Miracles

Following on what I wrote the other day about prayer, some thoughts on miracles.  I believe in them;  I insist on them.  Without the miraculous, life can't really be life.  And prayer and miracle are inextricably linked.

But when I speak about miracles, when I speak about the certainty of miracles, I don not insist on the inexplicability (if that's a word) of miracles.  There are miracles that are hard to explain, if not downright impossible.  "How on earth could that have happened?" we may say, on occasion.  But miracles of that sort are not a central part of my belief; far from it, in fact - back in the wilderness, confronted by Satan (or perhaps one might better say, by all the temptations that would be ever-present throughout his ministry and needed to be confronted now, before he even began), Jesus made it very clear that dazzling people into belief by performing impossible tricks was not part of his agenda.

Loving people into belief by "showing them the Father" clearly was, however.  For me miracles happen when love triumphs over hatred and apathy;  when sad situations and hurting people find healing;  when those who are turned aside, banned, turned into refugees find acceptance and welcome;  when peace is built by small caring actions even as the guns are firing down the road;  when water flows in the desert, and beauty lifts and changes hearts.  Miracles happen when our needs and fears and hurts find an answer;  it doesn't matter to me whether I know how it was done, whether I can see the workings-out;  it doesn't have to be one of the impossible things folk like me are supposed to believe every day before breakfast.  Miracle is the dawn breaking after the darkness of night.

And yet of course not every dark night ends with a sunrise, and not every pain is relieved by a healing touch.  The miracles I see don't make the whole world good, they don't clear up all the mess, the world is still often a rotten and hurtful place.  What miracles do is to persuade me that the world doesn't have to be like that - like this.  I am encouraged to believe that I should continue as a pilgrim.  Miracles are purposeful and contain within themselves the possibility of contagion:  one can lead to another, as candles can light other candles.  Whenever my life is brightened by a gracious impact, it's then that I should be asking "Why me?" - rather than, as so often is the case, when I feel downhearted or up against it.  Why me?  What can I do with this blessing, how can I share it and grow it and pass it on?

Thought For The Week

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED

FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

WAS MUSIC” 

Kurt Vonnegut

On Prayer

I found myself, strangely, in a conversation about prayer with someone I know, who, as far as I know, is a non-believer.  "What do you expect to gain from it?" he asked me at one point.

That knocked me back a little bit.  What did I expect to gain?  What do I?  "I don't pray in order to gain things," I started by saying - but then I found myself thinking, "Isn't that a rather faith-deficient approach to prayer, and to God?  Surely I should be expecting rather more than that?"

True, I don't pray in order to gain things;  that is, I try not to come before God with a shopping list, my prayer isn't an attempt to twist his arm in some way, to change his mind, to press my case for special treatment.  I do know the difference between prayers and magic spells.  The witch or wizard who weaves a spell is aiming (or claiming) to control the forces of nature, and to be able to bend them to her or his will.  Sometimes prayer may come close to presenting itself in that light, particularly when organised and co-ordinated prayers are arranged in support of a person or a cause.  I have at times joined such prayer campaigns, though usually I tend to opt out, if only because they can feel like an attempt to twist the arm of the Almighty.

Prayer, for me, is about relationship, and it is at least as much an offering and an opening of self before God as it is a matter of requesting his help and support.  Nonetheless, I should pray with the expectation of receiving, and I do believe that prayer is always answered, and some of my own experiences of prayer being answered have been amazing.  (That, by the way, is inevitably a very subjective statement, that can go no further than saying 'That's how it felt from where I was at the time').

So what do I hope to receive?  Not the miraculous, or at least not that in the sense of the elemental forces being bent and twisted round for my own benefit (or that of those for whom I have prayed, I don't only pray for myself!).  But I certainly pray with the hope and indeed expectation of gaining insight, of being supported or maybe corrected, of seeing things more clearly, of being helped.  I know that I won't always get the answer I want;  I hope I shall find the answer I need.  Sometimes that answer is immediate; at others, it's only in hindsight and at a distance that I see how my prayer has found its answer.  And there are those times when I have closed my ears to any answer;  when I haven't wanted to know.

