>Capricorny

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>Another decade. Another year – and for me another birthday (that’s quite a collection now. I wonder whether the combination of birthday and New Year is very helpful to the Capricorn mentality. New Year is a time for resolution and for looking forward to times ahead. It comes after the difficult days between Christmas and New Year which are days of lethargy. Capricorns, apparently love to climb mountains (the mountain goat) – and where none exist one will be created. Life can be lived under our own effort too much – maybe we take oursleves too seriously as a result.
So here’s a resolution to go alongside all the others I have failed with – to focus on the grace of God and his love, and to remember that if there are any mountains to be climbed I don’t go alone. That could make it a birthday to remember – a turning point.

Quentin Crisp

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>

I didn’t know till tonight that Sting’s Englishman in New York was a celebration of Quentin Crisp. Englishman in New York was the title of tonight’s moving ITV sequel to The Naked Civil Servant about Quentin Crisp’s life in New York. Crisp, played again by John Hurt, comes across as a man of great integrity. As a homosexual “who wore make up in London in the 30’s” he was always an outsider – and despised. His commitment to “being himself”, together with his wit, made him a celebrity figure in New York where he was in great demand as a public speaker.

In a question and answer session at his swansong at a gay club in Tampa, Florida, he comes up with a real pearl of wisdom:

Neither look forward where there is doubt, nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask yourself not if there is anything out in the world that you want and had better grab quickly before nightfall, but whether there is anything inside you that you have not yet unpacked.

The quote was prefaced with remarks about the privilege of being the scorned outsider – not as something to be avoided but as something to be embraced. As a privileged insider I wonder how wise his advice is:

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.

I am sure that the wisdom of wise outsiders like Quentin Crisp have helped many people on the outside to “be themselves” instead of selling themselves short.

As Sting writes:

It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile,
Be yourself no matter what they say.

>Counting Hairs

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>I am increasingly involved in preaching as a listener these days. Trevor Dennis, Canon at Chester Cathedral, began his sermon this morning by reminding us of God who “counts up my groaning; put my tears into your bottle” (Psalm 56:8) and who numbers even the vary hairs of our head (Matthew 10:30). What was Jesus meaning? Surely he was reassuring his followers that they were/are precious to God. Jesus spent most of his time with people who were on the fringe of society – who didn’t count and were not regarded by the people of power. These people counted very much with Jesus – each one of them (again expressed in the Parable of the Lost Sheep in Luke 15).

Referring to the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change, Trevor Dennis made the point that no longer can we regard God’s love as just for us humans. If he cares for us so much that he even counts the hairs of our head, then according to Trevor, he counts the feathers of a bird, the scales of the fish and the grain of the sand – so that the whole of his creation is treasured and loved by him. It therefore matters a lot that so many species are on the edge of extinction.

Here’s evidence from the Metereological Office of how temperatures have been rising over the decades, with temperatures of the last decade being the highest for 160 years.

The photo is of a “tear glass” used to collect tears of happiness or sadness. The store was kept for remembrance either of grief or happiness.

>Backtracking

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> Thank you, friend Julia for last night’s question – “are you still blogging?” – a painful dig in the ribs and reminder of former passion before going off the track – off the rails – whatever. The dig in the ribs brought a 5 o’clock wake up call to get back on track by backtracking.

What has happened? Well we have moved. Does that count? I suppose it counts more for some than it does for others. For a parish priest it counts a lot especially if it’s a completely different track to tread. The present track is an ordinary one – well worn by so many others. It is an anonymous track that is remarkably unremarkable. The path of the parish priest is a path less trod which verges on celebrity status and power walking.

The running stopped with the blogging. Former routes were all part of a plan for the sense of achievement of the Chester half marathon (at my age!)- there are new tracks, but they seem so insecure mainly because of the dogs.

For the moment – let’s say “I am back on track” – tentatively and lacking confidence. Was the suggestion of a reader over my shoulder the spur I needed? Those readers have gone and remain part of a track that became too deeply rutted for me to travel any further. We parted company resigning my identity of addresses – email, phone – and that driveway I should have so resented. Let’s say I am back on a new track – a pioneer in a wilderness – with this as an opportunity to reflect on a way ahead – spiritual journalling revisited, not as Jogger but as Foxtrotter – ready to explore Lightmoments and grateful that the dislocation was no more painful than it was. It’s a road less travelled – for me anyway.

Thank you Julia. And thank you Fergal OP for the photo – two roads diverged in a yeallow wood.

>Preaching warning

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>”The pressure on the preacher is to be topical and contemporary, to speak out like the prophets against injustice and unrighteousness, and it is right that he sh…ould do so, crucial even, and if he does not goad to righteous action he fails both God and man. But he must remember the ones he is speaking to who beneath all the clothes they wear are the poor, bare, forked animals who labor and are heavy laden under the burden of their own lives let alone of the world’s tragic life.”

Frederick Beuchner – telling the truth

Ethics of education

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“When we deal with ethics in education (and often we ignore it altogether), we approach it as a matter of helping individuals develop standards for personal behaviour. Not only do we stress personal at the expense of communal ethics: deeper still, we ignore the fact that the presence, or absence of communal imagery at every level of teaching and learning can form, or deform, students for life in the world. We underestimate the hidden curriculum of ethics that is being taught in classrooms even – and perhaps especially – when ethics is not the formal topic.”

