On my lunch break

That can be read on so many levels.

So, today I am trying to write about the Enlightenment, but... while I take a break from the rationalists of the world, I thought I would post another photo. This one evoked emotion, seemed so sad, and so very much where I live. It is on an allotment door, a stone's throw away from our green and holy space. [It seems to juxtapose itself with part of my sermon from yesterday, where I tried to read a passage in reverse (an idea from another website from Australia, but I can't rememberr which one, it just sank into my spirit), in the hope that I would think about the 'forward' version differently]:

I am without a leader, my need is endless. I never have enough.
My want is endless.
Concrete surrounds me, and I get no rest;
I am aimless as I wander,
and the torrents surround and overwhelm me.
My soul is restless, empty, needy.
I take myself frantically in multiple directions,
trying to find a good way… my own reputation I make.
When I go through bad places, I jump at shadows, I am alone. So alone.
My enemies mock and laugh, and scorn me.
I am hungry, and thirsty, and untouched and alone.
Nothingness, No mercy, Un mercy surrounds me, I am alone… forever

I am really thankful for the mercy of The Forward version:

The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths for his name's sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the Shadow of Death, I fear no evil;
for you are with me; your rod and your staff-- they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD my whole life long

On barefeet (and finally being able to post photos~thanks Lou)

I love bare feet. Not necessarily to look at, but the feel, the shape of the earth under them. And, then I came across this poem by Alastair McIntosh, called transfiguration from Love and Revolution.

barefoot, you know the touch of flesh on earth
some rivulets are warming to the step
they've long flowed over sunny slopes
and others keekit coyly from the spring
...they're the icy-feeling ones
to cup the hands and drink

and you tread the ground more gently
when out walking in this way
you don't cut in with hard-heeled boots
but softly contour toes
to grip the land on equal footing
leaning forwards better seeing what is waiting on to be found there
on passing by unharming over emerald sod set in
with mandalas of tormentil that salve the heart pursed open now
a golden blossomed harmony, a sermon of small things

a view of my mind

I have the mind of a flea. or a fruit fly. Something that leaps around a lot, goes no where very deep, and manages to create a lot of scratching.

Anyway, I have about five minutes before I head out to a Crosseyed Meeting - oh, I mean crossroads. I am knackered, having spent most of the day thinking about the Enlightenment. And no, I'm not. Enlightened, I mean.

Umm. Not much else to say. I've planted tomatoes, peas, and another rhubarb crown in the allotment, as well as a gooseberry bush called 'careless' (that's its real name, not one we've given it!) and we've cleared a heap of the rubbish (the usual: car doors, petrol cans, broken glass, asbestos sheets... you know, the tame stuff). I often feel a little sympathy for Spinoza and Baron D'Holbach, for the only way I can describe it is to say that for me nature gives me a real sense of the sacred. (I don't mean I completely agree with them, you understand).

Finished reading Jayber Crow. Wonderful, powerful, beautiful, faithful book.

Found this about the leading intellectuals of the eighteenth century in the press: they were “…habitually satirizing priests as perverts, friars as gluttons, monks and nuns as lechers, theologians as hair-splitters, inquisitors as sadistic torturers, and Popes as megalomaniacs.” I thought that it didn't sound all that different. Perhaps inquisitors would be called 'soldiers' and Popes, 'Prime ministers / Presidents' but apart from that.... (It's in Porter's The Enlightenment, p. 34)

Am thinking allot about weed again - just watching it swathe through lives and tear them apart. I think I can safely say I hate it.

(Wow, this post is really demonstrating my flea-like tendencies!).

Quote of my week:

Deirdre to Artum aged 8 in the church service: "What is your favourite thing?" Pause. Artum "God"... (Congregation: "ahhh")
Deirdre to Masha aged 4 in the church service: "What is your favourite thing?"
Pause. "Playing with Barbies...."
I love kids.

redemptive moments

Some of you will not know tommy, and I will find it hard to describe him. he is always the same age to me. a slightly awkward, but astute, loving, but difficult character. he is one of the most faithful members of our community, and often has depths of insight, challenges, that otherwise may remain unspoken. he is greatly loved. Last night his house burned down, and his dog died, and he is grieving. The fire officers that came out were wonderful to him - and provided such an act of grace. the police had given him a contact person to come and remove his dog, for a fee - £60. no one I know has that kind of money readily available, and tommy less so. but, a while later, the fire officer phoned and said that he and his crew had had a 'conflab' and 'if tommy signed off on it', they'd bury the dog, 'and give him a marker.' It was such a redemptive moment in an otherwise terrible night. And tommy was so pleased. He said 'ta, very much.' But I think he meant more than that.


