“ANNETICIPATION”

Magazine Letter for March

FOOD FOR CHANGE

Just last night I watched the BBC reporter, Lyse Doucet, interviewing a young boy in the midst of the chaos of a refugee camp for 20,000 people, just south of Damascus. It looked like a scene from hell, with signs of destruction everywhere and thousands of people waiting for meagre supplies of aid to be given out. The boy was describing the people’s plight and being very brave until a point came where he simply broke down and couldn’t control his sorrow and pain. In that moment the reporter stepped out of being an observer, a commentator, and, visibly moved herself, reached out to touch and comfort the boy.

His tears touched me too. What an evil, an affront to God’s justice this all is, when children cry for lack of bread in a world where bankers go on awarding themselves bonuses more than a lifetime’s earnings for most of the world’s poor, and footballers are worth more than would feed God knows how many people for God knows how long.

This year’s Lent material (Lent Food: Recipes for Change) focuses on this theme of hunger and God’s will that all should be fed. Our Shrove Tuesday party this year will begin with a meal from Brazil and a short Bible study, before our usual pancakes. And each Saturday in Lent (from 15^th March) we’ll share a meal at St Anne’s House using a different recipe from the book and exploring the issue of food justice together.

The journey of Lent invites us to follow again in the footsteps of the Man of Sorrows, whose sorrows, freely embraced out of love, are our sorrows. These are the sorrows of our poverty, our loneliness, our sin, and the sorrows of children who weep before our very eyes for lack of bread, lack of justice, lack of peace. May God bless this Lent to us, and may we and our world be changed.

For Lyse Doucet's report see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-26333533

ST ANNE'S DUNBAR GOSPELS 23RD FEB 2014

ST ANNE’S DUNBAR GOSPELS

2^nd Sunday before Lent - 23rd Feb 2014

Childlike trust

Readings:

Romans 8: 18-25 – Creation has been groaning in labour pains

Matthew 6: 25-34 – Do not worry; your Father knows your needs

“Therefore, do not worry”. In my case, I have to say, this is a counsel of perfection. I was probably born worrying. But I suspect that Jesus isn’t saying “Don’t worry; be happy”, let’s all chill out and just go with the flow because everything’s going to be ok. Because life isn’t like that, or at least it isn’t for most people.

Already Jesus has his eyes fixed on Jerusalem. He knows where he’s going and everything isn’t going to be ok. And for all those people who just clamour to draw power out of him – healing, kindness, love, forgiveness – he knows it doesn’t all turn out ok for them. He’ll raise Lazarus, but Lazarus will die again. It’s what Paul’s talking about when he says: the whole creation groans in labour pains. Which is what drives Jesus to Jerusalem and the Cross for our sakes. Because this is where darkness will be conquered, death won’t get the last word, so that that finally, because of Jesus, we do indeed know that everything will be not just ok, but better than that.

But for now, here is Jesus trying to teach us how to live in the now like he does. And so he almost takes us back to the garden of Eden. The world may not feel like Paradise any more, but God has not withdrawn his blessing from it. He still looks on us, and the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and the very soil itself out of which we sprang, and calls all of it good. Jesus reminds us we’re creatures, we’re dependent on God and God’s world for everything we need. In which there is a kind of freedom for us.

It’s all right to admit my need for God, my need for other people. Just as God said: It is not good for man to be alone, so he knows our need for each other and for the ultimate Other, God himself. So I don’t have to pretend that I’m coping better than I actually am. This “don’t worry” I think contains “don’t worry about pretending you’ve got everything in life all sorted out”.

Many things in the media push an idea of what it is to be a successful human being.  So lots of people spend their lives worrying about how they look, what kind of house they’ve got, how their children are doing compared to other people’s children, whether they’re keeping up the newest  generation of whatever social media site is now in fashion.

So there’s a lot to worry about. Being left out, left behind is a major anxiety when you’re young. And it’s not that great when you’re older either. Because you’re left with that sinking feeling that you’re losing the battle to get to grips with life, to be in control. You’re not wanted because you don’t measure up to what you think the world expects of you, and you can have that feeling at any age.

