>SILENT is an anagram of LISTEN.
Why has it taken me so long to notice that?
How can I remember it when I come to pray?
>Listen
>Blessing
>It is easy to believe we are ‘cursed’ – naturally, not supernaturally, I mean.
The media messages pick on our personal, social and institutional points of vulnerability. All these voices leave us with a deep sense of unease.
If we feel cursed ourselves the likelihood is that we will curse others.
However, if we know we are blessed the likelihood is that we will bless others. I know how much I curse others, and I know how much I bless others – and can draw my own conclusion that I haven’t been doing enough listening to the voices that call me blessed. I know I am not alone in finding it hard to accept blessing and to treasure the blessings people give.
Blessing comes from the Latin word “benediction” meaning “speaking well”. Jesus has a warning for us when too many speak well of us (Luke 6:26) that means we might have become too powerful, boastful and corruptible – but all of us need to be affirmed.
Nouwen points out that this is the way to “a sense of well-being and true belonging” and was moved by the blessing given to a 13 year old at his bar-mitzvah by his parents: “Son, whatever will happen to you in your life, whether you will have success or not, become important or not, will be healthy or not, always remember how much your mother and I love you.”
For Nouwen, prayer is about listening to that voice of blessing – to hear with the “ear of faith” the persistent voice of love saying “You are my beloved child – on you my favour rests.”
The blessings are there for us to receive.
“the blessings of the poor who stop us on the road, the blessings of the blossoming trees and fresh flowers that tell us about new life, the blessings of music, painting sculpture, and architecture – all of that – but most of all the blessings that come to us through words of gratitude, encouragement, affection and love. These many blessings do not have to be invented. They are there, surrounding us on all sides. But we have to be present to them and receive them. They don’t force themselves on us. They are gentle reminders of that beautiful, strong, but hidden voice of the one who calls us by name and speaks good things about us.”
There is a kind of love
This poem was quoyed by Chris Hewitson – Chester Cathedral 2008
There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it
Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;
Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes; which deals with dentists
And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds
The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living, which is Atlas.
And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.
U.A. Fanthorpe
>Lambeth Walk
>What is “holiness”?
Is it the ability to “grasp the intense suffering of the human condition without fear or flinching, and to be able to live with that knowledge and find within it hope and a great compassion”? Madeleine Bunting describes holiness in this way as she recalls the recent meeting between, what she describes (and I agree) two of the world’s holiest men.
Madeleine Bunting’s article in today’s Guardian is very much on the ball about Anglicanism, Lambeth and the Archbishop.
This is what the men share, and strikingly it is not in what they say that one senses it, but in their presence and how they relate to people: the warmth and humour, the lack of egotism to neither perform for listeners nor manipulate them, the humility and the capacity to pay attention. The holiness is not to be found in slick communication skills – both men are complex thinkers whose ideas are very hard to compress into soundbites – but you sense the holiness in the face-to-face encounter. A world that increasingly speaks to itself through media of mass communications increasingly cannot recognise this, the most inspiring of human experiences.
Williams may be one of the most holy men to lead the Church of England, but shame on us and our age for proving the old adage true: a prophet is never recognised in his own land.
Madeleine Bunting recognises that global communications are disrupting all religious traditions, traumatising identity and fuelling a literalist fundamentalism; the result is a gross simplifying of the complexity and paradox that is part of human experience.
The presenting issue is “gay clergy” and ++Rowan is told to get a grip. What is the point of that when people have adopte such extreme positions? He would only have to “get a grip” on the next issue and the next. The presenting issue is “gay clergy” (or to others “women bishops”) The real issue is how we deal with difference. That is the issue of our post-modern world. In Archbishop Rowan we perhaps have someone who is wise enough, holy enough and strong enough to lead us on that.
>Being loved
>
We don’t hear much of what God (as Father) has to say in the gospels. He does say to Jesus “You are my beloved”, and then Jesus says to us “as the Father loves me so I love you”, so Jesus had the clear intention that we would know ourselves as “beloved”.
