Forgive and forget (1)

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

I do not think that forgetfulness is necessarily helpful to forgiveness. Of course, neither is holding a grudge; but forgiveness, as part of a loving and generous outlook on relationship, depends upon an honest assessment of where we are together; and a deliberate, willed or otherwise fake forgetfulness is not conducive to honest and difficult, real reconciliation; nor, where reconciliation is neither safe not desirable, to the harder work of forgiving a serial or abusive offender.

Indeed, the worst abuses of this phrase often come in the midst of ongoing, abusive relationships, where “one more chance” is played off against “forgive and forget” in the quest for a better future in a present spiralling out of control.

Countryman makes a useful distinction between “single incidents of wrongdoing between people who have had a strong relationship, [between whom] there can sometimes be a fairly easy reconciliation and restoration,” and “habitual patterns [which] will not normally yield to such immediate solutions… Forgiveness, here, needs to respond to the whole pattern… it will say, ‘If there’s going to be a future tethered the two of us, it has to be a nonabusive one.’ … The only forgiving and loving thing here is to demand change.”*

I think that a corollary of Countryman’s argument is that the forgiving is done only when the abusive relationship is in the rear view mirror. It is almost impossible to forgive someone while they are in the act of harming us, however quickly afterwards a saint might find the grace. It is equally hard to forgive from the middle of an abusive relationship. Clear-sightedness, the kind that aids true forgiveness, takes just a little bit of perspective.

Forgiving does not demand forgetfulness; in fact, quite the opposite. If we have forgotten the hurt, what need is there to forgive?

Through Jeremiah, and the author of the letter to the Hebrews, God speaks of forgiving sins and remembering them no more (Jeremiah 31:34; Hebrews 8:12). Does this mean that God forgives and forgets? Or does refusing to remember our sins mean that God refuses to let our future relationship be defined by them; that this will not be at the forefront of any future conversation, nor the first thing that is thought of when we come to the mind of God? That, perhaps, is a different and more positive prospect than pretending to forget, attempting to rewrite a past that is indelible, but whose colours need not bleed through, which does not have to define the future.

Refusing to remember first the worst aspects of a relationship, of a person’s behaviour, even as we struggle for an honest and true way to love and forgive them, may be something we can get behind without the need for pretence or selective memory.

Forgiveness is not a parlour trick, nor sleight of hand; it is not done with smoke and mirrors, and it is not pretending to forget. It is the hard work looking reality in the face, and forgiving it anyway; forgiving it enough, perhaps, to care enough for the future of the relationship to demand real, unflinching, change; the kind we might call repentance.

I had intended exploring this phrase in light of the difficulty of forgiving one who has forgotten hurting us; I will return to that theme, but it seemed important, first, to address to issue of recognizing, realizing, and remembering abuse. Forgiving those who have forgotten will be up next.
*L. William Countryman, Forgiven and Forgiving (Morehouse Publishing, 1998), 84

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Religious rituals and summer Sunday attendance

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Two days after my mother died, at half past five in the morning, I heard a strange noise outside my bedroom window, the window of the spare bedroom in my parent’s house. It was a rasping, grinding, rolling, grunting, sighing sound, and it kept repeating over and over. I got up and looked out. My father was in the yard, rolling paving slabs to the wheelbarrow, hefting them in, and transporting them around to the back of the house to build the patio he was in the middle of making when my mother died.

This was half past five in the morning, and I had flown in the night before; it was still midnight-thirty east coast time, but what was I to do? I got up, got dressed, and joined the crazy man with the paving slabs and the wheelbarrow while the sun slowly rose.

A week later – these things take a little longer in Wales than they often do here – a week later, I was sitting in the back yard on the bench with my cup of tea. It was eight o’clock, a real eight o’clock, because the jet lag was over, and it was the day after my mother’s funeral. My father emerged with his own cuppa, still in his pyjamas.

“I slept well last night,” he announced.

I thought about the funeral that we had prayed and cried our way through the day before, and I was profoundly grateful for the rituals that had helped us to articulate our grief, our sorrow, our hope, our anger, our dependence on the good grace and mercy of God and of our neighbours. Rituals make a difference. This one allowed a crazy man to sleep for once, which in turn let me sleep, too.

