A Right Carry On

 

A few nights ago my training supervisor and I met to discuss, among other things, what I might give up in order to make room for my studies. The college guidance suggests I 'put down the PCC', which has its appeal.

The PCC survived the discussion, but there were other tasks which it was a 'no brainer' to stop. They included managing the sound during services, and helping clean the church room.

It didn't last, for the very next day I was in conversation with our churchwarden and she mentioned that one of our Lavalier microphones was dead and I was drawn into what we should do. Likewise, at the end of our meeting I realised that we'd met towards the end of the day in the week when we usually - you guessed it - clean the church room, and I apologised to her about missing it before beginning to suggest alternative days.

My training supervisor grinned and said something to the effect of 'welcome to ministry', where being swept up in other people's calls on your time comes with the territory.

If being on the PCC readily survived the cull of duties, it is because although it does call too much upon my time - even without my studies - it is nevertheless a place wherein I feel able to work out my calling (to help others themselves called to ministry). Sometimes, that happens in the wielding of a mop, too.

Yet awhile, I can see it is going to be a struggle for me to keep an eye on where I'm heading, and not allow myself to be drawn towards other people's demands. Servant ministry is important to me, but not at the cost that no-one gets where they're supposed to be: living in the Kingdom.

La la la not listening la la la ...

Evidently, Abraham Lincoln was wont to write 'hot letters'; missives in which he would vent his spleen on paper and then stash the result away 'unseen and unsent'. There's probably a person-centred therapy term for that, but anyway it matches what I was doing at silly-o-clock this morning when I couldn't sleep.

What kept me tossing and turning was that now that I have returned to theological studies, in search of licensing in Reader Ministry, I find the stubborn streak in me 'chuntering on' about how I'm being forced to do a weekend's residential on the rural context for ministry. Given that my new diocese is largely rural, the requirement seems sound enough, except that ...

... I moved to this diocese from another even more deeply rural, and I'm training at my theological alma mater, so I suspect I know exactly which benefice I'll be bussed off to to experience a few hours of what passes for rural life in the college's view.

Tossing and turning, I rehearsed all the knowledge and experience I have gained in a ministry that has been entirely rural since I've been a country dweller for over 25 years. The litany went something like:

• milking cows on Christmas morning
• receiving gifts of trout and pheasant from parishioners
• keeping a communion service going until the celebrant could make the ten miles from his previous church
• keeping an axe in the boot for those times when fallen trees stopped me driving ten miles to my next church
• etc

All this I threw at my keyboard for an hour or so before going back to bed, where I slept the sleep of the just.

Almost.

On waking, I turned to my latest reading matter (beyond Reader training), which happens to be John Kiser's The Monks of Tibhirine, and I came upon the following passage.

‘In [Bernardo’s] dream, one monk was throttling another and saying, ‘Fool, you’re wasting your time in the Muslim world—go where you are needed and can grow. You’re a deadweight to the Order.’ … Christian recounted Bernardo’s response when he awoke from the dream he had had during his visit to Tibhirine. “You are here so your Cistercian way of life can be enriched by what you gain from the local culture. This process of inculturation does not happen without anxiety over losing one’s own monastic identity. To avoid being overcome by this fear, the community must deepen and strengthen its own monastic culture.” [Kiser:2003]

Whatever my anger (for which read ‘fear’) at repetition of the Rural Context weekend, I haven’t stopped learning. Perhaps, just perhaps, I will develop my townie inculturation of living in and ministering among (I almost said ‘to’!) those who are often themselves, as newcomers, fighting the opportunities for enrichment that moving to the countryside brings.

… Besides, it will be good to know I can leave the retired colonels back in Wiltshire’s plains and downs when I return to the Mendip-hugging orchards where the Welsh come to retire ... both of which are perhaps the sort of preconceptions about my fellow country bums that I could do with expunging by dint of some repeat training.

Giving with the one hand ...

 

In a former parish I found there was a tacit agreement that anyone doing verger duties would let their fees go to the church. It struck me as wrong that anyone should make assumptions about the financial situation of other people. Also, I argued at the time, would it not benefit the church rather more if people claimed their verger fees but then donated them back, duly gift-aided where possible?

Then I had an image of Jesus overturning the table of the money-changers.

People commonly believe that Mark 11:15-18 is heavily down on churches being used as market places, and look somewhat guiltily at a book stall behind the font as a sign of the evil god Mammon's presence. But the main thrust of this passage and its synoptic equivalents seems to say more about the church determining that Mosaic law on sacrificial offerings could only be met by purchasing ritually pure animals from the church itself, and then setting the exchange rates to be levied so as to avoid unclean coinage going into church coffers. Yet, and yet, Jesus in his well-known 'Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's' comment (Mark 12:17), had the church's cards well and truly marked by showing how easily his detractors were able to produce a 'forbidden' Roman coin in the temple precincts.

