10 September, Season of Creation XII: Enter his gates with thanksgiving.

Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands. 
Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing. 
Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; 
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: 
be thankful unto him, and bless his name.
For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; 
and his truth endureth to all generations.
Ps 100

The psalms give us some of the most difficult prayers – Sister Johanna wrote about how to pray these vengeful psalms a while ago: her series begins here. This might be a good time to reread her wise words, so we will provide a link to each post every day for a week.

Sister also looks at the more benign Psalms, thanking God for creation; here is one of them. Short and sweet, easy enough to get by heart, especially in the hymnal version, ‘All People that on earth do dwell’.

If you cannot get to a Harvest Festival Thanksgiving this month, sit down to some local food – fruit or local bread, say – and thank God for the food he provides.

And think of those going without.

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Going Viral LXXII: Bishop Geoffrey says Thank you.

A letter from the Bishop of Rupert’s Land, based in Winnipeg, Canada, to the faithful people of his diocese, thanking them for all their efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Diocese of Rupert’s Land

The Right Reverend Geoffrey Woodcroft

Bishop of Rupert’s Land

We acknowledge that we meet and work in Treaty 1, 2 and 3 Land, the traditional land of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Dakota, Sioux and Oji-Cree people and the homeland of the Metis Nation.  We are grateful for their stewardship of this land and their hospitality which allows us to live, work and service God the Creator here.
 

March 19, 2021

A message for the Diocese of Rupert’s Land

I write today to express genuine and profound thanks to you. As Christ’s disciples we have learned to answer new calls to serve and be the Body. You and I have endeavored to reduce the risk spreading COVID 19, not just for self, but for the wider communities in which we serve.

For some of us, the lessons we gleaned way back in Sunday School prepared us well for our part in ministering through this pandemic. For those who have come to the Church not as children, your worship, study and fellowship has prepared you to serve compassionately in the world. In so many ways our Church has been preparing us all our lives for the extraordinary times we now navigate.

I am grateful for the parishes and missions who have slowly, carefully and safely begun to return to in-person worship and gatherings. I am grateful for your adherence to safety protocols, healthy education and communication strategies for members, and your zeal for excellence.

I am filled with gratitude for parishes and missions who have continue in dialogue in their communities, weighing risks and information maintaining the suspension of in-person worship. Your careful deliberation and care a fine example of our rich tradition.

I remain indebted to the many members across this diocese and our staff who have offered their expertise, advice/wisdom, their labour, and their love in Christ to me. We are many members, and we are One Body, it takes all of us to be the Church.

Finally, fatigue, grief and feeling like one is constantly on the edge is common amongst us all. Clergy and lay leaders have had steep learning curves in new technology, innovative ways of connecting, and being Church in the wilderness. We grieve the loss of life, relationships, hugs and kisses, we lament that routines have been upended, plans cancelled, and time forgotten, and every day we are hoping for clarity and definition. May we know forgiveness and kindness, and be made to feel less afraid, and raised to that place where we might carefully impart the very same to all who Creator God gives us upon our journey.

In Christ,

+ Geoffrey

2 December: A letter to Doctor Johnson about trees.

Monymusk today has mature trees

Doctor Johnson would have been pleased to receive this letter praising his observations on the lack of trees in Scotland, but his reaction shows how human nature does not like its motivations, nor its indifference, to be challenged. We’ve seen how timber was treated as an ‘extractive industry’ with no eye to grandchildren’s future, leaving bare hillside.

“‘SIR ALEXANDER DICK TO DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON. ‘Prestonfield, Feb. 17, 1777.

Sir, ‘I had yesterday the honour of receiving your book of your Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, which you was so good as to send me, by the hands of our mutual friend, Mr. Boswell, of Auchinleck; for which I return you my most hearty thanks …

Indeed our country of Scotland, in spite of the union of the crowns, is still in most places so devoid of clothing, or cover from hedges and plantations, that it was well you gave your readers a sound Monitoire with respect to that circumstance. The truths you have told, and the purity of the language in which they are expressed, as your Journey is universally read, may, and already appear to have a very good effect. For a man of my acquaintance, who has the largest nursery for trees and hedges in this country, tells me, that of late the demand upon him for these articles is doubled, and sometimes tripled.

I have, therefore, listed Dr. Samuel Johnson in some of my memorandums of the principal planters and favourers of the enclosures, under a name which I took the liberty to invent from the Greek, Papadendrion (Father of trees).

I am told that one gentleman in the shire of Aberdeen, viz. Sir Archibald Grant, has planted above fifty millions of trees on a piece of very wild ground at Monimusk: I must enquire if he has fenced them well, before he enters my list; for, that is the soul of enclosing. I began myself to plant a little, our ground being too valuable for much, and that is now fifty years ago; and the trees, now in my seventy-fourth year, I look up to with reverence, and shew them to my eldest son now in his fifteenth year. I shall always continue, with the truest esteem, dear Doctor, ‘Your much obliged, ‘And obedient humble servant, ‘ALEXANDER DICK

Johnson observed some weeks later: “Sir Alexander Dick is the only Scotsman liberal enough not to be angry that I could not find trees, where trees were not. I was much delighted by his kind letter.”