In the story of Elijah, ritual has run amok. The priests of Baal are running riot at the extremes of ritual, trying by their own actions and efforts of will to make something miraculous happen.

But that is not what religious ritual is about. It is not about saying the right incantation, or spilling the right blood, or believing the right things, having the right spirit, in order to bend God’s will to our own. Rather, it is about opening ourselves up to the power of God which is all around us, listening to God who loves us, acting on behalf of God who wills only good for us.

God was not dependent upon Elijah and his altar to do the deed of power that astonished the people; but perhaps the people were. They needed an interpreter, and they needed to understand what they saw on their own terms, so that they could own it and live it. In order to show them the one true God, the one true God met them where they could see and meet God, in their ritual lives, on a pile of sodden, soaking wood and stone.

Jesus was not dependent upon the faith of the centurion, or the ritual of the laying on of hands in order to heal his servant; but he knew what people needed, and he was prepared to come. There are other stories in which he goes even further, making mud from the dirty ground to cleanse a man’s sight, sighing up to heaven and sending his healed lepers to the priests for certification. Jesus knew that he could heal the centurion’s servant with a word, but he was surprised that the centurion knew it, too.

He was astonished at the centurion’s response: “I am not worthy to have you come into my house; I did not presume to come to you; but only say the word, and let my servant be healed.”

The centurion was used to ordering things with a word, and he figured, how much more so the living Word of God who spoke creation into being. But the centurion was the odd one out. This is not how people usually received Jesus, almost all of them needing to see, to hear, to touch, to feel in order to know the presence of God, the healing power of the Spirit upon themselves or their household; even after the Resurrection, Jesus offered Thomas his hands to touch, his side to feel, to know by his senses that he was for real.

Rituals are important. There is a reason that we come together, instead of remaining apart and simply sending word via facebook or email that we are praying, thinking of one another, thinking of God. There is a reason that we come together in material ways, sharing real bread, real wine, real matter that really matters. There is a reason why in church we sometimes weep real tears, sometimes tears of laughter if we’re lucky, why we hug each other at the Peace, why we use olive oil to anoint the sick and the heartsick, and lay our hands upon them. It is a rare centurion, a rare person who has no need of such rituals, of tangible and touchable symbols of God’s grace and presence with them.

Most of us will admit, if push comes to shove, that we need our signs, our symbols, our cultic and familiar assurances of God’s grace with and among us. And if we need them, then so do our neighbours; and it is a kindness that we do to gather with them to share God’s good gifts and graces with them.

And God has graciously agreed to meet us where we are, has given us the gifts of the church in order to help us out. God recognizes and affirms our need for contact and companionship, for food and fellowship, for care and community, for signs and symbols elevated by God into sacramental mysteries.

So I invite you this summer, in the words of the letter to the Hebrews, not to neglect to meet together, but to stand together in the presence of the living God, celebrating with joy and gratitude the gifts that we have been given, the gifts of ritual and of remembrance, of our baptism and of the Eucharist.

There will be times when you are travelling, or otherwise detained, and there will be one or two Sundays when I am, too; but when you do not see me, I will be gathered still into that great congregation, the cloud of witnesses, and at least one of those Sundays I will praying for you in that old stone church where I was married and where we lay my mother to rest, singing her to sleep with the sweet and gentle rituals that soften our own spiritual journeys, those gifts of a God who knows just what we need, and is ready always to come under our rooftops to offer it to us.

May you encounter God’s blessings in the most unexpected places, people and practices this summer, and may you come quickly home to share your good graces with us all.

Amen.

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The Plumber

Posted on June 1, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

My father decided to fix the faucet
without turning off the water at the mains.
He thought if he were quick enough,
shrewd enough; if he kept his
eye on the ball and his hand in,
he could pull it off without the need to
empty the system, waiting while the water
drained away. He was wrong.

