The Revd Writes… For a number of years, I served as the Special Needs Governor of a large secondary school. The school served a number of large housing estates with significant pockets of deprivation resulting in an above-average intake of students facing particular challenges on a number of fronts. I can still remember one particular visit when I was asked to go and see a PE lesson taking place. Thirty fifteen-year-old boys were all lined up in two rows. One row was composed of quiet, studious-looking types who wanted to please and get on with the lesson. The other row was made up of boys who were laughing and joking, making it clear that they did not want to be there and longing for the day when formal education would be behind them. The PE teacher had his hands full trying to enthuse the whole class with the idea of cross-country running and keeping fit as part of a healthy lifestyle. The Vicar's presence didn’t make life any easier for him when it came to containing adolescent subversive behaviour. I was on the point of leaving, thinking this would be the most helpful thing that I could do when the Headteacher appeared. The Headteacher ruled the school with an iron rod and a jolly sense of humour, much respected by staff and students alike. Silence fell upon the PE group. Order was quickly restored as one teacher quietly acknowledged the Head’s support. The Head turned to me and said, “I’m not worried about the boys who are larking about. They are learning an important life skill, how to get by with charm and humour. Most of them will be fine. They have the gift of the gab. It’s the other lot, the academic types I worry about. Will they survive the system?” And then he said something I have never ever forgotten. “Always expect to be surprised by a child. Just when you think you’ve got them all worked out – they surprise you!” Gerard Hughes, a Jesuit, and writer on spirituality published a book in the late 1980s titled God of Surprises. It sold widely and is now recognised as a spiritual classic. Hughes, who struggled with depression, writes of his learning to encounter God in the everyday. It is a God of surprises who breaks through the gloom and chaos of a dysfunctional world, bringing relief and a new sense of purpose and life just when you think all is lost. Easter celebrates this God of Surprises. The crucified Jesus walks out of the tomb of death, to embrace the world with a universal love that transforms and rekindles the broken. Faith is the surprising gift of God to those with the courage to seek food for the soul in the day-to-day. New life emerges often from quite unexpected quarters. In the words of my Headteacher friend, ‘Always expect to be surprised by a child.’ And in the words of Gerard Hughes, ‘Always expect to be surprised by faith in God.’ Happy Easter God Bless Mark
Holy Week: Honesty and the Path to the Cross A memory from early childhood… I remember my father coming into the back garden. I must have been seven. I was playing with my dog underneath the apricot tree… My father was smoking. He started smoking when he was about ten years old and smoked all of his life. My father had a love-hate relationship with nicotine. He took a long drag on his ‘ciggie’ and then he looked across at me and said, “Don’t do what I do. Do what I say. Don’t smoke.” And then he laughed and took another long drag on his cigarette. I can still feel the sense of confusion and bewilderment at what my father was saying to me and the paradox of his words. On the one hand, he was telling me what not to do, whilst on the other, he was acting out in front of me the behaviour that he was telling me was not good for me, but that he himself was going to continue to do. My father would often tell me that smoking was ‘a mug's game…’ It was one of the few ways that he allowed himself to be vulnerable with me. What my father could never tell me was that he loved to smoke. He loved his drug of choice – despite what the consequences might be. It was only later when working with mainline heroin addicts that I began to fully appreciate how powerful the physical and psychological dependency on nicotine could be. Coming off heroin is a really difficult thing to do. But for most of the addicts that I worked with, resolved to live a healthier lifestyle, nicotine was more often than not a step too far. And here’s the thing… Addictive behaviours bring to the very fore of our psyche how difficult it is for us human beings to be honest with ourselves. In my head, I might be able to rationalise away why I should not do what I know to be bad for me - or even, I know in my head why I should not act out certain behaviours which are bad for me, and equally, and perhaps even more damaging, has negative consequences for others, not least those I happen to live with. Ciggies, chocolate, alcohol, heroin, violence, sexual perversions. I know this in my head. But in my heart, I love what I do. And what I love to do gives me temporary relief from my own powerlessness and impotence. Even though I know in my head that this is bad for me. In my heart, I love this. I am addicted to that which seduces me, even though I know it hurts me. I love this escape into the delusional self. Psychoanalysis helps the addicted personality type to understand the early emotional deprivations that lead to such behaviours manifesting themselves in sadomasochistic ways. Such understanding is often helpful, and psychotherapy can help change some behaviours. But not always. Psychotherapy has its limits. Some people are simply too damaged for psychotherapy to be the cure. Hegel tells us that if we hold to reality then we will be given freedom. But what if reality is too painful, too difficult to bear? Human beings can only tolerate so much honesty. Too much honesty, too much reality, overwhelms us. Try changing the mind of a Parochial Church Council when everyone tells you that they agree with you Vicar - but no one agrees to change. Too much honesty, too much reality, and we retreat into our defended and addictive behaviours. We find relief in repeating the patterns that ultimately hurt us. Better to die in the old life… than to live in the changed and very unfamiliar new… I have come to understand that God alone, incarnated in the crucified, holds all honesty in his hands. The unbearable truth for humankind – the limits of our capacity to tolerate what it means to be truly honest – is given over to God. If I am limited by my own psychological make-up, gifted to me by my parents and my grandparents before them, then by faith alone, I know that I can be reassured by Christ crucified, that, that honesty which I cannot bear, God will bear for me. By faith, I project onto and into the heart of God that which to my own heart remains unknown or at best, only partly known to me because in truth, if I’m honest, I don’t want to know, and I cannot bear to know any more truth. My understanding of God, my own theology, takes me to a place where the crucified is changed beyond what I can and am willing to articulate for myself. This gives me hope…. And why it is that I am glad to be part of the Easter People. Revd Mark Bailey
