Waiting on our Reagan….

“Prayer of an Expectant Mother”, Dmitri Petrov

 

Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord,
who walks in his ways!

You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands;
you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you.

Your wife will be like a fruitful vine
within your house;

your children will be like olive shoots
around your table.

Behold, thus shall the man be blessed
who fears the Lord.

The Lord bless you from Zion!
May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem
all the days of your life!
May you see your children’s children!

Peace be upon Israel!

Psalm 128

 

Happy Mother’s Day…

“This maid wanted nothing, but to love and to be loved…”

“But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.”

Mitch Albom

Mama & Addie Lee

 

 

Katharine Quarmby: Redenhall Church and a Quiet Revolution….

The following is a great column I came across today in the Huffington Post.  I was especially moved by the idea that this ancient, small church is located in Norwich, since Julian of Norwich is one of my favorite Christian figures.  Julian promoted the idea of “full homely divinity”, that we should treat every moment of life, even the most mundane and small, as divine and holy.  In reading this article about a small group of faithful parishoners, I was struck by the purity and holiness of their love for their church, and for their community.  It’s a reminder to us all that sometimes, bigger is not necessarily better.  This post can also be read  at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/redenhall-church-and-a-qu_b_1423811.html .

St. Mary's, Redenhall

I took part in a very well-mannered, English revolution on Easter Sunday, in Redenhall Church, a beautiful 15th century church in the parish of Redenhall in Norfolk, nestling in the tranquil Waveney Valley, where the barn-owls hunt in the dusk and where I canoed on the river as a child.

The Diocese of Norwich had decreed that there would be no worship on Easter Sunday in the old church — the first time for some six hundred years. A few — 10 in all — local people thought that there should be. And I thought I should join them.

I walked over the fields from Harleston, as parishioners had done, clutching their prayer books, for hundreds of years, before a fearsomely ugly church in the town (St Johns) was built in Victorian times. As I walked out the birds were still calling each other before night fell — starlings, blackbirds, crows and magpies. A rabbit ran out from under my feet across a field and into a burrow in a drainage ditch. And the Redenhall bells rang out — bells that had rang out first as the Armada sailed across towards our shores — as I walked into the churchyard, and saw my father waiting for me underneath an old yew tree.

I walked into the church with my father, and was handed the Book of Common Prayer, and an old black leather hymn book. We clustered in the choir pews (I remember singing there as a child, in scratchy white ruff and long burgundy gown) and one parishioner turned on the CD player so we could sing the first hymn. We were out of time on that one, and the order of Evensong got a little muddled up, but somehow it all felt right, and that we were well protected from all the “perils and dangers of the night,” as the Evening Collect has it.

The reason that the Diocese had decreed that there would be no church service in Redenhall was that the church hierarchy was hoping for a good turn-out for the Bishop, who was preaching at St John’s in Harleston (and offering a finger buffet after the service). But those at Redenhall were there for simpler — and to my mind — more important reasons, than maximising the congregation at one church to make a good show.

They believed that a church that had survived two world wars, where the bells had rung out for some six hundred years, and is so much loved by the local people that it is full every Christmas for the carol service shouldn’t be allowed to die — not on Easter Sunday, without a service. I agree with them.

I somehow think that God, whatever and whoever God is, would have liked the bareness of the service that evening — just 10 people feeling their way through a kind of service with battered old hymn books and a CD player. Perhaps it would even be preferable than the pomp of the gowns and the mitres, the ruffs, the candles and the splendour of what the Church of England has come to represent because it brings us back to where it all started — a few people gathered together in a quiet place, thinking along the same lines.

This very well-mannered revolution — of the flower ladies who arranged Easter bouquets even though no service was planned, the bell-ringers who rang out a summons to prayer, the men and women who read the Evening Prayers — has a tinge of Occupy about it — that rebuke to the Church as Establishment, hierarchy, institution, which is so much needed at this time if the Church is to have any meaning.

I’m not in the Church of England any more — I can still remember the day when it lost me, when a vicar told the congregation that women couldn’t be priests — and I look for guidance to the Quakers now. But I can see that our old churches matter to us all — and I respect those who keep the oak pews dusted and polished, who ring the bells, who arrange the flowers, who tend the graveyards. My grandmother lies buried in the lea of the wall at Redenhall, next to my friend and neighbour, who died of cancer in his thirties. But the Church should be there for the quick, as well as the dead. If the Church means anything in these times, it should understand that places like Redenhall Church matter — and if they close on Easter Sunday they die — and a part of the Church dies too.

