A Message from the Vicar ...
The Revd Philip Martin
February Letter
Dear Friends,
Recently, I went back to school to take an exam.
My last exam was over 30 years ago. This time it felt less stressful, more supportive. There were about 7 or 8 of us taking AS Spanish - the others, of course, all youngsters at school. They were very kind to me: as we awaited the start, one of them showed me how to operate the CD machine needed for the listening test, while another proffered me a lemon drop. I was reminded that small acts of kindness make a big difference.
Learning a foreign language, especially as a mature (ie ‘old') student is a slow, slow process. They say that our innate ability to learn language begins to shut down from the age of 4. Nearly 50 years later it takes some rousing from its long sleep. Words will not stick in the memory and sentences have to be constructed with a painstaking effort. Simple communication becomes the aim, fluency a much more distant – perhaps impossible – hope.
Nonetheless, slow progress is better than none, in every walk of life. We must just keep on keeping on and try to notice the small signs of growth. Others can see the difference when at times we can't.
As with learning a foreign language or playing an instrument, so it is with learning human wisdom, or how to be a better parent, or how to pray or (instead of just pretending to be nice) learning how to be good. Learning, in short, how to be (as well as call oneself) a Christian.
These things all take time and patience, and the kind of hope that is not overturned when setbacks occur. They also require others' support and encouragement. And perhaps most of all there is a magic ingredient that isn't magic at all in the usual sense. It's what Christians describe as grace, the mysterious sense that all that is best within us comes in fact from somewhere beyond ourselves. There come brief moments when I can understand, and be understood, in a foreign language. At such moments I do not feel pride so much as just delighted gratitude: it happened!
Whatever you are trying to do better right now, at home or at work or in yourself, be it dealing with the kids, reading the Bible, keeping the bedroom tidy or saying your prayers: remember that progress comes slowly, but that every effort you make is answered from within the heart of God.
Take heart, and keep going!
With love,
Vicar Philip
Where is God in Haiti ?
Does our loving God permit earthquakes? Or is he powerless to prevent them? In either case, how can we trust and love such a God?
These questions, in faltering but heartfelt words, were raised by some of the children who are a part of our Sunday school called ‘Jim's Pilgrims.' I am glad that the Church is a place where such questions can be raised and discussed. Similar questions are raised in the Bible (for example, the book of Job in the Old Testament.) I don't think there are any neat answers. Instead, here I offer a few thoughts (inadequate, I acknowledge) from a Christian perspective.
Christians believe that the universe is created . Most Christians see this belief as compatible with a scientific account of geological history and a poetic rather than literal understanding of the account of creation in the book of Genesis. The world is a complicated and evolving system. Even the tectonic movement that gives rise to earthquakes is part of a mysterious environment that has enabled life – and humanity – to evolve and live. Disable one part (volcanoes, earthquakes, storms…) and the consequence would be a lifeless object, not the living organism that sustains you and me and Alderholt and Haiti.
Christians believe too that the universe is created for a purpose that affects us closely: a God who is love desires creatures like us to learn how to love and care for one another and for this beautiful world, and in so doing to live lives marked by thankfulness, generosity and praise. If God stepped in to prevent an earthquake he would also have to step in to prevent a child falling from a roof or being run over by a car. Such a world would be more like a computer game with God as the player, or like a family in which the parents try to control or protect their children to such an extent that they can never become adults and friends. The world, instead, is a place where we can grow to be independent and moral individuals, able freely to choose to love God and what he wants for us.
The Christian, therefore, responds to the Haiti catastrophe in several ways.
First, along with most people, we respond with shock and a desire to help. God has given us a sense of solidarity one with another. We don't have to care. That we do tells us something important and suggests that human nature is hard-wired for love. Who made us in such a way that other peoples' lives matter to us?
Secondly, prayer. It can't move the rubble no matter how much we want it to, and even to pray hurts us by enabling us to be a bit more ‘there' than is otherwise possible just by watching TV. But prayer moves our hearts in the right way and it helps make all kinds of good things begin to happen that can and must be a response to a disaster like Haiti.
