Creation, stillborn

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Broken waters heave;
Spirit gasps, shrinks, shocked breathless,
breeching the shore, still.

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Out of control

Posted on September 1, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

The calendar says that there are three weeks left of summer, up here in the northern hemisphere; but today was full of autumn leaves, red and gold and fallen. Clearly, my calendar is not fully in control of the seasons.

leaf

Like most people, I have experienced many times and seasons feeling out of control. Parents learn the feeling quickly. Or maybe we just remember; children get it, too.

When smallest child was very small, she very suddenly and dramatically developed asthma. This diagnosis hit me in the pit of my stomach. Since childhood I have been haunted by my brother’s asthmatic attacks, and one particular night when all was dark and I was pretending sleep while he resisted any attempts by our mother to soothe his raw attempts at breath. “Can you die of asthma?” he asked her. I never heard a reply. That silence haunted me until that lunchtime in the doctor’s office in Singapore, with my own rasping, gasping child.

When she was still very small, I would sneak into her room at night and count her breathing.

leaf

As out of whack as it sounds, I was thinking about those days of worrisome watching when eldest cat was diagnosed with diabetes last week. The first day of injecting him with insulin, I was worried about hypoglycaemia, which, in cats, can be as strikingly obvious as a seizure, or as frustratingly vague as “acting differently.” Given that I spent much of the day tracking him down and asking him if he was feeling ok, and given what we know about the act of observation inherently changing the thing observed, especially cats …

Teaching them to drive, too. Children, not cats. All of the responsibility sitting in the passenger seat while all of the control is one seat and a million miles away.

Sometimes, it is possible to reduce the responsibility (pay someone else to teach them), or to increase control (install dual controls in the family car). Most of the time, we’re left fretting about the cat in the box.

So where does that leave summer, and my autumn leaf?

leaf

Today has been designated as a World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. One might feel a certain degree of responsibility to do one’s part for the sustainability of the planet and its seasons, without owning as an individual a great deal of control. The options to palm off our responsibility are few: cats are notoriously indifferent to reducing any kind of warming. The only way to increase our control over climate change, clean water, a cared-for creation is to own it.

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15)

Lord God, forgive us our failings. Teach us humility, our place in creation less one of control than one of service, and of love. Teach us beauty, to see and to sustain and to preserve what you have made out of wonderment. Teach us gratitude, for the food of the earth, the fruit of creation, the labour of love that is life. Help us to till and to keep your garden, to restore its glory, to return all glory to you. Amen.

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Fragility

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

part of the beauty with which we were crafted,

the genius; fragility invites gentleness.

our hairline fractures allow luminescence

to dance with infinite grace against 

the canvas of creation.

betrayed, it is our curse.

a blessing, it reveals

the resilience of love,

the heft of forbearance,

the endurance of mercy.

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Year B Proper 17: commandments vs amendments

Posted on August 30, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

It all starts out so well: “This will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!’” pronounces Moses, so full of pride and hope, who has led his people, God’s own people, to the brink of the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 4:6).

And yet, centuries later, in that very land, Jesus throws back the words of another prophet: “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Isaiah 29:13).

Their hearts, says Jesus, are full instead with the rank growth of wickedness: avarice, adultery, deceit and envy, murder, theft; all folly. They abandon the commandment of God to hold to human tradition: and look where that leads: to sordidness, slander, pride, licentiousness; evil intentions (Mark 7:21-22).

The Ashley Madison data dump has held up a mirror to our own inclinations to put human folly before the faithfulness of God. The website, if you haven’t yet caught on or caught up, provided dating services to married people seeking actively to have an extramarital affair: paying an online company to arrange adultery, to be delivered at the convenience of their computer screen. I read one report that said that only three zip codes in the United States did not show up on the data hacked and released about the site’s customers: two in remote Alaska, and one in the New Mexico desert. Much has been made of the celebrity info and the gotcha grabs of profiles of supposed Christian crusaders like Josh Duggar and Sam Rader; but the real indictment is of a culture where a company can thrive on the tagline: “Life is short. Have an affair,” making out of infidelity a bucket-list item; making out of deceit and betrayal a game; making the kiss of Judas a thrill worth seeking.