By tradition, Christians pray 'through Jesus Christ'.  This isn't a magic formula added to guarantee the success of whatever our prayers ask for or demand.  It is a form of words that expresses the basic truth of all genuinely Christian prayer - that we should hope and aim and intend to come to God with the mind of Christ, asking those things that will best serve his will.  The starting point of prayer is that 'I am no more my own, but Christ's'.  So what do I hope to gain?  To grow into Christ, to be a better pilgrim, to be a better disciple.  For our Lord himself, prayer carried him along the road that would lead to Calvary; and it is at the foot of the cross that I make my prayer in his name.

Maurice

Maurice is standing where he can see the road;

Maurice keeps alert, likes to see what may be coming.

He does not want to be taken by surprise.

The day, as ever, is a hot one;  for a while

Maurice studies the shimmering poles that stand in line along the road,

each one topped by the football nest of swallows.

A few of the birds are sitting quietly on the wires,

their long tail feathers twisting and trailing;

and nothing else is moving at all.

Maurice lifts the cigar from the front pocket

of his dusty jacket, sniffs it and taps it,

returns it to its place. 

It is not yet time for cigars.  There is a little shade

where he is standing, but even so

he fans himself briefly with his denim cap

before covering again his thinning hair.

From behind him, a sudden cough: some kind of machine.

Maurice looks round, but there is nothing to see.  He knows that

over on the other side of the hill

Marco’s men will be harvesting the tobacco,

and hanging the yellowing leaves to dry;  while,

stretched out ahead of him into the haze,

the road he has come again to watch remains empty.

Maurice waits a while longer, kicking his boots against a stone.

Most days he comes to stand here and to hope for

that red cloud of dust,

something riding the dirt road towards him. 

Nothing much ever comes out this far,

just now and again a car, a truck, a pick-up; maybe Father Elias

with the minibus from the Parish House.

Each sudden and seldom plume of dust

is a lift and a catch to his heart,

and always he is disappointed, and still, and yet, he waits:

waits for the son to whom, all those years ago,

he waved a good-bye and blessing, waits for

his smiling prodigal boy who left him to tread

the golden streets of the city.

An October Morning

A dark October morning, Tuesday by the riverside, the world

waiting for the clocks to turn;   he stood where once they had stood together,

at the widening of the path near the old bridge.

He contemplated the remains of the last night’s steady rain

still twisting around the dying leaves of the trailing willows

to fall as black drops into the black water below.

On a day of monochrome, as he looked on

the colour was leaching out of the tired docks and nettles

along the path side;  even the abandoned drink cans and chocolate wrappers

were fading to grey. He blew on his hands,

thinking to move on, but no longer sure

where there might be next to go.

This was the two hundredth day:  sadly,

he had kept a careful count of the time,

of the year widening, warming and glowing,

challenging his dismay with its riot of summer colours

and with songs he could not share.  Now,

as the year was closing in on itself again

he considered that real and other world

in which people did and said sensible things, and played their happy games, and

made safe and good decisions. 

Once, he had aspired to that world.

Its promises had attracted and all but ensnared him, along with her;

he had longed to dwell in that perfect sunshine brightness.

But his days had grown darker long before the season turned.

And on this two hundredth day since she had said she had to go,

he was standing there once more, crumpled as the chip papers scattered by the broken bin,

while the river flowed on, black and unregarding.

Why did you demand to live in the real world, he wondered again;

why could there have been no life for you in mine?

He had expected that they would find him there, surprised only

that it had taken two hundred days of looking.  He turned

at the sound of the car door’s slam,

watched as the two men walked towards him, hands in pockets,

raincoat collars turned against the chill.

It would soon be time to go.