Thirdly, we ask ‘where is God? ' in it all. To that question there may be several answers possible. He is in the people, local or international, heroically trying to help. He is in those people just trying to survive and support their families through it. And (as we remember the kind of God we learn about through Jesus) we begin to see that God who enters into our suffering world is even there, in those broken and lifeless bodies amid the rubble…
Dear God, through earthquakes and storms that assail us, make us humble, compassionate and strong to help others. Help us remember that in this world, no matter how deep are the fault lines, love goes deepest. Amen
PJM
January Letter
Dear Friends,
There was an extra, and very touching aspect to our Blessing the Crib service on Christmas Eve just gone. Children had been invited to bring homemade crib figures and bring them forward as the crib was assembled. It made for a gorgeous assortment of angels and shepherds and kings and animals - with washing-up bottles, cardboard tubes, pipe cleaners, etc., all put to creative use. I'll post some pictures on the website ( click here ) and I hope some of you can take a look.
I think those fragile and stuck-together figures speak profoundly to all of us. Each of us at times feels we are not good enough. We feel we cannot meet others' expectations – or our own… Even worse – and this may reflect a seriously warped ‘picture' of God with which we were brought up – we feel we are not good enough for God.
May those homemade crib figures, then, be our reminder that ALL are welcome, and cherished, and treasured infinitely, by the One who knows us best and whose knowledge of us through and through is exceeded only by his love for us…
It has been said (by one who in this phrase, I think, summarised some key teachings of the Bible) that God cannot remember your sins but can never forget your beauty.
A New Year opens and a new decade begins. May you taste freedom from the oppressive straight jacket of ‘not good enough.' May you enjoy the liberation that is God's warm embrace enfolding you: ‘my beloved child.'
With love,
Vicar Philip
(and Kaspar the Camel)
December Letter
All the time in the world..
Dear Friends,
We have a crazy clock on the kitchen wall.
It works and goes round the normal way and at the normal speed (normal speed, that is, for a clock: slow when you look at it but whizzing around when you're not watching.) Most of the numbers, however, have toppled from their usual places, and two or three have spilled off and gone missing altogether. Perhaps we'll find them one day when we move the fridge out, there among the spiders and clothes pegs, along with generations of magnetic fridge letters and perhaps even the old spare car keys that never did turn up.
Yes, ours is a crazy clock, but perhaps no more crazy than the household it tells the time for. Oh, all those mornings of the children running to catch the school bus! No matter that they're carrying a trombone, art canvasses, football kit and rucksacks, and are still trying to put a coat on: you should see them sprint down the Vicarage drive when they can hear the bus about to leave...
A crazy clock for a crazy family, but which family household isn't? Life is full and busy and days are unpredictable. When you think that life has become quiet and organised, that's just when something unexpected happens and everything goes haywire.
A crazy clock just about sums it up: time passes, sometimes too quick, sometimes too slow, and life even for the most careful person can never be entirely organised.
Then ... at a midnight and candle lit hour, there is a hush amid all of creation. The clocks are stopped. Past, present and future are joined together in a moment of awe. Wise old men and fit young shepherds kneel in astonishment. They say even the beasts of the field and the angels of heaven looked on with wonder, for. ..
...the eternal has entered time
...love has stooped to conquer
...divinity has entered our humanity
...God has become flesh
and Christ is born!
However crazy your life is at present -whether time passes too slowly or too fast for you, whether Christmas be a time of joy or a time of loneliness -please remember that we have an even crazier God: one who loved and loves so much he will cross all of time to share the good times and the hard times with you, a God beyond time who simply wants to pass the time with you, for always.
Happy Christmas!
November letter
Tears at times ... but joy is eternal
Click Here (.pdf document)
October Letter
How to make the world a better place
– by doing nothing…
Dear Friends,
I once knew of a priest in the old days who was diligent about two things only: saying his prayers and having a snooze in the afternoon. “Whenever I wake up,” he used to say, “I check to see what I'm wearing. If I'm in my pyjamas I know it's time to go and say mass. If I'm in my clothes I know it's time to have tea.”
Such a simple approach to ordained ministry is a thing of the past. Clergy today, as other people in other jobs, tend to work harder, longer and more intensively than in the old days. Probably the two aspects of all our lives that are squeezed out as a consequence of modern pressure are precisely those that Fr Cyril epitomised: prayer…and rest .
Rest - and its good friend, sleep – seem in our busy world a waste of time. In fact, rest restores us to a proper time-scale. It reminds us that we cannot do everything and that the world goes on turning calmly around even when we stop spinning. Sometimes, faced with besetting problems all about us, our biggest act of faith may not be to call a meeting or mount a campaign or stay up working, but to go to bed. In that way we are expressing trust that God is up to the job, not us.
