Putting Priorities into Practice…

One of the great things about St. Cuthbert’s is that we have meetings which are both positive and productive. Last month we tried a new style of meeting for our PCC members - to ask what direction we should be taking as a church and how to get there. It entailed giving up a Saturday morning but I was cheered and encouraged both by the attitudes throughout the meeting and in seeking an effective outcome. Rosie Junemann, Liz Parker and Carol O’Malley all have articles in the November edition of our Parish Magazine recording what went on and reflecting upon the issues raised.

Our reason for meeting was to build on the Diocese’s initiative, “Preparing the Ground for Growth.” How can we join in? What are the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats that we need to deal with? And how can we then move forward? We identified two priorities in particular upon which we wish to take fresh action: (1) to become more confident in the basics of our faith; (2) to be renewed in the life of prayer.

These are not priorities only for the Parochial Church Council to do something about. We see them as basic to what we are about as a church. Unless we are grounded in the basics of our faith, then we’re not going to be very confident in sharing it with others. And our calling is to be a church with a praying heart so that we may know God’s purpose for us as his people.

And we need to act on these priorities. Just how we’ll work them out is a medium to long-term issue. But we can make a start straight away - and we’re going to do so this month. So on three Tuesdays of November there’s an invitation to come to the Vicarage to start looking at the basics of faith - perhaps we’ll need to ask what are the basics; so we need everyone’s contribution to identify those areas where we need to grow our faith. And on Monday 11^th November our church will be Open for Prayer from 2 to 3p.m. -  and hopefully on the second Monday of each month thereafter. Yes, you can pray at other times and in other places. But this is to join in a shared objective. You don’t need to stay the whole time - but come for as long as you can, and see what you discover!                 

 

Open for Prayer:

2 to 3p.m  Monday 11^th November - in church

 

Basic Belief - what do we believe as Christians?

7.30p.m. Tuesdays 5^th, 12^th & 19^th November - in the Vicarage

Two Thomases - the 2nd Sunday of Easter

(Gospel Reading: John 20.19–31)

“The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith.”

This is a tale of two Thomases. “Doubting Thomas” is the way one of the disciples in today’s Gospel reading is often unjustly described – as if we think we can write him off for his temerity in questioning the disciples’ account of their Easter meeting with Jesus. The other Thomas is the man who wrote those words with which I began: “The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith.”

This Thomas is a writer I’ve kept going back to throughout the time I’ve been ordained - over 30 years. Thomas Merton was one of the great Christian writers of the 20^th century. Like many people, I first encountered his work in his book “The Seven Storey Mountain.” It’s the account of his vocation – from his childhood upbringing in France and England, through the loss of both his parents, his move to America, and his coming to faith... which led him to become a Trappist monk. He realised, as he says in his book, that his vocation – any Christian’s vocation - was to be a saint, and the book ends on a high note with a great confession of faith and his profession into monastic vows. It’s a tremendous book of 400 pages telling how God has been there all along, seeking him out and calling him on his journey of faith.

But what becomes still more interesting is to see how he went on from that high point. Could he continue living at that level of faith and confidence? There’s a lot to learn from reading his personal journals. Just a few years after the runaway success of “The Seven Storey Mountain”, he finds himself correcting the proofs of the book’s translation into French. It had become one of the religious bestsellers of all time, but he admits that now the book leaves him quite cold – he is no longer the man who wrote that book. Or rather, we might say, he’d moved on. Faith cannot remain static, so a faith which is full of confidence will – if it’s going to be a living faith – have to be challenged, even questioned and doubted.

“The Seven Storey Mountain” remains a classic of Christian spirituality. But it didn’t deal with those parts of Merton’s life that his superiors thought unedifying. A rather wayward year as an undergraduate in Cambridge, for example. And it’s never been established whether during that year he had fathered a child with whom he then had no further contact, a child later killed with its Mother during the Blitz. Whatever the truth behind all the speculation, we know that beneath his desire for holiness, and the zealous faith of his best-selling book, there were private doubts, anxieties, questioning and griefs.

And this is something that comes out clearly for the first time with the publishing of his personal journals. Having renounced the world, taken his vows in a silent order, after getting special permission to live in his own hermitage in the woods, Merton at the age of 50 had to have surgery on his spine which required that he leave the monastery. The operation was a success, and he returned to the abbey just in time for Easter – only for it to dawn upon him in the days that followed that he had fallen in love. It was a student nurse who had cared for him only briefly, but his feelings forced him to conclude, “I will do the only thing possible and risk loving with Christ’s love when there is so obvious a need for it.” He knows that his vows and his security in the religious life require him to break off his contact with the nurse. But everything he felt he had under control is now called into question. Recklessly he calls her from the monastery and arranges meetings with her – and knowing their feelings for each other, he comes to understand himself the more deeply. As he writes in his Journal: “One of the good sane things about this love is seeing myself as I am loved by M. True, she idealizes me impossibly, yet at the same time I am unavoidably known to her as I am. Many of the things she loves in me are things I find humiliating and impossible, but she loves them because they are concretely mine. I love her the same way....”

In a sense it is a hopeless love affair. It’s not something Merton can continue while maintaining the integrity of his vows - nor in fairness to the young woman. But it’s also something deeply moving, something that enables him more than anything in the last years of his life to grow – and that finally allows him to make sense of his vocation.

