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Is there any hope?

The moss and lichen living on this standing stone in the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney, are just stunning.

We are coming up to Creation Time in the liturgical calendar and want to motivate people to positive action for people and planet. There is a strong desire to offer hope, but what hope can we honestly offer and what is the meaning of Christian hope in these times anyway?

I came across the following quote from NASA scientist Kate Marvel, which I find very helpful:

The opposite of hope is not despair. It is grief… we need courage, not hope… Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.

Now I think that we do need hope, but I would like to carefully define the nature of this hope. I have come up with a little diagram to illustrate where I have got up to in my thinking. It is just a diagram, and inevitably oversimplifies, but I offer it in case you find it helpful:

The idea is that once a person becomes aware of the ecological crises facing us, they might respond in one of two ways – with hope, or with grief.

Hope can be a good thing in that it can motivate you to take action, to do whatever you can to prevent disaster in the belief that your actions (as part of a collective effort, of course) can make a difference, along with technological innovations, government action etc. (the hope/action pathway). However, hope can also be counterproductive, if we are too hopeful, we can slip into complacency, believing that ‘they’ will find a solution and that we can carry on our lives the same as usual (hope/complacency).

Grief can be counterproductive if it means that we end in despair, seeing the depth of the crises and believing that nothing can be done. In this case, there is no point engaging and the result is paralysis (grief/despair). However, grief can also be a route into something positive. If we face up to the likely negative scenarios and go through a process of grief and lament, we can come out the other side as changed people, reinvigorated in our commitment to caring for creation with the courage and determination to make significant changes (grief/courage).

Many of the subsequent actions of the grief/courage pathway will overlap with those at the end of the hope/action pathway, but the motivation will be somewhat different. For grief/courage, the aim is no longer to prevent disaster, but to do whatever we can to minimize the impact of what is to come, to adapt our lifestyles and become more resilient; this is where I find myself, although I am only just at the very beginning of working out the implications for me. There can even be hope at the end of the grief/courage pathway, my hopes are the following:

– That, as we face increasingly difficult conditions, we will be faithful to God’s values, and live in such a way as to bring light, truth, peace and joy into whatever situations we find ourselves in.

– That, even if it gets to the point that the planet is no longer habitable for humans, life will survive in refugia and repopulate the planet in new and amazing ways, as happened after the fall of the dinosaurs.

– That, whatever happens, God will be with us every step of the way, and we will all ultimately find our home in the heart of the Divine.

My Bible passage for this morning was Romans 15:13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. This hope comes from a trust in God, not from a trust in what humans might do to dig ourselves out of our current hole. Our hope needs to be deeper than that. A hope coming from a trust that God is good, that he has the beginning and the end in his hands. It seems like the challenge is to hold together joy, peace and hope at the same time as facing and being with the grief, pain and suffering of all the inhabitants of this planet.

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DNR+

Last Sunday I sat in St Magnus cathedral in Kirkwall, the capital of the Orkney Islands. Along both side walls was a series of tombstones with large images of skulls, coffins and hour glasses at the bottom (see above). Many generations sitting in that cathedral have been reminded of their own mortality week by week. While in our time, with the exception of funerals, we don’t tend to talk about our return to the dust of the earth… but I wonder whether we should?

I think it could help people close to death and feeling afraid if we felt able to talk openly about our inevitable end. And if we discussed our death and how we would (ideally) like to die, perhaps we might avoid some of the prolonged suffering resulting from the advances of modern medicine? I decided some time ago that I would sign a DNR (a do not resuscitate order) in due course, but after what I have witnessed in recent years, I would like to expand that to encompass a broader set of eventualities, something along the lines of:

If I have a heart attack: do not resuscitate.
If I catch pneumonia: don’t give me antibiotics.
If I need an operation to be kept alive: don’t operate.
If you need to tie my hands down to stop me pulling at the feeding tube: remove the feeding tube.

I am very aware that many will disagree with me and wish to prolong life for as long as possible at almost any cost, but this isn’t what I want. When I’m ready (which I assume won’t be for some time), I plan to sign my ‘DNR plus’ form and let nature take its course.

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Guided meditation – a barbecue on the beach

The light shines through these pods to reveal the embryonic peas – nature’s ‘ultrasound’!

This in an imaginative contemplation based on one of Jesus’ appearances after the resurrection, John 21:1b-17.

In this form of prayer, we trust our imagination to lead us into an encounter with Jesus, so let the creative side of you explore the possibilities. Try not to censor yourself or be too concerned about keeping to the factual details, but trust the Holy Spirit to lead you into a closer connection with God.