 

An Easter Hymn…

“In that we have beheld the Resurrection of Christ, let us worship the holy Lord Jesus, the only sinless one.

Thy Cross do we adore, O Christ, and Thy holy Resurrection we praise and glorify.

For Thou art our God, and we know none other beside Thee; we call upon Thy name.

O come, all ye faithful, let us adore Christ’s holy Resurrection, for, lo! through the Cross is joy come into all the world.

Ever blessing the Lord, let us sing His Resurrection, for in that He endured the Cross for us, He hath destroyed death by death.”

Voskresenije Hristovo Vidjevse, An Eastern Orthodox Easter Chant

 

“Truly, this man is the Son of God!”…Good Friday Meditation from N.T. Wright

The centurion, knowing the nature of the charge against Jesus, looks on in awe and amazement and declares — “So he really was Son of God, after all.” Two days later, of course, God is going to declare, powerfully, that Jesus really was innocent, really was Son of God. But if we understand the cross we can see that, to the eye of faith, the evidence is already there. Because on the cross we see a love which is none other than God’s own love. Only God loves like that. Jesus said, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” But on the cross there was a greater love nailed up in public, when God gave his life for his enemies. We cannot understand the cross unless we understand the incarnation, and vice versa. As St Paul put it — God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. The words that Jesus himself spoke at supper on the night he was betrayed are, as it were, magnified into the words that God himself says, not with speech but with action, on the first Good Friday: “This is my body, broken for you.”

It is because in his death on the cross we see a love which can only be identified as God’s love that we Christians say: He was not just a great teacher, dying for his beliefs. He was not just a good man suffering innocently. He was, and is, the loving God himself, come as a human being to save men, women, and children from sin and death, and from all the stain and fear and guilt and shame which cling to our hearts, our memories, our imaginations, our lives. People still puzzle over how Jesus can be divine and human at the same time. It remains a puzzle if we assume that the word “God” refers to a distant, detached, supernatural landlord. Many people still think the word “God” refers to a being like that. But try imagining the Old Testament God for a minute—passionate, involved with his people in their wanderings and stupidity, loving them tenderly and rescuing them again and again, grieving over their folly and their pain, taking costly action to redeem them. What would that God look like if he were to become human, and live among us humans? I think he would look very much like Jesus of Nazareth; and never more so than as he hangs dying on the cross.

And, in Mark’s Gospel, written quite likely for a Roman audience, the centurion’s comment implicitly asks the question: Have you stood before the cross and recognised that here there is an act of love which marks out this man as none other than the Son of God? Have you allowed yourself to accept what was there accomplished on your behalf? Do you still, like so many, regard Good Friday as an awkward, somewhat embarrassing moment, stuck between the Hosannas of Palm Sunday and the Hallelujahs of Easter Day? Or have you learnt to recognise that, on Calvary, Jesus — even through his fear, his doubts, his final bitter temptations — was completing the obedient vocation he had undertaken? And have you attempted to bring the pains and puzzles and tragedies of your own life into the searching, but amazingly loving, light of that cross? If you have, you may have begun to realise this great truth: that here we cannot reduce the cross to either an abstract idea of “atonement,” or to a set of “bare historical facts.” Instead, the cross itself summons us to rethink and remake the whole fact and idea of knowledge itself, belief itself, life itself. Here we are unmade; here we are remade.

In Bach’s St Matthew Passion, towards the close, the centurion’s words (“Truly, this was the Son of God”) are given not to a soloist, as you might expect, but to the whole chorus, singing softly and penitently. They are not in the key one might expect for soloist or chorus, but are transposed into the key normally reserved for Christ himself. And into the bass line Bach has woven the musical letters which represent his own name. That, I suggest, is a true reading and re-presentation of the centurion’s words. They are the response of the awed and grateful people of God to this all-but-unbelievable revelation of love; and within that response we are, each of us, to write our names into the chorus. And the key in which we sing is not our own, a merely human key: it is the key which conforms, as now at last because of the cross and the Spirit we can conform, to the initiating sovereign love of God in Christ. He has been singing his own song to his people all this time; and now, because of his death, we are at last able to respond in the same key. Truly, we say, this man dying for us is the Son of God. On the cross we see dying love, and we recognise it as the undying love of God.

-N. T. Wright, The Crown and the Fire, 53-55