A post-script to the 'fear of death as the thing'

Mark commented that people he is with don't think about death [or something to that effect]. I think that makes death exactly the thing. But more, I think that 'fear of death' does not just mean physically expiring, but touches our lives - from politicians to office workers, from allotment gardeners to us all. Maybe the concept of death is much more broad than we realise - so there is death of emotion, meaning, purpose, youth, friendship, hope, love, expectation. There is fear of death that touches our relationships to aging, our families, our jobs... I think that is how I understood Sam. And, for example, in the church - this fear permeates and touches upon change, and recognition, speaking out, and reconciliation...

Anyway. I need to keep working.

The great, unearned beauty...

Here's something I read that I resonated with...

I said what about my eyes?
“Keep them on the road.”
I said what about my passion?
“Keep it burning.”
I said what about my heart?
“Tell me what you hold inside it?”
I said pain and sorrow.
He said:
“stay with it.” ~Rumi

from a thought provoking site in Oz.

And this: ‘Believers in Christianity are called in this age to become once again wanderers’

I've been thinking a lot about exile, and return. About longing for change, and being lost in the wilderness. About grace and suffering all in the one.

I am still gurgitating the conference in Amsterdam, but some of the hope-for-change seemed to me to lie in the older, white, male, north-american leadership both BEING THERE and GETTING IT. That is a funny thing for me to write, but I have experienced it over, and again, that for instance, as a female in ministry, for me to 'fight that corner' always appears to be agenda laden, whereas for some of my dogged, male friends to do the same... or to call me 'pastor' seems to provoke thought. There are such issues of POWER at work in that though.

[That is not to say, incidentally, that I don't defend, or believe in the need to defend women in ministry, or that I leave it to the boys, just that it is so difficult at points to believe that people take seriously the person 'from below.' Vive liberation. This is a huge question, but it is almost impossible for me to explain fully how it feels, subjectively, to have the heart-of-yourself called into question so casually... 'Women shouldn't be in the pulpit', or 'I'd have you as a server' or ... you get the picture.] The grace in suffering theme is one that keeps echoing you see.

Here are other things I've thought in no apparent order - all related to Amsterdam [or GTII as it was affectionately dubbed]:

*That giving away power is liberating. But hard to do.
*That my generation still wants permission to ask questions, but will ask them regardless. That we care about Authentic answers, not just answers. [I'd rather be told an unpalatable truth, than be lied to, or hear duplicitous responses]
*That restructuring any church is an enormous task, but that a holy subversion of any wedded-to-the-wrong-powers structure that exists is part of the calling of people in covenant with Christ
*That the issue of diversity seems to me to be often associated with control and fear of compromise...
*That being proactive in 'bringing people to the table' has to be balanced with genuinely giving people voice, not just making people 'tokens'
*That the question of magesterium is a huge one for any church [bar the ancients, I guess]... Who determines what is essential and non-essential?

I/we the conference heard [I nearly wrote herd, that was a funny slip!]- via Sam Vassel [quoting Longfellow (?) I think]: that 'fear of death' is the thing. That struck so many chords with me, I can hardly describe it.

And, I'll [nearly] leave you with Wendell Berry from Jayber Crow & the thought of our beingness:

Back there at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.
And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time. Toward the end of my life... I begin to understand that whenever death happened, it happened to me. That is knowledge that takes a long time to wear in. Finally it wears in. Finally I realised and fully accepted that one day I would belong entirely to memory, and it would then not be my memory that I belonged to, and I went ... to see if there was any room left besides my parents' graves. I learned that there was room for one more; if it belonged to anybody, it belonged to me.

