Things that I struggle with

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Things that I struggle with, in no particular order:
Unscrewing the lid from a new jar of pickles.
Unravelling tangled yarn chewed by the cat.
Understanding the holy mystery of the empty tomb.
Untying the umbilical cords that bind us tight.
Unsaying unspeakable things that have been said.
Undoing the grief occasioned by the dead.

Posted in poetry | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Year C Lent 5: a royal priesthood

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

The story of Jesus’ anointing is told in all four gospels, although there are differences in the details that each reports. Only John names the woman who performed the prophetic act: Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, of Bethany. Jesus seemed at home in their home; he loved them, and in the last weeks and days before he entered Jerusalem for the last time, theirs was a place of refuge for him, as well as a stepping stone to danger.

The last time Jesus came to Bethany, his disciples told him, “They are trying to stone you, and you would go back?”, and Thomas said, “Fine, we’ll go with you, and die with you there.”

The last time he came to Bethany was just after Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, had died; Lazarus who is sitting at table with Jesus in this next episode, restored and in good appetite.

In between that visit and this, we are told that Caiaphas, the high priest, afraid of the vengeance of Rome, wanted Jesus put to death, one man’s death to save the many from the wrath of the Romans: “It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed,” and he hardly knew what he was saying, that it would be better for the people to let Jesus die for them. Then, just before his return, the Pharisees gave orders that anyone who knew where Jesus was should tell them, so that they might arrest him. Those who would do Jesus harm were powerful, and they were made angrier still by the people’s loud love of him.

But then, during that last, previous visit, amazing things had happened.

Martha had confessed what she knew,
“Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world,”
and she told him,
“If you had been here, my brother would not have died,”
and Mary echoed her sister’s words:
“If you had been here, he would not have died.”
And then Lazarus walked out of the tomb.

The Gospel of John is the most literary of the gospels, the one which most considers style to be substance, which seeks to convey meaning not only by what it says, but by how it says it. This story is full of shadows. Foreshadowing, as you know, is a dramatic technique whereby something important, a climactic event, is signposted and built up throughout the drama, so that when it arrives, it is as though we knew all along that this was just how it must be, what had to happen.

The washing of feet; the tenderness to the body; Lazarus, sitting at the table eating weeks after he was dead; the outburst by Judas; and the perfume, the nard used to embrace the dead one last time; there are so many shadows to this story. And there is more: the prophetic act of anointing consecrates a person to the service of God, and nominates a king; it is used at baptisms, at coronations, as well as at death’s door.

Over the past couple of weeks, a few people have asked about the oils that we use in the church. Every month, on the first Sunday, we use oil blessed for healing, to anoint those seeking prayer and protection, healing and hope for themselves and those they love. We use it as a sign of that healing: doctors often used olive oil as a balm, as a medicine, in Jesus’ day.

And in baptism, after we die and rise with Christ, after we are washed and wiped, as we are sealed with the sign of the cross we use oil, we are anointed, to mark us as Christ’s own forever. Hear the words that are used by a bishop to consecrate the oil of Chrism:

Eternal Father, whose blessed Son was anointed by the Holy Spirit to be the Savior and servant of all, we pray you to consecrate this oil, that those who are sealed with it may share in the royal priesthood of Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever. Amen (BCP 307)

We are anointed to a royal priesthood, sharing in the life and work of Jesus Christ. We are sealed in his tomb and released to his resurrection. We are anointed, in a prophetic act, we are given a new life, a new direction.

Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair.
 
Mary knew that there was trouble ahead. As much as she loved Jesus, she could not keep him safe and she would not ask him not to go to his death in Jerusalem. And now, the authorities threatened even Lazarus, since it was because he lived that many were coming to believe in Jesus, because he did not stay dead.

And in the face of these trials and troubles and danger, they, Jesus’ friends, gave a dinner party, and Martha served, and Mary sat once more at Jesus’ feet, and she bathed him in oil, naming him king, priest, victim.

And Judas had a point, in a way, to question the extravagance of the gift and whether the money could be better spent, but Jesus reminded him, reminded them all, that he did not come only to serve but also to love, to spend time with people, to build relationships, to reciprocate friendship.

