A Poem: Work-Life Balance

It’s astonishing how the image 

Of a few balanced stones

Has come to be our icon

Of tranquillity, serenity, calm.

It sells us expensive spa days,

Sweet-smelling oils,

Pedicures, purifying rituals, peace.

You try balancing four stones. Go on.

You’ll get there, eventually.

And as your hand flutters

Over leaving the final adjustment just so –

Someone will glance by, admiringly, and say

‘I don’t know how you do it!’

And your hand arrests them from coming nearer,

As you watch the entire edifice tremble

At their footsteps,

At your breath.

The Zen of this moment

Isn’t the calm serenity of the advertisements -

A holding of all things in cosmic balance,

A resting place of quiet calm.

No; it’s in your hovering awareness

Of the inherent instability of the system –

It’s entropy -

It's in accepting the uncertainty of not knowing when

The certainty of the fall will come.

Compost

When the shit hits the fan,
When the bullshit bingo is over,
When you can only smell steaming piles of horseshit,

Wheel a barrow into the meeting room.

Shovel up the crap for the compost heap.
Mix it with all the other odds and sods of daily detritus -
Carrot peelings, pea pods, rotten bits, slime -
Add the bulky bore of routine maintenance -
Grass cuttings, loo roll inners, shredded statements.

Trust the alchemy of the soil
And the worms’ patient processing
To turn it into rich black honeycomb
Smelling of promise and roses and tomatoes.

When the shit hits the fan
Try to think of it
As muckspreading.

Poem: Meditation on Psalm 131

The second in a series of poems that I wrote whilst on retreat, undertaking the first stage of the Spiritual Exercises, at St Beuno's earlier this month. I shared this poem at St Bride's this morning:

Meditation on Psalm 131

‘Like a weaned child at her mother’s breast’ –

I sigh into you in contentment.

Not with the rooting hunger

Of breastfeeding, that single-minded devotion

That knows only need and turns blindly for its source –

That’s had its time, and will no doubt have its time again.

But now is for enjoying the stillness

Of knowing myself to be held;

Choosing, in simple desire,

To clamber onto your lap,

Lay my head against your shoulder,

And feel your cheek, your arms, your body

Envelop me – above, around, beneath.

Now is for relaxing into one another,

Both accepting, both offering,

This gift of presence.

Now is the time to feel my breathing slow

In time with yours;

To know that this is the Alpha and the Omega,

The beginning and the end.

This is the place I belong, the place

I have been longing for.

From here I will go out, in time,

And to here I will return.

My only prayer is an almost wordless yearning

That nothing may tempt me to forget,

To diminish this, from a distance, as a childish indulgence,

A mawkish fantasy,

That’s all very well, but has no place in the real world.

I want more than anything to always know,

In the very depths of my bones, as I know now,

That this is more real than any of the fantasies

On which I have constructed my life.

This is humility;

Not a performative fawning,

But this raw acceptance of my want of you.

This is not an intellectual proposition,

Or an argument to be won.

It is humiliating to discover,

After all my research and questioning,

After all my jealous frustration

At my inability to frame you in words,

That it comes down only to this –

My need, and my simple acceptance of my need,

To rest in your embrace.

A Poem: Verum Corpus

There is no greater awkward joy

Than to celebrate communion one-handed,

Clasping a child in your other arm.

Feeling its small, warm body

Conform itself to your curves; feeling yourself

Move that one side of your body

Into the universal jig that all flesh

Doesn’t know it knows 

Until a baby is put into its arms.

One hand splayed against the soft heaviness of head and neck,

The other outstretched in prayer -

You make God real 

in flesh and blood, 

bread and wine -

Tangible, fragile, consumable.

(One small corner of your mind concerned to do this with all possible dignity

To placate those who may feel the baby detracts

From the seriousness of the occasion –

Another, wondering if dry-cleaning would remove

Baby sick from the shoulder of the antique chasuble,

Should need arise)

In that moment, you are both the baby and God.

