All are welcome! No previous brunch-eating experience is necessary. If you’re a Home regular look out for a sign up list for food doing the rounds, if you’re a newbie it would be great to see you – do invite yourself along and just show up!

Sunday 26th February, 11am, House 244

The course is designed for anyone who considers themselves to be a spiritual seeker of some sort – both for those who would consider themselves to be Christian and those who wouldn’t. It’s simply an opportunity to take time out to reflect in a creative way.

The dates for the next course are : 28/2, 6/3, 13/3, 20/3, 27/3, 3/4

For more details take a look at the website www.essencecourse.org

The course is free but we would like you to book your place so we get an idea of numbers. Book here!

Wednesday 22nd February | 8pm | St Albans Church, Charles St

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I want to echo what +John has said and Richard Rohr in Matt’s email this week.

Haven’t read their books.

Very struck by Caroline, Mark and Lizzie’s stories – articulate abt what lost and inarticulacy abt what found.  Apophatic! Engagement and searching.

Cataphatic – God in all things. Creation, sacraments, religious experience.

Apophatic – God beyond all things.  Found in darkness. Abstract.  Beyond words.  Only in paradox.

By definition easier to speak of cataphatic.  Why we resort to concepts so – metaphor and story – my own and this Gospel story…….

4 parts:

1. Running towards the tomb.

2. They have taken away my Lord

3. Recognition and being named

4. Do not cling

Vivid picture of Mary coming with her spices and Peter and John running to the tomb.  But they are running towards what?

Emptiness.

The last place they knew God.

Shrouds of their old maps.  All 3 of them – Mary Magdalene, John and Peter had been profoundly touched by Jesus.  All of them, had “got it”.  They had glimpsed God. All of them had been on the most amazing adventure for 3 years where their hearts had been opened by their encounter with Christ.  They had listened hard, they’d been attentive but they hadn’t fully understood and here they were going to where they’d last known Christ but Christ isn’t there.  Christ has moved on.

And don’t we do that?

Part of us knows it’s time to move on and part of us stays on with the old stuff especially when it’s not all bad. We’ve learnt big things with God.  It has felt real and we want to stay there.

Beginning of our journey in faith as an adult, we encounter Jesus in some shape or form, normally through the Bible or church or fellowship or prayer, as a living God.  We do a lot of learning and grappling with the ideas and the institutions and the practises of faith.  We take on board a lot of information and we put our map together from this.  Our maps will look different.  Mine was the radical barefoot Jesus seen in St Francis and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, sung to in the meditative settings of Taize and in the hands on prayers of Celtic Christianity.  I liked churches lit with candles and hung with the little metal votives of ordinary prayer.  I have always been and still am sacramental with a large and small ‘s’.  I found the person of Christ compelling despite his gender beng misinterpreted as generic.  I liked the liveliness of Evangelicalism but not its theology.  I was much more at home with the apophatic way and I had also had 2 periods of doubt. So at centre I was relatively orthodox but my outworking of the Gospel was always liberal and always stronger on compassion rather than judgment.

One of the things that marks these early maps that we both find and make, is that they arise out of binary thinking.  The maps are already there for us to attach ourselves to but it’s us peculiarly that does the attaching.  We are discovering our identity and defining ourselves as for x and so against y.  So in the map I’ve just laid out for you, I would define myself as sacramental, therefore I’m not evangelical.  Reality is I took gifts from both and struggle deeply with aspects in both.

So there I am with my map in hand, which, being me, I’ve already questioned a thousand times, and on I go, running towards the tomb.

And the point about death, any death, including Jesus’s is that there are no maps.

This is what Mary and John and Peter were about to discover and so was I. We’re so afraid to go to the unmarked territory, afraid of its emptiness but in fact it’s where new things are happening. We stay with the dying places until we’re so unhappy we have to shift.  If only we could listen to our deeper self at that point because our heart knows but our mind hangs back and we listen to that instead.  And Mary was properly weeping at that tomb.  And God knows we do the same.  We let it get so bad until it finally becomes easier to move into the fearful unknown place than stay where the map isn’t working anymore.