When the joy of life is denied, we line up with the priests who would put Lazarus to death simply for being alive out of order, instead of celebrating the restoration of brother to sister, friend to friend.

So, once again, as Martha served, doing what was necessary to make a fine party, Mary sealed the deal from her seat at Jesus’ feet, and he loved them both, and their brother too, and the fragrance of it filled the house. There is no doubt that Mary loved Jesus, there is no other way to understand her actions except through the lens of deep and abiding love, but how much did she know, how much did she realize? Even as she anointed his body with perfume once intended for his burial, Mary must have remembered how he had already overcome death once on her family’s behalf, when he raised up her brother. Even though Jesus said they would not always have him near them, Mary hoped against hope that it wasn’t true.

Did she anticipate his acclaimed entry into Jerusalem, with the palms waving and the people cheering? Did she anoint him king because she expected him to pull off some sort of miraculous, improbable kingly coup?
She knew that it was dangerous. They were bound to arrest him. Then did she expect Jesus to die and remain in the tomb, perfumed and preserved?
Does she expect something else? Is she keeping him sweet smelling so that Martha, who warned him against entering Lazarus’ lair, does not have to worry about the stench from Jesus’ opened tomb? Jesus had already confounded the idea of death as the final act, the last word. Does Mary anticipate the resurrection?

Our anointing at baptism was not to perfume our bodies for the grave. It was to raise us up into new life and to ordain us to a royal priesthood. As we approach Holy Week, with its pomp and pall, betrayal and love, and passion and perfection hung out to dry, even as we approach the cross, we are seeking resurrection. Though we stumble, we are called to continue in hope.

We are a royal priesthood, anointed to share in the ministry of Jesus, to share in the fullness of his life, a life fully lived, with love and mercy, service, humility, friendship, grief, and joy, a life lived not alone, but in the company of friends and family who bring us to life.

Like Mary and Martha, Lazarus and Jesus, like Judas, in the midst of life we know death, and like Mary, in every death, and in every death to self, to fear, to sin, we know that there is the hope of resurrection.

Already, its fragrance fills the house.

Posted in sermon | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Nothing, nor anything else

Posted on March 16, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

A grace-filled daily reflection from a colleague got me thinking. He was writing about those wonderful words of Paul, which are included in the little rationale for joy and grief coexisting at funerals which is included in our Book of Common Prayer (p. 507):

“neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

My friend pondered those times when we are separated even from ourselves. I can only believe and hope that God knows each of our selves, often better than we do. God knows the little self left behind at an adoption; the self that would have been, the ones that become and ones that we try to deny. God gets the whole, integrated picture, even when we are disintegrated and more than a little fuzzy around the edges.

I commend my friend’s blog to you: http://thefunstons.com/?p=4808; do give it a read. In the meantime, this is why his words struck such a chord with me.

***

We grew up together. Our memories were forged on the anvil of the other, but the last time I met him, I didn’t recognize their shape or substance. It wasn’t that he remembered things differently, but that he carried different memories. It was as though a traveller from a parallel universe had stumbled into our world; he was a changeling.

It is hopeless and unfair to expect one who has not experienced harm to repent of it or to forgive it. And how can one who remembers no rift be reconciled? Nothing is any longer shared, nor can anything come between us.

A friend, wiser and more practiced in compassion than I, suggested that, in the absence of real memories, he had been free to create them in his own self-image. This, then, was the person he would choose to be: loving and faithful, happy, reliable, true and beloved. He didn’t choose power and influence; he did not choose wealth and worldly success; he was not cruel but kind; not selfish but generous. He did not even eschew grief; but he bore it honourably.

He chose the laughter of a child, and the touch of a lover, when he was freed from the fetters of reality to remember whatever he liked.

And who would be unkind enough to argue that this was not the person whom God had intended him to be all along?

Posted in lectionary reflection, other words | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Some things make me sad

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Some things make me sigh.

Recently, I admitted that I did not believe that I would ever fully understand the Resurrection, or the Incarnation, or God, or the Sacraments…

We are called to love God with all of our minds, as well as our hearts and souls and strength, and I try, and I will not stop studying, but there is so much that is simply beyond my understanding. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, says the Lord.”