If we offer our two copper coins (Mark 12:42) in a gift-aid envelope, what we're actually doing is saying 'I want some of the tax I have paid on my income to go to this or that charity, up to the whole of my tax payments'. Which is to say, into this or that charity rather than the NHS, social housing, education, etc.

The gift-aid scheme was lobbied for not by average church-goers, RNLI supporters and so on but by rich companies and individuals seeking to game a host of tax-avoidance schemes. If we use gift-aid in our regular giving, I have the uneasy feeling that we are complicit in such schemes. We can scarcely complain about wholesale avoidance of income and corporate tax if we whittle away what's left.

I Walk the Line

It was a great delight this morning to walk the labyrinth at Sheldon, home of the Society of Mary and Martha and a retreat centre in Devon. The labyrinth here is a full-sized replica of the one at Chartres, with one special difference: this one is outside.

No faint-hearted pilgrims here; nor do you tussle with tourists and cathedral seating to be able to pray your way in and out of it. You do however have the weather, attendant puddles and wind-blown brash from the trees, as well as rabbit droppings to contend with: and why not?

I’m struggling to read my way into a tome about the enneagram at the moment [Beesing et al (1984), The Enneagram: a Journey of Self Discovery, Denville, NJ: Dimension Books Inc.]. It is a struggle because the authors have cast the nine ‘types’ of the enneagram as the result of compulsions, avoidance techniques; ‘sins’ even. I have previously written of Peter Drucker’s view that one develops best when concentrating on those things which one is good at, if they are identifiable, rather than those things one is not good at. The message of Beesing et al seems to run to the contrary: ‘no pain, no gain’.

My inclination is that Drucker has it right, and concentrating on sin is not helpful. Yet I am drawn to my experience of the puddles and the droppings on this morning’s pilgrimage around the Sheldon labyrinth. Our journey through life is seldom along a clear path.

This morning I did something quite different to my normal way of walking a labyrinth. Rather than gaze prayerfully at my feet, a habit I’ve developed largely in order to keep to the path, I kept my head up in order to feel part of the landscape. It gave me a strong sense of place, and lo: I did not stray from the path. Perhaps starting out from an awareness of sin can be of use, but maintaining an holistic perspective is desirable. We are, after all, not alone in our sinfulness; and salvation is at hand if we but look up and notice.

Marriages Made in Heaven

A few years ago, I bumped into a former colleague at an Open University study day. We had worked together at the Medical Research Council: she as a radiographer and I as a laboratory technician. She left to have a baby a few months before I resigned to do other things, and so I asked her if she had returned to work. She looked askance at me, and told me that she’d not been able to go back. We had worked together in the late 1970s, and at that time there had been no right for women to return to work after maternity ‘leave’.

I believe that 30-40 years from now, someone will meet a pensioner and ask why he never married, and be as surprised as I to recall or discover that back in the early 2010s gay marriage had not been possible until, like my former colleague, it was too late.

I believe that today’s vote in the House of Commons in favour of gay marriage is progress, though I know not everyone will see it as such. I have listened to a few arguments against today, scarcely a wide view, let alone a scientific survey, but along the lines of the ‘the definition of marriage cannot change’, and ‘it wasn’t in any manifesto and shouldn’t be debated as legislation’. These are relatively easy to dispense with (underlining my selective choice, no doubt). Definitions change all the time. I don’t believe that ‘goods and chattels’ now include wives; and if items not included in party manifestos were to be banned, then early day motions and a raft of other parliamentary processes would disappear, and our democratic process would be diminished with them.

Chief among my thoughts following the vote, however, is one that I believe relates to a major argument against gay marriage. Despite what people have said on the matter, I don’t believe that my own marriage has been devalued by today’s decision. The promises my wife and I made before God are still ours and still extant and still important to who we are as two-joined-as-one. No man can put that asunder.

All Talk

It was the opinion of one commentator a few years back that I revealed too much of myself in my preaching. This is an issue worth looking at, since I hope not so much to wear my heart on my sleeve as to reflect my encounters with the living God. The former could disenfranchise a congregation, or give gossips ammunition: the latter, which is to say my own encounters with God, ought according to David Day (A Preaching Workbook) give hope to others through the authenticity it adds to my hermeneutics.

It has long been my view that my clergy colleagues are denied through their workload the chance to join with rather than lead their congregations. One hopes that they are more rigorous in their daily devotions than many of us, but in the end congregational worship is a boon to one’s own spiritual nurture. Here it is that the surprising nature of the Gospel, and the call to confession, contrition, and contribution, can be experienced to the full.

A less obvious reason for me until now has been that the pew is simply a great position to learn from as a preacher. To physically inhabit the same space as a congregation, to suffer the same numb backside or cold draft that they do, but also to hear Scripture dissected differently and to experience someone else’s gift of rhetoric, is all very useful.

