SECOND THOUGHTS, PLEASE!

Clearly, lots of us think LOVE is a good idea; the latest post, "Have I Told you Lately that I Love You?" got lots of positive feed back even if you prefer not to be published. Funny thing, when you mention Love to people, it nearly always rings a bell and brings a story along. Often the story has a sad side, but there's always great faith too. 

Now, I hope you don't mind but I'm going to push you all for something more please. That last piece about Love, also asked this question,
Wouldn't it be wonderful if love was the message that spilled out from all the activities known as Church?  

Perhaps it does and I'm too thick to notice, but I do notice or imagine anyway, that people often have a big, bossy image of the church, there to lay down the law as it were. I'm just wondering if the Church could be better at making sure that LOVE was the message that oozed out from all its umpteen activities. Many of you have different experiences from meeting the church head-on in your lives. You may well have thoughts on this, thoughts that could be a real help to others. I'd love to hear from you; we all would. Go on, "In All things Love" remember. And we don't have to publish your name.

HAVE I TOLD YOU LATELY THAT I LOVE YOU?

It was on the night I took ill in her house that my youngest sister first showed her concern, by saying, with a note of panic, "I love you, now Good night". 

By morning I felt much better and we hadn't needed to ring for medical help. I don't recall this particular sister telling me previously that she loved me, but she has many times since, and I her. We triggered something that night, it would seem, and I'm glad of it.

I was discussing this the other day with a woman who in spite of signing off her emails, "with love" then always concludes with the slightly careful, "your email friend". Perhaps that's just  as well; she's a happily married woman with absolutely no need of encouraging some lone male's daydreams. But she was surprised and pleasantly so when I told her of my sibling and I telling each other that we loved each other. "It's not usual you know" she said, "I think it's something we grow out of as we get older when in fact we should be growing into it." I think she has a point which is why I take the liberty of quoting her here.

"Growing Into" saying I love you, that's quite a thought. As we get older we may tend to take it as read that we love some people. They shouldn't need to be told, should they? I thought of that the other day when I called back to my old parish school. It's only a mile from my retirement home and I was, after all, Parish Priest there for 30 years. It's one of the happiest places I know and Helen, the Head, is very welcoming, even if she's busy, so why not?

But it was as I was leaving again that I noticed the school Mission Statement and more especially the simple, very direct line that acts as a summary. It says simply, "In All Things Love". Wow! In all things. All those lesson plans, meetings of parents, teachers, Governors, school football, emergency calls to parents, visits from Ofsted, "In All Things Love" Wow again. What a mission indeed, that no matter what's going on, the clear unmistakable message is "Love". That's definitely worth getting out of bed for on the coldest of mornings.

So let's ask the question one more time, "Have I told you lately that I love you?" and this time let's put it not in the mouth of our local school, but in that big thing called the Church. What comes quickest to our minds when we think of all that comes under the heading, Church? Buildings, money, institution, the next life, behaviour, Them, Us, or just possibly, "In all things, Love"?  Wouldn't it be wonderful if love was the message that spilled out from all the activities known as Church? Whether it's the big organisation we often think of as IT or THEM, the church, or it's the folk who continue to put their daily hopes and dreams in Jesus. What a difference if we could all do our bit in ensuring that the message that comes across from all things is simply, love.

I CAN BUT TRY 1

I shall be dying soon. Not too soon I hope, but soon enough to justify my saying so. 
[Look right for a picture of me on my mothers knee]
I am told that the last "oldest person" to die in this country had just turned 113. As I shall be 77 this August, even if I live long enough to earn a place in the record books, I am already well on the way. And my family's average age for troubling the Undertaker gives me no great reason to expect I shall beat the record set by that lady from Yorkshire.   

What is all this about? Well, I'll tell you, it's the books, that's what it is, the books. They've got to me. It's not that I've been a great reader, more a dabbler really and late into the field at that, but I have acquired a great many books. Moving into this nice comfortable flat, I took only a relatively small number with me (240 or so), but still enough to alarm the staff. I left by far the greater number behind in the presbytery where I had my home for some 30 years. They were to be shared out among friends and relatives as time went by. Alas time went by faster than friends and relatives, or even honest thieves showed up, and as the Bishop has chosen my old presbytery for his latest future-shaping idea, I've had to get the books out of there, pronto. It's been a wrench. 

I must not make too much of it for many of the books spent their time on my shelves beckoning me to read them. But even in that unrequited state, we became friends, the books and I. So parting is indeed a wrench, a wrench that is at its most acute this very day. For even as I write the man from Cleveleys may be on his way. He will be looking round the piles of books in my old place and taking what he wants. To be honest, I hope he takes them all. No he has not promised me any money for them, but better by far that these books beckon someone else to read them than that they end up on the rubbish dump.


I mentioned that I shall be dying soon and a necessary part of any dying is letting go of things, in my case, these books. So a part of my dying is taking place today.