Life of Johnson by James Boswell, via Kindle.

More about Sir Alexander Dick here.

More about Monymusk here.

image from Wikipedia by Lecored1

1 July: Thank you.

Sometimes this blog wanders where the Spirit takes us – trusting that we are listening properly – sometimes we have a theme or pattern in mind, causing us to think rather than just feel good and complacent. I, Will, from time to time reread something and ask, Did I really write that? Am I so comfortable as that? And then a paragraph is added, or one is altered or taken away.

Today’s message is, I am sure, one that the Spirit would want us to send out: thank you to all our followers and more occasional readers for reading, and liking, and following us; I write on behalf of all our contributors. It’s good mental and spiritual exercise to produce a concise reflection on a passage from Scripture, a poem, an event from my own life or the news. Please stay with us and send us a ‘like’ or a comment from time to time.

And have a blessed summer!

Will T and Co.

A lane in Herefordshire.

25 January, Church Unity Week. Unusual Kindness VIII.

Receiving and giving

And it happened that the father of Publius lay sick of a fever, and of a bloody flux. To whom Paul entered in; and when he had prayed, and laid his hands on him, he healed him. Which being done, all that had diseases in the island, came and were healed: Who also honoured us with many honours, and when we were to set sail, they laded us with such things as were necessary.(28:8-10)

Reflection

I thank the stranger for privileging me to receive You.

I thank the Samaritan for making me accept Your care and the love I thought wasn’t in You to give.

I thank Jesus for drawing me to Your precious death to receive Your poverty  as riches that outweigh the world.

I thank the others all who gave to me so much to give.

Prayer

God, giver of life, we thank You for the gift of Your compassionate love which soothes and strengthens us.

We pray that our churches may be always open to receive Your gifts from one another.

Grant us a spirit of generosity to all as we journey together in the path of Christian unity.

We ask this in the name of Your Son who reigns with You and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

11 January: Thomas Traherne XX: the world opens his nature.

The Services which the world doth you, are transcendent to all imagination. Did it only sustain your body and preserve your life and comfort your senses, you were bound to value it as much as those services were worth: but it discovers the being of God unto you, it opens His nature, and shews you His wisdom, goodness and power, it magnifies His love unto you, it serves Angels and men for you, it entertains you with many lovely and glorious objects, it feeds you with joys, and becomes a theme that furnishes you with perpetual praises and thanksgivings, it enflameth you with the love of God, and in the link of your union and communion with Him. It is the temple wherein you are exalted to glory and honour, and the visible porch or gate of Eternity: a sure pledge of Eternal joys, to all them that walk before God and are perfect in it.

From the Second Century of Meditations, 1. (Meditations 2:1)

This meditation follows on well from yesterday’s poem: those bubbles of joy may take us to Eden, but they are fed to us by the world in which we have been created.

Let us reflect on how we can make this Porch of Eternity in which we live more transparent to the eternal joys that the God who walks with us is waiting to pour out for us.  WT.

Goatsbeard seed head, a sphere of joy, a lovely and glorious object.

14 November: Can a man be profitable to God?

In the Book of Job, 22, his friend, Eliphaz the Temanite says:

“Can a man be profitable to God?
Surely he who is wise is profitable to himself.
Is it any pleasure to the Almighty if you are in the right,
or is it gain to him if you make your ways blameless? “

Job’s comforters have a bad press, indeed Blake, who engraved our image calls them ‘tormentors’. But even if it’s the wrong time and place for it, Eliphaz has a point for us, if not for Job! As Rowan Williams puts it in his discussion on William Tyndale:

Any system of religious activity and thinking that tries to give us some leverage over God – I’ve never denied God a moment of my time, I hope he remembers that – such an attitude is poisonous to our faith. 

And

We create religious institutions that are designed to preserve that divine indebtedness to us, and while we are doing that, we largely ignore the concrete forms of indebtedness toward other human beings to which we should be attending.*

ALL IS GIFT!

Accept the gift of your life, accept that it is a gift, be thankful for every breath! God did not have to bring you into being, and if you suffer, remember that so too did Jesus, his Son. Suffering is shared by God.

Alfred Joyce Kilmer put it this way in his Prayer of a Soldier in France:

My shoulders ache beneath my pack 

(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back). 

Please follow this link to our post from July last year for the whole poem, written shortly before Kilmer’s death in battle. He concludes:

So let me render back again 

This millionth of Thy gift. Amen. 

The gift is the redemptive suffering of Jesus; allying our suffering to his is to set ourselves in sympathy with Jesus; so if personal suffering is a gift, that is because of how we receive it, endure it, live it: through him, with him and in him. Him being the one who prayed: O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt. (Matthew 26:29)

Image from William Blake’s Illustrations for the Book of Job, via Wikipedia

* Rowan Williams:  Luminaries: Twenty lives that illuminate the Christian Way, London SPCK 2019. p54

13 October: John Henry Newman: Loss and Gain.

Today in Rome Pope Francis will declare John Henry Cardinal Newman a saint of the Catholic Church, an English saint who was not a martyr but a hard-working priest and theologian. He tended the sick during epidemics in Birmingham as well as founding schools and Oratories and defending the faith through fearless enquiry.