Open a valve without due caution
and all of the pressure built up behind
seizes the chance to attack the breach,
overwhelm it in a moment.
There was a lot of swearing, and a
family bucket-line of bailers and towel-bearers
pressed into service to fight the flood,
then sop up the sorry, soggy mess.

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To understand all is to forgive all

Posted on May 27, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

I understand from various casual sources that this commonplace was most famously recorded, if not coined, by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace, which I have yet to read:
“Tous comprendre, c’est tous pardonner.”

There is a reason it has become such a commonplace. It has some of the fundamental elements of graceful relationships: that we are all basically worthy of love and capable of forgiveness; that all of our motives are mixed, and many unfathomable; that our free will (and ultimate responsibility) are tempered by the pitfalls and stumbling blocks placed before us by original sin, or by nature or nurture, psychology or society; that healing comes from recognition of the good in one another.

Theologically, one might call upon the incarnation to bolster Tolstoy’s view. “For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15)

Yet God already knew all there was to know about us; God had, after all, created our very essence and being. More telling, God had already decided to forgive us, out of God’s steadfast mercy and faithful love, testified over centuries before Jesus’ advent, before Jesus’ incarnation; why else send us this great high priest at all?

By the time anyone takes the trouble to understand the one who has hurt them, they have already opened their heart to the possibility of forgiveness. They have already chosen the road to reconciliation and healing. The understanding may be a vehicle to help the journey along, but unless forgiveness is already an option, we will not embark, and unless forgiveness is our firmly fixed destination, we will get stuck when the engine of understanding gets derailed by senseless acts of violence or betrayal, when wrong decisions were made which cannot be rationalized away, because there was a choice to do the right thing instead of the wrong.

If we make understanding a condition of forgiveness, then we are tempted to contort ourselves into unlikely shapes and positions in order to achieve it; I am reminded of Cinderella’s stepsisters forcing their feet into someone else’s shoes when they are simply not designed to fit. If an act can be understood sufficiently to be excused, then stepping into another’s shoes will help us to do that; but what about forgiving that which is inexcusable?

A friend sent me the link to a wonderful and difficult NY Times story about forgiveness, understanding and justice. It’s worth a read just for its own sake, but in this context, I am struck by the parents’ refusal to be derailed by the lack of mitigating circumstance, by the deficiencies in empathetic excuse. They do not forgive through intellectual understanding so much as through a decision to be forgiving, merciful, loving people. This is the legacy they wish to leave for their daughter. If they had relied on understanding everything in order to begin to forgive it all, this was the moment that would have ended the whole pious project:

“I thought it was going to make sense,” Andy [the father of the victim] told her. Later, Andy told me that he had fantasized or hoped that maybe it had been an accident, maybe Conor’s finger had slipped — that he would hear something unexpected to help him make sense of his daughter’s death. But Conor’s recitation didn’t bring that kind of solace.
… He didn’t try to shirk responsibility at the conference or in long conversations with me about the murder. “What I did was inexcusable,” he told me. “There is no why, there are no excuses, there is no reason.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/can-forgiveness-play-a-role-in-criminal-justice.html?pagewanted=10&_r=1&emc=eta1

The essence of classical tragedy is the unfolding of an ironic series of events which seem so nearly inevitable as to be excruciatingly sympathetic; yet which we know could have been otherwise, had just one decision been differently executed.

Seeking to understand one another, to find God’s reflected image in one another, that divine spark which holds us together in love is a powerful and profound quest. Forgiveness, the giving and receiving of it, is likewise bound up with our understanding of the great Other: to err is human, we say, but to forgive is divine.

Yet they are not, I think, so tightly bound together as to depend on one another, and set free, they may be of more help to one another than tangled. Sometimes understanding will outstrip forgiveness, and it will take a while to apply the learnt knowledge of why hurt happened. Sometimes, forgiveness will defy understanding, strike out boldly in love and hope and in the face of all that is unreasonable and senseless.

