maggi dawn

trees

I love trees. They inspire me, make me feel good to be alive. I love them in winter, when they stand stark against a pale sky. I love them at twilight when they look full of secrets. In the spring when the light yellow green leaves begin, the freshness of that colour seems full of promise and hope. In the summer the sheer abundant lushness of great boughs of green and red and brown is enough to drown in. In california once I lay underneath a grapefruit tree in a friend's garden, and took about a hundred photos all at different angles.

In the park where I take my son to play there are enough different trees to keep a photographer as well as a tree-climbing boy very happy indeed.   

We went over to Burghley the other day, back when the sun was shining, where there is a sculpture garden and the new Garden of Surprises, both of which have astonishing art installations set among trees, making you see the landscape in a completely different way.

The artist who set these strange figures up on a branch must love trees too, I think.

SLOW priesthood

MadPriest and RevSam have been having a conversation about work, priorities, working hours and so on. This is MadPriest on being a priest:

I stick to 3 jobs as defined by the Ordinal. Preside, teach, visit. I got rid of all jobs outside of the parish, including at deanery level and never attend meetings or courses unless my people will definitely benefit from my attendance. I got rid of my need to be in charge, even if I thought I could do a better job. There is no reason why the local church leadership should not come from members of the laity. This even includes PCCs. Certainly people can be found to do most of the admin jobs and do it far better than someone trained mainly in the niceties of Biblical hermeneutics and church history. I stopped worrying about the Protestant work ethic. I don't care if I'm not busy. Nobody acknowledges the fact when you work all hours anyway.

All this leaves me with plenty of time to do do my pastoral work properly. Visiting, arranging funerals as if each one is a major society wedding, walking round the parish, talking to people in the street. And you know what Sam, everything still gets done and people believe I am the only priest in the neighbourhood who does his job, even though I am the laziest sod in the priesthood.

I aspire to be lazy but haven't achieved it yet. But like MadPriest I too have re-aligned a lot of what I do over the last year or so. Even in a Chaplaincy (where the popular myth is that we only work in term time) it's entirely possible to take on more and more and more things, not only beyond the call of duty but beyond the limit of human capacity. I chopped out a large number of things that weren't necessary, stopped doing other people's jobs for them, and found that not only did I have enough time left over at work to do the important things, but was less tired when I got home, and managed to write a book in my spare time.

Wait - Books? Writing? - where does that come in the Ordinal? (unless you include it in teaching, I suppose...) But because of that, I also like Rev Sam's response to MadPriest, which includes this:

"...in the end I did come to a resolution and a sense of peace: that a) I was called to parish ministry, but b) I had to work out for myself what it meant for ME to be a parish priest - not what being a parish priest was in general, but what sort of ministry is God specifically calling ME to - and that the model of ministry that I had been trained and formed for was not appropriate; that in fact, if I allowed that model to dominate who I was, that I would simply be repeatedly broken."

I like MadPriest's comment because it takes you back to the starting blocks - why am I in this job? What am I supposed to be doing? And what did I just accidentally get talked into along the way? But I like RevSam's development because it recognises there is more than one way to skin a cat.  MadPriest's conversation with RevSam is serious food for thought for anyone in ministry whose work load has got out of control.

slow down preaching...

AKMA records in his "Random Thoughts. that he preaches at about 100 words a minute, which means if he's preaching for five minutes he has to write 500 words.   I write nearly twice that much. Maybe I need to talk more slowly?

My sermon in Bury St Edmunds yesterday seemed to go down well. It was the beginning of the week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and I met some wonderful people there. I preached on Luke 18 - "Two men went up to the Temple to pray...".

Leaving Church

I promised myself that I would blog more of the books I read - so easy just to put them down and read the next one.  Over the summer I've read a pile of books, some for work, some for review, and some just for me! One that I read purely for my own interest was Leaving Church: a memoir of faith - I think I saw it pre-viewed on Prodigal Kiwis blog and ordered it right away. This is the book I quoted from in my Greenbelt talk back in August.