And that’s ok, because God can speak to every soul in words, in ways that each beloved child will understand as loving.

What made me sad was the person who told me they had never heard that from a church before.

(I do love my church, God’s church. I think that it tries hard to love God and God’s people.)

Sometimes it’s good to get sad. God save me from ever thinking I know it all, or that it’s my job to have all the answers.

That would be a shame.

Posted in other words | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Year C Lent 4: The hungry sons

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

I’ve been thinking this week about titles for this story, this famous parable of Jesus, so familiar and so well-thumbed that we defy ourselves to find anything new in it.

I do wonder if it needs a new title.

“The Prodigal Son.” Prodigal is not a word we use everyday, nor often at all. Chances are, ninety-nine percent of the utterances of that word that we have made refer to this very parable. So all it relates to is a character in a story, an example, a cartoon. It has no meaning left for us.

“Prodigal”, if you look it up in the “Shorter” Oxford English Dictionary, means as an adjective applied to a noun, like “son”

“Recklessly wasteful of one’s property or means, extravagant, lavish, proud, conceited”

We tell this story, time and again, as a tale of God’s love for the repentant sinner, as a tale of grace and forgiveness, of coming to one’s senses and the joy that follows, and yet we label it as sin, as profligacy, as shameful and wasteful and bad.

I have a hunch that the elder brother would approve, the elder brother who stayed in his father’s house, at his mother’s side, while his sibling packed his bags and wandered away, thumbing his nose at his family.

The elder brother is so angry at his sibling for getting away with it. That’s how he sees it – he got away with it! He comes home and all is forgiven and all is restored, he is loved and he is cherished – he got away with it!

This brother is blind to the self-harm that his sibling has suffered – the self-imposed exile, the shame, the degradation, the damage to his own self-worth that prompted him to exclude himself from his father’s love: “I am no longer worthy to call myself your son; treat me instead as your servant, your slave.” The elder brother has no idea of the depths of his younger sibling’s hunger, the hunger that was stronger even than his shame, the hunger that drove him home.

But more than that, he is blind to the present and to the future; he is stuck in the past, judging over and over again his brother’s past actions, instead of meeting him in the road, as their father does, and embracing the new reality of a restored family who will work out a new future together, one in which, by the way, one brother has no inheritance left and will have to start over building his retirement portfolio. All is forgiven, but some consequences remain.

The elder brother is stuck in the past, like the impatient owner of the fig tree – “No fruit the past three years – cut it down!”, or Jonah outside the city of Nineveh, “What if they repented? Smite them anyway! They deserve it.” [If you’re wondering what Jonah has to do with it, last week’s sermon is available here: https://rosalindhughes.com/2013/03/03/year-c-lent-3-manure-and-mercy/]

His anger has been balled up so long it turns to bile and bitterness. His stomach is too sour to enjoy the fatted calf, his spirit too sullen to rejoice. Part of the elder brother’s anger, one suspects, is at himself, for never trying kicking up the traces, never risking the wrath of his father, never over reaching; he is as angry at his own self-imposed servitude as his brother was despairing at his own self-imposed exile. He does not understand how his father could forgive, could embrace, could love his brother, because he has never understood how much his father loves him. He has lived in fear of offending his father, when all of this, all of this grace, all of this love, all of this embrace was his all along for the asking.

If you look at the verse numbers of the gospel reading that we heard this morning, you will notice a gap. At the beginning of the chapter, the Pharisees and the scribes are grumbling, because Jesus dares to dine with dissolute types, the prodigal sons, the wastrels and the profligate losers, the ones hungry enough to sit down at table with him and eat. They are angry at Jesus’ extravagance, his lavish lifestyle; they think him proud and conceited.

Jesus responds with a set of stories. The first, which we didn’t read, is the story of the ninety-nine sheep, and the one which was lost, and the shepherd who sought it out in the wilderness and brought it home rejoicing. The second is about a silver coin which a woman lost, and even though she knew that it must be still in the house, that it had never left, that it was always there – still she turned the house upside down until she found it and restored it to its proper place, and she rejoiced when she did so.