I suggest that you start with a stilling to help center yourself, to come to a place of rest, such as one of the ones available here.

Then read the passage a couple of times, until you are familiar with it.

And finally listen to this imaginative contemplation.

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The spiritual life of a blackcurrant

I finally came across a scripture passage that described this phenomenal blackcurrant! You really need to read the passage for this to make any sense.

A couple of years ago I created a Hügelkultur bed. I gathered discarded branches and logs of various sizes and buried them under a mound of earth, in the hope that the rotting wood would become a spongy mass and act as a reservoir for water, keeping the soil moist and reducing the need for watering. It was not a great success. Last autumn, I decided to turn it inside out, using the not very rotted wood to make a very rustic-looking frame for a more conventional vegetable bed. In so doing, I discovered a branch that had taken root and had even produced a shoot with some leaves on it. I was so amazed that this branch had spent those two years under the ground growing an extensive root system, to only in the previous few weeks emerge into the sunlight that I decided that I had to give it another chance (in its favour was the fact that I suspected it might be a currant). I replanted it into the newly-formed bed and waited. In the last week, I have been rewarded by a very vigorous bush producing clusters of succulent blackcurrants. When I read Ephesians 3:14-20 this morning, I knew that I had found the perfect Bible passage to describe this phenomenon.

The passage starts with the statement that every family in heaven and on earth takes its name from the Father – and so this anonymous branch maintained its identity as a blackcurrant, an identity written into the DNA of each of its resilient cells, despite being discarded and buried. Of all the branches that I buried, this was the only one that clung onto life – its inner being having been strengthened by the power of the Spirit that gives life to all things, according to the riches of the glory of Christ who rose from the dead. Through the faith of God in his creation, the life of Christ dwelt within the heart of this branch, which was literally rooted and grounded in the depths of the earth, nourished by the love of its creator.

And once the branch was ready, it sent a shoot to the outside world – and reached sunlight! As its leaves started to flow with energy, it comprehended, with all the other chlorophyll-containing saints (I’m looking at my glorious pea plants as I write this, the breadth and length and height and depth of the generosity of God who provides light –light which feeds and sustains, and fills them with the fullness of God. Then, wonder of wonders, the power at work within that discarded branch accomplished abundantly far more than all I could have asked for or imagined – beautiful clusters of delicious currants. To God be glory in the church, in my garden and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.

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My problem with Pentecost

A glorious mess of poppies, strawberries and tomato plants (and a rogue blackcurrant)!

Pentecost is another of those church events that I find difficult, and this morning I realised why. The original story (Acts 2:1-13) describes the coming of the Holy Spirit in the very physical forms of wind, fire and speaking in tongues.

In the circles in which I moved as a teenager, we were expected to have a similarly tangible experience of charismatic gifts, with the pinnacle being ‘slain in the Spirit’. But I was never slain in the Spirit nor gifted charismatically, which, at the time, left me feeling like there was something very wrong with me. Was I not worthy enough? Was I too closed? Did God not like me? (I knew he had to love me.) Now I see things differently, but there is still that place of vulnerability in me that wonders what I was doing wrong to not have this wonderful experience that others had.

I don’t believe that God hides from us; like Adam and Eve in the garden, we are the ones who hide from God – surely if we desire the Holy Spirit, she won’t refuse us? Even in traditions that don’t fall into the charismatic bracket, there is an understanding, expressed in liturgy and song, of the Spirit coming into people from the outside. Maybe it’s just semantics, but the language of being ‘filled with the Spirit’ implies that the Spirit is an external force that needs to be persuaded to enter into us, and probably in a limited way and only if certain conditions are met.

So how might we understand the Spirit differently? I love the idea of the Celtic wild goose, but spent too much time in close proximity to geese in my childhood to find it a genuinely helpful image (too much squawking and mud). Another concept is of the breath of God – something continually with us that keeps us alive, but that mostly goes unnoticed.

My current understanding is that the Holy Spirit dwells in that place within which is our point of connection to God, our inner being. This is something that every human being (and who knows, maybe all beings, and even all matter?) has within them, since we are made in the image of God. In this sense, as we are all connected to God – whether consciously or not – we are also all connected to each other through our connection to God. The degree to which we are in touch with this place is the degree to which we experience the Spirit; she isn’t something that God parcels out for good behaviour or right belief, but is available to all of us, all of the time. The Spirit is always there, but is sometimes experienced more deeply – when we reach into the depths of ourselves in silence or when we open ourselves to letting the Spirit bubble up out of our depths and into our consciousness, so that Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water (John 7:38).