And this is why Jesus puts before us this big picture vision of where we fit into the God’s scheme of things. We’re part of a beauty and a wonder that is greater than ourselves, precious to God almost beyond words, every hair of our heads counted, every tear we ever cried stored, the psalmist says, in God’s bottle, and one with the birds and the lilies.

All the time, God gives. Ignatius Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises just wonders at this. He says all the time God’s sending us good things: sunshine and rain, food and clothing, love and friendship, mercy and forgiveness. I just need to turn my face to the sun and receive, turn away from my own darkness and my sense of lack, my permanent awareness of what I don’t have, and bask in all that God does give me. That refrain of the psalmist: “For his mercy endures for ever”, needs to be ours.

One way to make this awareness part of your life is a very simple practice, again from St Ignatius, called the examen. I was given this by an older nun friend at a time when I didn’t feel I had much to be thankful about in life and my trust in God was being challenged. And she gave me this very simple, childlike pattern for praying at the end of the day: Thank you; sorry, please.

So you begin, a bit like the psalmist, by bringing to consciousness whatever’s been good in this day – which often brings to the surface more things to be thankful for than you could ever have imagined (a phone call from a friend, a lovely sunset – anything at all that’s gone well today). The “Sorry” part isn’t about beating yourself up, but again in a very creaturely, childlike way, to bring your life under God’s mercy – the interaction with someone that you could have handled better, the hard word you spoke maybe, or the hard word spoken to you. You just hold it before the God who loves you and allow him to help you let it go.

And finally, “Please”, where you turn your praying beyond yourself to anyone that you have on your heart and want to bring to God. Thank you; Sorry; Please. There’s a very popular book about this, written in the style of a book for children called: “Living with Bread, holding what gives you life”. The book gets its title from something that happened just after the Second World War where children who’d been orphaned were being looked after together and often at night they couldn’t sleep because they were so afraid there’d be nothing to eat next day. So someone came up with the idea of giving the children a piece of bread to put under their pillows simply to reassure them that just as there had been bread today, so there would be bread for tomorrow. Hence: Sleeping with bread: holding what gives you life.

And that’s what the examen is for, looking for the light in your life and following it. And what people find is that if you do this, and you make thankfulness your last thought at night, it will almost certainly be your first thought in the morning. This is what puts us into the place where Jesus, knowing how hard our lives can be, longs for us to be. In one translation of one the beatitudes Jesus says: how blessed are they who know their need of God. So we know we don’t have to have all the answers or everything under control. We learn again how to be children, how to let go and trust that the one who doesn’t let a sparrow fall to the ground unnoticed holds us in his love, daily, hourly, moment by moment in this life, and in the life to come.

“Sleeping with Bread: holding what gives you life”, by Dennis Linn (ed), available from Cornerstone Bookshop www.cornerstonebooks.org.uk/‎

CHRIST OF THE POOR - Homily at St Anne's House Chapel 20th Feb 2014

Thursday in 6^th Week of Ordinary Time

Eucharist at St Anne’s House Chapel, Dunbar 20^th Feb 2014

CHRIST OF THE POOR

James 2: 1-9 Did not God choose those who are poor?

Mark 8:27-33 The way you think is not God’s way, but man’s.

Poor foot-in-mouth Peter so often has the unenviable privilege of standing in our place and speaking, as it were, our lines. This time he speaks our fears, our hesitations, our unwillingness to take risks. Jesus has just responded to a profession of faith and love straight out of Peter’s best self ("Lord, you are the Christ!”) with the prediction of all that is to happen in Jerusalem. So now that faith Peter’s just expressed – and we can be assured he meant it at the time – now collapses in on itself, or rather into himself, into his dark and fearful places. Those are places which only the light of the Risen Christ will finally transform. For now this is the Peter we’ll see on that dark night of denials where “You are the Christ” and “Lord, to whom shall we go; you have the words of eternal life” turn into “I do not know the man”. It won’t be until the lakeside breakfast and that dialogue of “Do you love me?”/ “Lord, you know that I love you!” that the fearfulness we see in Peter here will be replaced by a courage that will enable him to stand in the very city of his denials and proclaim Jesus as Lord.