Leaving Church is an account of Barbara Brown Taylor's own journey into faith, ministry, and then Ordination; then her experience of life as a parish priest, first in a big city and later in a small rural town. Eventually, the story begins to track how and why she leaves the life  of a Parish priest, and what are the good and bad things about that experience. I trust (given the title) that that is not too much of a spoiler.

One of the reasons I love this book is because it traces the ambivalence that any Priest worth her (or his) salt is bound to live with - loving God, loving the Church and yet being painfully aware that commitment to Church brings as many constraints as it does freedoms, as many handicaps as priveleges.  Taylor puts her finger on the tension between living out what you believe you were called for, and living within the expectations that others have of a priest (almost invariably not the same thing!) To be a priest with any authenticity you have to be fully human, and yet very often it is the Church community that works against that necessity. Sometimes people will not accept ministry if you are not a priest, and yet they won't accept your humanity if you are.  Taylor also relates beautifully and tenderly the tension of living with a sense of calling, and the way in which that can so easily spill over into sheer workaholism and the inability to say "no".

The title, "leaving" might just as easily be read as "finding" - it's not a negative account at all, more an account of how, in order to continue a journey of faith and simply of human life, the season of ordained ministry had to be put to one side.  One of the reasons I like the book so much is that - unlike so much other rhetoric among Church leavers that is very simplistically anti-priest and anti-institution - she offers considered insight into the tensions of faith communities and their leaders, and shows how sometimes those communities disallow our calling first to be human, and only then to be ministers. She doesn't claim to have left the Church because she didn't believe in it any more, nor because she didin't believe in what she had done thus far, and she doesn't hold the Church in any kind of contempt. Rather, she relates the complex reasons why a clear shift in role and direction became desirable for her, and what she learned along the way. There are plenty of people who will give a bitter account of why they left, trashing where they have been before. It's refreshing to read someone who gives an affectionate and grateful account, despite finding in necessary to leave all the same.

I think anyone interested in Church would benefit from reading this - priests and leaders and ministers of course, but perhaps also those who take different roles within Christian communities - if we could think together about our mutual ministries and what our various roles give to the community, perhaps it would be possible to break down in some places the undesirable divide between the "professional" and the "rest" and start living as communities of truly interdependent people? Either that or I imagine that I and many others will eventually follow the path that Barbara Brown Taylor has found essential.

Wendell Berry

Will reviews Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America here: willzhead.

how many cushions?

I was walking through Cambridge this morning on the way to my new course (yep, I'm being a student again for a few hours a week, but more on that later), and noticed a new shop about to open. It's just up the road from Habitat, which sells furniture, cushions, picture frames, all that kind of stuff (and lovely too - I bought my bed there); it's round the corner from Robert Sayle, where you can buy all of the above along with clothes and toys and perfume and electrical goods.And the new shop is directly opposite two fairly new shops that sell cushions, candles, furniture, dishes and the like. And what does the new shop sell?  you guessed it- cushions, candles, small items of furniture, picture frames...   I stood at the shop window for a couple of minutes thinking. How many curtains and candles and the like can one city really make use of in a year? How much of this stuff is being replaced while perfectly serviceable stuff is consigned to the bin?

Now don't mistake me for a complete curmudgeon when it comes to shopping. Only last month a friend's grown-up daughter pronounced me  "absolutely the BEST shopper" after I introduced her to the delights of Oxford Street and found her at least half a dozen items of clothing that she definitely couldn't live without. I know sometimes it's therapy, and that clothes and home stuff is good for you. But there's also this worrying trend - the kind of shopping-mall disease - where you shop because you are bored, or your life isn't full enough of other things.  There's a version of shopping which is about filling a big emotional hole;  where shopping is no longer a trip to get things you need, or a few seasonal treats, but a "leisure activity". It's a fine line, but one side of it is definitely a sad prospect. I think there are too many cushions and curtains on sale in Cambridge. We need to do more walking in the country and making our own jam.

no time to stand and stare

    What is this life if, full of care,    
We have no time to stand and stare.    

No time to stand beneath the boughs    
And stare as long as sheep or cows.    

No time to see, when woods we pass,    
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.    

No time to see, in broad daylight,    
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.    

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,    
And watch her feet, how they can dance.    

No time to wait till her mouth can    
Enrich that smile her eyes began.    