I don’t want to deny people’s dramatic experiences of the Holy Spirit, but I would like to reframe them in terms of moments of special grace. When we are open, the way to that inner point of connection with God is made wider and our experience of the Holy Spirit is deeper, and it feels like the Spirit has made her home within us in a special way (Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’ John 14:23).

Perhaps on the day of Pentecost a physical manifestation was needed to convince the early church of the radical new concept that the Spirit dwelt within them and connected them to Christ, or perhaps this is a mythical story to teach us about the universality of the Spirit and the power of connection to God. I don’t really mind either way, but what I do mind is when people feel that their experience of the Spirit (whether tangible or not) is not valid. God deals with each one of us as individuals and our very different experiences just cannot be compared.

The Spirit is within us, we are already connected with God; the invitation is to dig deeper into this reality.

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The one great fear

I just love the curling tendrils of pea plants!

As a kid, I loved storms, the sound of rain hammering on the roof and counting the seconds between the thunder and lightning to work out how far away the epicentre was. As an adult, I can’t help feeling anxious during storms, or any extremes of weather, as I instinctively associate them with climate change. I woke up during a violent rainstorm last night and felt a powerful jolt of fear – but rather than numb myself, which is my typical strategy for coping with feeling overwhelmed, I tried to take a more constructive approach. Richard Rohr talks about God participating in the one great suffering through Christ on the cross, and how we can stand in solidarity with the suffering of others by consciously aligning our small suffering with the greater whole. I so applied this principle to my reaction to the storm – my fear of damage to my little vegetable patch being a tiny part of that bigger fear already experienced by people who have lost their entire livelihoods due to flooding. I wrote the following words as a reflection of this experience:

I wake in the night to unseasonal rain,
Sudden, violent.
Visceral fear overwhelms me – my little garden!
Wildly disproportionate, yet
Connecting me to the greater fear
Of crops destroyed,
communities wrecked.
A fear known at Golgotha
And drawn into the godhead.
I close my eyes and try to sleep.

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Why did Jesus leave it to the last minute?

The very first of the first fruits… I wonder whether the slugs will leave me any of them?

This is a reflection on Luke 24:36-53 for Ascension day

I was a very impatient child and always in a rush. My mother would repeatedly say to me ‘more haste, less speed’, and I was covered in so many bumps and bruises from doing things too quickly that my dad worried social services might come round to find out what was going on. That impatient part of me was brought up short by one short phrase in verse 45 of today’s gospel reading.

Luke recounts Jesus’ last interactions with his disciples. He spoke peace over them, encouraged them to have faith and showed them the wounds on his hands and feet. But, for the disciples, the news that Jesus was alive was too good to be true and they struggled to believe. Jesus had to go as far as snacking on a bit of fish to convince them he wasn’t a ghost. These disciples are not exactly what we might consider to be role models of faith. Yet, despite this, v45 tells us that Jesus ‘opened their minds to understand the scriptures’.

I find it fascinating that while Jesus had spent three years with his disciples and had ample time to open their minds, that he didn’t do so until after the trauma of the passion, and just as he is about to leave them. Why did he wait until then? If only Jesus had kick-started this process of revelation much earlier, think how much better prepared the disciples would have been for their subsequent mission, how much pain they could have been spared if they’d known that the crucifixion was only a temporary setback, and how much conflict from theological disagreements could have been avoided over the millennia. It would have given the disciples time to digest the information, ask questions and get everything properly worked out while they could still check the details in person with Jesus.

But these questions of mine are framed within a particular mindset that focuses on learning, achieving and making progress as rapidly as possible; while Jesus had a different purpose in mind. We strive for knowledge and power, look at how we are embracing artificial intelligence, assuming that if just we put our collective brains together we can solve the world’s problems; while Jesus let his disciples walk a path of ambiguity and pain. Our impatient mindset has resulted in something known as the ‘great acceleration’, the rapid and widespread increase in human activity which began around the mid-20th century and is having a devastating impact on the Earth’s natural systems.

The great acceleration is illustrated by a series of exponential graphs – with a shallow gradient until the 1950s, that shifts to a sudden and dramatic increase in recent years – and this holds true for many factors, ranging from the global population and plastic production, to ocean acidification and telecommunications. The impact of our ‘progress at any cost’ mindset on our planet and her inhabitants is catastrophic. We have used our knowledge and discoveries to bring about massive and rapid change, much of it arguably for the good, yet we have done this without wisdom and without insight into the potential unintended consequences.