Feeling all God’s fierce and tender protectiveness

As these tiny, fragile things are held in your hands –

Feeling all the infant’s fierce and needy grasping

To be held, protected, loved.

Clasping a miniature fistful of chasuble

Against being dropped.

Offering a mere handful of bread,

Against being alone.

Afterwards, I know, I will hear

Both complaints and sentimentality.

But this moment is neither sentimental nor profane.

If I had a spare hand, I would take off my shoes.

For here God is speaking ‘I AM’ into my very body.

‘Women’ priests?

Today’s been the day of the #JustAPriest25 hashtag, started by Jules Middleton

It’s the 25th anniversary of the first women being ordained as priests. But why are we still so often referred to as ‘women priests’?

At first, I must admit, I didn’t see the problem. A woman being a priest, after so many centuries, is something to be celebrated. Let’s shout it from the rooftops as we swing from the chandeliers of a cathedral! Women bishops were a rallying cry for so long that you get used to the weird syntax.

But when you think about it, ‘women priests’ is a weird way to put it. There’s a simple test - would you say ‘men priests’? No. You might, if gender was particularly the issue at hand, say ‘male priests’ or ‘priests who are men’, but not ‘men priests’. It just sounds wrong in English. So why ‘women priests’?

It’s a subtle reminder of male normativity. Saying ‘women priests’ assumes most priests are men, that’s the norm, and we women who are priests are something slightly different.

Well, 25 years in (25 years into a recurrence of something that seems very likely to have happened in the ancient church - see Gary Macy’s book if you’d like to read up on this) it’s time to stop this nonsense. When gender is relevant - maybe you’re excited that a woman is coming to be your vicar, or you want to know whether the celebrant is male or female because you have reservations catholicity of women’s orders - let’s talk about male and female priests. But otherwise, we’re just priests from now on.

Evangelism isn't just for Evangelicals

It's one of those times when words can be not just unhelpful, but positively misleading.

If you're 'exvangelical', as so many people in my current church are, it can be a real issue.  Before you've even got to the end of the word, a negative emotional reaction has been evoked by the 'evangel' prefix. Your body has tensed, a fight or flight reaction has begun, and you might feel the need to leave the room or shut down the conversation in instinctive self-protection.

It can be hard to understand this if you yourself identify as evangelical, or have generally positive associations with the word; or if, like me, you became a Christian later in life without any real sense of churchmanship, so these labels are an interesting talking point rather than having huge emotional weight attached to them. Books like Vicky Beeching's 'Undivided' are beginning to communicate to the rest of us just why some exvangelicals have such a strong response to these words.

I blogged about what I called the 'Natural Grammar of Evangelism' back in 2016. As I said then, I think that sharing good news is something that we very naturally do as humans - when we discover something new that we enjoy or find helpful, we naturally want to tell our family and friends about it. But for some reason we find this embarrasing when it comes to church - and I suggested that was often because it isn't 'new' enough for us. If we've been Christians all our lives, we haven't recently discovered it, and so it is odd and feels forced in our culture to share it. This, I think, is why Bob Jackson's research found that churches that were growing tend to be those that have made a change - any change. That gives us something to share with people!

Since then I've had many conversations about evangelism with people, and found that the same Frequently Asked Questions keep coming up. For example:

• Why do evangelism if we don't believe people will go to hell?

• Does it matter whether people are Christian or not?

• What about other faiths?

• How do we evangelise in a culture that is inherently suspicious of truth claims?

• Is Christianity a 'toxic brand'?

• What is the 'good news' for liberals?

To help us think through some of these questions, I and my colleague Mark Waters are organising a day conference in February, 'Reclaiming Evangelism: Postive Liberal Theologies of Mission'. You can read more about it on the Eventbrite booking site, and you can book tickets there or via the link at the top right corner of this page.


Please come along and join in the conversation. Because - like the word or not - evangelism is too important to be left to evangelicals alone.