Then the stories of the two brothers, the one who stayed, and the one who’ll come home when he’s hungry, both beloved of their father, both the apples of his eye and the joy of his heart, if only they knew it; one in the wilderness who so nearly never came home out of his shame; and one who was in the house all along, but hidden from sight by the shadow of his own self-righteous anger. We saw last week how such self-righteous judgement is a two-edged sword; “Why do you love him?” spills over too readily into, “Why don’t you love me more?”

In the story of the lost sheep, the shepherd left the others safely penned and went out looking for the lamb. In the story of the lost coin, the widow stayed home and searched diligently till she found it. In the story of the lost son, the father gave him all that he had to give, and waited, sorrowing but ever hopeful, for his return.

I grew up with a  brother who would, from time to time, express his displeasure at his parents by leaving home. He would pack up his little bag with his worldly possessions – a few choice comic books, a few pennies left from his weekly allowance, his Peter Rabbit stuffed animal toy, maybe a bag of chips for the road – and he would set off, announcing his intention to leave home and make his own way in the world. For us, “the world” was fairly well bounded by the shops on the hill, by the main road on one side of town and by the sea on the other side, and by the lane past school, where my brother spent most of his adventurous afternoons sitting in the tree we had claimed as a den, eating his chips and reading his comics. Our mother would say, “He’ll come home when he gets hungry,”

He’ll come home when he’s hungry.

In the story of the elder son, the grumbling son, the father went out to him, and pleaded with him, reminded him, “All that is mine is yours.” His father loved him, and when he finally gets hungry enough to give up his anger and come and join the feast, he will find himself as celebrated as any sheep.

Very soon, we will find ourselves invited to a feast that God has prepared for us, a table set with a white cloth and silver plates and fine chalices. We will be invited to take part in the most extravagant meal imaginable, to partake of God, to share in the mysteries of God’s sacramental presence with us.

And we will approach it like repentant sons, hungry and poor and penitent, “Most merciful God, we are not worthy so much as to gather up crumbs under the table” – we are not fit to be even your servants, cleaning up after the meal. But we remember that God is always waiting for our return, that God loves us, so we pray, “but your property, Lord, is always to have mercy. Therefore, grant us so to eat.”

We all know what it is to be lost, whether in the wilderness or in some dark corner of our own homes, our own lives, buried in the dust and ashes of our desires, our regrets, fermented into bitterness; we all know what it is to be hungry.

So if, after our prayer, we like the Pharisees and the scribes, like Jonah, and like the elder brother, are in our hearts still grumbling a little at life and luck, at the love that God has for our neighbour, may God meet us in the aisle and challenge our angry assumptions and convict our self-righteous hearts, unravel our regrets, and smite our sullenness, so that we might also know God’s mercy, God’s compassion even for us, and feast on God’s love, and be satisfied.

Posted in sermon | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hungry

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

My brother was one of those children – maybe you were, or maybe you had one like him – who would, from time to time, express his displeasure at his parents by leaving home. He would pack up his little bag with his worldly possessions – a few choice comic books, a few pennies left from his weekly allowance, his Peter Rabbit stuffed animal toy, maybe a bag of chips for the road – and he would set off, announcing his intention to leave home and make his own way in the world.

My mother didn’t take a whole lot of notice. For us, “the world” was fairly well bounded by the shops on the hill, by the main road on one side of town and by the sea on the other side, and by the lane past school, where my brother spent most of his adventurous afternoons sitting in the tree we had claimed as a den, eating his chips and reading his comics.

Our mother’s perennial prediction was, “He’ll come home when he gets hungry,” and he did.

Posted in sermon preparation | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Prodigal

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

“The Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.'”

So Jesus told them a few stories, about things that were lost and then found, about a boy who got a little lost then found himself, came to his sense, as it were, and was welcomed back to the fold by a fond father, and finally about another who was never lost but lost himself in grumbling.

We get the point. Don’t we?

Then why do we still call the story, “The Prodigal Son”? Prodigal means spendthrift, wastrel, wasteful, reckless. There are no positive synonyms for prodigal.

So instead of focusing on the outcome of the story, about the story Jesus tells the Pharisees about themselves, the elder sons lost in grumbling, we lose ourselves in, well, grumbling. We continue to define the younger boy by the actions of which he has already repented, instead of delighting in the way that he turned himself around.