>Learning Church

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>Can the Church be anything other than a “Learning Organisation”? It would seem so as the metaphor of the “learning Church” is one that has become something of a buzz word – presumably because the Church was something other than a “learning church” – like a “teaching church”, or an organisation that had stopped learning.

Membership of the Church is called “discipleship” which has learning at its heart. We are disciples of Jesus – called to learn his way(s). Disco is the Latin for “I learn”.

It was Peter Senge who promoted the idea of “learning organisations” in the 90’s. He wrote of organisation “where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to learn together.” (Senge, 1990, p.3). Senge was writing as a generation was coming to terms with the accelerating pace of change which would leave the unlearning organisation extinct and the unlearning person behind.

George Lovell writes: “To be effective and to experience vocational fulfilment in this changing context, clergy … must reflect critically, imaginatively and systematically, on their own and with others, on the work, ministry and mission in which they are engaged or contemplating.”

In a really stimulating training session yesterday at Woodchurch High School, Andy referred to our age as the “exponential age” in which the pace of change virtually goes off the scale. We’ve seen nothing yet! He showed us the way technology is shaping change (shifthappens uk) and referred to some of the implications of the new technologies highlighted by Mark Pemsky.

Pemsky refers to students as “digital natives” who think and process information so fundamentally differently from ourselves. The way they relate to one another is fundamentally different and would have been seen as science fiction even 10 years ago. The way these digital natives think, and the way their brains have developed is likely to be different from us – born to a different age – and from virtually a different planet. We can enter their world but we enter as “digital immigrants”.

What has all this got to say about Church and about belonging? Digital natives do belong together – but not as we know it. They have a culture – but a culture that as cultural immigrants we find it hard to penetrate. What does it say about mission and how we might begin to bridge that generation gap? It brought to mind the beautiful work of Vincent Donovan who with tremendous love, humility and respect shared the gospel with the Masai thinking that the principles he adopted may have something to teach us about how we relate to this new age from which so many have become alienated. Interestingly Donovan, way back in 1972 – an age ago – wrote this:

“Never be afraid to ask questions about the work we have inherited or the work we are doing. There is no question that should not be asked or that is outlawed. The day we are completely satisfied with what we have been doing, the day we have found the perfect unchangeable system of work, the perfect answer, never in need of being corrected again, on that day we will know that we are wrong, that we have made the biggest mistake of all.” (p197)

The Winton Train

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Wow. The Winton Train arrives at Liverpool Street Station today – with passengers rescued from Prague 70 years ago – the train will be met by the person who masterminded the rescue – Nicholas Winton (pictured). Nicholas Winton is 100 years old.


Altogether he managed to rescue 669 children transporting them by train from Prague to Lon don. Most of them were Jewish children who otherwise would have become victims of the holocaust. They have become known as the Winton Children – and that family of 669 has now become a family of 5000. This was part of the Kindertransport rescue mission which began a few days after Kristallnacht (1938) when some British Jewish leaders petitioned the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, to accept unaccompanied Jewish children from Europe to protect them from Nazism. Six million Jews were killed in the holocaust. A quarter of them were children.

Dagmar Simova is one of the Winton Children on the train. Her response to the question of what it felt like to be once again being on a train from Prague is on the Winton Train Project’s blog: “My mother, father and grandfather came to the station with me. We all wept. This time my husband and daughter came to see me off. When we waved, suddenly it struck me. I was looking at them, but again I saw those three.”

Nicholas Winton never mentioned anything about this. It only became known 50 years later when his wife, Elizabeth, came across some papers when she was cleaning out their attic.

People like Nicholas Winton are honoured in a memorial park in Prague called the Orchard of Saviours. It celebrates all who helped Jewish children at great cost to themselves. Four types of apple trees have been planted and the refurbished fountain has been named after Sir Nicholas Winton.

The Winton Train Project hopes to despatch another Winton Train with young people and their artworks inspired by goodness bound for other European cities, and that it become a tradition to commemorate the resilient determination of people to believe in goodness and actively take part in a common future.

>St Augustine’s Day

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>Paul Ballard and John Pritchard talk the work of the practical theologian in their book “Practical Theology in Action”. “The work of the practical theologian is to participate in and be a catalyst for the common life of the whole Christian community”.

They quote St Augustine:

When I am frightened by what I am to you then I am consoled by what I am with you. To you I am bishop, with you I am a Christian. The first is an office, the second a grace; the first a danger, the second salvation.

Ballard and Pritchard also write about the practical theologian:

The practical theologian strives to be a bridge across a divide; a catalyst sstimulating change and renewal; an enabler, who allows others to take up responsibilities; an educator who opens up the world to students within the community of shared learning. Of course there are set occasions and structured means to facilitate this process of theological reflection but it is essentially an ongoing process of shared living. It is always a vulnerable and exposed position appearing to have no status or substance other than the wisdom and the skills that are learned in the doing. (p37)