For those whose lives have been affected by infidelity, I am sorry that this is painful. I am sorry that it is hard to wrestle with our own sin, and I am sorry that it is hard to forgive those who sin against us, and I am sorry that our hearts are breakable. Of course, I pray for the healing of those hurt by these affairs and by these games; and still I question a marketplace that thrives on such “sordidness and rank growth of wickedness” (James 1:21).

“Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!” said Moses. “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me,” replied Jesus (Mark 7:8). If he had gone on just one verse further, we would have heard him say, “The wisdom of the wise shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden” (Isaiah 29:14)

Our public foolishness is not limited to adultery. This week, we watched in horror as a journalist and her cameraman were murdered on live television, one day after a fourteen-year-old took his class and teacher hostage with a gun one state over. There may be no way for us completely to eliminate the “rank growth of wickedness” within the human heart that may lead to murder; but neither is there any wisdom in giving up all discernment, and doing nothing to change a status quo in which 88 people per day are killed by guns in America. Eighty-eight people every day.

And it is simply not true to think that there is nothing we can do, that whether or not the guns kill people, the people will kill anyway. The numbers beg to differ. Women in abusive relationships are five times more likely to die at the hands of an intimate partner if that partner holds a gun, and domestic violence that involves a gun is twelve times more likely to result in death than assaults carried out with another weapon or with bodily force alone.

No, we can’t solve all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness that soils the human heart, but we can use our discernment to look for ways to reduce the risk to widows and orphans, the vulnerable, the innocent, the at risk, choosing God’s law over human traditions.

“You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition,” Jesus accuses (Mark 7:8). What would he say about our relationship to the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”; and to the second amendment?

Jesus sounds pretty cynical about the state of the nation, the state of his religion, the state of the human heart in this story. He is angry with those who would let their own pride, avarice, envy, their own folly blind them to the goodness that is in God, that God wills for us. He is angry, and he is frustrated, and he keeps on trying all the same, to open the eyes of the blind, the ears turned deaf, because he loves them.

He loves them. With all of their “sordidness and rank growth of wickedness” and hypocrisy and foolishness and willful denial of wisdom; he still loves us. He still tries to teach us right from wrong, love from hate, life from death.

Our Collect for today asks God to “Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works” (Book of Common Prayer, 233).  The letter of James exhorts us to “welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save [our] souls” (James 1:21).

Grafted, implanted, growing, the love of God, the love of Jesus Christ has the power to drive out the “rank growth of wickedness” that restricts our hearts and constricts our lives. It has the power to nourish something better, something cleaner and greener, livelier, lovelier than that list that Jesus enumerated to the Pharisees.

You’ve heard the old story that an old Cherokee man told his grandson, about the battle within the human heart between two wolves.

He said “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all.

One is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?…”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one that you feed”

May this wise and discerning people choose to feed, to water, to nurture the implanted word which has the power to save our souls, rather than the rank growth of wickedness.

May we remember God’s commandments before our own choice traditions.

May the good Lord Jesus continue to teach us patiently, and as often as we need reminding, the difference between right and wrong, love and hate, life and death.

In the name of Christ. Amen.

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A vain and foolish thing

Posted on August 26, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Vain and foolish,

one would not think that with
no animal spirit, nor soul,
no mind of its own,
but an idle thing
could inspire such passion,
such pain, such tearing,
such rending of hearts,
of lives apart;

only with our consent, assent
to live under its power:

we have absolved ourselves
of discernment, of wisdom,
choosing instead the cradle of
a vain and foolish thing.

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Solid ground

Posted on August 20, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Constant God,

You are the one fixed point in a universe that never stops moving;

expanding, exploding, orbiting, spinning on its axis;

the very earth beneath our feet shifts and shrugs,

magma boils beneath the surface, fluid.

No wonder we find it difficult to keep our balance.