And thus and so, by our use of language, by using the title to  perpetuate the cycle, we continue to identify with the grumblers, and show ourselves in need of hearing the story one more time.

Posted in sermon preparation | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Year C Lent 3: manure and mercy

Posted on March 3, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

The thing about a parable is that it can be read from many different angles, with different results. Like those silhouetted pictures that can be a vase or a pair of faces, depending on where you place your focus, or those animated holograms which seem to move and change as you turn them this way and that. I think that the reason that Jesus used parables was because he was conveying a truth too complicated, too large, too perfect to be captured in one still frame, one stark image, one unambiguous slogan. When we ask of a parable, does it mean this or does it mean that, the answer is probably “yes.”

So this parable of the fig tree: a strange little story of gardening and efficiency, mercy and manure.

In Genesis, God creates the world and all that is in it, and it grows and puts forth fruit, and it is good. God creates the human, and places the human in charge of tending the garden; Adam is the gardener, charged with nurturing and protecting and cultivating the land.

Is the gardener Adam, then, pleading for the life of the fig tree even though it is producing so poorly, failing in its purpose, taking valuable nutrients from the soil for nothing? Is it Abraham, bargaining for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah – if I can find you just fifty righteous men, will you spare the whole city? What about forty, or thirty, or ten? For just ten figs, will you spare the whole tree?

And God agreed, and sought out the righteous of the city, and found only the family of Lot, and plucked them out of there before the destruction of the city.

Maybe that’s how Paul read this parable, because in his letter to the Corinthians, he says,

“It’s a scary world out there and scary things can happen – serpents and all sorts – so you’d better straighten up and fly right. Don’t put Christ’s mercy to the test. You shall not test the Lord your God.”

But Jesus reads the signs somewhat differently. He refuses to blame the Galilean rebels for the violence that Pilate visited upon them, and he will not attribute the construction accident at the Temple to unrighteousness. Jesus says, “It’s a scary world out there and scary things can happen. They happen to all sorts of people, good, bad, indifferent – because that’s what people are, all of them: good, bad and indifferent all at the same time. Repent, straighten up, so that you can concentrate on the mercy and love of God instead of living in fear of the random acts of fate.”

And he tells this story.

A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, “See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” He replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” (Luke 13:6-9)

Let it alone for one more year; let it alone.

I am reminded of the story at the end of the book of Jonah – not the part about the whale or the fish or whatever sort of marine animal swallowed him up, but the part after he was spat out on the beach, after he walked three days into Nineveh, that city whose name is synonymous with Sodom, whose reputation was as bad as Gomorrah. The part after he preached repentance to them, the fear of God, the forty days they had to make their penance, turn their lives around, to turn their lives over to God. The part after they listened, and proclaimed a fast, from food and drink, from evil ways, from violence and from rich robes; from the king to the smallest sheep, all were dressed in their disgrace with sackcloth and ashes.

And God looked upon the city that God had promised to destroy, and said, “Look how they have borne fruit.” And God let them be.

Jonah was furious. He had come a long way and gone through a whole lot – storms, man overboard, fish belly, faceplant on the beach, and a long, hot hike through the vile and violent city. And now, he feels, it is all for nothing – God is not even going to smite them! He is furious, and he tells God this is just why he didn’t want to come in the first place: “I knew it!” he shouted, “I knew that you were going to turn around and forgive them, because that’s just what you do, isn’t it? All love and mercy and grace and forgiveness! All this trouble for nothing! You might as well just smite me instead!”

And he went off in a huff and sat down outside the city. God arranged for a shade tree to spring up and shade him, and after Jonah had let off some steam and cooled down some, he began to feel a little better about the world. Then God sent a worm to attack the root of the tree, and it died overnight. The next day the sun was back in full force over Jonah’s head and a hot desert wind completely blew his cool. Again, he railed at God, and again, God gently pointed out that Jonah had nothing to be angry about.

“Did you plant the tree, or water it, or tend to it?” asked God. “If you, then, are so keen to reverse the punishment that befell this tree, how much more ready should I be to restore the city of Nineveh, a city full of my children, not to mention their innocent animals?” God told Jonah a parable about a tree, about the fruits of repentance, about love and mercy.