Sometimes there are external circumstances that push this like the breakdown of a marriage, the loss of a loved one and sometimes nothing in particular.  For me it was nothing as bad as those.  It was my curacy.  I had uprooted my family and moved to a commuter village near Newbury.  I did the job fine, I got on well with my training vicar, and the people of the parish, I learnt my trade and loved some of it but there was something about standing at the front of a church saying words that did not signify God for me and knowing almost right from the word go, certainly by the first 6 months, that being a conservative figure in the middle of a conservative church in a conservative village did not fit.  I’m not the right person to be the keeper of the inherited church and to be fair, knew I wouldn’t probably end up in a parish.   I felt as if my soul was shriveling inside me. Drying out.  It is also significant that I did my curacy between the ages of 39-41 and that we lived beside a wood where I walked or ran with our dog most days.

“In the middle of the journey of our life

I found myself in a dark wood,

For the straight way was lost”

- Dante

2. They have taken away my Lord

I felt very like Mary.  They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.  My prayer was more – I trusted you God.  You led me into this wood and now you’ve disappeared.

This was not precisely a Dark Night in that I felt God was there but couldn’t begin to describe that in any sensible way.

Wood – Presence.  Diffuse.  Christ not knowing.  Lay aside.  Knew God was big enough.  Knew there was nothing I could do that would put me outside God’s presence.  Might end up going our separate ways.

Rowan Williams – Dark Night of the Soul

Extracted from “Open to Judgment” 1994, p95 - 97

He has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths.  Job 19:18

It is very easy to go round and round the paths for a long time.  There may be nothing in particular that puts an obstacle in the way.  Whether we think of ourselves as ‘conservative’ or ‘radical’ where spirituality is concerned, the same is true.  If I am a ‘conservative’, my circular path will be one of conventional sacramental observance and a theological picture, however vague or naïve, which sees God as the reliable source of meaning behind it all – God arranging the Church and its observances as the best available mans for me to get to him.  If I am a ‘radical’, my God will be the disturber of the social order, the one who calls me into freedom and into creative action – the God of the future, of the new and liberated humanity.

Both of these pictures as they stand are delusory.  They are, equally, religious games, designed to comfort us and justify us in the style of religious life we have found congenial.  As they stand, they are projections and wish-fulfilments, and all the unkind things psychologists have always tended to accuse religion of. ‘God’ is a word or a concept which has well-defined function in the way I order my life: and when you have explained that function, you have explained God.   Something else might do just as well………..

The night of the soul is often thought of as another kind of religious experience, a very exalted, very painful, very dramatic mystical sharing in the sufferings of Christ, or something of that sort.  But the truth is, alas, that it is simpler and much more alarming. It is the end of religious experience, the very opposite of mysticism.  It is a wall in the way, as Job says, it is the evacuation of meaning.  We have been going round and round a hole, a bottomless black pit.  In the middle of all our religious constructs – if we have the honesty to look at it – is an emptiness. It makes nonsense of all religion – conservative or radical – and all piety……….

However it is reached, the experience is one: the breakdown of order, the breakdown of schemes and maps.  There are no guiding lines in the darkness: there is no straightforward religious experience we can hold on to.  If we can still pray at all, we talk to an iron heaven, empty of signs………..

The real question is about what you are really after: do you want ‘spirituality’, mystical experience, inner peace, or do you want God?  If you want God, then you must be prepared to let go of all, absolutely all substitute satisfactions, intellectual and emotional. You must recognize that God is so unlike whatever can be thought or pictured, that when you have got beyond the stage of self indulgent religiosity there will be nothing you can securely know or feel.  You face a blank: and any attempt to avoid that or shy away from it is a return to playing comfortable religious games.  The dark night is God’s attack on religion.  If you genuinely desire union with the unspeakable love of God, then you must be prepared to have your religious world shattered.

At end of curacy, decided to return home, to the last place I felt safe.

