Do not forsake me, o my darling.

David Ford concludes the opening chapter of Christian Wisdom with the following:

“The abundance of imagery and ideas flowing from close attention to scripture and to those who have responded to it most wisely create an environment in which the desire for wisdom may grow. Heart and mind are educated together and are stretched to engage passionately in their own search for wisdom. The messy particularities of the Bible and of life refuse to be neatly contained, and the wisdom that copes creatively with them never attains closure but is always alert, searching and desiring more and more of an infinite superabundance. “

The paragraph continues, but for the moment this will do. My experience in my work has often been that life has messy particularities. In the middle of a busy week someone died and their family needed my attention. There was no option but to find time and go, but that seems to push up the pressure elsewhere. Last night I was leading a bible study on the story of Zacchaeus. I had spent time the day before with my head in commentaries on Luke and knew the story well, but hadn’t found a nailed down way of leading the study. I went to my study, praying and informing God what he already knew, that I was tearing my hair out. I pulled a bible study book on evangelism randomly (I didn’t know what was in it) off the shelf and it fell open to the story of Zacchaeus! The gentleman who introduced the evening read the passage from Matthew’s gospel chp.6 about not worrying. I know that is true, Fiona and I discussed trusting God and ‘going with the flow’ yesterday and so it shouldn’t have been a surprise when I heard it read. Zacchaeus had messy particularities. I’ll bet it wasn’t so comfortable up that tree, and he had bucketfuls of issues. But Jesus stepped in with a cry of ‘Come down immediately’. When I am climbing the walls, when I want to see Jesus, it is wonderful when in small things I hear that same call.

It was Socrates who said essentially ‘the more I know the more I know I don’t know’ and he was very clever. When I was very young, between about the ages of 6-11 years, I hadn’t read any Socrates but I considered myself to be wise. I remember looking at people and thinking, I know what you are thinking because I have wisdom (I considered it a kind of super power!). Looking back it seems both a strange and a rather arrogant thing to have been thinking at that age, but then after all, I WAS that age! Nowadays I hope such wisdom as I have is mine from learning it the hard way, and see it much more as a gift from the Lord . God alone is truly wise but God’s wisdom is, as the book of Proverbs says, more precious than rubies ie highly desirable, so I figure we ought to ask God for it.

Recently I’ve been reading Christian Wisdom - Desiring God and Learning in Love by David Ford and it has been sparking off thoughts on the subject in various directions. In order to give myself some reminder of what I’ve been studying and maybe open some conversation I’m going to blog regularly for a while on aspects of the book. It will be interesting to see whether I can sum up any of it in a way which does it any justice.

After many months of inactivity I have returned to my voxblog looking to do something fresh. One of the delights of Christianity is we get used to being able to start again. So a name change seemed in order.

Why ‘Do not forsake me, o my darling’? A number of reasons - I was noodling around with puns and variations on my name and I remembered Shakespeare’s sonnet 18, perhaps because it is howling a gale here and denuding the trees of branches:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

My surname is Budd and I hope/believe in God’s eyes I am his darling (’loveable or endearing person’ COD). Then I imagined God saying to me, “Don’t forsake me”, along with Jesus’ cry of dereliction in the other direction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) and I thought about the wrestling of faith in the face of trials and such.

Finally, and rather frivolously, Do not forsake me O my Darling is not only a good song from the classic western, High Noon, it also is the title of an episode of The Prisoner (a series I’ve been fond of for many years). Strangely though, it is not the cowboy episode which was called Living in Harmony, and which followed it in the series. Enough for now.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6637429.stm

No need to comment, I feel.

Sunday night, Fional and I went along to an experimental worship event at Citygate church here in Brighton. Not knowing quite what to expect, we did know that Terl Bryant and some of his musical friends would be there.  The Pastor of Citygate, Andy, had told me during the week that they didn’t quite know what they were going to do on the evening but had some resources ready.

We arrived on time, 7pm, but all that happened for perhaps 15 minutes was the band began drumming out rhythms, at first gently then with increasing volume until by the time Andy and Kirsty, his p.a. made the opening announcements and welcome things were buzzing. There were perhaps 150 20/30 somethings there seated around cafe style tables with drinks and nibbles and a large video screen overhead showed an arty selection of photographs. These changed throughout the night, flicking through in a postmodern stylee.

Citygate is a charismatic church and as such the evening of experimental worship was different in feel from a lot of the alt.worship and emerging church scene in the UK, at least. In fact the blend created across the evening was very relaxed and as the band moved with the rhythm, and as people came forward to read poems or scripture etc themes did emerge albeit in a pencil sketched, rather than hard delineated obviously deliberate kind of way. At times things got a little confusing in the mix, such as when a poet stood up and performed one of his pieces which though clearly poetic was not easy to follow and seemed just to throw more questions into the pot. At another point someone else shouted into a microphone for 2 minutes in tongues, and it wasn’t very clear if any interpretation was given or whether this was just the person’s deep sense of God coming out.

A moment which I felt didn’t click was when the band (top class musicians all of them), first slipped via the bassist into riffs from Buffalo Soldier, and not long after into a full blown (literally!) rendition of a Miles Davis number from A Kind of Blue. Whilst I enjoy Miles Davis, it felt clearly to me like we’d moved from worship into performance. I’ve talked before about this crossover point, having thought about it for example in relation to the Cambridge / Oxford university college choir tradition where art may or may not meet worship (IMHO). Still we soon came back to very fly blues/jazz version of the Ishmael song ‘Father God’.  Some parts such as quietly moving into ‘Here is love, vast as the ocean’ were deeply moving.

