The life of the pilgrim…

The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signalled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.

(Brennan Manning in “Ruthless Trust”)

From a place of weakness…

“ This is what happened to me. I came to a full stop. One day I was in my bishop’s study, as if in some eerily calm nightmare, hearing myself say these words: I cant do this anymore.”

Paul Swann

In a church where often so much emphasis is placed on success and strength, imagine being a church leader who is suddenly struck down by the raw experience of failure and debilitating illness, causing him to question the very foundations of his life, faith and ministry as he goes through a time in a wilderness of fatigue…

In 2016 the Francis Schaeffer Institute published the findings of a survey on clergy health and stress. They do not make for encouraging reading.

At least 90% of ministers feel honoured and satisfied to be in this role, and work hard at it because they genuinely care for people.

Unfortunately, it seems that such commitment comes at a cost, indeed that very commitment often makes it impossible to even notice, and therefore respond to, the results of stress and pressure in our ministry before we are close to breaking point.

A 2016 survey of pastors in the USA by the Francis Schaeffer Institute has some grim statistics:

• 54% of pastors work over 55 hours a week
• 57% can’t pay their bills without a second income 
• 54% are overworked and 43% are overstressed
• 53% feel their training had not properly prepared them for the task.
• 35% battle depression
• 26% are overly fatigued
• 28% are spiritually undernourished and 9% are burnt-out
• 23% are distant to their families
• 18% work more than 70 hours a week and face unreasonable challenges
• 12% are belittled.
• 3% have had an affair

This does not paint a healthy picture of those who are called to model a healthy Christian life…

The church leader referred to in the opening paragraph was Paul Swann. After a number of years working hard in two growing parishes in the Diocese of Worcester he was forced to retire early due to  chronic fatigue syndrome (ME). An enforced period of reflection helped him to put together the circumstances that had led him to this place, and to identify the many warning signs that had been ignored along the way.

He now serves as an adviser on spirituality, offers spiritual direction and leads retreats, from a place of weakness. His book, “Sustaining Leadership – you are more important than your ministry” is both a helpful preventative and ongoing resource for a life and ministry characterised by a balance of self-care with healthy ministry.

The book begins by telling Paul’s story of disintegration and  reintegration, using this as a model for much sound and helpful advice. The chapter entitled “A question of balance” was very helpful and challenging, especially its advice on the keeping of a “Sabbath lifestyle”, and the “Soul Food” chapter amply repays the purchase price of the book and more.

The book finishes with a section on “Holding on to hope”, which invites the reader to move forward, not sustained by ‘false strength’, but rather from hope in a place of vulnerability. Faith and hope are often major casualties in this burnout process…the whole thrust of the book relates to keeping those essentials alive.

Guiltless challenge…

I read lots of books about prayer. One of my most recent reads is “Prayer in the Making” by Lyndall Bywater. Readers of this blog may remember that I found her previous book, “Faith in the Making” challenging and inspiring, so I thought I’d take a look.

I am not a great prayer, but I do take pains to keep my relationship with God fresh and two-way, so I like to get ideas and be inspired by others who are perhaps more accomplished pray-ers than me.

Books on prayer can be ‘deep’, otherworldly and guilt inducing. “Prayer in the Making” is not one of those; it is thoroughly practical and encouraging, as one would expect from someone who has travelled the path of discovering prayer herself. Challenging…yes, guilt-inducing…definitely not!

The sub-title of the book, “Trying it, talking it, sustaining it’ gives away something of the authors approach, as she invites us to investigate 12 different ways of praying to find those that suit both our personalities and our lifestyles…it is about an open door to prayer rather than a narrow gate opened to the chosen few.

Using a scriptural theme and lots of practical examples we are taken on a journey through the themes Encounter, Worship, Listening, Stillness, Action, Intercession, Strategy, Restorations, Voice and body, Scripture, Warfare and Resilience. Each section finishes with exercises to help us try it, talk it and sustain it.

When I read a new book, I like to use coloured post-it tabs to mark pages of interest, and there is a veritable forest of tabs in my copy of this book. The section about ‘grief and gratitude’ in worship is a firm favourite, as are the sections on ‘Stillness’, ‘Strategy’ and ‘Scripture’. The section under ‘Resilience’ that talks about building a rhythm of prayer, and uses the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ as a template is excellent (I’ve read lots of books about the Lord’s Prayer, and the section in “Prayer in the Making” is one of the most helpful and accessible I have found.

This book makes for a great personal read, but would also provide excellent material for Home Groups, Reading Groups and so on, and would even provide a useful framework for a teaching series on prayer.

But don’t take my word for it…read it for yourself!

Love…fear…change…

Something has happened in the nations that make up the UK. It crept up on us silently and unannounced. It took most of us completely by surprise, and is causing many of us to lose sleep.

I see it in the news, I hear it on the streets and I read it on social media. It seems as if everything is changing, and many of the things we have taken for granted are being shaken.

It must have been bubbling away just beneath the surface for many years, occasionally breaking through into plain view before diving again.

Then, it seems that the events of 23^rd June 2016 allowed it to burst to the surface and slowly take over our whole society.

