Harrison's locked-in life. I quote Bram because his life is more like Tony's than mine is, for the moment. However I agree with Bram. It's surprising how much can be made of how little, given the opportunity and a positive attitude.

Times and seasons

I see it's a very long time since I last posted here. Business isn't the reason. I suppose it's because I've not had much to say. However I was struck in the interim by what Jesus said before ascending: "It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed...".


At the end of May, Jane had to make the difficult decision to uproot our wallflowers and pansies which were still in full bloom. The result was that the flower bed and the pots were left bare and brown. Of course that wasn't the end. The next stage was putting in the young plants we bought from the local garden centre. Even so the view from my seat is a tad dull and not a patch on what it was before.  

Why did she grub up flowers in their prime? Vandalism? Perversity? Of course not. We know the reason. The season is the reason. In order for new flowers to blossom in the summer, the winter/spring flowers need to be grubbed up. As I look at the incomplete garden, it occurs to me that it might be how God works with us. Why does he take away? Why does he cut us down in our prime? Why does life hurt so often? Maybe it's a matter of times and seasons. Maybe it's because, as St Paul says, we are his workmanship. Maybe he has something good in mind.