He is not here

My husband has put up a really good post on his blog which I want to take a moment here to divert you to if you’ve not already seen it.  It looks at the art work ‘Dead Dad’.  Have you seen it before?  When we saw it a few years back it was one of those rare profound moments when a piece of art really speaks to you and moves you.  It was quite devastating.  Confrontation with death and pain, mixed in with a reflection on our transcendental state.  I look at my hand and think that it’s ultimately an animated lump of meat, and then wonder what it means for me to be alive.  And what it will mean to be dead.

Anyway, read The State That I Am In’s post, he says it far better.

A vision for community

I’m really drawn to the idea of living in close community with others, and have been inspired by Shane Claiborne amongst others to consider this as a serious and radical challenge to change.

This website, of the Church of the Sojourners in San Francisco, has really challenged me today.

I’m going to quote wholesale from the ‘Common life’ section, because I really like it and see in it elements of spiritual life which are lacking in how I live just now, and which I hunger for.  I hope the community who produce it don’t mind, I would just like to honour and celebrate what is good that I find there.

Common life

Loving one another

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. John 13:34

We want to live out this commandment which Jesus gave his disciples. Knowing that Christ’s love for us included going to the cross, we expect that loving each other may demand real and costly sacrifice. We love in this way hoping that by doing so “the world may know that you are my disciples” (John 13:35). We hope that self-sacrificing love might be one of the most obvious characteristics of our life together. Through loving one another we seek to provide a place where each is well loved, and to draw others to Christ and his church.Some of the concrete ways we seek to love each other include:

• keeping the commitments expressed in our covenant
• seeing each other as family
• delighting in (liking) each other and enjoying time together
• living in a households
• encouragement and accountability
• praying for each other
• laughing and weeping with each other
• living out the “one anothers” (honoring, submitting to, encouraging, reverencing, etc.) 

“But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” – Matthew 6:33

Thanksgiving Retreat with Friends

The good news of the gospel means that we can now join a new social, political, economic and spiritual order. The Church is meant to be that new order. As Westerners deeply trained in the habits of individualism, we have a hard time living into that new order. To help ourselves understand that radical call of God, we sometimes say that “church ought to be the organizing principle of our lives.” Ways we seek to live that out include:

Common Decision Making

• use of time

• jobs

• openness to counsel concerning dating, marriage, and children

• stability and calls to go elsewhere

Common Time

• quality time for one another and the church

• meals

• calendar

• meetings

Common space

• living together

• common decisions about living arrangements

• openness to living with who God gives us, and where God puts us

Common Money

“All who believed were together and had all things in common.” Acts 2:44

One of the primary alternative gods in American culture is money. We want put our trust in God rather than in money. Toward that end we commit ourselves to:

• a spirit of generosity

• shared finances

• a similar standard of living

• helping those in need

Man, does this challenge me! 

• Common decision making – in a culture which promotes and develops independence this would be a challenging one to adapt to.  I am curious as to how it would work practically, based on the suggested areas it might cover.  How would I take it if I was expected to be ever ready to take the advice and counsel of others in relation to my marriage, or parenting?  These are boundaried areas in our life just now.  I am happy to accept advice when I have asked for it, but they feel like private areas which others are privileged to have insight into.  Yet when I daydream about, for example, living in close community with our small group members and try to get my head around that, I see how it could work, and how valuable it might be.
• Common time – this I love unreservedly.  I love our small group coming round and hanging out over a meal, I love joining with the larger church to celebrate God’s goodness, and the idea of shared and purposeful time to be together as a community – as well as informal ‘just being in the same place’ gatherings – is very attractive.  But at the moment my time, on a day to day basis, is mine to order as I will.  Living in close community, like a shared house or shared collection of nearby houses, where there would be perhaps daily times to gather would impose some discipline into that.  I’m not that disciplined in many ways, so I guess that could only be a good thing.
• Common space - at the moment this is the one which on a practical level I am enjoying pondering.  Would everyone have their own private space to retreat to?  How would it work for families, where they (and I mean we!) would need (want?) their own separate bedrooms as well as a shared family space.  So when I am out and about and spy a disused hotel, I find myself thinking “hmmm, plenty of bedrooms but how about living space?  I wonder how it’s divided up inside?” .  There’s a big house for sale down the road from us just now, and it’s far too posh for this kind of thing but I’m still tempted to check out the room divisions to see if it has potential.  And I have seen a smallish slightly shabby looking hotel for sale (or perhaps lease, must pay attention next time I pass it).
• Common money – the equitableness of this is so attractive.  We had fun at small group talking about the believers in Acts sharing everything, and debating what we would find hardest and easiest to share.  But in the context of a shared house, for example, it makes such sense to share stuff.  Perhaps less cars would be required (or just a big people carrier!).  A shared library of books would liberate duplicate copies for others to benefit from.  To live in this way demands generosity in order for the whole project to work, any other approach would be self-defeating.

So this is what’s on my mind just now.  There are so many communities out there doing this kind of stuff, seeking to honour God and transform their own lives and their surrounding communities by their way of life.  The biggest challenge, the biggest barrier to stepping out and doing this is, well, me.  To contemplate leaving our beloved home, and the community we’ve come to love is at the moment unthinkable.  And yet I’m still so drawn to it.  I can see how making a decision to do this would free up resources and even time to find purposeful ways to serve God, to just spend time alongside those in the surrounding community. 