It is for us to hear this one voice above all the other voices that crowd our minds – all with the same basic message “Prove yourself. You are guilty until proved innocent” – so we try to prove ourselves through our image, through our hard work – and still those voices refuse to believe us, perhaps because in all our hearts of hearst we know that we are guilty. There’s always something of ourselves we need to hide away. “If they knew what I was really like they would never love me” – and so we bury our shame.
There is a beautiful story in Genesis of Adam hiding his shame. But God searches out Adam and his shame – and in the lovely story of the return of the prodigal the father embraces the shame of his son. (The picture is from the Poor Clare Colettine Community at Hawarden and shows the embrace of the prodigal)
When Jesus says “I love you” he means us to to know that God loves us. He knows that we all have a dark place in which we hide our shame. We do not have to prove ourselves before God loves us.
Henri Nouwen wrote of “being the beloved” and claimed that the greatest temptation is “self-rejection”, the flip side of which is “arrogance”. He wrote:
Both self-rejection and arrogance pull us out of the common reality of existence and make a gentle community of people extremely difficult, if not impossible, to attain.
This video is worth a watch/listen – a sermon from Henri Nouwen.
Bottom up leadership
If you look to lead, invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself – your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers.
If those over whom we have authority properly manage themselves, manage us, manage their peers, and replicate the porcess with those they employ, what is there to do but see they are properly recognised, rewarded and stay out of their way? It is not making better people of others that management is about. It’s about making a better person of self. Income, power, and titles have nothing to do with that.
Dee Hock p 70
In my view, we are at that precise point in time when a four-hundred-year-old age is rattling in its deathbed and another struggling to be born. A shifting of consciousness, culture, society and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of liberty, community and ethics such as the world has never known, and a harmony with nature, with one another and with the divine intelligence such as the world has ever dreamed.
Unfortunately, ahead lies equal possibility of increasing institutional failure, enormous human and ecological carnage, and regression to even more mechanistic, tyrannical concepts of control, which, in turn, would have to collapse with even more carnage before chaordic institutions could emerge. It matters not a whit whether such regression and tyranny is in the hands of political, commercial or social institutions, or by what ideology we label them. In the end, it will come to the same.
We do not have an environmental problem. We do not have an education problem. We do not have a health care problem, a welfare problem, a political problem, an economic problem, a peace problem or a population problem. At bottom, we have an institutional problem, and until we deal with it we will struggle in vain with the all the symptoms.
Dee Hock
>
So the NHS is 60 years old this weekend.
Apparently, in the summer of 1948 every household received a leaflet explaining the new NHS. It said: “Your new National Health Service begins on 5th July. What is it? How do you get it? It will provide you with all medical, dental, and nursing care. Everyone, rich or poor, man, woman or child—can use it. There are no charges except for a few special items. There are no insurance qualifications. But it is not a charity You are all paying for it, mainly as taxpayers, and it will relieve your money worries in time of illness.”
What an amazing national achievement is the NHS. Of course there’s stuff wrong with it – but none of it is terminal. I hear staff are demoralised, but people have always complained like that. What is amazing is the commitment of so many to the enterprise – doctors, nurses, researchers, admin staff and ancillary staff.
Birds without Wings
You and I used to fancy ourselves as birds, and we were very happy even when we flapped our wings and fell down and bruised ourselves, but the truth is that we were birds without wings. You were a robin and I was a blackbird, and there were some who were eagles, or vultures, or pretty goldfinches, but none of us had wings.
For birds with wings nothing changes; they fly where they will and they know nothing about borders and their quarrels are very small.
But we are always confined to earth, no matter how much we climb to the high places and flap our arms. Because we cannot fly, we are condemned to do things that do not agree with us. Because we have no wings we are pushed into struggles and abominations that we did not seek.
conclusion of Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernieres
” A man began to give large doses of cod-liver oil to his Doberman because he had been told that the stuff was good for dogs. Each day he would hold the head of the protesting dog between his knees, force its jaws open, and pour the liquid down its throat.
One day the dog broke loose and spilled the oil of the floor. Then, to the man’s great surprise, it returned to lick the spoon. That is when he discovered that what the dog had been fighting was not the oil but his method of administration.”
A “story meditation” from the ‘Education’ section of Anthony de Mello’s The Heart of the Enlightened
Grits and Grains 