A poor life this if, full of care,    
We have no time to stand and stare.

William Henry Davies

Slow thinking (or how a seven year old thinks)

Mike at Wheeliebinland wrote a while back about a supper we had at his house, and captured the essence of what it's like to be seven - the age when it's hard to grasp the adult concept that only one word can come out of your mouth at a time, only one thing can be thought of or attempted or achieved. The outrageous flow of creativity is as yet neither curtailed nor enabled by the rigours of Fast Thinking.  The toy you were playing with broke? Oh dear. Never mind, there's still time to write a novel before bedtime.

Slow thinking

Picture from Black and White Photography blog

"Experts think that the brain has two modes of thought...Guy Claxton, a British psychologist, cals them Fast thinking and Slow thinking. Fast thinking is rational, analytical, linear, logical. It is what we do under pressure, when the clock is ticking; it is the way computers think and the modern workplace operates; it delivers clear solutions to well-defined problems. Slow thinking is intuitive, woolly, and creative. It is what we do when the pressure is off, and we have time to let ideas simmer at their own pace on the back burner. It yields rich and subtle insights...

...Of course, Slow thinking on its own is just indulgence without the rigours of fast thinking. We have to be able to seize, analyze and evaluate the ideas that surface from the subconscious - and often we must do so quickly. Einstein appreciated the need to marry the two modes of thought: "Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings  are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination."   

In praise of Slow, Carl Honore, 105-6

In praise of SLOW

The SLOW movement is not about being lazy, being boring, having no life, being a technophobe, or checking out of the world.  It's about making use of speed when it serves you well, but maintaining an inner poise that refuses to let your soul be rushed through life. The Slow movement is not against speed when you need it, it's against speed for the sake of speed. 

"Most of us do not wish to replace the cult of speed with the cult of slowness. Speed can be fun, productive and powerful, and we would be poorer without it. What the world needs, and what the Slow movement offers, is a middle path, a recipe for marrying 'la dolce vita' with the dynamism of the information age. The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between. Being Slow means never rushing, never striving to save time just for the sake of it. It means remaining calm and unflustered even when circumstances force us to speed up. One way to cultivate inner Slowness is to make time for activities that defy acceleration--meditation, knitting, gardening, yoga, painting, reading, walking …"  Carl Honore,  In Praise of Slow.

left unsaid

I've been writing a lot lately. Some days it seems to flow along, and others I struggle. But even when it's going OK, I end up feeling that if I even manage to articulate 10% of what I set out to do,  that's about the best I ever manage.  Writing - good writing - is in itself something that demands a bit of the philosophy of SLOW; you can dash off a bit of writing, of course, as anyone who lives under RAE pressure knows very well. But you can't just dash off something really good.

Life itself is much the same.  Sure, we all have things to celebrate, things to be thankful for, things to be proud of.  But only in the privacy of your own soul do you know the huge discrepancy between what is and what might have been; the ragged remains and the false starts and the failures to complete and the unfulfilled hopes that, for the most part, no-one else is aware of.  George Eliot once said, "It is never too late to become what you might have been." That's hopeful, and offers the inspiration never to give up. But in a way, I think Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy got closer to the mark with this mixture of hope and resignation: 

I cannot read the writing of the years,
My eyes are full of tears,
It gets all blurred and won’t make sense;
It’s full of contradictions
Like the scribblings of a child.

I can but hand it in, and hope
That Thy great mind, which reads
The writings of so many lives,
Will understand this scrawl
And what it strives to say – but leaves unsaid.

read the rest of the poem here

gonna lay down my burden

Sushi blogs on stress management here. It's rather good. And adds something rather good to my current "SLOW" meditations.

sleeping on the job

To add to my meditations on SLOW, here's a clip from Simply Simon:

The latest research by the Sleep/Wake Research Centre at Massey University in Wellington has found that a workplace nap is one of the most effective strategies to greater productivity. Up to forty minutes of sleep, they say, can make a world of difference to the well-being of workers, to the health of workplace relationships and, ultimately, to the financial bottom line. Even a ten-minute doze sharpens the fatigued mind far more effectively that copious cups of coffee.