Month: August 2024

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Back to school prayers

Freshly harvested coriander seeds.

These prayers were inspired by the reading for last Sunday’s service: Ephesians 6:10-20

Heavenly father, at this time of new beginnings we ask for your grace, strength and wisdom as we prepare for the next academic year.

In Ephesians 6, Paul encourages us to put on the whole armour of God, and so we fasten the belt of truth around our waists – help us to embrace all that is good and beautiful and true. May those who are studying enjoy their learning, and may all of us keep our minds open and willing to learn until the end of our days. Give grace and patience to those who teach and care for us, and help us to guide each other into truth.
Lord in your mercy: hear our prayer.

Next we put on the breastplate of righteousness. Help us take every opportunity to be kind to others, to include the person who seems to be left out, in the playground, at church, or wherever we find ourselves. Give us the courage to do what is right, even when it might be unpopular or cost us something, remembering your great love for every single person that we meet.
Lord in your mercy: hear our prayer.

And then we put on shoes that make us ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. May we be peacemakers where there is conflict, teach us ways to disagree well, and help us to remember that you ask us not only to love our friends but also our enemies.
Lord in your mercy: hear our prayer.

Next we take hold of the shield of faith, to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one, so that when things are difficult, we remember that you love us, that we matter to you, and that however hard things get, nothing can separate us from your love. Thank you for the people you have made us, with our skills and gifts as well as our weaknesses and foibles; help us to put all of who we are at your service and to resist the voices that seek to undermine us.
Lord in your mercy: hear our prayer.

We now put on the helmet of salvation, surrounding our minds with the assurance that we are safe with you, that we are united with Christ in God. Help us to remember that, whether our studies, work, or other activities are going well or badly, you love us just the same. Thank you that our place in your heart is assured no matter what is going on in our lives.
Lord in your mercy: hear our prayer.

And finally we grasp the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, not to attack other people but to help us learn the best way to live and to make wise decisions. As we enter this new academic year, teach us your ways and may we grow ever closer to you.
Merciful father: accept these prayers for the sake of your son, our saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

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Elderberries, hens and societal collapse

Straining the juice

Beautiful patterns in the nascent jelly

We went foraging a lot when I was a child, for blackberries, elderberries, and even firewood on a couple of occasions; the fun continued when we got home, with hot cauldrons of boiling jam and jars of jewel-like sweetness. To this day I have a very soft spot for certain preserves, elderberry and apple jelly being one of them – it has a very particular taste that doesn’t suit everyone’s palate, but it reminds me of those happy days foraging.

Not long after we moved in to our current home, I planted an elder tree in the garden, and for the last couple of years it has had enough fruit on it to make jelly, so yesterday I harvested the berries. I looked up a recipe online and stumbled across a blog post entitled Taking Care of the Elders, which brought me up short. The author of this blog encourages her readers to forage responsibly, only taking a maximum of 10% of the berries from each tree, leaving the rest for the wildlife and giving the tree a good chance of reproducing itself. I, however, practically stripped my tree bare.

In my defence, this is a tree that I had planted, not a wild specimen, and I couldn’t risk letting the juicy dark red clusters fall onto my neighbour’s pristine astroturf – but that isn’t the point. Despite having read Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants less than a year ago and totally taking on board the author’s mantra of reciprocity, respect, and restraint, I didn’t remotely reflect on that as I greedily, but at least gratefully, took all the ripe berries I could reach.

I’m clearly not the only person with this problem, as in many parts of Switzerland there are strict rules, for example about mushrooms: when you are allowed to pick them, and how many, in order to protect them for the future, which is important as mushroom picking grows in popularity. This tendency to take too much is part of a much bigger problem, as described in the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive; why societies fall apart is obviously a complex question with many factors involved, but one analogy that stuck with me from this book was how often we choose to eat the ‘hen’ rather than sustainably eating her ‘eggs’.

Perhaps I can at least partly blame the culture I find myself in, with its very short-term perspective, fear of scarcity and the need to hoard to get through the winter? It pains me to say how very challenged I am by the Indian proverb “Store your grain in your neighbour’s belly”, as I am far more likely to fill up my freezer than to be generous towards others with any abundance from my garden.

I can’t promise to limit myself to only 10% of next year’s potential elderberry harvest, but I will at least remember this reflection and leave some for the birds.

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Does the fruit of the tree of life have grubs in it?

This year, my fig tree is producing lots of fruit. Unfortunately for me, the birds in my garden also have a taste for figs and so I have taken to picking the fruit before it is fully ripe, since the birds swiftly demolish any that I miss. Even then, about half the figs I harvest contain a grub or two who have eaten their way through a good part of the flesh.