The Revd Writes… “The seasons bring the flower again, And bring the firstling to the flock; And in the dusk of thee, the clock Beats out the lives of little men.” Alfred, Lord Tennyson The above lines are thought to have been written by Tennyson as he stood in the churchyard at his friend, Arthur Hallam’s, grave. He speaks to the ancient yew that has endured more seasons than the lifespan of ten men, standing regal and sentry-like against the ravages of time. Tennyson found solace and comfort underneath the branches of the evergreen, and the timelessness of the new season of spring that was bursting into bloom all around him. We are indeed blessed with churchyards at the heart of each of our communities; scared spaces that not only treasure the remains of our loved ones and immortalise their lives in stone for us to cherish but equally offer a welcoming reflective space in which to contemplate the meaning of our own stories and the time allocated to us, the seasons that “Beats out the lives of little men.” To wander around a churchyard is to take in, with a deep breath, the reality of our own mortal nature and the challenge of what we want to do with the rest of our days. Graves bring the message that life is a gift not to be taken for granted. Dates on stones remind us that no one of us knows what lies around the corner. Good health, in mind and body, and the capacity to live independently and fruitfully is never to be taken for granted. A fact perhaps even more pertinent in Tennyson’s own thoughts, living in the C19th without the advances of modern-day science and a national health service. For many hundreds of years, the Church of England has served the country by being the main provider of burial space. In most towns and cities, the size of populations and the pressure on land means that this is no longer the case. Civic authorities have had to step in to provide burial space. But we are still blessed within our own Benefice to have a place within which to lay our loved ones to rest not very far from our own Church doors. It is a blessing that the local Church of England shares willingly with everyone. Our Parochial Church Councils all take very seriously the responsibility bestowed upon them to do their best in maintaining our churchyards. Resources are limited however, and we are grateful to all those who work and volunteer in helping to keep our churchyards in a state in which it is a delight to view “the seasons” that “bring the flower again…” God Bless Mark
The Revd Writes… “The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the deep…” Genesis 1:2 This year Ash Wednesday falls on the 22nd of February and marks the great penitential season of the Church’s year. Traditionally, the forty days before Easter (forty-six if you include Sundays) are a focus for reflecting on the story of Jesus being tempted in the desert before he begins his ministry of teaching and healing. Christians around the world often use this time to reflect on those areas of their lives that they wish to reform and amend, sometimes aided by exercises of self-denial e.g., giving up sweets and alcohol or by taking on extra challenges - more time for reading and exercise, less time for television and screens. Alongside attempts to develop wholesome life-enhancing habits, the aim and purpose is to identify more closely with the trials that Jesus endured in his tribulations, making the penitent more ready for a joyful celebration of the Resurrection come Easter morning. Arresting bad habits is a good and necessary thing if human beings are to flourish. A child who fails to learn the importance of self-discipline will struggle to structure day-to-day living activities in such a way as to enjoy a balanced life. The consequences are likely to be a life of excess followed by chronic illness before an untimely death. Teaching a child that too many sweets are bad for you is encouraging a child to learn to say ‘No!’ to all sorts of temptations that will inevitably come their way later on. In Christian speak, the word ‘sin’ has been used for centuries to describe those activities that impact on life negatively and even cause harm to both the self and others. Some ‘sins’ might be viewed as being small and even trivial – a white lie – whilst others – war – are seen to be such big sins they are denoted as being evil. The complex range of what is sinful has, over generations, been divided up between those sins that are essentially personal e.g., not looking after my body properly, and those sins in which humanity engages corporately e.g., discrimination by one group of people against another on grounds of race, gender, religion etc. Knowledge also impacts what is viewed as sinful. What was sinful decades ago, might no longer be so as our understanding of what it means to be human has evolved. Same-sex relationships, once viewed as being so sinful that they were criminalised, are now understood to be a normal and healthy part of society. Similarly, new ‘sins’ emerge. So much of the way in which humanity has failed to properly steward the earth’s resources, denuding the habitat on which the biodiversity of our planet home is dependent, means a whole new list of sins has been brought into the frame. The writer of Genesis delights in the story that out of nothing God creates something - the wonders of the universe. In our own day, we now face the very real prospect of turning that something back into nothing – returning the earth into a ‘formless and empty, darkness…’ The need for a season of Lent, a time to reflect and reform our way of life, to hold ourselves to account before God and each other, is, it seems, needed now as much as ever. God Bless. Mark