Why can’t he do it now? Why can’t he see why Jesus must embrace this path? It isn’t just his fears that blind him. He has yet to see that this Christ “had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every respect” (Heb 2: 17a), a destiny which includes embracing the poverty of his brothers and sisters, which includes our poverty, all that we lack as human beings and all our incompleteness. To this Cross, which so appals Peter in this Gospel, his half-understood Christ will take every shred of human vulnerability and know the helplessness of that vulnerability to the very depths.

This is why James in his Letter is so confident in asserting the identification of Jesus with the poor. The heirs of the poor Man of Nazareth, the one who had nowhere to lay his head and who called the poor “blessed”, daren’t fool themselves that the poor can be ignored. Peter’s Christ, made destitute in crucifixion and glorified in resurrection, compels us to see things differently. The poor have best seats at God’s kingdom banquet – a realisation to affect how we act, speak, spend and even vote. Neither is our own particular kind of poverty left out in the cold as unimportant enough to deserve a place. The Cross which Peter so much feared and resisted is nothing less than our gilt-edged invitation to the banquet of life.

“The Christ of the Poor” by Jose Ignacio Fletes Cruz

 

TRUE WISDOM - Homily at Emmaus House Chapel, Edinburgh 17th Feb 2014

Monday in 6^th Week of Ordinary Time

Eucharist at Emmaus house chapel, Edinburgh

TRUE WISDOM

James 1: 1-11; Mark 8: 11-13

“My brothers, you will always have trials. Faith is put to the test to make you patient”. This isn’t news we want to hear. It has echoes of that old catholic tradition of saying this is a vale of tears. It also plays into good old Scottish fatalism. Life’s an uphill struggle to please a God who’s a bit like a demanding parent and for whom you’re never going to be quite good enough; or life is an obstacle course and God is the drill sergeant watching you fall flat on your face.

But this isn’t what James is meaning. Trials are to make us “fully developed, complete, nothing missing”. In other words whole, all that we want to be and more than we can think of – more than we even think we want for ourselves. This is the wisdom that’s going to form the Christ life in us. So here’s a thing, when we ask God for things (I ask God for a lot), is wisdom on the list? You remember Solomon was blessed because he didn’t ask for wealth or power or the lives of his enemies, but for wisdom. And James sets the bar high on what wisdom means, because he says, with wisdom you won’t be forever buffeted about by the waves of life – up one minute and down the next. That strikes me as a wisdom worth asking for.

With wisdom you know what’s worth setting your heart on – what really makes you rich or poor in the eyes of God, because for God it’s all topsy turvy. We see each other differently with God’s wisdom. (We “look at the world through your eyes” as one of our liturgies says).

And this is what the Pharisees just don’t get in today’s short Gospel. They’ve just seen the feeding of the 4000, so they basically show up and say “Do it again!” or “show us something else, what else have you got up your sleeve, Rabbi? Show us a sign”. But the sign is right in front of them, to quote James again: a fully developed human being, complete, nothing missing. The wisdom of God shown in utter humility, God made flesh. They just don’t get it, but we should. Jesus is the sign. Jesus is the Wisdom. Through all the buffetings we get and the testing of our faith and the testing of our patience, his wisdom, if we accept it, is the Way to life.

Alongside these words, here is a reflection received today from Sister Joan Chittister, which echoes this invitation to be fully human and whole:

Meditation 10
 
Come, come, whoever you are,
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving—
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vows
A hundred times
Come, come again, come.
–Rumi
 
Commentary by Joan Chittister: 
 
When we make the spiritual life
“a caravan of despair,”
we betray the God of life.
 
Life is a growth process
that melts and shapes us
and brings us to the white heat of living well.
 
It is a long, long process—full of stumbling
and errors and failings and sins.
 
All of which teach us something
about ourselves, about living,
about becoming all we are meant to be.
 
Nothing is inconsequential to sanctity,
there is nothing to despair.
It is all a matter of choosing
to choose differently,
if necessary, the next time.
 
