St Peter at Wentworth

No, not the golf tournament, but the church just north of Ely in Cambridgeshire. I enjoyed meeting a group of clergy there this week who work in ‘multi-parish benefices’ – ones with more than two churches in them. They’re the salt of the earth, and it was a privilege to share ideas with them from my own 20 years in similar patches.

All of us, of course, are trying to pass on the same Gospel that St Peter proclaimed. As ‘Prince of the Apostles’ he was a popular dedicatee of churches. Most of what you see at Wentworth now is later reconstruction, but it has has a Norman core, and I can imagine its builders being pleased to have all the help they could get in this resistantly Saxon area, so Peter’s image stands proudly there, in the north wall now. I didn’t have time for a long look, but is he holding an aspergill, and perhaps symbolically consecrating the church with water and book?

Wentworth now is very small, and the church has been imaginatively divided a village room as well as a sanctuary. The continuity and persistence of our small parish churches makes my blood run a bit faster, and my intuition is that their story is far from over yet.

Filed under: Thoughts for the Day, Cambridgeshire

Pandita Mary Ramabai

The Church of England remembers Mary Ramabai today. Born in 1858, the daughter of a Sanskrit scholar, who believed in educating women, she became well known as a lecturer on social questions, becoming the first woman to be awarded the title ‘Pandita’. She spent years working for the education of women and orphans, founding many schools and homes. She lived in great simplicity and was a prominent opponent of the caste system and child marriage. She died in 1922.

Her conversion to Christianity came like this, in her own words.

The [Wantage] Sisters there took me to see the rescue work carried on by them. I met several of the women who had once been in their Rescue Home, but who had so completely changed, and were so filled with the love of Christ and compassion for suffering humanity, that they had given their life for the service of the sick and infirm. Here for the first time in my life I came to know that something should be done to reclaim the so-called fallen women, and that Christians, whom Hindus considered outcastes and cruel, were kind to these unfortunate women, degraded in the eyes of society. I had never heard or seen anything of the kind done for this class of women by the Hindus in my own country. I had not heard anyone speaking kindly of them, nor seen any one making any effort to turn them from the evil path they had chosen in their folly. The Hindu Shastras do not deal kindly with these women. The law of the Hindu commands that the king shall cause the fallen women to be eaten by dogs in the outskirts of the town. They are considered the greatest sinners, and not worthy of compassion. After my visit to the Homes at Fulham, where I saw the work of mercy carried on by the Sisters of the Cross, I began to think that there was a real difference between Hinduism and Christianity. I asked the Sisters who instructed me to tell me what it was that made the Christians care for and reclaim the "fallen" women. She read the story of Christ meeting the Samaritan woman, and His wonderful discourse on the nature of true worship, and explained it to me. She spoke of the Infinite Love of Christ for sinners. He did not despise them but came to save them. I had never read or heard anything like this in the religious books of the Hindus; I realized, after reading the 4th Chapter of St. John’s Gospel, that
Christ was truly the Divine Saviour He claimed to be, and no one but He could transform and uplift the downtrodden womanhood of India and of every land. Thus my heart was drawn to the religion of Christ.

Filed under: Christianity

Cuthbert at Carlisle

Carlisle Cathedral is set to host what promises to be an excellent festival later this week (Thursday 30 April to Sunday 3rd May) to celebrate St Cuthbert and his connections with Carlisle and the surrounding region.

The events will include:

• a keynote address delivered in the cathedral by Prof. Richard Sharpe on the evening of Thursday 30^th April at 7.30pm. (This event will be sponsored by the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society)

• an all-day coach trip to see the Bewcastle and Ruthwell crosses on Friday 1^st April, led by the Bishop of Huntingdon (!) – who in another life is a recent writer about the Bewcastle Cross.
• an all-day academic seminar chaired by Dr Jonathan Wooding on Saturday 2^nd May in the Fratry building at the Cathedral. Speakers will include Dr Hugh Doherty, Dr Fiona Edmonds, Dr Mary Low, Dr Mike McCarthy, Dr Alan Thacker, and Dr Jonathan Wooding.
• The Dean of Durham will be the preacher at the 10.30 Cathedral Eucharist on Sunday 3rd May

Tickets can be ordered from the Cathedral Office (01228 548151). Further details, including a festival programme, can be obtained on the Carlisle Diocesan website.