When we learned to dance, the teacher said

to pick a spot on which to fix our eyes,

and let our body spin around it,

our focus constant,

to guard against motion sickness, dizziness, the fall.

Constant God,

fix us on you so that in the rise and fall of

breath and death,

in the steady erosion of glacial grooves

and the rush of the flood, we are not overwhelmed,

nor frightened to fall against you.

Amen.

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Heart healthy

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

If I am working into the evening, I try to get out around four or five o’clock for a walk. It’s cheaper than caffeine, and it doesn’t keep me up all night.

So I found myself contemplating our contemplative prayer session to come tonight while walking an unfamiliar path. That was something of a miracle in itself: lately, I’ve been hard pressed to take a new breath, let alone a new path. When I was working the hospital chaplaincy, and I’d come home sad, my spouse would ask if it was the death that did it. No, I told him, death was one thing; life, in its infinite variety, that’s what would do you in.

Anyway so, on a new path, wondering if it would take me under the road with the water, into pastures new. Instead, at the break, it made a sharp turn to the vertical. Lacking the initiative to do otherwise, I followed it.

As I wandered along the top, I contemplated the fact that I had not seen any other trails up from the bottom, which meant none down. The head of the valley was far too far to reach in time for contemplative prayer, and for some reason, going back the way I had come was unthinkable, fearful.

As the road in the valley below kept pace, I meandered past spent fireworks and beer cans, plastic chairs cascading down the cliffside. I reviewed the fact that I was wearing a skirt and proper sandals for a light afternoon stroll, and that the proximity of the parish precluded hitching everything up over my shoulders and sliding down the hill.

I found an opening, and began gingerly, sideways, to inch my way from tree to tree – I think this is how we became tree-huggers – down the hill. I contemplated my imminent embarrassment. After about two-thirds of the descent, I took off my shoes, despite the earlier broken glass and large red spiders, feeling the need to grip the dirt with my toes.

As I reached the last line of trees, I saw across the divide another woman of a certain age, wearing a pretty blue dress and proper shoes, walking on the all-purpose tarmac trail, and I felt such kinship that I wanted to hug her and douse her with my elation, but it seemed unfair to frighten the poor thing.

Smiling foolishly, I made my way across the valley floor towards my little red car and reality. Little had changed. Except that as I left the path for the sunlight, my eye fell upon a little heart of stone. A little dirty, and not quite as perfectly shaped as it first appeared, it was, I thought, a start.

heart of stone

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Year B Proper 15: the bread of life

Posted on August 16, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

SO for the past several weeks, we have been reading from the Gospel of John all about Jesus as the bread of life, the bread that comes down from heaven, the bread that will never leave us hungry, the bread of eternal life. Funnily enough, in the Gospel according to John, at the Last Supper, there is no institution of the Eucharist as there is in the other gospels. Instead, there is a foot washing, a betrayal, and a long, long set of speeches and prayers. The Eucharist, the Communion bread, in the Gospel of John, is truly embodied by Jesus in the heart of his ministry, in the middle of the people, in the offering of himself, his flesh and blood, his living presence among them.

The gathered people, not unreasonably, disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

Have you ever watched those cooking competitions on television where the celebrity chefs exhort and appeal to the everyday, ordinary home cooks, “I want to see ‘you’ on a plate! I want to eat your story, I want to taste your passion!” I want you to put your heart and soul into your food. I want to you to put yourself on the plate; that, and passion. If I had a nickel for every time the word “passion” is played out on one of those shows!

And we understand what they’re getting at, even if the words are overused and overplayed; we understand that they are looking for authenticity, engagement, risk, vulnerability, that they are being asked to sacrifice something of themselves in what they offer for the judges to eat.