This weekend I went to church as a worship leader from the perspective of someone wanting to know more about the congregation by worshipping with them. It turned out that I learned more of myself and my preaching style because of the privilege of hearing an ordained colleague.

Which is to say, on some level her sermon worked on me and I heard God moving me to action. She preached on Candlemas being a turning point in the church year, and it became for me a turning point in my leading of worship.

I still don’t know, I haven’t concluded either way, whether I reveal too much of myself in my preaching, yet I do feel God’s presence with me as he equips me to prepare and to deliver them. My hope is that the warm words of support I get from my listeners is because God speaks to them too, for in that lies the possibility of the Kingdom here on Earth.

Déjà vu

Mary came up to me at the end of a service to ask “Why do we need to love ourselves?” Now there’s a loaded question, steeped in overtones of ‘I’m having difficulty loving myself’, so mentally I took a deep breath and then had a stab at answering her.

I began this blog in the exilic state, 4 years ago, of having been turned down for ordination by my bishop of the time. I have of late been re-visiting the issue, but yesterday my Diocesan Director of Ordinands (DDO) sat with me to impart the news that the decision still stands. No-one has been convinced of any reason to change it.

At the heart of the decision is the lack of conviction in others that I can … well … elucidate? (no) … describe? (sort of) … enunciate? (spit it out, man, spit it out!) … verbalize? (almost there: c’mon) … to whatever it is my call to ordained ministry. I am unable to explain persuasively to others what it is that I feel God is calling me to, and why. You see the problem.

I am reminded, though perhaps it is a false memory, that the protagonist in Douglas Adams’s book Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is socially inept. When insulted by someone, he comes back with a cracking retort … about 4 hours later when tucked up in bed in his fleecy pyjamas. My memory of Douglas Adams’s art and literacy is perhaps flawed, but I am left with self-recognition of the character.

I am surrounded by loving support at this time, though that is a state I have enjoyed for a very long while. It therefore pains me to see how others are affected by my afflictions, among whom I include those who have had to rake up the past to consider how they arrived at the recommendation they did. They feel that all the evidence – or rather, the lack of it – shows that the system has worked well which has protected both someone who might be ordained, and a potential flock, from a wrong move.

In reporting to me how fully and sensitively the matter has been looked at, my DDO used the phrase ‘nebulous’ in relation to my efforts at describing my calling. It is a word I’m familiar with, being right in there in the Ed Psych’s report into my dyslexia. I have, I was told at that time, a somewhat nebulous problem with organization. That is, I find it difficult to martial ideas to a coherent argument or plan of action. I know and somehow instinctively understand more than I am able to say: so when asked something important, I incline to panic. How very frustrating, my Ed Psych told me, I must find it to have such an intellect and yet not be able to convey its machinations.

A ministry issue attaches to this problem. If I cannot describe why it is I feel that there is a tonsure-shaped hole in my ministry, a gap where a collar seems right, then how might I deal with matters of deep theological and practical pastoral concern raised by a parishioner?

Which brings me back to Mary and her softly put, slightly apprehensive, question: “Why do we need to love ourselves?” I find myself affirmed that people like Mary hear God speaking to them when I lead worship; glad that they find me approachable regarding their struggles; surprised that I can after all begin an ‘ad hoc’ dialogue on themes such as authentic love for others being present only when we can love ourselves; aware of the un-asked question that needs to be given time to emerge; and finally that I actually, substantially, care.

It is right that someone unable to articulate – thank you, Sara: that’s the word! – a sense of calling should be treated with caution when they persist in seeking ordination. I have, when all is said and done, struggled for many years with that very issue: why me, God? And thus we come to a rising tide of anger, no – frustration, within me which is fuelled not by the decision that I should not be ordained, but by my growing suspicion that perhaps the church – that is to say, people like Mary and I – has gaps in its ability to help ordinary people articulate their fears, faith, or feelings. It seems to me damningly to indict the system: a system that rightly strives to avoid ‘priming’ me with model answers to questions of discernment, but seems utterly unable to perceive that my real need is to be equipped to articulate those unspoken thoughts upon which ministry and other decisions might be based.

I have the feeling that Mary might benefit from joining the right sort of house or Lent group (she and I both). By the grace of God perhaps I may have a part in helping her to seek and acknowledge the forgiveness that seems thus far to have eluded her. But I find above all that I am deeply distressed that I have brought myself to be forbidden from entering into that sacramental ministry by which I might absolve her in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour.

I stand at the foot of the cross. And I feel, God forgive me, the weight of a hammer in my hand. I have failed my Lord, yet still he loves me. His love endures for ever. If I can persuade you of nothing else, trust me in this.