And I absolutely knew and I was absolutely right that once back in a place of safety, the real trouble would begin.  What our psyche does.  Gets thru the crisis and the processing of it which happens afterwards can be much much harder.  Past the map’s edge there be dragons.  But as I once wrote in poem, I want to meet them.  Bring them on.  Tho I wasn’t feeling that cocky.  But that moment when you’re ready to face the monsters is a very decisive one.

The Journey

One day you finally knew

What you had to do, and began,

Though the voices around you

Kept  shouting

Their bad advice-

Though the whole house

Began to tremble

And you felt the old tug

At your ankles.

“Mend my life!”

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

Though the wind pried

With its stiff fingers

At the very foundations,

Though their melancholy

Was terrible.

It was already late

Enough, and a wild night,

And the road full of fallen

Branches and stones.

But little by little,

As you left their voices behind,

The stars began to burn

Through the sheets of clouds,

And there was a new voice which you slowly

Recognized as your own,

That kept you company

As you strode deeper and deeper

Into the world

Determined to do

The only thing you could do-

Determined to save

The only life you could save.

Mary Oliver

There began 5 years of bushwhacking.  Leaving the beaten path.

External life not so important from here on in but for the record, I was never without a job.  The hospice is my 3^rd chaplaincy job since I was a curate and 12 years since I was ordained.

No church for over 4 years. Previously prepared to hold the tension.  But that snapped in my curacy.  V. Important for me to not be around the exclusivity of institutional religion when I was exploring what living from the Oneness of all things where everything belongs felt like.  It was like sand paper on my open heart and I continue to find that language and thought forms difficult. Home

In the strangeness of returning home but not going back to what I left, it was the Spirit in her guise as the Earth tradition that helped me.

In the Gospel Mary believes the gardener to be asking her “Why are you weeping?”  and I was being asked something of the same question.  What is it that is making you so sad when you are surrounded by love? When I looked backwards I saw confusion and when I looked forwards I couldn’t see anything, nothing at all.  And so I stayed right where I was.  I stayed still.  I knew that I really needed to stay with what is.  The Earth bears witness to that.

And as the milky light did fade

and the chalky cliffs they stood and shone

the sun went down behind the sea

but I was far from home.

Which way to go I did not know

for the dusk it gathered with my fears.

The night fell thick, the hours moved slow

and nameless creatures stirred.

And so I stopped in stillness there

to listen to the world about.

Though lost and pathless and gone astray

the owls and darkness bade me stay.

I came here with a flame within

that kindles in quiet and deepest dark

for silence sheds its light to see

and guides us by the stars.

And so I wandered on and up

across black fields and branch and thorn

Needing God unmediated.

Unlearning.

In Straight Talk from Fox , Mary Oliver, speaking for Fox says

“I see you in all your seasons

making love, arguing, talking about God

as if he were an idea instead of the grass,

instead of the stars, the rabbit caught

in one good teeth-whacking hit and brought

home to the den.”

Rain upon my face, wind in hair, feet on the earth and warmth.

Rather than book-reading, concept thinking and doctrine arguing.

Touch, see, smell, taste and hear God. Pre-Christian Celt.

Or as 2 of our spiritual masters put it:

I pray to God that he may rid me of God – Meister Eckhart.

Beginners mind.  St Benedict – Always we begin again.

T S Eliot – East Coker

In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

3. Recognition and being named

As we know, it is when Jesus says Mary’s name that she recognizes him.  For me it was not an instant thing, much more like Mary Oliver’s “there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own.”  And I recall that old evangelical sermon point that when we get to heaven, Jesus will not ask “why were you not like Mother Teresa or Cynthia Bourgeault or anyone else we might admire, or even, Jesus himself, but why were you not Tess?”  This is what I made you to be. The only life we can save is our own.  And the more I just stayed with what I had been given, the more I found some things that I recognized as authentic and real.  Many skins were shed but in the shaking down this is what remained.

- Earth.  Fully and wholly embraced.  Oneness.  Nature= text.

- Trying and failing at meditation.  Keeping the space open.