“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

This passage, these passages appeal to me on the level of my bone-writing, those words that were engraved on me as I grew and have become indelible. Many of you, I know from when we use it in Lent, grew up as I did saying the Prayer of Humble Access at each Communion:

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen. (Book of Common Prayer, 337)

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them;” and yet, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

I read an article a year or so ago on Tumblr by Lillian Keil. She wrote, in part,

I always thought communion was a little weird.
I became a Christian when I was 20. Though my love for Jesus came easily, my acceptance of church traditions did not. Communion struck me as a pointless relic of orthodoxy. The vague cannibalism implied by “this-is-my-body” and “this-is-my-blood” made me wonder if the whole thing wasn’t just a misquote of Jesus. …
It wasn’t until I became a nursing a mother that I began to understand the Eucharist.

She goes on to talk about the revelation that breastfeeding can be; not neglecting the pain of the broken body; but also the delight that can happen, and how all-encompassing that nursing relationship can be, providing not only food, but closeness, comfort, the soothing of tears, love.

Perhaps this is what Jesus had in mind for the Eucharist. Through the breaking of the bread, God invites us into the nursing relationship: the meeting of all our needs.

“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” they are still asking in the background there, grumbling on, some of them by now slightly scandalized.

Did you know that the very moon has been blessed by the celebration of the Eucharist? Buzz Aldrin wrote in his book, Magnificent Desolation,

during those first hours on the moon, before the planned eating and rest periods, I reached into my personal preference kit and pulled out the communion elements along with a three-by-five card on which I had written the words of Jesus: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me.” I poured a thimbleful of wine from a sealed plastic container into a small chalice, and waited for the wine to settle down as it swirled in the one-sixth Earth gravity of the moon. My comments to the world were inclusive: “I would like to request a few moments of silence … and to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.” I silently read the Bible passage as I partook of the wafer and the wine, and offered a private prayer for the task at hand and the opportunity I had been given.

He reflected later that maybe given his time over, he wouldn’t have chosen such an explicitly Christian symbol to use, to commemorate the whole of humanity’s first moments on the moon, but it made perfect sense to him at that time, and it makes sense to me. His pastor, speaking to the earthbound press, showed them the bread from which Aldrin’s piece of the Body of Christ had been broken; the rest would be shared among his fellow-parishioners, in the assurance that even beyond the boundaries of space, he was still in communion with them, as well as with God;* because Communion only happens in community.

“Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” And we who are many are one body, because we all eat of the one bread.

“How can this man give us his flesh to eat on the moon?” they demanded to know, adding, “This is getting a little ridiculous.”

So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

I’ve been telling you, says Jesus, that I have come to bring you to life. I have come to share your flesh and blood, to be a part of you, bone from your bone, swapping DNA, shedding dust from my feet that matches your skin, living your life, so that you might live my life, so that you might know heaven on earth, and beyond the earth, and beyond the moon and the stars.

I am the bread of life, says Jesus.

I remember the first time I took Communion at my seminary, before I had begun my studies there; I was on a visit. It was the end of a long day – Communion was in the evening – and I sat quietly with my best visitor face and my visitor hands tucked neatly in my visitor lap, on my best visitor behavior, and I stood and joined the line to the altar with my visitor eyes cast humbly to the floor, and I took the bread in my hand and it burst on my tongue, and I was broken open; and the wine was like salting a wound and seasoning the deal and soothing all at once, and I thought, My God! Jesus knew what he was doing when he instituted this stuff. This tastes like life!

Jesus said, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. And the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

Amen.

________

http://lilliankeil.tumblr.com/post/99411163279/breastfeeding-and-the-eucharist
Buzz Aldrin with Ken Abraham, Magnificent Desolation: the long journey home from the moon (New York, 2009), 26-7
*As reported by http://www.snopes.com/glurge/communion.asp

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The strange story of Barry Baker

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

There are occasional joys in being a borderline hoarder. This week at Bible Study, we were looking at the Gospel for the coming Sunday, and feeling as bewildered as the poor people in the passage wondering what the devil Jesus could mean by offering them his right arm for bread – too hairy, surely! – and his blood for wine.
I half recalled writing a story on the side, more than twelve years ago, when I was meant to be writing for a publication offering resources for church with children. The story was never published, but it did, apparently, travel the ocean from England to Ohio, and move from one basement to the next, until it surfaced this afternoon, to make its inglorious debut on the pages of the internet.