At the least, it is important to divorce the concept of understanding from those of condoning, excusing, or rationalizing in order to forgive. That which most needs forgiveness is often that which is the least rational, reasonable, excusable, comprehensible in human activity. To hold our forgiveness hostage, in such a case, to internalizing all from which our minds and imaginations recoil, may be to make victims of ourselves all over again.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in a summing up for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, spoke thus:

“We have been shocked and filled with revulsion to hear of the depths to which we are able to sink in our inhumanity to one another: …That is one side – the ghastly and somber side of the picture that is emerging thus far.
But there is another side, a more noble and inspiring one. We have been deeply touched and moved by the resilience of the human spirit… It is quite incredible the capacity people have shown to be magnanimous – refusing to be consumed by bitterness and hatred, willing to meet with those who have violated their persons and their rights, willing to meet in a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation  eager only to know the truth, to know the perpetrator so that they could forgive them.”

Desmond Mpilo Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999), pages 119-120

 

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Trinity Sunday 2013

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

(A sermon I won’t be there to preach, ironically because I am “suffering” from shingles. But my love and prayers are with the parish of Epiphany this morning, and I’m so glad to be in a relationship with them.)

I know that it’s Trinity Sunday. Maybe you are itching for a theological treatise on the traditional, reformed and emergent doctrinal debates about the nature of our Triune God. Well, to be honest, that’s not a sermon I’m dying to preach. As we discussed in a conversation earlier this week, my clergy colleagues and I, this is not the Feast Day of a doctrine of the church; it is a celebration of God, of the wonder and mystery that is the Holy Trinity; it is a day set aside among all of the days in which we praise the name of our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, the God in whom we live and move and have our being.

So that being said, what difference does it make that we have a relationship with a God that is all about relationship, that consists in relationship, that subsists in mutuality and love?

According to St Paul, it means that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It means that we are filled with peace, with grace, with love.

Lovely stuff: then he goes and spoils it by talking yet again about suffering, and about how it produces endurance and character, like a gruff school master out of a black and white movie who insists that anything you don’t like and don’t want to do is, in fact, character-building and therefore desirable.

The problem with the gruff and grumpy approach to Paul’s invitation to boast in suffering is that it becomes a badge of pride in itself, something to be sought after. We should suffer, we begin to think, so as to find opportunities to boast in it. We saw something of this in the early martyrs of the church: Ignatius of Antioch, for example, was delighted, overjoyed, ecstatic at the prospect of being eaten by lions!

He wrote to friends in Rome in the year 110, worried that they would try to save him from his martyrdom:

What a thrill I shall have from the wild beasts that are ready for me! I hope they will make short work of me. I shall coax them on to eat me up at once and not to hold off, as sometimes happens, through fear. And if they are reluctant, I shall force them to it. Forgive me – I know what is good for me. Now is the moment I am beginning to be a disciple. May nothing seen or unseen begrudge me making my way to Jesus Christ. Come fire, cross, battling with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the devil – only let me get to Jesus Christ![1]

Now, Ignatius may be a justly revered Christian saint, but honestly, this all seems a little twisted to me, and after the suffering we have seen even just this week, just this month, just this year, in Oklahoma, in Boston, in Newtown, on Seymour Avenue in Cleveland, the idea that we are supposed to celebrate suffering is quite obscene.

And I think that when we do that, we are in fact pushing Paul’s words further than they can really go on their own. What Paul writes, if we read it faithfully, is not, “Boast about your suffering,” nor even “Boast of your suffering,” but “We boast even in our suffering.”

The people whom we memorialize this weekend did not go out in order to suffer, but to overcome. Theirs was a courage born of necessity, not the excess of all kinds of extremists.

It’s a very different message.

Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:24-25)

Jesus used the same word – take up – to the man lowered through the roof by his friends in order to be healed: “Take up your bed and walk.” Take up your cross; take up your bed. It is the same action, one not of hardship only but of healing, one which finds its way through suffering to the reward to come, one which bears as its fruit not despair, but hope.

Jesus did not tell any of them to seek out suffering, although he warned them that it would find them. He did not seek himself to suffer, but he did not turn aside when the true course, the path to freedom led him through those dark valleys. His instruction was not one of cruelty but of mercy, of healing. He told his disciples, he told us that when we stub our toes on the hard wood of the cross, when we stumble, even when it feels as though we have fallen through the floor, we are to pick up and carry on, and Jesus will be right there beside us.

