Author: reverendally

Human, parent, priest, (hymn)writer, painter, vegan, amateur. She/they. Chaplain @catz_Cambridge (views my own). Trying to do justly, love mercy & walk humbly.

A poem about Lent

lent, poems

Trying to get myself in the right mindset (heartset, soulset etc) for Lent.

These forty days of prayer and discipline
are given for us to slowly grow in grace
and learn to be your people once again,
to find our truest home in your embrace.
In pilgrimage, through hours and days and weeks
of changing who we are and what we do,
the human heart may find that which it seeks:
ourselves, once restless, find their rest in you,
our mother hen, whose chicks at last come home
to find the safest place where they may cling;
we need not face the wilderness alone,
but nestle in shadow of your wing.
Oh, forty days of learning how to be
what you have promised us eternally.

The Wisdom of Daniel: Sacraments

Other cool stuff
I was playing over in my mind and reflecting again what my son said the other day about sacraments.
He was painting an abstract/symbolic picture of ‘a battle between warm and cold’. He’s always been very sensory, very huggy, and treats the warmth left behind by another person when they get up out of a sofa or out of bed as something to be treasured, almost revered, because for him, the person has left something of themselves there, of which warmth is the sign.
Anyway, he was painting his picture, and started to talk about how I was warm, and I pointed out that my hands and feet are often quite cold, but that I was warm inside.
He then said, ‘Yes, like a sacrament.’
We unpacked this a bit, and what he meant was that there is an inner warmth in a person you love and who loves you that is somewhere between spiritual and emotional, and that our outer bodily warmth is a sign of that, but not the thing itself.  I said to him that that was pretty profound stuff.  He said to me, ‘I didn’t make it up, you told me about it last year when I was doing communion preparation.’ As it happens, I do remember telling them about the classic definition of a sacrament as ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’ but I don’t remember applying it to people.
He went on to talk about how this works in holy communion:
‘When you drink the wine, and it feels warm when you swallow it, that’s the outward bit of the sacrament, and the inward bit is the warmth of love. That’s why you’re like a sacrament.’ 

He’s always felt very strongly that unless he’s had wine as well as a wafer, he hasn’t really taken communion properly, and now I know why – it seems from this conversation that, while for many of us, the idea of bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ can be almost ‘abstracted’ from the physical elements, for my son, in his multisensory spiritual world, it is the warmth of the wine, rather than the fact that it is red, or simply the idea of it, that enables it to function sacramentally.
He’s done this before, I now remember. Once when he was much younger, maybe four or five, he came running in from the garden with a big juicy strawberry in his little hand. He held it out to me, eyes like saucers, and said, ‘Mummy, I thought of you as I picked it. Eat it, mummy, can you taste the love?’
I realise that my son is unusually articulate about this kind of thing, but I’m also pretty confident that his experience is not unique. Time and time again in engaging with children (often much younger than my son) I am both inspired and challenged by the way that they can effortlessly and holistically engage mind, body and spirit in the processing of experience, and playfully hold together material and spiritual and emotional reality in a way that many adults find so hard.
Undoubtedly, children can do theology. To be honest, if often feels as if children are natural theologians, and their experience of church can either nurture that innate ability to experience the divine, or crush it.  Lord, let my kids always be in a church that honours what they bring, that welcomes them to participate fully, and that engages with the senses as well as with the brain.

Transfiguration doodle

Other cool stuff

image

Getting ahead of myself a bit – here is a doodle for Sunday’s gospel, the Transfiguration.

Candlemas

random thoughts

SimeonThe first time I saw a reproduction of Rembrandt’s portrayal of Simeon with the Christ child (the late one, not the earlier one) it immediately became my favourite painting.  It has all the fuzziness and limited palette associated with the artist’s late works, as well as all of the spiritual and emotional depth – it is the work of an artist for whom physical sight and the detail of appearance has taken second place to the ability see with the eyes of his heart and soul.

prodigalIn this painting, just as in his portrayal of the Return of the Prodigal Son (also a late work, and also featuring what could almost be the same model for the figure of the old man), he is depicting someone who, like the artist himself, is also seeing with the eyes of the soul. When you look at Simeon’s face, you know, somehow, that he is blind, and yet it is he who sees the baby Jesus for who he really is.  When you look on the prodigal’s father, you know that he is seeing not the wreck that the young man has become, but the son he truly is, and will be again.

selfportraitDuring his last years, Rembrandt returned several times to the project of painting self portraits.  I often wonder whether in these two biblical old men he was somehow portraying himself, and whether, in all of these paintings, the self-portraits included, he was, in a way, learning to see himself with the eyes of the heart, and the soul, learning to see himself not in terms of his physical appearance, but in terms of who he truly was. Was he portraying, again and again, his true self, as he felt he was looked upon by God? And was he, then, in a very real sense, preparing for his own death?

Simeon sees Jesus and immediately prays, ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace’.  Perhaps the reconciliation of the family is the last act of the prodigal’s father?  In these last paintings, I see a man who has been through a great deal, and made many mistakes, and at the end of his life has learned to see himself for who he is.

Perhaps all this is a bit fanciful – one can never know the mind of an artist, and one of the great joys of art is that we can each look on it and see something different, something that reflects our own experience, our own questions, hopes, dreams or fears. But it was something of this that I had in my mind when I wrote, in my hymn for the Feast of Candlemas, “We come just as we are to you, as one who knows us through and through, and keeps us in your care, in love beyond compare.”

Simeon saw Jesus and recognised him, and at that moment, as Jesus gazed back with the intensity that only a baby can offer, he saw himself as God saw him: beloved.   May we learn to do the same.

Who really matters?

children's ministry, random thoughts

I can’t believe I’m actually going to write a blog post about someone else’s blog post about someone else’s article. It’s just daft. But it’s only short, so here we go:

This morning my facebook feed presented me with this piece, slating (in a nice way) the even more bizarre list produced by Tatler, of “People Who Really Matter”.

My first thought was simply that a list of people who really matter would be an unranked list of about seven billion names, and that it would be quite a task to produce it and keep updating as new little humans are born.

My second thought was that the list would just get longer and longer, as people don’t stop mattering just because they die.

My third thought came at some point in the third paragraph of the blog post, when I realised that the problem with the list was framed around the fact that number one on it was a baby.  It’s princess Charlotte, by the way.

My fourth thought was that, while the baby princess is ranked #1 because she is a princess, it is actually wonderful, rather than silly, that a baby is considered someone who “really matters”.  Charlotte is a delight, and the light of her parents’ lives, I have no doubt, but really she hasn’t done anything much yet – most of her major life achievements are still ahead of her. She matters (in real life, that is, not in Tatler) because she exists, because she is beloved of God just as we all are.

If a person cannot “really matter” from the moment they exist, then we are left with the conclusion that our significance is dependant on things we learn to do only later in our lives, if at all, or worse still, on our contribution to the economy, and so on. So, Tatler, while I am baffled by your bizarre and strangely pointless ranking of people’s significance, I applaud you for placing a young child first, and reminding us that we are significant simply because we exist, for to exist is to be beloved of God.