Once upon a time, many, many years ago, a little boy was found next to Barry Island beach in South Wales. The child, not more than one year old, was wrapped in a blanket and laid in a basket to shield him from the stiff sea breeze, and was sleeping peacefully when he was stumbled across – almost literally, by the village baker. Where he had come from was a complete mystery, and the people decided that they must keep him and raise him as their own. Because the baker had found him, he went to live at the bakery with the Master Baker and his wife, and the villagers named him Barry, for the beach where he had been washed up.

Barry Baker grew like any other child, although the villagers sometimes observed that his dark eyes seemed to hold secrets, perhaps of faraway places that they themselves had never seen. Others dismissed this as romantic nonsense. He was liked well enough, though, and was a great help to the baker and his wife in their bakery, as they had no other child.

When Barry was nearly a man, a terrible drought fell across the land of Wales. The rivers stopped running, the crops failed, and there was terrible hunger throughout the Vale in which the baker and his family lived. One day, there was no more flour at all with which to bake bread. The people dragged themselves through the days, waiting to die of thirst or salvation, with barely the bile left to be angry at God, or to plead.

At last, it seemed as though their time had come. The baker and his wife kissed Barry good night at the end of another dark day, and said goodbye, for there did not expect to wake in the morning. Barry held them close, and told them not to worry. They shook their heads and smiled at him – there was still love left to spare, after all – and went off to bed.

But Barry did not go to bed. He went over to the baking counter, and drew together a large clump of thin air. Like a little boy playing at baking, he poured together invisible water and lively yeast, sifted ethereal flour and salt, and brought them together like a conductor directing music, conjuring the very vibrations of the air into something beautiful.

Barry began to knead the nothing that he had brought together. He kneaded away so hard and so long that droplets of sweat ran down his hair and fell into a puddle on the counter. He kneaded the nothingness so long and so hard that it seemed to turn into somethingness beneath and between his very fingers.

If anyone had been there to see, they might have noticed that as the somethingness became more solid, Barry became less so, until a watcher could not only have seen through him, but passed a hand right through his body to touch the bread on the counter. But there was no one to see, and Barry worked on, through the night, the sweat of his brow pooling and cooling beside the new bread.

To their surprise, the baker and his wife did awaken the next morning, and when they did, they smelt the most delicious aroma of fresh bread coming from the bakery kitchen. They thought that they must have gone made with hunger: “Is there such a thing as a smell mirage?” asked the wife; but they crawled down the stairs to look all the same.

They were astonished to see the fire ablaze, and a perfectly baked loaf of bread browning beautifully in the oven. It was large enough to feed the whole village, and the baker’s wife lost no time calling all her neighbours in as her husband broke it into pieces.

Moreover, they discovered a deep pool of water, fresh and clear, on the bakery counter. A dip had appeared, a built-in bowl worn away as though by centuries of erosion, the slow drip of time, and there was enough to wet everyone’s lips so that they could chew and enjoy the bread. The people were overjoyed to find themselves saved from the famine.

Only one person was missing from this great and happy occasion, and that was Barry. As time went on, and whenever they came together to eat of the bread and drink of the sweet, cool water, as they did daily until the drought was done, the baker and his wife and their neighbours would wonder aloud where Barry had gone, and why he had left just as salvation was within their grasp.

But somewhere in their hearts, they knew. And when the drought was over, and the times of plenty returned, and there was meat and fruit and bread to eat in abundance, and wine to drink; still the villagers would find themselves drawn together at the baker’s counter, to break bread and drink from the little pool of water that had given them life when they were sure that death was upon them. And they would thank God for sending them young Barry Baker.

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Suspended animation

Posted on August 11, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Oh honey, it’s not the suspense that’s killing you.
In that moment when the knife slices open the rope,
fingertip fibres flicking away one by one, unravelling,
their grip slipping; when the last straw breaks,
in that one perfect moment of
freefall,
you will know what life was all along.

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