Thought For The Week

"Many people tirade against the materialism and unspirituality of our age, but spirituality has been interpreted so narrowly that we do not recognise it when we meet it in ourselves and in others."

Gerard Hughes

Butterfly

I heard today of the death of someone I had come to know quite well and to like.  It had all happened very suddenly, and once again I am reminded of the fragility of human existence - at least as measured in our physical selves, within the passage of time.

At a recent funeral, all those attending were given butterflies cut from crepe paper.  The butterfly is a symbol both of beauty and of fragility, and just for those reasons made a relevant and moving keepsake.  But perhaps, too, the metamorphosis that is a feature of the butterfly life cycle can take us a little further and help us to explore what it may mean to think of our selves as not only physical beings but spiritual.

In early times, the butterfly was a symbol of resurrection, and of the faith that has Easter at its centre.  So for those who believe, or at any rate hope, that the death of our physical body is not the end of us, well, each butterfly we see is living proof that the pupa and chrysalis are not the end of the caterpillar, but just an onward stage of its journey.

The fact that there are butterflies does not prove anything really, of course, about our own life and death.  After all, butterflies, in this physical world, die too.  I suspect, though, that the fact that we find them beautiful and inspiring may be an indication that there is something more about us than can be weighed, assessed and measured in physical terms.  For me the marvel has never been that butterflies, flowers, birdsong are beautiful, but that we have the capacity to find them so (and to celebrate this in poetic words, inspirational music, or paint on canvas).

And while that's not in itself a proof of the existence of the spiritual me, it certainly sows within me the seeds of doubt that I could really be only dust and ashes . . .

Some Thoughts on Preservation

Someone on a film I glanced at on passing our television the other day (I don't watch many films, but others in the household do) spoke about setting up a "preserve for wildlife" - and I immediately fastened upon that somewhat inappropriate word.

Why is the word 'preserve' inappropriate?  Well, I spent a summer once preserving wildlife, as part of my university degree course.  I didn't enjoy it, as I don't much like killing things;  even annoying houseflies get shooed out of a window rather than flattened with a rolled-up newspaper.  I had to collect insects and other invertebrates along a particular stretch of hedge and woodland, and over a particular two month period.  I enjoyed observing them - flies, beetles, moths, whatever - and I enjoyed trying to make some assessment of numbers, and of the balance between species.  But I didn't enjoy catching and killing specimens, watching them die in a jar primed with chopped laurel leaves, and pinning them out on cork boards.

But, to be sure, they got preserved:  well and truly preserved.  I remember a story about a rare plant found in a field where, it was decided, it was very vulnerable to being destroyed by grazing or by the unwary feet of cattle or hikers;  so it had a fence erected around it to keep it safe.  What happened, of course, was that it got completely smothered by all the rank and rampant weeds that sprang up inside the fence.  By the end of the season, it had disappeared without trace.

Naturalists are careful to distinguish between conservation and preservation.  No living thing exists on its own, but always as part of an ecosystem, which may attain a balance but will shift, over a period of time and dependent on weather and other variables, from one balance to another.  Conservation is the management of ecological change;  the aim may be to ensure the survival of a species that might otherwise be at risk, but in the wild environment that can't be done by isolating it, only by managing things in such a way as to give it a better competitive edge.

The word 'preservation' gets used a lot about buildings, too, churches and cathedrals included.  It is a little more appropriate, of course, when used of a building, which is after all constructed of inert materials, stone and brick, glass and wood, which need protecting and at times replacing;  but it is not appropriate, surely, when used about the use to which that building is put.  I'm as quick as the next person to oppose change that is purely for the sake of change, but even so, change there must be - it's only dead things that don't change (though even they, of course, moulder and weather away).  A living church may need some conservation work, so that change is managed and does not cause unnecessary and harmful division, but a church that rejects all thought of change and opts for (self) preservation is destined to become every bit as dead as those little flies and moths I pinned to cork boards all those years ago.