An equally important part of dying is a very positive thing, the conscious leaving of our things to others. Such are wills. Mine is made and settled and yet there are still some things, not of a physical nature, I would like to pass to others. These are the thoughts, dreams and ideas which surfaced in me as I attempted to live out my allotted time span. They may prove of no use to any one but I would rather they floated on the airwaves than that they simply joined me in the grave. I can but try.

I CAN BUT TRY 2

 EASTER: 
WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES

"Now is not the time", as we often say, but suppose "time" is not the currency we're using. Suppose instead of thinking in centuries, generations or even the space between general elections, we were asked instead to put time aside and measure all our thinking against the background of eternity, what then? Would we so much as know where to begin? Funnily enough we would, you know, or at least should.
 

Today, Easter Sunday, rouses us with the answer. Though it is tempting to think that if cameras had been around "when he rose out from the tomb" we would have had first hand proof, all we needed to set our minds at ease and solve all our doubts, in fact such a thought is silly and wrong. 

Easter could never have been recorded on camera, even digital, because Easter is not an event at all in the way history records such things. Put away cameras, diaries, clocks and tape recorders for Easter is rooted in none of these things but in something we call eternity.

In eternity none of the usual elements come into play, not time, not space, not place, size or gravity. Not, directions or colour. None of these.  In eternity we are freed from dependency on all of these things, freed to be in the sheer presence of God. "Free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last."  Alleluia.  

Easter invites every human being to cross the threshold from time to eternity. Yes we will have to go on using the things of time for they are the elements that make up life as we know it.  But if we are one day to leave all these things aside and make the crossing from time to eternity then we must even now, live with our trust and hope not in time but in eternity. This is the great challenge of Easter; to live lives of FAITH. Not faith as a lame excuse for continuing to believe things reason cannot explain but faith that puts Hope and Trust in a world beyond mere reason.

Jesus showed us: Hanging there on the Cross in the world of time, he cried as we all would, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But then, crossing from time to eternity he declares for himself and for all who journey in faith,  Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit. 

Especially must the Church, while hanging out in the world of time, be courageous enough to set out all its thinking, make all its decisions, not on the basis of this world of time, but of eternity, Resurrection Land.    

"EMPTIED HIMSELF" (Philippians, 2:7)

"EMPTIED HIMSELF"

It was a Sunday morning and I was “filling in” for a priest on holiday from a neighbouring parish. I was busy getting myself ready for the early Mass when the telephone interrupted me, mid-shave.  “Tony” had collapsed, would I please come. 

As it happened, although I was not in my own neck of the woods, I knew the address having been to a meeting in that house only a short time before. I dashed off. The ambulance people had got there before me and I only had to look at them to know that Tony had not just collapsed, he was dead. A massive heart attack as we say. 

I did all the priest things and spoke briefly with the younger ones before going back upstairs to have a word with Winnie, Tony’s wife. I pushed open the bedroom door thinking desperately of what to say. I need not have worried, Winnie spoke first and more than forty years later I can still clearly recall what she said. Looking across her husband’s body at me, but I think not really seeing me at all, she said with what I can only describe as a great forlornness of heart, “Father, he was my life”.

For all I know some of you reading this may well have lived through such a harrowing experience; the death of loved ones comes the way of us all sooner or later, and it was certainly not my intention to renew anyone's pain. But it's almost Good Friday and I've been thinking of things I like to do on that day. 

Weather permitting I love to wander about among trees, tall and spare, not yet in leaf. I like to feel their great strength about me, admire their sheer size and listen in awe to their creaking and groaning in the wind. Inevitably I find myself thinking of the Cross of Christ and of how the Church liturgy so often refers to it as a tree; the tree of life, the tree of victory. And I love to be alone as I wander about among the trees. I'm not sure why, but it helps, sometimes even more than the Church liturgy does. 

I also like to sing quietly, if only in my head, that lovely hymn, "My Song is Love Unknown". It was the favourite Holy Week hymn of a parish choir-mistress I once had. She went to God a few years ago and now, especially on Good Friday, I like to cherish her memory, and again, doing so just seems to help.

Then too, and always, I find myself hearing again the awful call of Christ, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" It is then that all the little things I like to do on Good Friday, seem to shatter and lie worthless about me. How can I possibly dare treat Good Friday as if it were simply "a few of my favourite things", designed to pander to my aesthetic tastes?  

Good Friday must never amount to this and neither does it.Those last despairing words of Christ on the cross have a habit of surfacing in our own lives insisting that Good Friday is never just a memory but an experience, a genuine sharing in his crucifixion. I think of Winnie and so many like her, left gasping "He was my life". 

At moments like that I find myself saying those simple, daft, words of the childrens' catechism of my early days at school, " God made the world, he made it out of nothing because he is our creator."

Is that the answer then? The answer to the lonely cry of Christ on the cross, that first Good Friday, the bewildered cry of Winnie over the dead body of her young husband, her own Good Friday? Or is it that God our creator, does not allow us answers of any kind,  preferring to work with a blank sheet. It would seem so for Christ the Lord took on the loneliness of his death with a final cry, " Father, into your hands I commend my spirit".  With that great cry, he asks us to empty ourselves of all earthly reassurance and accept instead the lifelong call to faith.