Fear, especially of those who are different to us, now seems to dominate so much of our time. It seems that no one is immune – politicians, workers, bosses, educationalists, pensioners, students have all succumbed to it.

Our nation is deeply and dangerously divided.

At the same time, something more hopeful is also stirring.

Long ago, Jesus prayed a prayer that has largely gone unanswered…perhaps until now.

“I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message,
that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.
May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.
I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.”

John 17:20-23, New Testament

As I talk to Christian people all over the UK, as I travel around and catch up with friends who are also believers through social media, I am aware that God is at work in our land.

Churches in many places are coming together, working together in ways I have not seen in my lifetime. Denominations far apart on the theological spectrum are laying down their differences of interpretation, preference and practice and coming together out of their love for Jesus and each other and from their shared desire to see his Kingdom come “on earth as it is in heaven”.

What has prevented Christians from coming together in the past, indeed, why is our history littered with splits and divisions?

 “Perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment”

I John 4: 18, New Testament

Could it be fear that has kept us apart, the same fears we see expressed in the world round us. Why do we fear others?

• Fear of difference
• Fear of the unknown
• Fear of being criticised
• Fear of being “polluted” – “will God be angry with us if we mix with them?”

Many of us spend a lot of time working out who to exclude, based on our fears. We need to remind ourselves that Jesus always hung around with the excluded…maybe we should too if we want to know him better.

“You cannot love those you fear”

Robert Benson, “The Body Broken”

Some of us find it hard enough to love people in our own church who are different from us. How will we be able to be obedient to Jesus and love those in other parts of the church that are different to our own? Paul and the other letter writers in the NT were well aware of this tendency among us, hence the frequent warnings against gossip, criticism and sowing division.

Part of the good news, the Gospel, is that Jesus death heals divisions between people as well as healing the division between us and God. John goes as far as to say that if we can’t love our brothers and sisters who are right there in front of us, it calls our love for God into question too…if Jesus has really changed us it affects the way we love everyone.

It’s important that we ask ourselves, “Why is God bringing Christians together in new ways today?”

I believe that a more united church is demonstrating a prophetic and counter-cultural contrast, as a sign of hope to the increasingly fractured and broken culture in which we live.

I guess the question is: do we want to be part of what God is doing, or will we continue to allow old fears and prejudices keep us apart?

(Adapted from a talk given by me at Tweedmouth Parish church on 20th January 2019, at the start of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity)

Lose to win…

Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it.

…and…

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Jesus of Nazareth
(Luke 17:33 and Matthew 6:34)

A lot of stuff has been written these days about finding yourself.

Find solitude…escape from life’s routines…live without distraction…eschew social obligations…lay work commitments aside…get ‘off-grid’…do whatever it takes to find your true self!

 Neil Ansell definitely has a ‘take’ on this. As one who enacted all of the above, and more, he certainly has lived experience.

In “Deep Country”, he writes:

By the time the first frosts came in November, my shelves would be laden with jars of jam and pickled mushrooms, bottles of ketchup and wine, and whatever else I had preserved that year. What vegetables could not be left out to overwinter would be harvested and stored. I would be like a squirrel with my cache of nuts to keep me through the hard times to come. The hatches would be battened down; I was ready for the worst. Happiness is a full larder.
 
This was the pattern of my days, a simple life led by natural rhythms rather than the requirements and expectations of others. Imagine being given the opportunity to take time out of your life, for five whole years. Free of social obligations, free of work commitments. Think how well you would get to know yourself, all that time to consider your past and the choices you had made, to focus on your personal development, to know yourself through and through, to work out your goals in life, your true ambitions.
 
None of this happened, not to me. Perhaps for someone else it would have been different. Any insight I have gained has been the result of later reflection. Solitude did not breed introspection, quite the reverse. My days were spent outside, immersed in nature, watching…My attention was constantly focused away from myself and onto the natural world around me. And my nights were spent sitting in front of a log fire, aimlessly turning a log from time to time and staring at the flickering flames. I would not be thinking about the day just gone; that day was done. And I would not be planning tomorrow; tomorrow would take care of itself. The silence outside was reflected by a growing silence within…I certainly learned to be at ease with myself in the years I spent at Penlan, but it was not by knowing myself better – it was by forgetting I was there. I had become a part of the landscape, a stone.

From “Deep Country – Five Years in the Welsh Hills”, by Neil Ansell

So lonely…

Back in 2011 Neil Ansell (see previous post) wrote another book, called “Deep Country: five years in the Welsh hills.” In it he writes about a stay of five years in a remote cottage, without modern services, transport or a phone, a story about wild, remote places and wild creatures that became his society…

Once again, the book contains some real gems, both in its encounters with wild life and some of Neil’s discoveries as he spends this extended time with only occasional human companionship, like this one:

I couldn’t feel lonely. Loneliness is the product of isolation that has not been freely chosen. You can of course feel more lonely in the midst of a crowd of people if those people are not giving you the human contact you desire, in the same way that poverty surrounded by affluence feels harsher, more shocking, than poverty shared. Solitude embraced is the opposite of loneliness.