Jonah’s worldview was steeped in judgement and anger, revenge and punishment. God’s view of the world noticed how dangerous those things were in the hands of God’s people. Perhaps that is why Adam and Eve were warned away from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

God urged instead mercy and justice, love and forgiveness, patience and tenderness.

When you wonder, when someone asks you, what did I do to deserve this? – remember the workers killed at the temple by the falling tower, whom Jesus specifically absolved of any particular blame for their accident, for their misfortune, for their demise. This did not happen, he said explicitly, because they were evil or sinful. God is not punishing you, any more than God punished Nineveh.

When you hear the televangelist telling the victims of a hurricane or worse that this is God’s punishment for something that they have done, that we have done, that God refused to help their children because they didn’t pray right; remember Jesus’ words: Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? I tell you, No. God loved even Nineveh.

When Jonah went out of the city to the east, he was still running from God, just as he had on the ship, but God followed him, and explained to him in the parable of the tree God’s never-failing love. When your shade is gone and the sun is hot on your head, remember, God still loves you. God is forever waiting for ways to show mercy to you, in the comfort of a friend, in a whisper from the Word, in the silence of the night.

In his work on Jesus’ language of story and prayer, Tell it Slant, Eugene Peterson, who authored the Bible translation known as The Message, notes that, “Our translations obscure the identity of [the] word that Jesus prayed from the cross with Jesus’ earlier word in the story of the Manure and the Fig Tree. The farmer’s order, ‘Chop it down!’ is echoed in the Holy Week ‘Crucify him!’ Jesus prayer to his Father, ‘Forgive them,” is a verbatim repetition of the gardener’s intervention, ‘Let it alone.’”[1]

The same word that Jesus prays from the cross is the word that the gardener uses to plead for the life of the fig tree.

It is the same word that Jesus taught us to use in our own prayers, Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.[2]

Our judgement, of ourselves, of our enemies, of our friends, is no match for God’s forgiveness, no match for Jesus’ words from the cross.

Therefore repent, says Jesus, not because you are afraid of what might befall you: who knows what corners your life will turn, what fruit it will grow? Therefore repent, says Jesus, do not continue to test the Lord your God, because your God is ever waiting for your return, patiently, every year saying, “one more year, let it be, let it alone, forgive it, because it hardly knows what it is doing.” Repent, because God’s mercy endures forever.

[1] Eugene Peterson, Tell it Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 74

[2] ibid

[1] Eugene Peterson, Tell it Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 74

[2] ibid

Posted in sermon | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

David and other saints

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

St David’s in the seventies. A family walking the cliffs around the tiny city on the sea; well, they were walking, but she was skipping. She was, after all, six. She was lost in her own thoughts, as was often the case in those days, out with her family but alone on the edge of the world, skipping.

From far, far away, a few feet behind her, she distantly heard the frantic voices of her parents, shouting in unison, “STOP! Stand still!”

She stopped, mid-skip, and returned to reality, one foot hanging in the air, inches short of the cliff edge. The path had turned ninety degrees just behind her, but in her own little world, it was straight on till morning, and she had nearly skipped straight off the earth.

I seem to remember that David was not keen to become archbishop of Wales. He was dragged out of a peaceful life of prayer and set amongst bickering bishops and given the task of setting them straight, or turning them around, as seemed best to him. His life of prayer never left him; but he was persuaded by voices not his own that his own road would not bend to his will, but that he must be guided by those around him who saw in turn where his leadership could help the church not to fall off a cliff.

We do not discern our life’s work, our ministry, even our passion alone. We are influenced, warned, repelled, drawn out, distracted and sidetracked, and saved by those around us; those we hear, those whose stories we read, those who pray for us.

I wonder how often David, a monk all at sea in the archepiscopacy, took to those narrow ledges to wander in the quiet of the distant surf and seagulls, the plain salt air, lost in thought, lost in prayer, and who it was that watched over him.

Posted in holy days, story | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Aflame

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Aflame with a passion which has
yet to be quite requited,
reaching out tongues of everlasting fire
to melt the perennially hard-hearted
with the patience of Time itself,
burning with love, yet unconsumed.

Posted in lectionary reflection, poetry | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment