Swing Low Sweet Charity

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>Chewing over the phrase “charity begins at home” (it always sticks in my throat!) my mind went to “Swing low sweet charity” (must have been watching too much rugby over the weekend!) Since 1988 Swing Low Sweet Chariot has been the anthem of the England Rugby Union supporters. The song has a long history – from being sung by Afro-Americans to being a pretty obscene drinking song (about which I know so little!)

According to my friend Wikipedia, the song was composed by a native American slave, Wallis Willis around 1862. He also wrote “Steal away to Jesus”. Unbeknown to Rugby Union fans both the songs have hidden references to the Underground Railroad by which many slaves escaped to freedom.

“Swing low” refers to the escape “conductors” going down south to get their “passengers”. “Sweet chariot” was the carriage to “carry me home” to freedom. “Looking over Jordan” refers to the rivers Ohio and Mississippi beyond which is freedom. There was no physical railroad – but the slaves used the language of the railroad as code to help slaves escape. The Underground Railroad consisted of meeting points, secret routes, transportation, safe houses, and assistance provided by abolitionist sympathizers – who were the “conductors”. The churches were involved in this underground movement through which, some estimate, up to 100,000 slaves found their escape.

How many rugby fans are freedom fighters I wonder? It might make them think again if they were to sing the song standing in the shoes and chains of slaves.

Saint Patrick’s Day

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>Good to meet friends Roddy Evans and Jim Lynn from Belfast on St Patrick’s Day, 10 years since the Good Friday Agreement. They have come over to take part in a series we have called Living Hope. Both have played their part in the peace process in Northern Ireland and seeing beyond revenge. They are both living hope. Roddy is Anglo-Irish and Jim is Roman Catholic, so I guess what was inspiring was not just their talks but their friendship which is based in their shared membership of the Clonard Bible Study group.
This prayer is supposed to be from St Patrick:
May the Strength of God guide us.
May the Power of God preserve us.
May the Wisdom of God instruct us.
May the Hand of God protect us.
May the Way of God direct us.
May the Shield of God defend us.
May the Angels of God guard us.- Against the snares of the evil one.
May Christ be with us!May Christ be before us!May Christ be in us,Christ be over all! May Thy Grace, Lord,Always be ours,This day, O Lord, and forevermore. Amen.

>Pearls

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>Good authors gift us with pearls. Here are some pearls polished and presented by Timothy radcliffe from my reading today – What is the Point of being a Christian?
How about this?

  • As fish were made to swim in water, human beings were made to thrive in the truth (p121)
  • When Wittgenstein was asked how philosophers should greet each other, he replied ‘Take your time.’ (p123)
  • We come to see people as lovable because we see other people loving them. (p124)

and then Radcliffe uses this story. “one day a rabbi asked his students, ‘How can you tell that night has ended and the day is returning? One student suggested, ‘When you can see clearly that an animal in the distance is a lion and not a leopard.’ ‘No’, said the rabbi. ‘It is when you can look on the face of another person and see that woman or man is your sister or brother. Because until you are able to do so, no matter what time of day it is, it is still night.'”

>World Book Day

David Herbert1 Comment

>When Prince Charming married Cinderella – it was World Book Day. I’ve just waved Jeanette off to her school in her Willie Wonka outfit – no doubt going to see all the oompa-lumpas. It’s World Book Day – when children will be dressing up as characters from well loved books. I don’t think I’ve seen anybody in a costume other than what that is derived from film, which shows how dependant we are on those who can visualise and transfer a character from one media to another. Some schools will be having a bookstall and some will be having authors coming into school.

I wonder what everybody will be reading today in the cafes, tubes or stretched out on the settee. One blogger, Sonya Worthy, spends her time asking people what they’re reading – her blog, People Reading, is a real celebration of books. As for me, I shall be reading more from What is the Point of being a Christian? because I promised myself that for Lent – and today I have already come across this lovely quote from Salman Rushdie’s article Is Nothing Sacred?:

I grew up kissing books and bread. In our house, whenever anyone dropped a book or let fall a chapatti … the fallen object was required not only to be picked up but also kissed, by way of apology for the act of clumsy disrespect. I was a s careless and butter-fingered as any child and, accordingly, during my childhood years, i kissed a large number of ‘slices and also my fair share of books. Devout households in India often contained, and still cotain, persons in the habit of kissing holy books. But we kissed everything. We kissed dictionaries and atlases. We kissed Enid Blyton novels and Superman comics. If i’d ever have dropped the telephone directory I’d probably have kissed that too. All this happened before I ever kissed a girl. In fact it would be true, true enough for a fiction writer, anyhow, to say that once I started kissing girls, my activities with regard to bread and books lost some of their special excitement. But one never forgets one’s first loves. Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul – what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

That’s from Granta 31:1990

>Mothering Sunday

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>Highlighting Mothering Sunday was a brief encounter with a family I knew in a previous parish. I remember Victoria being born. She is very disabled. I have met her and her wonderful Mum Robina only a few times over the years. Victoria is wheelchair bound and uses sign language. She is so cheerful – yesterday admiring the beard. What an achievement for all the family – fought for not just day by day, but hour by hour for 27 years through I am sure tension, tiredness, anger and frustration. Robina gets my Mothering Sunday prize for “Mum of the Year”. Victoria gets the prize for being the “most cheerful”.