All that and he found time to write novels, including Loss and Gain, The Story of a Convert. In the early pages he has these two contrasting passages about a familiar country walk. Draw your own conclusions!

“When we ourselves were young, we once on a time walked on a hot summer-day from Oxford to Newington—a dull road, as any one who has gone it knows; yet it was new to us; and we protest to you, reader, believe it or not, laugh or not, as you will, to us it seemed on that occasion quite touchingly beautiful; and a soft melancholy came over us, of which the shadows fall even now, when we look back on that dusty, weary journey. And why? because every object which met us was unknown and full of mystery. A tree or two in the distance seemed the beginning of a great wood, or park, stretching endlessly; a hill implied a vale beyond, with that vale’s history; the bye-lanes, with their green hedges, wound and vanished, yet were not lost to the imagination. Such was our first journey; but when we had gone it several times, the mind refused to act, the scene ceased to enchant, stern reality alone remained; and we thought it one of the most tiresome, odious roads we ever had occasion to traverse.” 

“”People call this country ugly, and perhaps it is; but whether I am used to it or no, I always am pleased with it. The lights are always new; and thus the landscape, if it deserves the name, is always presented in a new dress. I have known Shotover there take the most opposite hues, sometimes purple, sometimes a bright saffron or tawny orange.” Here he stopped. 

Loss and Gain is available on Kindle

Start reading it for free: http://amzn.eu/7WLLVaT  

September 14: Before the Cross XXV: Cease to complain!

 

 

This post is taken from The Imitation of Christ, Book 3, Chapter XIX. I am using the copy my late Aunt Margaret gave to my Grandmother Evelyn sometime in the late 1930s. 

What is it thou sayest, my son? Cease to complain, and consider my Passion, and that of the other Saints. Thou hast not yet resisted unto blood. (Hebrews 12.14)

Thou oughtest to call to mind the heaviest sufferings of others, that thou mayest the easier bear the very little things that thou sufferest. And if to thee they seem not little, take heed lest this also proceed from thy impatience. But whether  they be little or great, strive to bear them all with patience.

He is not a truly patient man who will suffer nothing, only so much as he shall think fit, and from whom he pleaseth. The truly patient man … how much soever and how often soever any adversity happeneth to him from any creature, he taketh it all equally with thanksgiving as from the hand of God, and esteemeth it a great gain. For with God not anything, how trifling soever, suffered for God’s sake, shall go unrewarded …

Make, O Lord, that possible to me by grace, which seemeth impossible to me by nature. Thou knowest how little I can bear, and that I am soon dejected when a small adversity ariseth. Let all exercises of tribulation become lovely and most desirable to me for thy Name’s sake, for to suffer and be afflicted for Thee is very healthful for my soul.

There is scriptural foundation for the Imitation’s position on accepting suffering: Here for instance is Ben Sirach, otherwise known as Ecclesiasticus, a late Jewish wisdom writer. (Ch2:3-10).

Wait on God with patience: join thyself to God, and endure, that thy life may be increased in the latter end. Take all that shall be brought upon thee: and in thy sorrow endure, and in thy humiliation keep patience. For gold and silver are tried in the fire, but acceptable men in the furnace of humiliation. Believe God, and he will recover thee: and direct thy way, and trust in him. Keep his fear, and grow old therein. Ye that fear the Lord, wait for his mercy: and go not aside from him, lest ye fall. Ye that fear the Lord, believe him: and your reward shall not be made void. Ye that fear the Lord, hope in him: and mercy shall come to you for your delight.  Ye that fear the Lord, love him, and your hearts shall be enlightened.

And here is Jesus in Luke 6:27-29:

But I say to you that hear: Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you. Bless them that curse you, and pray for them that calumniate you. And to him that striketh thee on the one cheek, offer also the other. And him that taketh away from thee thy cloak, forbid not to take thy coat also.

Nana’s little copy of the Imitation  was well thumbed and  could really  do with some repairs  to the cover. She had a great devotion to Christ crucified. Nana knew many trials in her life, but was a source of strength and fun to us, her grandchildren. (MMB)

 

July 16: Prayer in an Airport

Lord, I know that we always fly
too close to the sun, melt our wax wings
and plummet. I don’t deny it. Still, deign
to give us a safe flight. Let loose great
flocks of your angels, let them range
all around us and let their long hair
stream and their wings be orange, green
and violet. And let their knowledge of
the spheres steer our pilot and keep him
in a state of wonder at the power
you have shared with humans. Show us
that we do not fly by technology alone
but by the grace of spirits who give us
our morsel and cup. And when several tons
of roaring metal and human flesh alight
with a shudder on tarmac, may we thank them,
before we grab our existence back again,
and sprint.

SJC

Another one for the holidays. It’s always good to get down from that plane! Happy Landings to all.                                                                                                                        Will.