In Praise of Dandelions

A perfect day for autumn gardening today - until the rain came at about five o'clock, anyway.  I've weeded through a large bed of perennials and shrubs, and cleared some smaller beds too.  I'm fascinated by weeds, their adaptability and the speed with which they claim or reclaim any piece of bare ground.  But I have a special place in my heart for dandelions.

It may be because they were flowers we loved to pick and to play with as small children.  Children today still enjoy blowing on dandelion "clocks", much to the despair of anyone trying to keep a clean and tidy garden nearby!  They are splendid flowers of course, especially in the spring season when they line the roadsides and cover many a field, but they are also a bane to the gardener, with their deep taproot, easily broken when pulling so that the plant can sprout again from the remnant, and of course those floaty seeds so quickly released into the wind by children 'telling the time'.

The name dandelion comes from the French dents de lion, lion's teeth, a fanciful description perhaps of the densely packed florets (each one in reality a small adapted flower) that together make up the flower head.  Such a common and pervasive weed has many local names, of course, but one that is quite widespread is "piss-a-bed", for the dandelion has, I gather, a diuretic effect.  Whether the root, dried and roasted and drunk as a sort of coffee substitute, would have that effect, I don't know.  I haven't tried it, though I see you can get dandelion coffee in some health food shops.  Like many weeds, it isn't completely useless, and has been used in medicine and herbalism as well as in place of coffee, over the years:  its botanical name of Taraxacum officinale combines a generic name that I think comes originally from Persian, via Arabic, and would have been used by the pharmacists of long ago who collected it for medical use.  Any plant with the specific name officinale, or officinalis, would have been the type specimen used in medical preparation.

These days I, like all gardeners, do regular battle with dandelions.  But I do so with more than a grudging respect, and I was quite pleased yesterday therefore to hear a harvest festival sermon that was in part at least, in praise of dandelions.  Why in praise?  Well, mostly because dandelions are the great exploiters;  as our preacher reminded us, "they grow anywhere and everywhere."  It's all very well to aim to be like productive wheat, as the parable reminds us we should, bearing "thirty fold, and sixty fold, and an hundred fold".  But let's also aim for something of the dandelion's stickability, its readiness to exploit every opportunity for growth, its ability to do well in quite unpromising soil (and even the cracks between the slabs of my patio, from which I can never dislodge them).  And what about that deep tap root, giving dandelions the ability to come back and rejuvenate themselves, even from quite unpromising situations?

Perhaps we might find more insights and challenges for the Church in mission from a study of the dandelion than from many a more obvious harvest crop.  Nonetheless, I don't expect to see large numbers of dandelions among the harvest decorations in my local church any time soon!

Thought For The Week

"Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain."

Billie Holliday 

Printing Error

I have just produced a new collection of my poems ("To Dream of Angels", £3 per book if interested), and this morning, reading through a copy before putting a few books aside for a recital tonight, I noticed a printing error.  Nothing too major, just "the the" instead of "to the" - remarkable, though, how a mistake like that involving unimportant words can survive any number of checks and read-throughs!

And then, of course, it leaps out of the page at you so that it becomes virtually all you can see there!

I've put it right, and, as I print my books as I need them, all future copies will have this line correct.  I'm reminded, though, that we live in an imperfect world, and most of the time we have to make compromises and read around the bits that are untidy, uncomfortable or don't quite make sense.  I like the way that Persian carpet-weavers always include a deliberate mistake, because "only Allah is perfect".

Of course, we should always do our best to get things as right as we can.  It's also true that there are flaws and mistakes that really are important, things we can't overlook or live with, but are bound to do something about, whether they are faults within ourselves or within others - so that people do not get hurt, so that the lives of others are not damaged or spoiled.  At present, we're being made all too aware of a situation in which people who should have known better turned a blind eye to the very damaging and exploitative behaviour of a "celebrity".  Few people will come out of that story smelling all that sweet, I suspect.