In the Bible, God gives us a good role model in the beautiful story of creation in Genesis (a myth of the start of time that tells us truths for all time.) The stages of creation include one that is just as good and important as the others, that ‘on the seventh day, he rested…' Jesus, too, takes time to rest. He takes his time when others are in a rush. He likes people to just sit and enjoy being with him, being with each other.
‘Being with him, being with each other' is not a bad description of prayer . Prayer can include words, but in silence prayer deepens. Silence prevents us employing too many words, or busy activity, to avoid facing the uncomfortable facts about us. Silence brings us simply face to face with ourselves as we are (not usually a pleasant or easy process) and with God as he is (usually an even less easy process – but if you keep a focus on Jesus as the face of God you cannot go far wrong.)
The Christian Church, for all its faults (about which I should know, being one of them) contains yet within it a rich seam of spiritual wisdom. Generations have prayed and loved with a heart's-quietness of attention and contemplation. Their witness still rings true. The fellowship of the Christian Church is a good place to grow wise in, to grow in that distinctive human capacity to breathe with God's in-breathing love. One such exemplar we have is called St John of the Cross. He lived in 16 th century Spain . He wrote a book called ‘The Dark Night of the Soul,' about the difficulties anyone faces who seeks to wake up to their true self and their utter need of God. He wrote this poem-prayer:
Beloved God…please remind me again and again that I am nothing. Strip me of the ‘feel good' factor of my pretended spirituality. Plunge me into the darkness where I cannot rely on any old tricks for maintaining my separation from you. Let me give up trying to convince myself that my own spiritual deeds are bound to be pleasing to you. Take all my ‘nice' spiritual feelings, Beloved, and dry them up, and then please light them on fire…
Let me only love you, Beloved. Let me quietly and with unutterable simplicity just love you. Amen.
With love, Vicar Philip
December 2008 Letter
Dear Friends,
In Alderholt one might wait some time for a bus to arrive…
So instead I invite you all to crowd aboard with me on to the top deck of a remembered bus, the number 37 from Stockton to Roseworth, about 28 years ago.
In those days I had encountered and lived some time with a small community of religious brothers sharing a small cottage in a Sussex village. The chapel was a shed in the garden. a space of quite astounding silence, stillness and awareness of God as the sun rose early across fields and downs. The kitchen was equally a place of un- stated but transforming humour, hospitality .., and good food.
But now, in 1980, I am at home with my parents back in northeast England for a few days, The bus groans its way along Norton Road . past the beery Brown Jug pub and the closed factories, past turnings into estates where police dare go only in pairs. Now as we pause for a turning car by the Malleable Social Club, a customer leaning against his lady companion making their unsteady way home, I see, as an irrefutable, breath- taking, beautiful and fearful fact: that at the heart of all things is love and that at the heart of love is sacrifice, What the cross proclaims, I realised as if for the first time, and what had been so quietly but powerfully re-presented each cold autumn morning in that shed as the mass was offered was at one with all the scenes we see in and from that bus: that God is ever and always and everywhere pouring himself out in love, and this love makes us want to sing and to dance - and that this love comes with a cost. a cost that has been borne for us...
What was true in the Sussex countryside and Stockton-on-Tees is just as true here in our village. As you walk or drive its streets during these short wintry days and long, misty evenings I hope you can view it all with a little more insight than most of us commonly manage. The School at its busy home-time; the Co-op that we can't help referring to still as the Spar. those houses with their exuberant displays of Christmas lights and reindeer and those others where Father Christmas might approach more circumspectly; as you negotiate the perhaps bottomless puddles of Camel Green; as you drive past the welcoming glow of the Churchill Arms at opening time, or join the early evening digest of the day with those gathering in the Sports Club; when you walk with the assorted dogs and their owners circling the rec. or view the lights of village houses from amid the mud and wind-whispering pines of the common; as you attend Church or Chapel with the assurance of one all too at home or with the humble awkwardness of an infrequent visitor. ..in every case, may our eyes be opened. ..
At Christmas we celebrate the birth of One who opens our eyes to see love at the heart of everything and in him we also see the sacrifice that is at the heart of love. At Christmas we are reminded that God has journeyed into the heart of darkness with a light that can never be overcome.. At Christmas we see things anew, as if from the upper deck of that number 37 bus. ..
With love...Happy' Christmas!
Vicar Phillip
