Category: random thoughts

Love Life Live Lent – day three: be more giving

Love Life Live Lent, random thoughts

Today’s action is to start a small change jar – in aid of any suitable charity – and add to it all through Lent.  A very excellent thing to do – even copper coins and 5p pieces add up over time to make a decent pot of money to hand over to somewhere where it can make far more difference that it would have done in our purses.

As it happens, I already have a rule that all 1p, 2p and 5p coins go in our Children’s Society box, but reading today’s task reminded me that for some reason I couldn’t find the box the other day, and I still can’t. This is worrying – not because it means the Children’s Society won’t get their money (they already have – I’ve done a £20 donation in lieu of the box of small change, just in case) but because the box is usually in the front hall, next to the phone, where I see it every time I pass, and therefore remember to check my purse.  If the box has been put somewhere else, or if it’s fallen down behind something, or got buried in a pile of junk mail, then this is a Very Bad Sign.  It’s a bad sign because it means that just possibly being generous has stopped being a daily (or many times a day) activity.

Someone once told me when I was a member of a church youth club that I should keep my bible out, and not on a shelf, but that I should also pay attention to what gets put on top of it.  The idea of this is that the stuff that ends up on top of the Bible, obscuring it from sight (and therefore risking putting it out of mind) is also the stuff that may be getting in the way of my faith, my Christian life.  I’m not sure that this is a foolproof way of discerning one’s main barriers to a growing relationship with God, but there must be something in it for it to have stayed with me.

Which brings me back to the Children’s Society Box.  I still don’t know where it is.  But every day that it’s not in plain sight, right in front of my face, there are 5p, 2p and 1p coins accumulating in my purse (or worse still, being spent by me) and therefore missing their true vocation.  They are like the ‘gleanings’ (the spare crops at the edges of the field) that rightfully belong to those who need them more than I do.  If the Children’s Society box doesn’t turn up when I tidy up tomorrow morning, then I’m going to start my jam jar. And I’m going to set it going with some nice fat 10p coins. And I’m going to paint it pink, or yellow, or something else that’s so bright and colourful that it will stick out like a sore thumb and make generosity prominent again on our hallway table.

(Oh yes, and it’s well worth checking down behind the sofa cushions – it’s amazing how much money is sometimes lurking there!)

Love Life Live Lent – Say sorry!

Love Life Live Lent, random thoughts

I emailed a wedding couple today, finally sending them their order of service, for which they had been patiently waiting some time.  I am sure I’m not the only vicar in the world who finds the administration of the occasional offices (baptisms, weddings and funerals) sometimes ‘slips away’ and that bits of paper and emails become buried under many other bits of paper and emails.

Hence my apology.

And I do feel better now.

I feel better not only because I said sorry, but because I made good on what I’d done wrong.  The happy couple now have an order of service, and this has no doubt reduced their stress levels and made them happy.

Sometimes an apology is enough on its own, especially if we really, really mean it. And sometimes it’s all we’ve got, if the thing we’ve done wrong has been and gone and there’s no way to ‘make it good.’

My big apology last week was for completely missing Offord Women’s Guild – they always have Evensong on the first Tuesday of the month, and I always take the service and deliver a short homily-type thing, and enjoy tea and biccies afterwards. But last week for some reason I spent most of Tuesday thinking it was Monday, and only realised halfway through the midweek Eucharist on Wednesday that I’d missed the Guild.  Nothing I can do at that point. But I did write an apology on a nice tasteful card (it happened to have a picture of the church on it) by hand, and hand-delivered it to the chairperson of the Guild, on Wednesday, even though the level crossing meant that it took half an hour to do so.  And it felt better then. Until I next forget something….

Because the trouble is that I apologise quite a lot.  Some weeks I seem to spend most of my time apologising for things that I have got wrong.  So much so that while I was emailing my wedding couple earlier today I happened to glance up and see that I still have last Lent’s ‘motivational sign’ stuck to the shelf in front of my desk: “Get your act together, Barrett!” it reads, in bright red pen.  Clearly my disorganisation is not a new problem. And clearly I can be heartily and miserably sorry for the ways that it gets in the way of the gospel (ie the ways that I get in the way of the gospel), for the ways that it lets people down (ie for the way that I let people down) and for the damage that it may do to the credibility of the church (ie the damage that I do to the credibility of the church).  And I can apologise till I’m blue in the face, but my apology, my penitence, is empty unless I have the desire and the means to do things differently, and genuinely prioritise and care for every single one of those things entrusted to me.

So, one last sorry: to everyone reading this who I have ever offended by my disorganisation, tardiness, or forgetfulness, I truly and sorry, and I truly am asking God to help me do things better.

So maybe this Lent, my ‘sorry’ can be less empty.  Maybe this Lent my ‘sorry’ will come with a genuine ‘please’ to God to help me get my act together.  I pray for myself and for all disorganised vicars everywhere that the Good Shepherd will seek out and save the things we lose track of…

Love life live lent: have a pancake party!

church resources, Love Life Live Lent, random thoughts

No doubt there will be pancakes at tonight’s fundraising meeting, but just in case, my daughter and I had some for breakfast.  In fact, I was woken up especially early “because it’s pancake day!” to give me time to make them.

As I groggily mixed the flour and egg and milk and set the frying pan to heat up, it occurred to me that everyone probably has their own favoured pancake recipe.  When I first made pancakes I used the Delia recipe, but these days I don’t weigh or measure anything, I just chuck stuff in a bowl and stir it until it looks right. It generally works, and it suits my personality much better than getting out the kitchen scales and doing things ‘properly’.