To be human is to be vulnerable to suffering; to be in relationship, to feel love for another, for God and the children of God, for special relationships, partners, children, friends, is to open ourselves up not to the possibility but to the inevitability of suffering.

To be human is also to be vulnerable to the most profound joy, and love, and hope; only in relationship can we be open not only to the possibility but the inevitability of reciprocal love and mutual enjoyment.

To be made in the image of a God whose essence is love, who exists eternally in relationship, who cannot be confined but must always be sharing, intimate and discrete, three in one, one in three – to be made in this image is to be made for relationship, for love and mercy, for hope and kindness.

So Paul can say, even out of the suffering of his own life, that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. Thus we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God; not by an effort of our own will but by the grace and gift of God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, one God, love shared but undivided, bound together in relationship and reaching out in love to us; and we need not be afraid that any kind of suffering, or shame, or doubt can come between us and the love of God poured out in the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

[1] “From Early Christian Fathers, edited and translated by Cyril C. Richardson (Volume I: The Library of Christian Classics), pages 104-105. First published in MCMLIII vy the SCM Press Ltd., London, and The Westminster Press, Philadelphia. Used by permission of the publishers.” William C. Placher, Readings in the History of Christian Theology, Volume 1: From its Beginnings to the Eve of the Reformation (Westminster Press, 1988), pages 17-18

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Trinity

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Trinity (in preparation for Sunday)

When the children were little,
and they wouldn’t listen,
they wouldn’t play nicely,
or tidy their toys, or eat their greens,
or let go of the poor cat’s tender tail,
I would say, “I’ll count to three,”

And every time it did the trick:
the cat was saved,
the sprouts were ingested,
the sprawling teddy bears laid to rest,
friendships mended and mothers mollified,
and all I had to say was “One …”

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To forgive is divine

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

the first in a short series on forgiveness. I’m really interested to hear your own stories, insights and opinions

“To forgive is divine,” so they say.

In some ways, it’s simple. Why forgive? we might ask, and we can enumerate the spiritual and psychological benefits, but if we are Christians it usually, eventually comes down to, because we are forgiven, and anyway Jesus said so.

To forgive is divine, and we strive to follow in the footsteps of the revealed incarnate God.

But happens when it is God that you need to forgive?

After my grandmother died, my mother was very angry at God, not for her death so much as for the suffering that preceded it. Why, she demanded, did your god put my mother through all that, if she was only going to die of it anyway? I was fourteen, and I hardly knew what to say; truth be told, more than thirty years later it’s still a struggle.

My mother eventually forgave God. I don’t know how she got there.

I have had my own moments of shouting at God, particularly over parenting issues: “They’re your children, too, you know!”

But like any other relationship, if it’s going to carry on, if it’s going to bear fruit, the grudges have to be given up. Whether or not we understand the behaviour of the other, whether or not we know what in heaven or on earth they were thinking, whether or not we agree with their actions (if in fact we can ever really know what they were up to, in the case of the ineffable godhead), we cannot reach out to take their hand if our own arms are full to falling off of heavy resentments and half-remembered arguments.

Because of the difficulties, because he would not remove all of the difficulties but in some ways seemed to add to them, many of his disciples turned away from Jesus (John 6:66-68). He asked the others, “Do wish also to go away?” And Simon Peter answered, exasperated, exhausted, resigned, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Forgiveness is a very practical matter, when it comes right down to it, a function, perhaps, of the creator god who liked to use anthropomorphic hands to mould out of clay the trees and the people and the sea anemones; less a manufactured feeling of softness than a shrug of the shoulders and a sigh as the resentments stream like grains of sand through unclenched fingers.

If we practice on God, we might even find that we are able to forgive one another, all in good time.

We forgive in order to live together, to live for one another, we and God; and that becomes, if we live it and let it, our deep, deeply serious, and profound joy.