3 miles an hour might even become an attainable speed limit for living.

Remember, wherever you go that’s where you are

Wise words from Dad in “The Brady Bunch” film.  If only I had heeded them last Saturday…

I was going to deliver some training workshops at a conference in Port Seton, down the coast from Edinburgh.  I left my house at 8am, knowing I needed to be at my destination for 9 to have time to set up, and confident that I’d got more than enough time in hand – I even anticipated that for once I might be a good bit early.

The journey was uneventful, the traffic was not too busy at that time on a Saturday morning as I made my way around the city by-pass.  I hit a series of uncomplicated junctions and roundabouts and navigated them with no problems, just needing a cursory glance at my printout of directions from AA’s route finder site.  

As I drove down to where Prestonpans, Cockenzie and Port Seton all run essentially along the same road by the coast I got to that stage in my journey where I knew I just had to look out for the signs and landmarks my colleagues had told me to aim for.  So I drove, and drove, and drove.  I followed signs for community centres, scooted to likely-looking buildings and anxiously watched the clock as my early arrival was steadily eroded. 

Then.  THEN…I realised that the signs for Prestonpans Community Centre were going to do me no good at all, and the reason I couldn’t find the streets on my map of Port Seton was that I was actually driving around Prestonpans and had been for the last 20 minutes. 

How stupid am I?!

This is, according to my good friend Brunette Koala, known as a Malteser moment.  Look at her blog for some more classic examples.  It’s good to know there’s more than one of us.  Or maybe just quite worrying…

3 miles an hour

I would like to live at 3 miles an hour. 

This morning I listened to an awesome sermon our senior pastor and our pastor for discipleship and training did jointly.  They preached as a sort of tag team, looking at the end of Acts 2.  The sermon itself is a few weeks old now, but I missed it and everyone has been talking about it so my husband put it onto a cd for me to listen to on my way to work this morning.

The sermon spoke to me, challenged me in so many ways.  I ended up listening to it twice, on my way to and on my way from work.  It was worth it, I found I’d missed some vital points, presumably when in complicated traffic or something.

However, the part that on this particular morning spoke volumes to me was when Karl (our senior pastor) said essentially we need to slow down, that ‘hurry’ and ‘busy’ are not listed as fruit of the spirit, that we need to live at 3 miles an hour.  Oh the irony, as I rushed to work, late because I’d had to drop our sick daughter’s urine sample (another story, getting a urine sample from a 3 year old into a tiny tube) at the doctor’s surgery, late because I’d had mortgage papers to sign as I was meant to be leaving the house, late because, well I’m almost always late for something at some point in the day.

As I listened I considered how many times I hurry through the day missing moments and opportunities to love and show grace and peace to people.  I considered what it was about my life that seems to conspire against living at a God-pace.  I haven’t come to any conclusions yet, but this is something I need to address.

Any tips on simplifying life?

On the plus side, one of the things which delayed me this morning was getting together a bunch of plants and bulbs that are excess to our vegetable gardening needs.  I shared the excess with half a dozen women who use our centre, and am excited to see if we each have any success with our vegetable growing exploits next year.  Maybe being late doesn’t matter that much…(or at least that’s what I’m hoping my boss thinks, so long as I make up the time)

Mourning and laughing

I mentioned in my previous (and now very old) post that there has been a lot of sadness surrounding people I’m in contact with at work.  As the last couple of weeks have gone by this hasn’t lessened, and I’ve found myself more and more entwined with some of those people at the centre of it.

A colleague lost her much-awaited baby to pre-eclampsia just a few weeks before she was due to give birth and the grief we all are feeling for her is too huge for words just now.  She speaks English as a second language and to read her faltering and heartbroken words as she wrote in a card to us all was an agonising taste of what she and her boyfriend are tryng to come to terms with just now.  Another friend who uses the centre where I work to improve her English lost her dad two weekends ago.  She came back to our centre for the first time this week and, again, to feel the waves of grief and pain flowing from her was almost unbearable.  I wept with her and hugged her and felt so inadequate in the face of her suffering.  She is also friends with the colleague who lost her baby, and this fresh grief she faced when hearing the news of the baby’s death was heartrending.  However, I suspect that they will find support and fellowship in each other which will be more helpful than what they might find elsewhere.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted…

Then on Wednesday night we had invited our small group round for a take-away from the excellent ‘Bombay Feast’ near our house.  Not everyone was around, but we had a lovely night.  I was feeling tired after having a busy wee while at work, and sad after contemplating the pain of my friends at work.  What a welcome relief it was to have the simple pleasure of choosing good food to share with good friends (new and old).  What a pleasure to share laughter, anecdotes and ideas. 

Our good friend Keith is a minister and one of the aspects of his job that I have always thought must be so hard is standing alongside people in their grief and loss, often with relentless frequency.  God, I realise now, must gift him and others like him to perform that particular ministry, because it is no ordinary human skill to be able to do so without, as I seem to be, becoming overwhelmed with the grief yourself.  Or maybe it’s just something the rest of us insulate ourselves from.  Either way, I have been grateful for the moments of normality and this Wednesday evening in particular.

Rowan Williams has some interesting things to say about suffering (and Dostoevsky) in this interview, printed in the Guardian yesterday.