Otherwise friend Ron used Michelangelo’s Pieta when he was preaching about motherhood – the sculpture appealing to him because of mother and child being sculpted from the one piece of marble – which sounds a lot better than “a chip off the old block”.

>Sexuality and lust

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> “This is my body which is given for you.” Any Christian worshipper will recognise these words of Jesus by which he declares his love for the world because they are central to the Christian gathering. We meet round the table and celebrate that Jesus gave his body for us. The words are repeated by lovers who give themselves to one another. They could be words used in the marriage service – that would hot things up well wouldn’t it? Tim Radcliffe – in What is the Point of Being a Christian? – underlines the importance of the body in love and sexuality, and in so doing manages to distinguish between love and lust, and between erotic and pornographic art. (Rodin’s kiss is lovely. It’s erotic and it’s good because both partners are lost in their mutual self-giving).

We give ourselves in love. With lust we make of the other an object of desire for our own pleasure. Often the focus of desire is one part of the body, so the object of our desire is dismembered before our very eyes. Interestingly Jesus says “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.” (Matt 5:29) presumably to help us to understand that if we dismember others we ought to dismember ourselves. Radcliffe refers to the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland who wouldn’t let Alice eat the mutton to which she had been introduced. “It isn’t etiquette to eat anyone you’ve been introduced to.” she says.
The cure for lust is not chopping off our hand or plucking out our eye – and it’s good that very few have tested that theory – the first step, according to radcliife’s wise words “is not to abolish desire, but to restore it, liberate it, discover that it is for a person and not an object.”

Room at the Inn

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>

An interesting day yesterday at our local George and Dragon (linked as a thank you for their hospitality and for the benefit of those reading this blog in New Zealand who might want somewhere to stay in tarvin!). We’ve tried various things this Lent – one of which is a group meeting in the pub. Thanks to friend Hazel’s suggestion we’ve called it Room at the Inn and that’s caught people’s imagination. We gather every Tuesday morning at 9.30, each week starting with one of the four great questions of human being;

Who am I?
Where do I come from?
Where do I belong?
Where am I going?
Group members go where they like with the questions – but we’ve been returning to Psalm 139 at the end. It’s a great time and what we have shared has been really valuable. Friend Jinty came up with a really thought provoking quote from Penelope Lively:

We are all conditioned in a sense by those to whom we are bound; my real-life husband affected the person that I have become. Without him, with someone else, who knows what twists of personality might not have come about. I am a rather pragmatic and organized person. I was about to write “naturally pragmatic and organized” – but is that the case? Are such tendencies innate, or honed by circumstance?

Other people referred to the likes of Nelson Mandela and Terry Waite raising the question of why we react as we do, and what makes some reactions exemplary?
Note to me: see what happens when you only say the first words and then let people get on with it!

>More words

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>With emails, weekly newsletters, sermons, magazine articles mouth and keyboard are in overdrive on communications. I wonder what coomes over. It’s intriguing to have someone play back what I’ve said often with a completely different interpretation of what I have meant to say. Sometimes that means I’ve not expressed myself very clearly, and sometimes it means that the reader or listener has focussed clearly – but their minds might have gone in a different direction altogether. That’s OK. Often what people come back with is far more interesting than the original version.
Of course, we can say too much. Woodrow Wilson said “If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”
This song by Boney M is the prayer that ends Psalm 19. A catchy number which doesn’t capture the desolation of the exiles by the Rivers of Babylon who couldn’t bring themselves to sing in a strange land. Oh well.

http://www.youtube.com/get_player

>Prayer for the Stressed

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>Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I cannot accept,
and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill today because they got on my nerves.
And also, help me to be careful of the toes I step on today, as they may be connected to the feet I may have to kiss tomorrow.
Help me always to give 100% at work…
12% on Monday,
23% on Tuesday,
40% on Wednesday,
20% on Thursday
and 5% on Friday
And help me to remember…
when I’m having a bad day and it seems that people are trying to wind me up, it takes 42 muscles to frown, 28 to smile and only 4 to extend my arm and smack someone in the mouth! Amen
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