–from God Speaks in Many Tongues by Joan Chittister (Benetvision)

ST ANNE’S DUNBAR GOSPELS

3^rd Sunday before Lent

CHOOSE LIFE!

(Readings: Deuteronomy: 30: 15-end; Matthew 5: 21-37)

One of the most iconic films of the 1990’s, Trainspotting, begins with Mark “Rent boy” Renton tearing down Princes Street, with these breathless words running through his head as he runs: “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a ******* big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin can openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of ******* fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the **** you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing ******* junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, *****-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life . . . But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?”

That’s the Gospel according to Mark (with expletives deleted), a different Mark, a 1990’s Mark, which held up a mirror to show an Edinburgh (and a Leith) that most of us would prefer not to know about. And not much has changed.

This is making wrong choices big time, but Mark Renton says he chooses heroin. He says: we’re not stupid; we choose this because it’s the best high we’ve ever known. And I guess if life is dark and you’ve not much hope and maybe your parents were even addicts before you, then perhaps it’s not so hard to understand.

But in fact much of the stuff Mark Renton scorns as an illusion, maybe an addiction to things we think are going to make us happy, the radical young prophet Jesus would warn us against too. This Sunday’s Gospel continues where last week’s left off. Last Sunday: be salt, be light, be a city set on a hill, be different. Make sure your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. This week, he gets into the detail. Anger is a corrosive luxury you can’t afford. Just as storing up earthly treasures won’t do us much good (Mark Renton seems to agree on that), so we can’t afford to hold on to anger either.

So if you’re at odds with someone you do what you can to heal the breach. Jesus says: make the first move. Don’t wait for the other person to give you the apology you maybe think you deserve. Before the utterly holy God who’s forgiven me, dare I withhold forgiveness from anyone?

And if actual reconciliation isn’t possible then we can at least ask God to help us be reconciled in our hearts. Help me, Father, to let go of this situation that’s hurting me, don’t let me store up anger that can only poison my heart and keep me in the darkness. Choose forgiveness, choose setting other people free just as God has freed you. Choose life.

Similarly for marriage and divorce Jesus puts forward the ideal which exceeds even the Law of Moses. Jesus knows this is hard and if you remember his meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well who’d had five husbands and her present one isn’t her husband at all, you’ll know how tenderly Jesus deals with us. Inside of most of us there’s so much pain and woundedness as well as all the wonderful things about us that it’s little wonder we hurt each other and mess up, and break things that should be precious to us, and end up asking how on earth we got to where we are. Jesus knows all that.

Come and see someone who told me everything I ever did, exclaims the Samaritan woman in astonishment. And to the adulterous woman about to be stoned, after Jesus has shamed her judges with: Let him who is without sin cast the first stone... there is not a condemning word. Just: Go and sin no more. Choose life, choose what Paul calls “the more excellent way”, choose love.

So, if your right hand causes you to sin... cast it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be cast into hell. Apply this not just to sinful thoughts and lust, but to any self-defeating habit that holds you back from choosing life. Self-condemnation is a good one for most people. That Greek chorus off stage that says “You’re no good really, you know. If people knew what you were really like they’d be horrified.” Well God knows what you’re like and he’s not horrified at all, so we need to push that chorus out, cast it away.

A bit like Jesus does in the desert - when the Devil puts before him all those choices which all look so attractive, all the quick-fix possibilities to escape pain - Jesus puts a roadblock on those thoughts, those temptations: This is what God says, scripture says, this is what I know. Or like Job, in the face of so-called comforters who just say: Oh for heaven’s sakes, Job, admit it’s all your fault, then just curse God and die – to all of that Greek chorus Job answers: I know that my Redeemer liveth and that he shall stand at the last, whom my eyes shall behold and not another.

That’s choosing life. Choosing it in the desert times; choosing it in sufferings; choosing it after you’ve got things wrong and need to start again and hardly believe that you can. Challenging your most insidious thoughts and temptations and doubts, like one of the saints of God, because that is what you are: This is what God says about me; I know that my Redeemer liveth; and here’s one from St Paul: for when our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts. Choose life. The God who loves you; the God who lived and died for you, will not allow you to choose anything else.