This is so different from the way that Jesus worked with his disciples. Rather than ensuring they learned, achieved and made progress as rapidly as they possibly could, Jesus let the disciples go though through the drama of the passion before he opened their minds. During the passion, the disciples went on their own journeys of failure, betrayal, loss, grief and confusion. Post-resurrection, their faith and hope were rebuilt slowly, and, rather than being announced with trumpet blasts and choirs of angels, the resurrection itself was met with disbelief and soldiers whose silence could be bought with a few coins. Even as he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, Jesus emphasized his suffering, saying ‘The messiah is to suffer and to rise’ and when He blessed them, he did so by lifting up his wounded hands – a visual reminder of his suffering. This painful process is incompatible with any route to success that our society can imagine.

Jesus’s whole ministry was full of ambiguity, hyperbole and parables, he certainly didn’t teach in straight lines, perhaps partly to avoid us ever being too sure about what he was saying – to keep us humble and teachable? And giving the disciples the understanding they needed at the last possible moment seems entirely in character with this!

Had Jesus opened their minds earlier, these insights might have prevented them from humbly engaging with the message of the Gospel. With the ‘answer’ in their pockets, without having failed so catastrophically themselves, and without then fully engaging with Jesus’s suffering and death, they might have too easily distorted the message from a place of self-satisfaction.

Which is what, I fear, the church has done many times throughout the centuries. From a position of certainty and strength, we have forced Christianity upon others, causing all manner of damage in the process. But failure, humility and grace is a red line throughout the Scriptures. One of our earliest role models, St Paul, is someone who first had to get everything very badly wrong, ruthlessly persecuting the early church, before he was ready to become arguably the most influential Christian of all time – he had that touchstone of his own total failure, coupled with grace given by a God who knows what it is to suffer.

It might also comfort us to know that those who walked with Jesus himself had to go through the threshold of suffering – since Jesus didn’t spare his beloved friends, we shouldn’t expect him to spare us either. Rather than asking why we are suffering as if it were an aberration, might we come to accept it as a normal part of life to be faced and even embraced as the material we have to work with in this moment?

For example, the material my daughter had to work with over the last few years has come in the form of two very difficult bouts of depression. Looked at through the lens of capitalism, this experience was nothing but an unfortunate set-back to her career that rendered her less ‘successful’ and less able to produce, consume and generally keep the system going. However, she was forced to engage with this material to find a way forward, and although she wouldn’t wish depression on anyone and certainly doesn’t ever want to go through it again, the work she had to do to get healthy again has helped her to become more true to who she really is.

There is so much unnecessary suffering in the world that seems to serve no purpose. And just as we struggle to accept the suffering in our own lives, the suffering woven into the very fabric of creation is a great mystery. Consider the parasitoid wasp, who lays its eggs inside the body of a living caterpillar. These hatch and feed on their living host until the day they paralyze it and bore their way out through its skin to escape. Or consider the cuckoo who hatches in other birds’ nests and pushes its rivals out to their deaths. As Tennyson wrote in his poem In Memorandum, Nature is red in tooth and claw.

But St Paul seems very at home with the idea, and frequently links the early church’s experience of persecution and suffering to sharing in Christ’s sufferings as well as in his glory. For St Paul, this is the normal Christian experience; and I would extend that to being the normal human experience. We all share in Christ’s suffering, and he shares in ours – I feel there must be an open wound in the very heart of God.

While God can work through our suffering to bring growth, we must be careful not to go either to the extreme of spiritual bypassing (whereby we avoid our negative feelings by telling ourselves not to get upset because it’s all part of God’s plan) or to the extreme of self-flagellation – life brings suffering enough on its own, we don’t need to add to it. And, of course, Jesus calls us to alleviate suffering wherever we can, to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and visit those in prison – it is clearly not something to encourage or ignore.

At the end of our gospel passage, Jesus blessed his disciples and left them – at which point they were filled with great joy. There must have been great joy in knowing that God wasn’t demanding perfection through flawless adherence to the law, as they had been taught, but that God welcomes broken, messed-up, failures to join him in the adventure of life. There is great joy in knowing that suffering isn’t something alien to us that we need to resist, but that it is part of what makes us the complex, beautiful people that we are. It creates depth as it hollows us out and makes a space where God is freer to work. There is joy and freedom in realising that the places we considered broken, shameful and ugly are the very places where God works to bring forth beauty, courage, and compassion.