None the less I'd want also to caution against a small-minded attitude that looks to find faults everywhere, and that then magnifies things that really don't matter all that much (I find myself thinking again of the way my "the the" suddenly leapt off the page), so that they are given more weight and importance than the achievements and the good things.  It can be tempting to do this, but in fact it is a form of tyranny, the more so as we're more likely to be doing it to shore up and massage our own ego than to give help and advice to the person at whom we point our finger.

Life has to go on, people need to work and play together in useful and creative ways, and for this to happen some sense of "live and let live" is vital (and didn't Jesus tell a story about someone with a dirty great plank in his own eye pointing out the speck of dust in someone else's?). Where fault-finding is about putting down rather than building up, we would be better not doing it, and that is certainly true where the faults in themselves are trivial and harmless.

Car Crash

Driving out to Llanfair Caereinion today to install some sound equipment, I noted two crashed cars within no more than a mile of each other.  This is a twisty road in places, deceptively so I suppose for the young and unwary boy racer.  One car was sat on the grass beside the road on a sharp bend, closely bound in blue police tape, while the other was set in a field which it had not entered via the gate - you could see where the hedge had been extensively remodelled.  Neither car looked too badly damaged, at least so far as the passenger compartment was concerned so I hope the drivers and passengers escaped without serious injury.  Sadly, though, not all do;  the number of families each year plunged into sadness because of road traffic accidents is far too high.  Many of those injured and killed are, of course, the innocent victims of the foolishness or inattention - or, let's face it, the criminal negligence - of others.

To me, the cars I saw today were a reminder not only of how dangerous and all too often deadly our roads are, but also of how suddenly and traumatically accidents of any kind can change our lives.  So far as these particular accidents were concerned, at the very least there were two cars that are out of circulation, two drivers presumably now having to catch the bus;  both cars could very well be written off.  And who knows? maybe there is also the pain and discomfort of living with disability or with injuries that will take time to heal.  I hope there is nothing worse than that.  In the work I now do I am constantly in contact with people whose lives have been traumatically changed.  I've seen how they handle this - with acceptance and resignation, with fortitude and nobility, or perhaps with a real sense of being crushed by events and crippled by sadness and loss.  People are different, and so are the circumstances they face.

And it occurs to me that often, whatever one's actual role in the events, part of what has to be faced when accident or trauma happens is a burden of guilt, of having messed up, of actions or inaction to be regretted.  I shouldn't have done that!  I could have done more!  What the happens can be that we magnify these things up, twisting reality so as, almost, to gratuitously hurt ourselves more than we should be hurt.  Or we may thrash about, throwing blows and blame in every direction as one way of silencing those nagging voices from deep within.  Grief is a profoundly disabling thing, and it is, therefore, something we're not going to handle well on our own.  Sometimes the only role one can play as a friend or adviser is that of the parent whose little hurt child has no words, just pummelling fists against the legs of Mum or Dad to express the frustration of pain.  But that is such a vital role, when we're just there to help soak up the angst, until calmness and acceptance begin to prevail.

So today I was thinking not only of the disabling and disorientating suddenness of traumatic changes, but of how much, and how deeply, we need each other when this happens.  How vital is the work of the Good Samaritan!

Driving to Middleton

My most recent 'Nature Notes' essay, as published locally . . .

If I needed any reminder as to how rich and lovely the countryside around us is in these parts, my Sunday morning journey a few weeks ago to attend church at Middleton-in-Chirbury certainly provided one.  It was a pleasant enough day at the end of September, with the leaves just beginning to catch fire at the tops of some of the overhanging trees.  Just past Marton I saw one red kite, then a second, lift from a tree near the road and then with a sort of lethargic aerial grace skirt the field border nearby.  I seldom fail to see a kite when I’m near Marton, and this beautiful bird is a welcome addition to our local avian fauna.