Andy has an international dance ministry and the influence of that became clear as through the course of the evening a number of young women danced freely and interpretively in the space created for this near the front of worship area. Andy used a huge trailing flag on a 10ft pole to interpret the music for a few minutes, which was powerful as an image and a great demonstration of physicality meeting spirituality (I find some interpretive dance can seem quite formulaic, but this was a long way from that).

All in all I want to say ‘Hallelujah!’ and give thanks to God for Andy and Citygate because what they with Terl Bryant and friends tried to do was risky, but a very well worthwhile attempt to go “Stepping Beyond” (loose theme for the night) the ‘boyband’ or personality driven form of worship leading that is quite prevalent at the moment in many evangelical churches.  The sense of freedom and experimentation was a hard thing to bring together successfully, but I felt that it was a taste of the kind of thing I’ve longed to be into for years.

Just a quickie…

For those interested in The God Delusion you can find here a 2 part podcast of a debate between Prof. Richard Dawkins and Prof. Alister McGrath, hosted by The Times.

I came across it on a site that looks full of interesting articles to prompt the mind of the thinking Christian. Find it here (bethinking.org) 

On an entirely different note, remember me at 10.20 am UK time Wednesday, as I’m up for root canal surgery! Say AAAAAAAAAARGH!

I’m reading my way through the Psalms, making notes as I go. Yesterday I came across a question  pertinent to becoming a political animal and not least the Localworks campaign: 

“When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?”  (Psalm 11:3)

Mrs Mandylion is reading the Bible in chronological order using a book called Cover to Cover. This scheme places Psalm 11 with Saul’s behaviour towards David in 1 Samuel 19, and David’s friendship with Jonathan in the following chapter. One part of an answer to the question above is that if we consider ourselves to be righteous (always potentially dangerous, admittedly), we need to ally ourselves with others who are righteous, just as David did in his friendship with Jonathan, not in order to bring Saul down but to enable David to keep saying what he needed to say, to keep being what he needed to be, and stay in touch.

It was encouraging at the Sustainable Communities Bill rally to see members and leaders from the Women’s Institute, CAMRA, several large unions, The Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem and Green Parties speaking in support of the bill. Each was there because they see, as I do, some foundational things in British society being swept away. It is happening, I believe, in the name of following a raw socio-economic dogma that has some very debatable precepts at its heart.

There is, of course, room to argue about what is ‘foundation’ and what is dispensible (and I am not one just to preserve ‘in aspic’ anything to the detriment of genuine progress and improvement), but in this instance at least there is a growing consensus that many many good things, things which are to the benefit of local communities are on the brink of being sacrificed and lost.

In the 1950s and 60s in the UK many attractive and functional buildings were lost, demolished to make way for ‘modern’ developments (which later became slums and housing nightmares). Are we about to allow the same on a much grander and more catastrophic scale with British society? Alone, we might feel like this, but collectively we may have more of a say. I hope and pray so.

Well, for a lot of clergy I know reaching Easter Monday is a big relief. For me, alongside the even greater significance of Easter over Christmas, there is usually a greater workload - not that it is excessive, but just that I haven’t had a clear week’s break since October and on Palm Sunday my body succombed to the bug that various others in my family have had for weeks and right on top of Holy Week I found myself feeling very drained, with a hacking chesty cough and needing to think straight and finding that nearby impossible.

At times like this, I think I learn lessons from my body. Feeling ‘How am I going to get through this?’, as I prepared for Maundy Thursday (recalling the Last Supper), feeling drained on Good Friday and then noticing going through Easter Sunday a sense of light at the end of the tunnel is a little Lent reflection all of its own. 

The cry of ‘Holiday!’ after the services were over was heartfelt, and I entered a short period of being silly around the house and playing games with the children. The joy of resurrection was immeasurably greater. I quoted several times over the weekend, “We may not know, we cannot tell what pains he had to bear” (There is a Green Hill), but I guess it is also true that “We may not know, we cannot tell, what joy he later shared”. And in that vein, just as we have a hand in the events of Palm Sunday through Holy Week to Easter Sunday, so too we like St Paul may continue to pray ourselves towards knowing more deeply the cross and resurrection and the power of Christ’s suffering and joy.

Happy Easter! Happy holidays!

The Sustainable Communities Bill (download here to read in pdf) has attracted a lot of support from MPs and others in recent years as it has been submitted and resubmitted to Parliament. This year it looks like the Bill has the best chance yet of being adopted.

Recently I travelled to Westminster Central Hall ,a Methodist Church at the heart of London, close to the Houses of Parliament for the Localworks Rally in support of the bill, sponsored by Unlock Democracy.

Chaired by the editor of the Evening Standard, an impressive succession of speakers, (including Rt Hon David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, Sir Menzies Cambell, leader of the Liberal Democrats, as well as a government minister, the CEO of Help the Aged, the Chairwoman of the Women’s Institute and others) rose to voice their support for the bill, present their own reasons for supporting it. (For example, you can watch Ming Cambell’s speech here.)

The BBC report on the evening does a good job of summarizing what was said, and on the same page there are items on ‘The Death of the High Street?’, which illustrate some of the problems the bill seeks to address. The range of issues is in fact very wide indeed and impinges on a huge number of areas of public policy. Everyone realised the need for the bill to be workable, so it doesn’t go as far as others would like, for instance in tackling problems with planning laws, but what it does address seems to me to make a great amount of sense - it scatches where many many ordinary people are itching whether they realise it or not.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll try some analysis!