Five things...

Five things you probably didn’t know about me
1. I have visited Kazakhstan (before Borat, who hasn’t been there anyway).
2. I have a Silver C gliding proficiency award.
3. I have given 140 donations of blood.
4. I used to be paid to take my clothes off in public.
5. My napkin rings have been handled by HRH The Prince of Wales…

Having accepted Simon's challenge, he has also tagged the bloggers I would have tagged...so you are spared. This time.

Que sera sera...

If you haven't seen it already the forecast for 2007 produced by the prescient people at Religious Intelligence (is that an oxymoron or tautology, I wonder) is well worth a look. Try http://www.religiousintelligence.co.uk/news/?NewsID=533

Thanks to a certain Dean for the info.
And a belated Happy Christmas and premature Happy New Year to the (few) readers of this blog.

New Year photo quiz - who is the fellow in the photo?

The Costly Loss of Lament...

Wading my way through the essays – preparing sermons must be preferable – I have been reading what Walter Brueggemann has to say about lament psalms (The Psalms and the Life of Faith, 1995). Sounds boring? But it seems strangely applicable to recent discussion of what one puts on a blog about what goes on at college or at work (see www.wannabepriest.org.uk). Brueggemann notes that we have removed the laments from our use of the scriptures and thus have lost the specific social function that they perform. In the laments ‘Israel moves from articulation of the hurt and anger, to submission of them to God, and finally to relinquishment.’ The lament psalm redresses the distribution of power between the two parties, so that the complainer is taken seriously and God gets involved in the crisis.
Brueggemann asks what happens when appreciation of the lament as a form of speech and faith is lost, as it is largely now. When speech forms that redress power distribution are silenced and eliminated? His answer is ‘a theological monopoly is reinforced, docility and submissiveness are engendered, and the outcome in terms of social practice is to reinforce and consolidate the political-economic monopoly of the status quo. In other words, the removal of lament from life and liturgy is not disinterested…’ Later, ‘covenant minus lament is finally a practice of denial, cover-up and pretense, which sanctions social control.’ One party to the covenant is disenfranchised and has become voiceless.
Well, it gave me something to think about re what one blogs about. Does/can a blog function as a contemporary lament?
Back to Augustine of Hippo…

Quiet day: lunch

Called, we form
an accidental procession
along the double-bended
corridor, following
the old groove,
earthy threads worn
by our tread,
thin at tricky corners;
beyond a table spread,
bread for breaking,
wine for drinking.

The light of your presence…

Sitting yesterday in a wonderfully quiet and peaceful evening prayer, as writ in Common Worship, I got to musing about stained glass windows.
Wikipedia says the following about stained glass:
‘Although usually set into windows, the purpose of stained glass is not to allow those within a building to see out or even primarily to admit light but rather to control it. For this reason stained glass windows have been described as 'illuminated wall decorations'.’
(See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stained-glass)
Looking up at the chapel’s east window, I could see very little of its colours and design because it was dark outside. When you are inside a church you need light outside to see the windows. But if you are outside in the dark, there needs to be light inside the church in order for you to see the windows.
A reminder that as tellers of the gospel we need to be both in the church and outside in the world.

Pray always...

I am enjoying reading a book I bought on impulse while on our staircase quiet day at Ely Cathedral last week. I have more than enough books already but never mind, having lots of books seems to be a characteristic of vicar people. ‘Sister Wendy on Prayer’ is well worth looking at, if you can get on with her slightly sideways look on things – which appeals to me being a slightly sideways person myself. Her ‘Gaze of Love’ was a brilliant meditation resource for me on retreat once – now out of print but occasionally surfaces in second hand shops and offered on Amazon for quite a lot of money.
One thing she says is relevant to the current buzz about not being able to find time to pray at Ridley. It is a very busy and workaholic place anyway (the evangelical tendency) and even worse this term for many people on the new BA. Sister Wendy writes that when people say that there isn’t enough time to pray she suspects that they mean that they think that they don’t have enough quiet time. Besides doubting that no one can find some spare time – while having a shower, walking to the shops, not having that conversation in the kitchen or whatever – she says that this is missing the point about prayer. Prayer isn’t for our benefit. It is for God’s. It isn’t about us getting an emotional hit or feeling good by praying. It's about being there for God, about putting ourselves in front of him/her. So we don’t need to find half an hour, one hour, of quiet time. If we can that is great. But the important thing is find some moments when we can be before God, what she calls ‘flinders of time’. This, remember, is from someone who usually spends many hours each day in prayer.
I have the feeling that her approach may not sit easily in the evangelical heart but it makes sense to me. (But then, according to that quiz, I am a Wesleyan.)

Have mercy upon us miserable offenders...

