Category: random thoughts

Love Life Live Lent Thursday of Week three: tidy up!

Love Life Live Lent, random thoughts

They say that charity begins at home. But does that also apply to today’s action? I suspect I could fill a bin bag full of rubbish just from all the stuff that’s accumulated on the floor of my study in the last couple of weeks…

Actually, this time of year (and especially a day like today, which in my neck of the woods at least, has been reasonably sunny) is a great time for spring cleaning and tidying up generally.  Sunlight comes through windows and makes you realise (a) how dirty the windows are after a winter’s worth of dust and rain, and (b) how untidy the rest of the house is (if you’re anything like me it is, anyway).

Light shows things up.  It reveals mess.

But is also shows up beauty. And this is also an ideal time of year to appreciate the beauty more, too.  All our snowdrops are out, and the first couple of daffodils are starting to brave the cold, like miniature sunshines.

When the snow disappears, what’s underneath it is revealed – whether that’s spring flowers, or old lager cans, crisp packets and cigarette butts. And once the sun comes out, more and more people venture out not because they have to get from A to B, but because they want to be outside.  And when they do, they see not only the flowers, but the litter, too.

The sunlight and the longer days mean that tidying up our local neighbourhoods is immensely rewarding – the fruits of our labours will be enjoyed by dog walkers, toddlers, postmen, children on the way to school, people waiting at bus stops… all of whom will feel their hearts warmed by the sight of spring flowers without the plastic wrappers and crushed cans next to it.

It’s also true that keeping our environment tidy means that the people around us are more likely to respect it, and to do their part in keeping it tidy, whereas mess tends to perpetuate more mess: when a place is already looking like a tip, there’s little motivation for the next person not to add their rubbish to what’s already there.

On that note, part one of my action today is to clear my study floor, to find homes for the things that I need to keep and to get rid of the things that need to go.  Part two will be to do the same to the small patch of our garden that’s right next to the pavement – there are some beer cans there that need to be introduced to a recycling bin!

Love life live Lent – Wednesday of week 3 – be more generous

Love Life Live Lent, random thoughts

I thought I had this action covered first thing this morning: after an exhausting but very worthwhile school RE day in church yesterday, I bought a big box of choccies for the school staffroom to say thank you for all the teachers’ and teaching assistants’ willingness to engage with the day and go the extra mile.

But here we have a problem: the action today is to be more generous, but there can be many other motivations for giving other than generosity. Did I buy the chocolates to be generous? Or perhaps as a retrospective bribe to keep people’s goodwill, implying that I didn’t trust them to be motivated by anything ‘higher’? Or as a reward for making everyone work harder than they should have to, or making them do things that were out of their comfort zone? Or to assuage my own guilt for the things during the day that didn’t go quite right? Or out of a sense that it is my institutional duty to thank them?

It can be good to question our motivations, which may often be very mixed and complex. In the end, though, our actions really do count for a lot. For one thing, they are real and quantifiable, even if our motivations may be hard to define.

But our actions are also important because they affect who we are.  I think it was C S Lewis who was asked once by someone, ‘How can I become more generous?’ To which he replied, ‘Give.’ He didn’t just mean that because we give things away we are de facto generous (I’ve already said that I’m not sure that giving is the same as generosity). Rather, giving things away, whatever our motivation, gets us into a habit of giving which, over time, can make us into generous people for whom giving, out of our generosity, is second nature.

So many of the actions in Love Life Live Lent work on this basis: by taking some simple actions and ‘practising virtue’ we not only change the world around us, we also change ourselves.

Love Life Live Lent Tuesday of week 3: Be friendly to someone new

Love Life Live Lent, random thoughts

As a vicar I meet new people all the time, and largely I’m required to be friendly to them. It’s sort of expected.  I have no problem with this, in fact, I think it’s great that people see me and their immediate assumption is that I’m probably generally benevolent.

The tricky bit is that I’d like to be more than generally benevolent. I suppose I’m trying to tease out the difference between being friendly (which might include saying hello, exchanging the time of day, smiling, holding the door open for someone, engaging in small talk, etc) and being a friend to someone (which opens a whole other can of worms).

To offer yourself as a friend to someone is to take the risk that that person may turn out to have quite substantial needs, or may really need to talk about something that is bothering them… It is to offer your time, your emotional engagement, your energy.  And, if it a real friendship develops, it also means that you, too, may need to ask for help, to share a burden than you have been carrying  – and some people find that very hard to do.  Any relationship involves a certain vulnerability and that can feel like a big risk to take.