Everyone has their own favourite toppings, too. My daughter and I love golden syrup and lemon juice, while one of her friends will only eat pancakes if they are coated in tomato ketchup.  One of the tutors at my theological college used to make the most wonderful orange pancake sauce which I’ve never been able to replicate.  Our taste in food is as unique as we are, clearly, and some of the best pancake parties I’ve been to have been those with a ‘bring and share topping’ rule – enabling each person to try everyone’s favourites, perhaps enjoying something new, perhaps confirming their own preferences.

Whether it’s syrup, lemon juice, orange, or ketchup, there seems little point in trying to be frugal about pancakes.  Their whole function on Shrove Tuesday is to use up some of the luxuries that will be denied during Lent. So making the most of this last ‘feast’ is absolutely related to the way we approach the fast of Lent, whether or not we’re actually going to be giving up a particular food.  ‘Deny yourself’ we are often told at the start of Lent.  But this isn’t about denying who we are – we are still unique people, with unique tastes, preferences and desires. But Lent is a good time for each of us to reflect on how the person we are impacts on those around us and on the wider world.

So much in Love Life Live Lent is not about denying ourselves, but rather about revisiting who we are; doing things a bit differently in the belief that what we do can profoundly affect who we are, as well as affecting others.

As you eat your pancakes (whatever topping you put on them), think about how the person you are, in all your individuality, makes a difference to the world around you, and how, during Lent, you are going to make that impact even more into something which really does change things for the better.

The truth shall set you free

random thoughts

In ministry and in my personal life I’m confronted again and again by these gospel words, and every time I find them just as challenging.
Perhaps it’s because on some level of wishful thinking I believe that if only I really did have all the facts I would be able to make all the right choices, and pick my way better through the minefield of small and large decisions (and their consequences)  that face me, as they do us all, each day. Maybe it’s because I so often find myself dealing with people’s expectations that I will know what to do, that I’ll have access to some crucial wisdom or insight. Maybe it’s because I’ve almost started believing that this might be the case?
But most of all think it’s because, while I’ve always told myself and others that I value my doubts, and that uncertainty is ok, even healthy, there is some part of me that wants to know the whole truth about myself. I want to know what my motivations really are, whether my memories of things I’ve done and things that have been done to me or for me are as inaccurate and subjective as I fear they are. I want to be able to be wholly honest about who I am, and what I am. I want to be able to see myself as I really am, so that I can smile at the good and repent of the evil, safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing I have missed.
Can any of us ever really become that self aware? Is it possible to dig deep enough to find a truth that is beyond the scope of our self-deception?
When I was at school, I clearly remember an incident when someone had flushed paper towels down the loo and the whole school was kept in detention after assembly until the guilty pupil would own up. It only took about two minutes for me to convince myself that it had been me, even though I also knew in my mind that I was innocent. But equally there are other times in my life where I have been guilty as hell, and I’ve instead told myself lies about mitigating circumstances and how it wasn’t really as bad as it looked, until I’ve ended up believing my own spin. How hard it is to recover truth once we’ve started the process of lying to ourselves!
Reaching truth is like peeling a many-layered onion, we can peel off each painful tearful layer thinking that we’ve finally got to the centre, only to find another layer and another round of tears. Is there ever a point where it’s right to stop, when to go further would be ‘too much truth’? Or if we find that the layer we have reached is not, in fact, setting us free at all, have we rather not gone deep enough?
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C S Lewis writes of an incident in which a rather unpleasant child is turned into a dragon, and while he desperately wants to scratch off the scaly dragon skin to rediscover his human self, each time he does so there is another layer of scales beneath. He simply cannot scratch deeply enough to reach who he really is. He is finally helped by the lion, Aslan, whose claws are sharper and longer, and who scratches so deeply that when the Dragon skin finally cones off the boy feels small and vulnerable, and the sensation of the fresh water on this skin as the lion throws him in a pool nearby is painful for an instant. But he is himself again. Or is he? For the child who emerges from this ordeal is not the same as the one who turned into the Dragon; he has been reborn, and the child he is now is less the spoiled, objectionable brat that he was before and is closer to being the human being that God created him to be. When Aslan strips off the Dragon skin, he also strips off some of the other layers of the boy that were also not part of who he was created to be. In the search for himself, the boy found Aslan – God- and also found a different self from the one he expected to get back.
For St Augustine, the quest for truth about himself was inextricably bound up with what turned out to be a quest for God, as he related in his autobiographical Confessions. For he discovered that ‘You were within me, but I was outside myself’ – that it was impossible to know the truth about himself without learning to see himself in the context of God. It’s a sort of theocentric anthropology.
I want to see myself as God sees me, but even having got as far as that realisation is not enough to enable me actually to do so. I am left with the only viable option being to pray continually to the only one who can really see me, in all my happy successes and dismal failings, and still love me, and ask him to keep on transforming me, whether I notice or not, and even if I might sometimes object to the pain of the process.
Will I ever in this life know the whole truth about myself? I don’t think so. But God does. And he is working on me. And maybe that will have to do.

The Visitation – a very random thought

random thoughts

The visitation of Mary to Elizabeth: a metaphor of the incarnation and/or a reality of which worship is the metaphor?

That’s all.