You might like this promotional video HERE

 

A pilgrimage by any other name…

It’s now a little over two weeks since Berwick Literary Festival 2018, and much as I’d like it to, I realise that this blog post is not going to write itself. I really want to respond to at least one of the talks I went to at the Festival, but am struggling (as I often do) with a sense of how unable I am to do it justice…

I’ve been a regular visitor to the Festival for at least three years now, and generally pick out sessions about History, Archaeology, Current Affairs or the Great Outdoors, and in previous years have enjoyed readings and talks from authors such as Alistair Moffat (‘Scotland: a history from earliest times’), Max Adams (‘In the Land of Giants’) and Richard Hingley (‘Hadrian’s Wall: a life’)…I particularly enjoyed the talk by Max Adams (a landscape archaeologist) and went on to read all his books.

This year I chose two very different sessions:

My ‘current affairs’ session was a talk by Douglas Alexander, who was an MP for 18 years before taking on his current role as Chair of UNICEF UK, entitled ‘Trump, the transatlantic relationship and the rise of populism’. Whilst I’m not writing about this session in any depth, I do want to record what a pleasure it was to listen to an ex- politician who was knowledgeable, erudite and, well, very nice!

The second talk was by an author I had not heard of, called Neil Ansell, who would provide my ‘outdoor’ session as he talked about his book, “The Last Wilderness”.

I don’t always manage it, but I made a point of reading his book in the week running up to the talk…seemed only polite…and I was captivated on so many levels.

Although, on the surface, the book is about a series of flesh and blood journeys around a wild area of the west coast of Scotland, the Rough Bounds, that the author visited decades ago, also present is an interior journey into the unknown wilderness of loss, aging and dying. This is why, for me, this is very much a book about a pilgrimage. The descriptions of his experiences, courage and moments of insight made me want to meet the man…so I booked for his session.

I was not disappointed.

Neil is a self-effacing, single parent with two daughters, who lives on the south coast of England. He had travelled up to Berwick that day in order to give his one hour talk and was travelling back as soon as he had finished…which seemed no big deal to this seasoned traveller at all. He seems very at home in his own skin, which showed as he shared aspects of his life and travels in a friendly and welcoming way, and seemed adept at getting to the heart of any question asked by a member of the audience, using appropriate readings from his book.

Although, as I said, I had read the book prior to attending the talk, his readings, with their personal comments and applications made several bits really come alive to me.

I don’t want to spoil the book for other readers by saying too much, but I’d like to give just a few snippets, focussing on the interior journey, hopefully as a way to increase your interest.

The sub title of the book is ‘A Journey into Silence’. Early in the book he tells us that:

“I have been deaf in one ear since infancy, and the hearing in what I call my ‘good’ ear is severely compromised too, and is rapidly deteriorating.”

This experience leads to many thoughts on loss and aging as the narrative develops. For example, as he observes flights of common sandpipers on the loch shore, he writes:

“And they call their piercing, insistent call, which for me has always been emblematic of summer in the uplands. But not any more. For me they are no longer sandpipers, for me they are just sand – -.  I can scarcely believe that I have now lost such a shrill, loud call. It feels as if my world is being dismantled around me, piece by piece…perhaps it makes me value the moment more…and when I see something extraordinary, an eagle or an otter, perhaps, there is a little part of me that cannot help but think, is this my last eagle? Is this my last otter? For in reality it is not the world that is leaving me, it is me that is leaving the world. It is my own absence that I am having to come to terms with.”

I am not personally facing the immanent loss of any of my senses, yet as I age, I often find myself realising that a day will come when I see a creature or a person for the last time, or go to a place I love for the last time ever, and this is no morbid introspection, but rather an encouragement to relish every sight, every place and every relationship that comes my way.

Ansell writes about not allowing the aging process to define and shrink our world unnecessarily:

“When it come to our own decline, it is never a matter of if, only of when. And we all have to work within the confines of our own physical limitations. If I could no longer climb a mountain, then I would climb a hill. And if the only thing that was still a walk in the park was an actual walk in the park, then I would find a park. And when the time came that I could do nothing more than look out of a window, then I hope I would have chosen for myself a room with a view worth watching.”

What had actually led to this particular train of though was the ‘as-yet-undiagnosed’ heart condition that was giving him a lot of trouble on one of his later expeditions, in September. Camped out on the shore, miles from anyone or anywhere, in Knoydart he was awoken by crushing pains in his chest, that no medication would ease.

He spends a long night, alone and at peace with his choices and consequences…

“I walked the strand all night, until the darkness began to have texture, until the first grey light of dawn. The pain in my heart had not gone away, but nor had it got worse. I was still here. The onshore breeze had picked up, and brought with it a sudden squall of rain…I paused and turned towards the sea, spread my arms, turned my gaze to the heavens. Bring it on. Ice cold raindrops lashed against my face; it felt like being alive.”

I immensely enjoyed the journey of the book and the company of the man (albeit briefly), and am motivated and encouraged in life as a result.

That’s not something you could always say!