I tell the story because it shows that faith is not something we can insist upon. We cannot impose our faith upon other people, and we cannot maintain it for ourselves simply by keeping the rules. We can only live out the life of faith by recognising our humanity, by allowing questions and doubts to reach our hearts and minds – and above all by letting love do its work. In the end for Merton there is no conflict between his monastic vocation and the call to love – and to love with all his human being. Because when he is able to accept finally that someone else is loving him as the person he is – rather than as a monk, a priest or a writer – he comes to understand truly what love is.

It’s a lesson which has had to be learned over and over again from the earliest of times by anyone who would be a follower of Christ. The apostle Thomas is not someone to be condemned for his failure to believe that Christ was risen from the dead. Perhaps he was a man of stubbornness, someone who just wouldn’t take other people at their word – he tells us that much himself: “Unless I see.... I will not believe.” But can we not feel for him too? The other disciples have a message they can proclaim with boldness, because they have seen for themselves that first Easter day, when Jesus had come to them through the locked doors. But he had missed it – how is Thomas ever to be able to join with the other apostles in proclaiming their message of the Resurrection when he hasn’t seen it the same way they have?

And I want to ask, isn’t there a message for us all here, when we are trying to bear witness to the faith which keeps us going? We need to be confident in our faith, but we need to see that our experience is not necessarily that of other people. What is convincing to us may mean nothing to other people. Have they been there with us in our experience? Have we gone through the same experiences as them?

Of course St. John’s Gospel gives us a “happy ending” for Thomas despite all his questioning when Jesus comes a week later to stand again in the midst of the disciples. But what strikes me is that though Jesus shows the wounds in his hands and side to Thomas and invites him to touch them, we’re not told that Thomas does in fact do so. “My Lord and my God!” says Thomas to Jesus, but there is no longer the need for him to have tangible proof. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” says Jesus. And the truth of Thomas’s conversion is not that he can now reach out and touch the wounds of the risen Christ, but that the risen Christ has reached out and touched him. Jesus comes to Thomas with all his doubts and questions. He lets him ask, he allows for his anxieties, and still he calls him his disciple. Failure to believe is not grounds for condemnation. And the way to faith for Thomas is through the love of God in Christ in accepting him in all the frailty of his humanity.

The other Thomas – Thomas Merton – had embarked upon his Christian journey and his monastic vocation with the highest of goals, but was to discover the true meaning of love only when he found someone who loved him outside the rules and boundaries he’d set himself, someone who loved him as and for himself. That’s the way that God loves us, and the way he calls us into a community where we love one another. As Merton records: “I dreamt I was telling several other monks, ‘I shall be a saint’, and they did not seem to question me. Furthermore, I believed it myself. If I do – I shall – it will be because of the prayers of other people who, though they are better than I am, still want me to pray for them.”

Faith and Fruitfulness

Having returned from pilgrimage to the Holy Land before the beginning of Lent, I still haven’t sorted out the pictures that I took while I was there. I know there’s over a thousand of them. About 200 are on my phone - so I sometimes find myself scrolling through them, generally in an odd moment when I’m waiting to do something else.

I see that the final picture I took is of a man squeezing pomegranates. He’d set up his stall outside the church where we’d held our final Eucharist. And he’d chosen his location wisely. Having had no refreshments since breakfast and nearing lunch, we were a large group of thirsty pilgrims, ready to buy his coffee, orange juice and the juice of pomegranates.

The pomegranate is a delicious fruit. And it has special symbolism in a number of different religions. For the Jews they represented the fertility of the Promised Land. Wikipedia tells us: “It is traditional to consume pomegranates on Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year) because the pomegranate, with its numerous seeds, symbolizes fruitfulness. Also, it is said to have 613 seeds, which corresponds with the 613 mitzvot or commandments of the Torah. And they’re a frequent decoration - in the Temple, on the hem of the High Priest’s robe, perhaps a model for Solomon’s crown.

They’re symbolic also in Christianity, often woven into the fabric of vestments and liturgical hangings. They’re found in the paintings of Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci amongst others, and placed in the hands of the Virgin Mary and the child Jesus. The fruit, broken or bursting open, is a symbol of the fullness of Jesus' suffering and resurrection.

It’s significant that this was the last picture I took - the place was Abu Ghosh, the likeliest location of Emmaus, the village to which two disciples walked on Easter Day when they were joined by Jesus. They failed to recognise him until they had invited this stranger encountered on the road into their house - and there he broke bread. Then it was they knew him to be the Risen Christ.

At Easter we are called to recognise the fruits of Christ’s work for us, his love shown upon the Cross, his sacrificial death - and the power of the Resurrection. I was glad that our pilgrimage ended in Emmaus - the place where the risen Jesus was seen and known. Let’s pray that his love for us may be a reality which we find at work in our lives.

This is taken from the April issue of our Parish Magazine - now available online.

And meanwhile our Parish Website - with details of Holy Week and Easter - has been updated.

Commitment and Faith

Giles Fraser, former Chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral, has been much in the news recently. But for a long time he'd been booked to take part in Radio 3's "Free Thinking" Festival of Ideas at The Sage, Gateshead. He honoured the booking last Sunday and delivered an excellent lecture on the nature of commitment, taking as his starting point the differing callings of farmers and gunfighters in the film, "The Magnificent Seven." The Hall in which he spoke was packed - a rare occasion when someone can develop a cogent intellectual argument - and get listened to.

The lecture itself wasn't distracted by the events at St. Paul's, but a time for interview and audience questions gave us the opportunity to see how theory and practice relate - and the centrality of Christian faith.

The lecture was broadcast last night on Radio 3. You can listen to it on I-Player and to a podcast version - just follow this link and either play or download.

I didn't tackle "commitment" explicitly on Sunday morning - but it had its place as I tackled the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids; the homily is on this link.