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Tornadoes and sympathy

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

When I attended prenatal classes nearly twenty years ago, they warned us that watching the news would never be the same again after giving birth; that we would weep more, suffer more, seeing each vulnerable child in the light of our own babies, every family tragedy as a warning of what can happen; that our hearts would break for every mourning mother as though for our own.

Tonight, CNN.com added a line to their coverage of the tornadoes in Oklahoma between updates. They mentioned a man, the father of a third grader, waiting quietly on a stool for news of his child.

I doubt that anyone needs to have given birth to weep with him, to wait and watch with him, to hope against hope and pray with him for his baby.

Whether we are mothers or daughters, sons or brothers, fathers or grandparents, godparents, friends, our hearts go out to Oklahoma tonight, as we wait, and watch, and weep with those whose lives, whose loved ones are on the line, and we offer up our prayers to the night sky, hoping that they will be heard above the noise and chaos of the wind and weather, that peace might prevail in the morning; and we add our tears to those who already mourn.

 

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Pentecost 2013

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

It was Pentecost. The disciples were gathered all together in one place. And the Holy Spirit came among them like a rush of wind, like the breath of god, the sound of a mighty exhalation, god whispering in what might seem to the vastness of the universe like a still small voice; a whisper which deafened the disciples like the roar of a hurricane, with the timbre of a tornado, rushing and beating and throbbing and insisting,
I am here.

They all knew the stories of Moses. They were Jews; they had been raised on the Exodus and the covenants and the burning bush, so when tongues as of fire divided and settled on each person’s head, then their neighbours saw and recognized the sign of the Angel of The Lord, the presence of god come to earth, the fire that burns but does not consume.
Their shoes would already have been removed, since they were indoors; truly, surrounded by burning women and men, every one knew themselves to be by the sign of the others to be in the presence of the divine.

Did each know that his own head burned, too? Yes; he must have seen the flames reflected in his astonished sister’s eyes.

Silence. First the noise, then the shear shock robbed them of words, of their sense almost. Then, as the wind died down and the flames began to diminish, the impulsive one said,

“Dude! Your head was on fire!”
And the dude said, “Ja, ganz recht es war!”
And another said, “C’est incroyable!”

Whose idea was it to go outside and try out their new voices on the crowd? One who remembered, perhaps, Jesus’ injunction to them: you will do even greater things than these, after I have gone to the Father.

These were people who knew their history, who knew the wonderful deeds that god could do when a bush was set on fire in the path of a reluctant refugee like Moses. They had recently witnessed much greater deeds than these, travelling with Jesus before and after his execution, his resurrection. They knew, by now, to take his predictions and his promises seriously. They knew their history, and they gathered together in one place to rehearse that history, to praise God and pray together, so that when the call came, the urging of the Holy Spirit upon them, they were ready to do great things. They went out declaring, so the crowd reports, the wonderful deeds of god, confident that they would be understood, even if they themselves weren’t entirely sure what they were saying.
Jesus said, you will do greater things than these.
They were ready to rock Jerusalem’s multicultural world.

Do we believe that? Do we really claim the baptism of the Holy Spirit poured out upon us? Do we read our salvation history and expect that we, like they, will be touched by a burning flame, passionate and lively, powerful yet gentle, and sent out to proclaim, to demonstrate, the greatness of god in the world? Do we look for the tell-tale signs of God’s presence with us, among us, the tongues of fire, the blaze of the Spirit of God within everyone we meet? Do we remove our shoes to acknowledge the ground upon which they stand, upon which we meet, as holy ground, touched by the presence of God?

Jesus has promised that the Holy Spirit is with us, is in us. The Holy Spirit is God’s continuation of the Emmanuel story, the story that tells how god lives among us and loves us intimately, pouring upon us the life of the divine, eternal life.

All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God, says Paul. For we do not receive a spirit of slavery, but of adoption. We are not mean minions, cowed and bowed before God, but we are heirs with Christ, children adopted into the family of God. Adoption means that whatever has been, wherever, whoever we have been, whatever names we bring with us, we are from henceforth now and forever family, with all of the rights and responsibilities, privileges and advantages of blood-born children. We are God’s family, and we can do anything, be anything that we are called to be, in the family business.