And so, as I was reading the words of my daily prayer for Sunday morning: Come and shelter under the tree of life, enjoy the cool shade and taste its fruit my mind went straight to my fig tree. In my imagination, I picked a ripe fruit and settled myself down on a shady chair – but I stopped myself short, did I dare take a big bite? What if it were full of grubs? Could the fruit of the tree of life have grubs in? Surely not, since heaven, where the tree of life is found, is perfect! Surely there is no place in paradise for grubs, slugs, nettles and everything else that causes me trouble?!

Of course, this is a philosophical question, it being highly unlikely that the afterlife will resemble life on Earth, and perhaps I shouldn’t make so much of symbols anyway, particularly apocalyptic ones? But it did strike me that perhaps at least some of the fruit of the tree of life would contain grubs. The insects they will grow into have a role to play in the ecosystem, just like the birds who enjoy their figs as much as I do.

It’s interesting to notice that I can come to terms with sharing the fruit of the tree of life with the grubs and the birds, while sharing the figs from my own tree is much more problematic. I think that, since I planted and tended the tree, I see them as my figs, that I have an exclusive right to them.

It looks like the problem here might be my selfishness and anthropocentrism! Maybe heaven, the kingdom of God, is where I can share my figs with the birds and the insects without begrudging them their share, after all:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.

Isaiah 11:6

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A form of daily prayer

My first-ever baby cucumber!

I have been meaning to put together a simple form of morning and evening prayer for a while now, and have finally managed to get it finished. I have unashamedly chosen my favourite passages and modified them to fit the pattern of the liturgy. I hope you find them helpful.

I have mainly focused on passages that explore the glory of God as seen in creation, to help encourage a sense of awe, but have also chosen passages that point us to ultimate hope.

Since there are fourteen separate sets of prayers, I have put them as individual tabs on a separate page. You can access them here, or even download them as a PDF for printing, (print them as a ‘booklet’.)

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1 Corinthians 2:9-16

My daughter finds deep symbolism in the stressed-looking mother opossum carrying her babies around, and felt the need to express this in clay 😉

I was pondering 1 Corinthians 2:9-16 on a train journey a few weeks ago – it’s rather dense text, and so my imagination took a bit of a leap. I’d like to share with you where I ended up. Once again, I wish I were an artist, because these verses conjure up a beautiful image that I struggle to describe in words.

Verse 10 talks about the Spirit who searches everything, even the depths of God, and so we start with the Holy Spirit reaching into the heart of God the Father.
Then in verse 11, we read that the human spirit, deep within us, knows what is truly human – our spirit reaches deep into our hearts.
Verse 12 tells us that we have received the Spirit that is from God, this makes a connection between our heart and the heart of God. The Holy Spirit joins with the spirit of our inner being, bringing us and God into union.

I imagine the Holy Spirit as a sort of dynamic loop of light flowing from the heart of God into our hearts, bringing love and peace. Once inside, the Spirit searches out our inmost being (Psalm 139:1-6), and then flows out of our bodies, bringing all we are living with into the heart of God the Father, where Christ is. This is an unbroken flow of the Spirit between our heart and the heart of God.

This action of the Holy Spirit changes our hearts and changes our minds, to the point that Paul dares to write in verse 16 that ‘we have the mind of Christ’. I am comforted by this intimate image of the love of God the Father being brought into my heart by the Holy Spirit, and that the troubles of my heart are then carried up to Christ in God, who understands me and transforms me.

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It’s high time I wrote something about compost.

My compost heap has gradually been working on me. I no longer pull out the pervasive weeds that invade my vegetable beds in frustration, rather these days I do it with gratitude, as they will soon be transformed into food for my plants in the warm, dark womb of the heap.

This morning I decided that it was time to cut down the stinging nettles standing guard around it. Since the neighbours have kindly consented to donating their kitchen scraps to my garden project, I thought I ought to at least make the area reasonably accessible. As I was stuffing the felled nettles into the top of the heap, I noticed a seedling that had grown at the bottom – probably a courgette or a pumpkin – and it made me smile.

Compost can also be a metaphor for life. Everything that happens to us, good or bad, can be put on the inner compost heap, broken down over time with reflection and prayer, and then be transformed into something new and life-giving. We have to trust this slow but steady process, perhaps that’s what the words I was reading in the letter of James this morning were talking about?

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Colossians 3:1-11

Limax maximus: slugs are my enemies, but this is a fabulous specimen, and, after all, we are called to love our enemies!

I was struck the other morning by the mysterious words at the beginning of chapter 3 of the letter to the Colossians. I had a sense of our inner beings being drawn out of a state of turmoil and darkness (3:1 you have been raised with Christ) into a place of warmth, light and safety (3:3 hidden with Christ in God).