Filed under: Art, Christianity, Travel, Carlisle, Cuthbert

Chomping for Christ

I’m just catching up with the winter edition of Mixed Economy, the journal of Fresh Expressions – which somehow got buried in the less-than-fresh depths of my reading pile. There is a wealth of story and suggestiveness in it, but the quote of the moment has to be this one from Lucy Moore’s article on Messy Church:

Messy Church is a fresh expression of church for families, based around sacred values of chilling, creating, celebrating and chomping.

My take on sacred just took a whole new turn! Set-apartness is of course part of what sacred is all about, but I love the challenge of learning to see it shot through the everyday silk of life as well as separated out in the sanctuary.

Filed under: Thoughts for the Day, Fresh Expressions, Messy Church

Catherine of Siena

The Church of England remembers Catherine of Siena today, who was born in 1347, the second youngest of twenty-five children! She was a spiritual writer, active in caring for the sick, and started a correspondence with the great and the good that remarkably led to a successful one-woman campaign to persuade Pope Gregory XI to return the papal seat from Avignon to Rome. She is a co-patron saint of Italy.

Much of her writing is cast in the form of a passionate dialogue with Jesus. Here he is speaking in The Dialogue:

I ask you to love me with same love with which I love you. But for me you cannot do this, for I love you without being loved. Whatever love you have for me you owe me, so you love me not gratuitously but out of duty, while I love you not out of duty but gratuitously. So you cannot give me the kind of love I ask of you. This is why I have put you among your neighbors: so that you can do for them what you cannot do for me–that is, love them without any concern for thanks and without looking for any profit for yourself. And whatever you do for them I will consider done for me.

Collect

God of compassion,
who gave your servant Catherine of Siena
a wondrous love of the passion of Christ:
grant that your people
   may be united to him in his majesty
and rejoice for ever in the revelation of his glory;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Filed under: Christianity

God, Darwin and Design

That was the title of an excellent lecture I’ve just been to by Prof. Kenneth Miller of Brown University, USA. it was put on by the Faraday Institute in Cambridge, who mount a most impressive series of lectures and seminars on the science-faith interface.

Miller was the key scientific witness in the key Kitzmiller v. Dover US court case that saw Intelligent Design discredited as a scientific theory. ‘ID’ in this sense does not mean the thesis that there is an intelligent creator but is a theory of special creation, or design intervention by a creator in the formation of species, for instance. Miller accedes to the first, and sees no problem in scientists and proponents of evolution being religious believers, but not to the second: and I would agree with him. Design is there, but in the weaving of the rainbow of creation’s foundations (apologies to Mr Dawkins), in the intent of creation and in the outworking of evolution itself as a process. There is more to be said than came up in the lecture about the presence of God to and in his creation and the whole area of ‘miracle’ and indeed the unique event of the resurrection, but our thinking about this will still want to take both spiritual realities and material facts seriously. (Miller reminded us that C S Lewis remarked that God has no problem with matter: he invented it…)

Next up in the series is Prof Rosalind Picard of the MIT Media Laboratory on Playing God?: Toward Machines that Deny Their Maker – 5.30 pm Thursday 12th November 2009 in the Queen’s Lecture Theatre Emmanuel College. It sounds fascinating.

If you have Quicktime you might also like to look at Sarah Coakley’s lecture on God, Providence, and the Evolutionary Phenomenon of Cooperation last autumn, which was fascinating too.