- Compassion. Because I had come to such a desperate place within myself, I felt held in compassion.  My fragility enabled me to see everyone from their place of fragility.  So for example, when I hear the word paedophile, I am both recoiling  with horror at what he may do to a child as well as seeing a man who was more than likely abused himself as a child and is an ordinary needy human being like me. So even as my own pain hollowed me, it also made a wider space for compassion. Binary thinking becomes more and more untenable.  Which is how I see the cross.  Christ emptied himself to make a space to hold the whole of the world in lovingkindness and compassion.  He takes the pain of the abused child and the pain of the paedophile into himself.

Prayer for Wholeness-  Janet Morley

O God,

You are able to accept in us what we cannot even acknowledge,

You are able to name in us what we cannot bear to speak of,

You are able to  hold in your memory what we have tried to forget,

You are able to hold out to us [the glory ]that we cannot conceive of.

Reconcile us [through your cross]to all that we have rejected in ourselves,

That we may find no part of your creation, alien or strange to us

And that we ourselves may be made whole.

- Gratitude. The other thing that happened in the staying still and the waiting was gratitude.  Why are you weeping.

Spirit of God all around me.  Thankfulness.  Awe.  Taking the goodness in.  Important gift for me with my personality – glass half empty.  Since returning to Oxford I’ve had moments of light and joy that I’ve never had before.  Gift.  Fully alive.

This is it.  Thank you.  Present moment.

“Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.”  (Eliot)

Missed them as a younger woman because I was so busy searching.

The problem when you are searching is that you can be so fixed on what you are searching for, on the goal, even if that goal is God, that you miss what is there directly in front of your eyes.  Exactly as Mary did in this Gospel.  She’s searching hard.  She’s searching for the right things but she misses what is there.

And as we move away from feeling so lost, we may find that we can infold all the elements of our life, even those bits, like my curacy which were so painful.  I see that it had to happen.  There is no waste with God.  This is part of the wholeness  and healing that is available to people on their death bed which I see in my work and available to each of us.  That vision of Christ with his arms open to the whole of us, our joys and our fragility.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell
that encloses your understanding.

And could you keep your heart in wonder
at the daily miracles of your life,

your pain
would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your
heart,

even as you have always accepted
the seasons that pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity
through the winters of your grief.

- Kahlil Gibran

4 Do not cling

I should say when I keep looping this back to Christ or the Cross that this was not formed neatly in my mind as I was going through it and even now, I hesitate to place experience into neat conceptual frameworks.  Just like Mary I have often said, “Show me the body.  Give me some old fashioned certainty and comfort.” But just like Jesus does with Mary he says “Tess!  C’mon.  What’s alive is right there infront of you. All you need is already here.“ Or as Paula D’Arcy says “God comes to you disguised as your own life.”   Like Mary we want to touch and be held.  We want to feel secure.  And Jesus says “Do not cling.  You have tasted transformation.  You have new life.  With your old map you were projecting onto childish things. What you have lost in illusory security you have gained in freedom.  The sorrows, the joys all woven in together, is life in abundance. This is why I came. “  We want to look down the corridors of our unknowing and see a doctrine or a juicy idea or even, the cross.  But God is not there.  Christ is risen.  Beyond those things is the Oneness of life itself.  And sometimes they can block us from seeing life. Christ places this good news this flow of love, into Mary’s hands and our hands.

I don’t personally believe that I and a few select others have it and others don’t.  I believe that the love of God is flowing all the time.  And our job is to keep the channels open.

If we could gather up both the sadness and the joys of our lives, we would see in all the stages on our journey that there can be no death without birth and that there can be no births without death. As we move forward into the new, all we need to do is say “yes, that’s how it is”.  The resurrection breaks open the floodgates with the flow of love to show us the fullness of life , love for the earth, compassion for each other and ourselves, and love for God.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. (Eliot)

or as Mary put it, “I have seen the Lord”.

To see the trailer etc. go here.

Come along and watch is with us at House 244 (244 Iffley Rd) on Friday February 3rd, 8pm.