Traditionally when we’ve thought of being ‘raised with Christ’ we’ve mostly talked about being forgiven our sins, about guilt and sacrifice, but as I read it, it feels like being raised up out of the consequences of sin – what has been done to us and how in our weakness and pain we have reacted – in an act of profound healing.

I had a good childhood, with a stable home and parents that loved me. But being a highly sensitive person, I took the inevitable knocks of life very hard. I became a very anxious child and suffered with inexplicable stomach aches that I now understand as an expression of my built-up stress. This later appeared in various forms such as free-floating anxiety and teeth-grinding. I tried to ‘leave it at the foot of the cross’ and ‘just trust God’, but it wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I realised I had to do my part and stop turning things over in my mind; viewing them from every conceivable angle in a compulsive attempt to solve the problem was only making things worse. Trusting God meant properly letting go, and with that came great relief.

I made a conscious step of faith aged 12, which I see as the beginning of my healing, of my being raised with Christ. If I were an artist, I would draw a figure in the bottom left-hand corner of the page drowning in a murky quagmire, or entangled in a forbidding thorny forest, unable to escape from their anxiety and distress. Then in the top right-hand corner there is an area of pure light where God is, out of which reach the hands of Christ to grab hold of the suffering person and pull them into the light. The person’s true self is also made of light, and that becomes visible as they are raised up out of their distress.

Then I would draw another picture, this time of God the Father holding the figure together with Christ at the centre of a warm embrace. It is a place of utter peace, love and rest, of light and wholeness… and there is room for everyone in the all-encompassing arms of God (3:11 there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!)

My experience is that the move from being in the quagmire to being aware of our safety in the arms of God does not take place overnight. As with every relationship, it develops in stages and continues to grow. Verse 10 says [you] have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. This present, active process started, at least as I understand it, at the age of 12, and since then my faith in God has been growing and changing in a surprising (and very non-linear) journey of discovery, and there is still so much more to learn!

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Does God love us more than the dinosaurs?

When my children were small, I felt that in order to be a ‘good mother’ I ought to take them swimming, even though I didn’t really want to. It was always such a joy when the pool was unexpectedly closed, because that meant we could pop over the road and spend the afternoon in the local natural history museum. The dinosaur section remains our favourite, and we aren’t the only ones who feel that way: a friend’s son said that he couldn’t believe in a God who would let the dinosaurs be wiped out. That got me thinking… there are hints in the Bible about a future restoration of heaven and earth, but we have no idea how or when, so what follows is neither theology nor palaeontology, but just where my imagination takes me!

Why do we assume that God loves us more than the dinosaurs? Do you know how much longer they lived on the Earth than we have done? 600 times! They roamed an abundant planet filled with horsetails and ferns, giant millipedes and dragonflies, and mysterious creatures that the fossil record only hints at.

And yet, God did not spare their majesty from the comet’s strike. She surely wept over this devastation, such great loss of diversity, curiosity, and life – but God picked up the pieces and started again. She nurtured the beings hidden in refugia that were spared the worst of the calamity. These persistent threads of life not only survived, but thrived as God guided their evolution into ever-widening variety, spreading to fill every ecological nook and cranny until the Earth was teaming with life again; and God saw that it was good.

One particular ape caught God’s eye. She called them up onto two legs and taught them language, love, and art. She gave them the freedom to choose good, the capacity for reason, and a desire for union with the divine. Since God had called them out of the primordial earth, she named them earth creatures – Adam – reminding them of their connection with the soil. But Mother Earth did not give Adam an easy time, there were poisonous plants and dangerous animals, the heat, the cold, and conflicts with other humans. These struggles against the forces of nature were the crucible in which we grew and developed, learnt to master our surroundings, and made our lives more comfortable – but as the balance of power shifted too far, the price was paid by other humans and by the rest of the natural world.

God saw our increasing alienation from her, from the earth, and from each other. She spoke in many ways, but we struggled to hear. In Christ, she communicated directly by becoming human, and showed the way for us to live in harmony with all things. But still we struggled to hear.

In time, we discovered vast stores of gas, coal, and oil, made from prehistoric plants and plankton buried deep underground millions of years before even the dinosaurs made their appearance. We were cold, and we knew no better than to burn them, precipitating our own extinction, and the extinction of most of everything else. God is not sparing her reflected majesty in us, but is surely weeping over the loss of so much diversity, curiosity, and life. Perhaps one day, she will pick up the pieces of what survives in the refugia and start again? Lovingly storing us, and everything we have dragged down with us, deep underground. Then, in millions of years, with characteristic patience, who knows what new life God might draw out of the earth?