Today sees the end of three weeks of morning prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. Yesterday’s chapel service started with a clip from the Lord of the Rings – the struggle between Gandalf and the Balrog – and included intercessions before the Lord’s Prayer and petitions, after a homily (a Thursday Ridley custom). All fairly typical of the Ridley way with BCP, except we didn’t sing a hymn or song. It wasn’t awful. But it set me thinking about the integrity of liturgy and how far we can fiddle with it. We seldom, if ever, run the CW or BCP morning office as writ. This is partly because we have quite a tight time limit – lectures start at 9.05 am at up to 15-20 mins walk away. And also we are encouraged to be imaginative about worship, quite rightly. But how much can you play around with Cranmer’s finely crafted common prayer for the people without destroying its integrity?
I’m not a particular fan of BCP – love the poetry of it but it sends me straight back to being a child at church. I know most of it by heart. But there comes a stage in experimenting when even I think ‘This has lost the point.’ Cranmer had very good reasons for structuring BCP offices as he did, confirmed by a few centuries of tradition. The postmodern take tends to be that doesn’t matter too much if we just slip that in here, drop that out, change ‘Queen’ to ‘rulers’ or don’t follow the rubric. But then it isn’t really BCP…
Does that matter? How far do we go down the apologetic route that says that it has to be accessible and relevant to today’s culture before we lose the plot? Liturgy of any sort seems to be a novel concept to some ordinands, let alone the possible person in the pew or café church. Does it matter if ‘Te Deum’ comes out as ‘tedium’ as long as we do praise you, O God? My heart says that it does but my mind is just confused.

And, scary thought, is there a Precentor or liturgist inside me struggling to get out?

Pawn to Queen's Bishop...

On the staircase this term we are mostly wearing purple (my favourite colour – I will have a purple clerical shirt, I will, I will…). Or, more accurately, that peculiar claret pinky-purple worn by bishops. Every other guest seems to be a bishop. We even have a resident bishop – which must mean that Simon and I are Deans of this staircase Cathedral? But after this week’s crop of guests, we’ve raised our sights – Archbishops only please. Admittedly this particular exotic Archbishop wore black not purple but the headwear scored mega-points. Fab hat, Your Grace! Going home late evening earlier in the term, I stepped through the small outer door and found myself nose to nose with one of our home purple Archbishops. What does one say…? Hopefully I will have a bit more time to sort that out when the other one visits here very soon.

But what I am really looking forward to is the sighting of the female of the species…

Hail, hail bright Cecilia ...

Today is St Cecilia's Day

Thank God for music! – life would be so much emptier without it. On Saturday evening I will be in Ely Cathedral as one of the chorus in a performance of Duke Ellington’s sacred music. Gospel hits jazzzzz… The rehearsal last night promises that it will be a good evening.
There is just something about making music in company with others that takes you out of yourself, maybe it's just about teamwork, maybe there is more to it. At its best it is transcendent, a glimpse of something other. I was singing once next to the percussion in a come-and-sing in the Royal Albert Hall. For the second half the timpanist’s mother-in-law, a non-musician, came and sat with us. She was overwhelmed by being in the middle of the music making - something she had never experienced before.

Praise the Lord!

Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty firmament!

Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his surpassing greatness!
Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp!

Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe!

Praise him with clanging cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals!

Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!

Praise the Lord!
Psalm 150 (NRSV)

Good luck to the Decibelles singing tonight in Brighton – sing it out, sister!

To be or not to be...

This term we are mainly agonizing about ... formation. Well, and the new BA. The returners have correctly identified that the two reasons for being at theological college as ordinands are 1) to get the bit of paper and 2) formation - a strange term thrown at you by DDOs, Bishops' Advisers and tutors. In essence it means to become the person you really are and are made by God to be - and so is not exclusive to ordination training at all. It is, or should be, what we are all aiming at. But at college it assumes a prominence that it often seems to lack in churches.
What puzzles me is how it happens. I recognise formation milestones in myself and others but not how I/you got there. During my (wonderful) placement I realised I had been formed to the extent that I had become 'clergy', that I had moved from pew to pulpit. It took a visit to my home church to jolt me into seeing that but my placement supervisor, who is responsible for preparing ordinands during the last few days before the donning of the dog collar, commented that it had happened in my first day with them. And please would I think about what it was that made that change, because knowing that would be very useful on ordination retreats when faced with the problem of moving an ordinand from 'there' to 'here' in two or three days.

Some second years want a course on formation - which I suspect sort of misses the point because it happens to you, you are formed. I think that it is about your focus moving outwards from yourself to others, and through them to God. It happens to you in the everyday, in college and among people, and has to be a very individual thing because we all start from different places. One size doesn't fit all.

And, of course, we won't leave here fully formed, just a bit more so.