The rounder wings, stockier shape and wedge tail of a buzzard made a familiar sight over to the right of the lane.  Buzzards too are more common than they used to be, and have spread into many areas in which until recently they were rare - but there have always been plenty in these parts.  This one was hovering just short of some woodland.  Buzzards don’t hover with the ease and skill of a kestrel, but they can do it, though sometimes they have to work pretty hard.  Their keen vision will spot a vole or mouse that we would certainly miss.

There were plenty of pheasants along the lane, birds not known for their sharpness of wit.  They certainly don’t seem to have the nous to get out of the way of cars, and many are killed on our roads.  But then I came across a little group of partridges, two of which flew out of my way immediately, while a third ran along the road in front of me for a little way, before peeling off right and plunging into some bracken.  These were not the common or grey partridge which is our native species, but the red-legged or French partridge, introduced as a game bird and now quite widespread.  This is a neat and strongly marked bird, a sharper and more russet brown than the grey partridge (and, of course, it has red legs).  I’m very fond of them.

I’ve often seen hares along this road, and I did again on this occasion - just a glimpse, really, of this shy and rangy creature.  He dodged quickly into the hedgerow, but previously I’ve followed hares some distance along the lane here before they’ve turned aside.  They tend to follow established paths, and so will run in front of you until they reach one.  Finally, though, I came across a weasel, which quickly scampered across in front of me and into the bushes.  There are more weasels around than you would think, for they’re not too often seen, being quick and furtive.  This one, to my surprise, had been investigating some roadkill;  I had associated weasels entirely with live prey.  So much to see, in just a short journey - magic!

Thought For The Week

"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."

Scott Peck

Taking Stock

Last week was not as wearing as I had feared, though for various reasons it did have its sleepless moments.  I had a significant meeting to attend, which seemed to point up some big decisions to make, and perhaps a case to argue.  What might be on the table, I wondered? Not so much, as it turned out;  well, nothing dramatically life-changing, anyway.  So I suppose the meeting failed to produce all that I had hoped for in the way of progress and direction, and the case I had thought I might make for myself rather faded away to nothing almost as I tried to articulate it. I am rarely at my best in meetings like this, especially in interview and one-to-one situations, and it would have been easy for me to have come away feeling really frustrated, and full of clever and cogent things I could have said if only I had thought of them at the time - but that isn't actually how I felt afterwards at all.  In fact I think all went as well as it really could have.  I felt listened to and understood, and also informed and encouraged.  And, I think, valued, cared about.

Now that's as it should be, of course.  If the Church can't be caring and pastoral, who can?  If broken people can't come here to be mended, where can they go?  But, third question: where does all of this leave me, as a Christian and as a minister?  It is clear that for the foreseeable future I shall, in my retirement, continue to set aside my orders as a priest, and to operate as, to all intents and purposes, a lay member of the Church.  And if I'm to be truly honest with myself, this is for the present where I feel comfortable and right.  For I do not feel the call to leadership, nor do I have much of a sense that I can or should be offering a sacramental ministry.  That this sense of call should still be absent remains something of a surprise to me, the more so as I sense a growing awareness of being called to serve God in pastoral and teaching activities.  One thing that has become clear is that the opportunity can be there for me to do this, with the Church's blessing and encouragement, and perhaps this may in itself awaken and enable other things.

The most important thing is that here I am, in almost every way in which these things can be measured, a well, happy and balanced man.  And if part of me would like there to be a closure that my journey thus far has not brought me to, and I remain a 'work in progress', I can find assurance in being given things to say or do, in finding a quiet but real and sustaining faith, and in being offered the opportunities, friendships and systems of support that will enable me to move forward.  I have hope, and I have the love of my Lord.  I do not need anything more than this.

For Ann

A little piece for 'National Poetry Day'

Summer sun blind

he’d been walking in circles,

helpless and stumbling, till

she caught his hand, and at last

he felt himself secure, no more afraid,

but ready to

face the autumn.

Thought For The Week

"October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again."

Hal Borland