Friendships are places where joys and sorrows, hopes, fears and dreams can be shared.  And ‘being friendly’ can lead to an investment which is demanding and rewarding.  I suppose for me, the question remains how much of the time I really do have the personal, emotional, spiritual and physical energy to move from general benevolence to something more.

Love Life Live Lent Monday Week 3 – Say thank you

Love Life Live Lent, random thoughts

Having tweeted about the fact that we said a hearty thank you for our food at lunchtime, at the ecumenical Lent Study Lunch – and that the thank you was particularly heartfelt because we benefit from soup and bread made by one of our lay ministers, who happens to be a cordon bleu cook – I now have to confess that I was so late for the lunch that I missed it (both the thank you and the food itself).

As it happens I’d also missed breakfast, and only got back home after running from meeting to meeting all day at 7pm, so by that time I was pretty hungry.  My ‘thank you’ to God for curry in the freezer and a microwave to heat it up was heartfelt, and made up for the fact that I was too late to meet the rest of the family at McDonalds….

But being hungry today, even for a short time, reminded me, as it always does (fasting is something I find helpful, so I do fast regularly) that in the Western world we don’t experience hunger very often. Mostly we eat because it is a meal time, rather than because we are hungry.  We eat out of habit, or for comfort, or because we are bored, or because the people around us are eating and we feel we have to eat with them in order to be polite.

But eating simple food when you’re genuinely hungry or having a drink when you’re genuinely thirsty that is one of the greatest pleasures we can experience.  I remember going for a long morning walk in the hills in the south of France and returning to the village where we were staying just as the sun was highest in the sky – the local people, in the middle of picking the peach harvest, saw how hot and sweaty we were, and threw fruits to us as we ambled past, and I think those peaches were quite possibly a foretaste of heaven.

The food for which we are most grateful is often not the most expensive, or the most elaborate, but rather the food that is given to us when we are most in need. During Lent we remember the story of the People of God in the wilderness, learning to trust God for their every need, through the provision of their daily ‘angel bread’, the manna from heaven. It is when we experience need that we are most likely to learn gratitude, but if we can remember what that feels like, perhaps every mealtime can be one that makes us want to say ‘thank you.’

Loving the unlovely: sermon starter for Lent 2 (Luke 13.31-end)

Love Life Live Lent, random thoughts

The various run-ins between Jesus and the Scribes and Pharisees are some of the most unlovely encounters in the gospels, full of threats, traps, accusations, petty jealousy… But they’re only one element in a whole bunch of stuff that makes Jerusalem seem a very unlovely place.

With a very unlovely history.  Anyone who knows their Old Testament will remember the stories about prophets being, at best, ignored, and at worst, persecuted and killed for speaking the word of God.  Elijah being pursued by Jezebel is just the best known.  God’s most faithful servants and spokesmen always suffered for their calling.

We might also recognise something of the parable of the wicked tenants in the vineyard; Jesus certainly sees Jerusalem as, “The city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.”

Nothing about Jerusalem in the gospels seems lovable.  And yet Jesus loves it and its people, feeling as a parent does about a wayward child – loving, frustrated, desperate even… Jesus’ love for Jerusalem is a love that takes him to the cross, but it is also a love that is ultimately stronger than death.

God’s love for that which seems unlovely is awe-inspiring. Loving that which seems unlovely is a hallmark of Godliness, and if we ourselves can learn to look around us and at one another through the eyes of God then we rejuvenate the divine image within us.

Thursday’s Love Life Live Lent action challenges us to love the unloveliest parts of our neighbourhood enough to tidy them up.  Like a God who came into one of the darkest, most difficult parts of the world in order to bring his light right into the heart of where it was needed.

Saturday’s action asks us whether we love our friends enough to put the emotional energy into keeping in touch, rather than relying on them to make the first move. The incarnation shows that God does not insist that we make the first move in keeping in touch with him, but is always more ready to listen than we are to pray.

Friday’s action demands that we love ourselves enough to dare to disrupt our habits and give ourselves the chance for new life and new experiences. 

Learning to pour love into places and people, and learning to love ourselves, is generous, and it is Godly.  This is a good challenge to rise to.  But for me, this reading overwhelmingly reassures me that even in my most unlovely moments, God is still my heavenly Father, and still longs to gather me, like a mother hen protecting her chicks.