Filed under: Resources, Darwin, evolution

Christina Rossetti

The Church of England remembers Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) in its calendar today. An acclaimed poet, she was also deeply influenced by the Tractarian movement, and was a volunteer worker from 1859 to 1870 at the St Mary Magdalene "house of charity" in Highgate, a refuge for former prostitutes. Her best-known verse is probably “In the Bleak Midwinter”, but here for Eastertide is  “A Better Resurrection”, which explores a similar theme.

I have no wit, no words, no tears;

My heart within me like a stone

Is numb’d too much for hopes or fears;

Look right, look left, I dwell alone;

I lift mine eyes, but dimm’d with grief

No everlasting hills I see;

My life is in the falling leaf:

O Jesus, quicken me.

My life is like a faded leaf,

My harvest dwindled to a husk:

Truly my life is void and brief

And tedious in the barren dusk;

My life is like a frozen thing,

No bud nor greenness can I see:

Yet rise it shall–the sap of Spring;

O Jesus, rise in me.

My life is like a broken bowl,

A broken bowl that cannot hold

One drop of water for my soul

Or cordial in the searching cold;

Cast in the fire the perish’d thing;

Melt and remould it, till it be

A royal cup for Him, my King:

O Jesus, drink of me.

Filed under: Christianity

Sacred and Secular

I’m at a conference about liturgy and architecture, and we’re kicking off with a talk by Allan Doig on Christianity in the Public Square – from long processions around the city in early Jerusalem, to the classic mediaeval town with church and civic buildings facing each other across the market square. Sacred and secular are integrated.
 
Recent debate has pointed up the problematic nature of this in today’s secular state. Here ‘secular’ can imply for some a programmatic caution about corporate public engagement with faith, and a wariness about the adherents of faiths bringing them in a shared public way into the marketplace – which could be seen as a threat to other faiths, or to the neutrality of the public realm.
 
But in the actuality of our English towns and villages, places of worship are already there, often a focal point of the community, full of its history and close to its heart. The health of the community will have a lot to do with their health; and their health cannot be divorced from their spirituality. And so, mutatis mutandis, in just about every society ever known.
 
The sacred is there anyway and already, and is part of the landscape. A neutrality in the public realm that is taken to mean stripping it out tends to feel either Stalinist or silly. Neutral here should not, I suggest, mean neutering the spiritual, but the harder task of providing for the same healthy participation by faiths in the public realm as commercial and political interests, for instance, which require the same challenge of combining equality of access and maintenance of boundaries. It’s a challenge to which we should be able to rise, and must.

Filed under: Thoughts for the Day

Gooderstone Gardens

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Just back from a great trip out in the sun to Gooderstone Water Gardens in West Norfolk. Not too much in bloom yet, but a very pleasant place to amble around and relax, with excellent cakes in the tea room too.

Filed under: Travel

Chaplaincy to People at Work

Along with other local church leaders, I had the privilege recently of visiting  the trustees and staff of Cambridge Chaplaincy to People at Work. CPW is committed to supporting people in  their work places. It was established in 1980 and began employing full time ordained chaplains from 1982 onwards. It is an independent registered charity with a Christian basis. Since 2005 CPW ist has also been a Local Ecumenical Partnership supported by the Baptist Union, the Church of England, the Methodist Church, the Roman Catholic Church and the United Reformed Church. It seeks to work in any multi faith workplace setting offering confidential and impartial support and counselling. It always respects an organisation’s diversity policy. CPW has a board of Trustees and an executive committee that directs and supports the ministry of workplace chaplaincy in Cambridgeshire.

Two mini stories.

The Team Leader, Canon Chris Savage has been supporting an employee who was being systematically bullied by his employer who happened to be a committed Christian. The intervention by Chris and some friends of the organisation has led to a better ending to this sad affair than might have been previously expected.

The Rev Stuart Wood, the much respected and loved chaplain to Cambridge United Football Club led a group of players and club officials in regular sessions of prayer at a time when the club was in dire financial straits. Stuart’s ministry has had a profound impact on the club and has played a major role its rising or resurrection from the abyss.

My thanks to Chris Savage for these.

Filed under: Christianity, Workplace Chaplaincy