I met a woman once who had given up praying because she felt unworthy any more to approach god. I asked her what would it take for her to know that god still loved her, that god missed her and wanted to invite her back into the relationship that she once enjoyed through her prayer; that God forgave her,. She said she would need a sign.
This was well before I was ordained. I wasn’t at all sure that I had the authority to say what I was about to say, but since she had asked for a sign, I suggested that maybe god sending someone to listen to her, and then to tell her unequivocally that god had forgiven her and loved her and wanted her to come back into the divine embrace – could that be a sign? She agreed that could work, and together we prayed.
I was afraid, honestly, to claim that I might be a sign from god to anyone, but I am convinced that the Holy Spirit was indeed burning in that room, between her and me, and that the power of that flame was what burned away enough guilt, shame and fear from both of us to achieve and pretty great outcome.

In the Holy Spirit, with the Holy Spirit, you have become the signs of God’s presence in the world, the dwelling place of God. In the Holy Spirit, we know ourselves to be children of God, with all of the rights and responsibilities and privileges of family. It is a bold claim, but we are not given a spirit of fear but of fire, to do great things. In the Holy Spirit we have the boldness, the confidence to do great things, and those great things can start with a simple word, spoken to someone in their own language. And they can happen anywhere: at work, at play, on the bus, on the beach, even at church.

Teilhard de Chardin says,

“There are, of course, certain noble and cherished moments of the day – those when we pray or receive the sacraments. Were it not for these moments of more efficient or explicit commerce with God, the tide of divine omnipresence, and our perception of it, would weaken until all that was best in our human endeavour, without being entirely lost to the world, would be for us emptied of God. But once we have jealously safeguarded our relation to God [thus] encountered …, there is no need to fear that the most trivial or the most absorbing of occupations should force us to depart from him. … Nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see …Try to realize that heaven itself smiles upon you, and through your works, draws you to itself; then, as you leave church for the noisy streets, you will remain with only one feeling, that of continuing to immerse yourself in God.”[1]

We come together, continuing in the apostles’ teaching and in the prayers, so as to equip one another, to draw water from the well of god’s praise, to rekindle the flame of passion for God’s mercy and love, then we are sent out to proclaim god’s greatness in many different ways and languages; the language of work, of play, or forgiveness and love, of generosity, of music and the arts, each of them the language of the family of God.

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came … divided tongues, as of fire, … and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” And as they looked at one another, and recognized the presence of God in each and every one around them, each saw reflected in their neighbour’s eyes that same fiery passion of God anointing their own heads.

Amen.

[1] Teilhard de Chardin, The  Divine Milieu (London: William Collins Sons & Co, Ltd and New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1960),  pp. 65-66

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Scary monsters at play

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

This may be irreligious, but…

Have you ever had that person in your life (perhaps you are that person) who thought that it was funny to jump out from behind the sofa and yell “Boo!” at the climactic moment of a suspenseful horror movie? The ones that think that it is hilarious to scare the living daylights out of you, because they know it’s all ok, they know they would do anything to save you from a real monster, so it’s all just a bit of fun, right?

You may be getting an inkling of how I feel about having my dignity undermined by an undeservedly provoked screaming session.

Bearing that in mind, here is a verse from this Sunday’s psalm:

Yonder is the great and wide sea with its living creatures too many to number, creatures both small and great.
There move the ships, and there is that Leviathan, which you have made for the sport of it. (BCP)
The CEV, “as well as the Leviathan, the monster you created to splash in the sea.”
The New American Bible for Catholics, “here leviathan, your creature, plays.”
The NIV has it formed for frolicking.

I could go on, but I think that the point is made: God made sea monsters – big hulking, scary monsters, Nessie, lurking in the Loch, the dragons that “here be” on the old maps – for fun. As a little splashy, scary joke.

Well colour me Queen Victoria.

I guess it’s good to know that God has a sense of humour, and it may be even more reassuring to those on the giving, rather than the receiving end of the behind the sofa late night horror movie ambushes.

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