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Intercessory prayer based on Psalm 65

It’s so easy to see the presence of God in the Springtime!

I wrote this prayer based on Psalm 65 – feel free to fill in the gaps!

O God of our salvation, O hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas

We bring to you our concerns today, knowing that you always hear us when we pray.

Happy are they whom you choose and draw to your courts to dwell there. We shall be satisfied with the blessings of your house, even of your holy temple.

We thank you for our communities of faith, and all the places where you sustain us. We ask for your blessing upon them. We pray for gifts of stamina, resilience, grace and wisdom to those who lead us….

You still the raging of the seas, the roaring of their waves and the clamour of the peoples.

We pray you will still the raging of leaders who do not follow your ways, or care for the people in their charge. We pray for leaders whose hearts are drawn to service and who seek your wisdom. We pray for so many troubled places of the world where the people clamour for peace, for a new desire to work together to find solutions that will last. We pray for … .

Those who dwell at the ends of the earth tremble at your marvels; the gates of the morning and evening sing your praise.

We pray for those in the morning of their lives, for the young people on our hearts…

We pray for those in the evening of their lives, in particular for …

We pray for those who have passed beyond the evening of their life, and for the families and friends of those who they have left behind. We pray for…

You visit the earth and water it; you prepare grain for your people, you soften the ground with showers and bless its increase and crown the year with your goodness.

We pray for those who live in fear of flooding or drought, who cannot depend on the weather. Help us to act in solidarity, treasuring the precious gift of water and striving to minimize our impact on climate change. We long for a world where everyone enjoys the fruits of creation. Give us the imagination and the courage to walk the road that will us lead there.

May the pastures of the wilderness flow with goodness and the hills be girded with joy.

We pray for those who feel they are in the wilderness, who are struggling with their health, fearful for the future, or dealing with other problems. May their wilderness begin to flow with goodness and their lives be filled with joy. We pray for…

May the meadows be clothed with flocks of sheep and the valleys stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing.

We share in the joy of those who are particularly aware of your blessings upon them…

Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion; to you that answer prayer shall vows be paid. With wonders you will answer us in your righteousness

We leave our prayers with you, trusting in your righteousness and readiness to answer us. Help us to notice your wonders and to live in praise of you. In the name of Christ,
Amen.

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But what did Tabitha want?

My neighbour’s cat seeing off an enemy cat on behalf of my (black and white) cat, who now considers turf wars beneath him.

I had a strong reaction to this morning’s reading from Acts 9:36-41. This was the story of Tabitha, a woman who was very active in the church community. ‘Full of good works’, she helped the poor and even made coats and clothes for widows. But then she fell sick and died, at which point Peter, who happened to be in the neighbourhood, was summoned. He prayed for Tabitha and summoned her back to life again.

But is this what Tabitha wanted?

It sounds like she had worked very hard for her church community, perhaps in death she had found rest and peace? Would she really have wanted to come back from that? Were they expecting her to carry on as before? In her death they had lost a valued member of their pastoral care team – is this why Peter brought her back to life again?

Perhaps something to bear in mind if we start to value others for their contribution to our community rather than for who they are, or if we are tempted to use other people for ‘God’s purposes’ rather than supporting them in their journey of faith…

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Death is swallowed up by life

Between my dad’s death and his funeral, I dug a new vegetable plot and wove a fence around it using willow branches I had just pruned away. Dad’s body was placed in a wicker coffin, and this plot reminds me of that. With the coming of Spring, the upright branches have begun to sprout with new life.

I tend to talk about my dad dying rather than passing away because I want to face what happened head on. This was my first direct experience of death and, although it was a great privilege to be with my dad as he died, it was quite confusing. He suffered a heart attack and while I waited for the ambulance I tried to reassure him that I was with him, at the same time as not being sure whether he was still with me.

I witnessed my dad struggle to cling on to this life – but what was going on with that eternal part of him, his ‘being’, for want of a better word? As I read 2 Corinthians 5:1-5 the other morning, I was struck by these words in verse 4: so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. This is an extraordinary image of what happens when we die – our being is somehow engulfed in that greater life that is God. Our very being joins with the ground of all being and we fully realise our unity with God, as we are hidden in Him with Christ. My dad was not religious, and he had good reasons for that, yet the things that were most important to him: justice, integrity, and the equal value of all human beings, are important to God too and, I am sure, continue to bind them together.