We've been at the allotment a lot. It seems a prerequisite. What a joy. We have friendly birds, ladybirds galore, worms, a great spider [I like it, Andrew not] and serious planting happening... kohl rhabi, cauliflower, beans, peas, leeks, onions, carrots, herbs... rhubarb. It's great. And, although our greenhouse blew away/over, and we have almost no glass left in its sadly twisted little frame, we have high hopes that it too can be rescued. The notion of such beauty, and work, cojoined, being part of being fruitful seems wonderful to me, and grace-full...

my fish is still alive

Well

I am home. Listening to Sigur Ros/ Jose Gonzalez /Regina Spektor/ Joanna Newsom, and recuperating after trying to clean my office, my house, my mind.

Deconstructing Amsterdam

Since my last post I’ve mostly been in Amsterdam at the “Global Theology Conference.” It was an interesting experience. In order of joy-moments,

1. The people, the people [old & new friends]
1. The idea of reconciliation was brought up, developed and became a word-on-the-lips-for-this-moment.
2. The ‘up-all-night’ with Larry and Jamie, chatting and laughing
3. The ‘graduate student’ group experience
4. The Eucharist being celebrated [waitforit] not ONCE but TWICE
5. The small group idea [though somehow I missed the e-mail asking me to lead a small group, and therefore missed saying no, and therefore one of the worlds’ worst ‘small group facilitators’ ended up trying to facilitate one. Argh]

I am still ruminating on the overall experience. My perennial dilemma in being a Nazarene is the question of what that actually means. If there is a spectrum of thinking allowed, then I think I am on the Wesleyan end. What, you might ask, does that mean? It means a swimming pool not a font. The various potentials within a Wesleyan embrace allowing multi-faceted thinking and also permits a range of views to be held, and considered legitimate. The possibility of being allowed to think as a believer of the historical creeds and a postmodern questioner, the room for perspectives to be at the table, the ability to share story as something that genuinely matters… it’s all there.

Things I wasn’t comfortable with [does that matter? Comfort and theology have never been good bedfellows, I don’t think]:
I didn’t think it was a joined-up-thinking conference. The summative papers were great, but somehow I was left wanting …
The maleness of it – though it makes for wonderfully few queues at the ladies’ loo, it was still very masculine, from the first platform, right the way through to the conveners of the ‘discussions’
The lack of ability for presenters to respond to their respondents… The conversation was limited [perhaps I am just speaking for myself…]
Several people seemed to hint that this was a more gracious conference than the Guatemala experience [a lot of you will be clueless as to what I mean, but there we are] which was tense. True. One of the reasons for that was that the sharp, edgy, outsidethebox thinkers are now, well, outside the box. I found that a point of grief. AND, I guess it makes me inside the box as well, which I don’t really like.

Funny things:
A man-who-shall-remain-nameless said to me 'well done, gal.' hmmm. [was that a cross-cultural experience?!]
Another man said 'you're likeable on the platform' [code which became relatively clear in the rest of the conversation] but your paper was pretty crap...!
I accidentally [really] ordered a drink with alcohol when I was out with a group of Southern Nazbo's. I don't know if they noticed, but I did have thought bubbles going on over their heads about 'Europeans'



Longsight

Well, I’m back at the Community Church of the Nazarene Longsight. It was so lovely to see friends/family again, and people who know my name. We celebrated the Resurrection at the Ancient-Future service [with some quite comical moments thrown in, ah, to be home], and then had Church@4, which was even more, well, chaotic.

Levenshulme

My overwhelming sense of being at home was probably summarised by the litter, watching a drug deal go down with a mum using her pram [complete with baby] as the drop-point, and a 4x4 mow down a pedestrian and smash them into the door frame of TopKapi a local takeaway. So, welcome back.

Actually, I had forgotten that Levenshulme was so deprived. It is probably because I was in the gloriously litter free Lowlands, preceded by the relatively clean Kansas City, that the culture-shock of it all struck me.

Fortunately, Andrew and I have been able to go walking, and [since I gave myself Easter Week off] we’ve been at the allotment daily. Planting, thinking, talking - hoping for answers to questions we are still trying to articulate.

Anyway, a lot is happening in my head, so who knows what will happen, in the meantime…

I’ve started reading Madelaine L’Engle as a devotional writer again. Her writing moves me. And I’ve gotten Andrew totally and utterly hooked on Anne Lamott! I consider that a triumph of good taste.