John 2 v 1-11 The Wedding at Cana

• I think this passage in John highlights some of the best qualities of storytelling as a way of communicating. I would like to start my reflection by  asking you to consider what sort of questions arise when you read this story about the start of Jesus ministry?

Perhaps you are amazed by the kind of miracle that takes place?

Perhaps you are amused by the way in which Jesus and His mother interact in the story?

Perhaps you are struck by the cultural dynamics of the wedding in Galilee?

Here are a few of the thoughts I have had over the last week or so ..

• Firstly I am struck by the fact that Jesus is at a wedding at this stage in His ministry! The passage starts .. On the third day !! The third day of what …Jesus has been baptised by John on day 1 (after 40 days in the wilderness testing His call and vision of who He was and who God was). On day 2 He called His disciples to give up their lives and follow Him. On day 3 .. He is at a friend’s wedding. What does this tell us about Jesus and His values? Maybe it tells us that he sees the everyday events as the place for His ministry to unfold?

• Secondly, there is a crucial message about Christian authority! Here is Jesus at the very start of His ministry without cudos, qualifications, or previous experience it seems. He is a reluctant leader as we see Mary asking Him to make a difference and Him being slow to agree. We have an insight into why the writer of Hebrews see’s Jesus leadership as being ‘of the order of Melchizedek’. Melchizedek is the king we meet in our Old Testament reading this morning. He is a strange figure, the kind of figure of storytellers, who appears as a Priest considered even closer to God Most High than Abram.  This is really quite amazing .. here in the story of Abram Father of Israel and the Church .. appears another leader without cudos, qualification, or relevance to the story of Abram. Perhaps we would be wise to expect to find wisdom and leadership in unexpected places as Christians? In Jesus we have a reluctant teacher and miracle worker. What are the important things in Christian leadership?  Certainly Jesus  acted out of compassion and with an act of provision and harmony .. an act that revealed how God feels toward us!

• Thirdly and finally, there is a theological message behind Jesus actions in this story. John is quite clear to tell us the way in which Jesus provided the wine. Why is this important?I think the fact that Jesus used the ceremonial stone water-jars for this miracle is crucial. These jars were available to all good Jews to be able to continue eating and drinking in a ritually clean way. They would have performed cleansing rites prior to eating and drinking. With these jars unavailable there would have been a dilemma. I think it is reasonable to say that Jesus was setting out His stall for the rest of His ministry when He challenged the Jewish practices through an act of compassion.

So there it is .. a ministry situated in the mundane and the every day .. a ministry that did not rely on status or qualifications for its authority .. a ministry that put compassion above ritual and legalism and of course this means we can all share in this kind of Christian ministry.

I am sure you will find your own messages in this story too .. because the story it seems might belong as much to the listener as to the characters in it?

During this cycle we are exploring the ebb and flow dynamics of our relationship with God, how our lives often seem to exhibit patterns of finding God, only to lose God again, perhaps to find God anew in a different way.

Walking the labyrinth – an ancient way of whole-body prayer – is a really good way to come at this exploration from a different angle, leading with the body rather than the mind. We journey towards the middle of the labyrinth, linger at the centre for a while and then journey outwards again, exploring our journey of divine discovery, the gift/s God has for us, and our vocation to share these gifts for the world’s transformation (although walking the labyrinth is such a symbolically rich experience there are always new insights to discover).

Here’s an excerpt from the guide notes we used last night :

There are therefore three stages to this prayer walk -

 Purgation (Releasing) ~ A releasing, a letting go of the details of your life. This is the act of shedding thoughts and distractions. A time to open the heart and quiet the mind.

 Illumination (Receiving) ~ When you reach the centre, stay there as long as you like. It is a place of meditation and prayer. Receive what is there for you to receive.

 Union (Returning) ~ As you leave, following the same path out of the centre as you came in, you enter the third stage, which is joining God’s work in the world. 

Here’s a gallery of pictures from the service :

[Show as slideshow]

Next Gathering Details : 

Wednesday 18h January, 8pm

Magdalen Arms, Iffley Road

Conversation theme : ‘What about other faiths?’