A Message from the Vicar ...
The Revd Philip Martin
Dear Friends,
I walked by a paddock where some contented-looking pigs snuffled about happily. I remembered something in the Bible…
Jesus arrived early one morning across the Sea of Galilee to a lonely bit of country called the Gerasene and met there a man wild with inner torments, so many that he was called ‘Legion.' He was too disturbed to live peaceably in the nearby village and so he spent his days hiding and crying among the tombs that occupied that out-of-the-way spot. Jesus cast out the spirits that were pulling him apart and they instead attached themselves to an enormous herd of pigs which, usually so tranquil, went berserk and plunged over a cliff into the sea.
Poor old pigs! Maybe it happened exactly like that or maybe someone added the pigs to the story for emphasis. Either way it reminds us that within each person are depths. We are each loaded with possibilities for good, and for destructiveness. Sometimes if you could transfer what is in the heart of man, it would be enough to send a thousand animals crazy… What happened on a calm summer's morning in Cumbria a few weeks ago is (thank God) unthinkably rare. But we are not of a different species. If others heard your words, if my thoughts were communicated, if all our past deeds and our present inclinations were public, we would all have some explaining to do, I fear. We, too, like Legion, are drawn at times to occupy not the living rooms of hope and kindness but instead the tombs of fear and dislike, of guilt and envy. The sun sets and we no longer expect a new dawn.
And, then, landing on our desolate shore, there comes One before whom pretence is as futile as it is unnecessary. His understanding of us is exceeded only by his love and his liking of us. Here is one whose voice reaches to the depths of our cemetery-souls.
Legion's first response was fearful and resistant: What have you to do with me, Jesus? We too devise various and odd means by which to keep God away. We may take refuge in the rather thin but noisy denials of God provided by atheism. More effective is to protect ourselves with distracting words and busy rituals: money, work, sex are all well tried and tested. Even religion can be notoriously brought into service to help protect us from God, from the pressing reality of truth and love, rather than drawing us closer into friendship with him.
Ultimately, though, there is no escaping him. Surrender is our greatest victory , for it is victory over our make-believe life whose walls are nothing more than a prison. The sunrise was always certain. It was only we who kept love out, whose wintry walls denied the sun's spring-time. His arrival, and our letting him in, can be at any and at every moment. Here and now is always a good place and time to begin.
It is no small matter when we let God in – though we don't need to make a song and dance about it (and it is usually best if any changes within us are shown more by deeds than by words). But we need not fear for pets or livestock, those pigs have served their turn. They remain as testament to Christ who is greater than a thousand demons and greater than all that terrifies or assaults you . All he needs is our honesty and our Yes . Our honesty and our Yes may take a lifetime, but that lifetime lies before each one us at this and every moment.
With love from a fellow, slow learner,
Vicar Philip
June Letter
Dear Friends,
Eternal love longs to touch our time-bound lives. The love that moves the sun and the other stars, for whom the entire universe is but an arm's embrace requires places where we, so focused on the immediate, can awake to a bigger view. The God of heaven and earth, who is 'from the beginning and ever shall be' needs places where we may eat and drink in his company.
So it is that those who trod this local earth before us built their chapels and so it is that 161 years ago, on 2nd June, 1849 , they gathered in their finery and in their smocks and wooden clogs, to open and bless St James' Church. There bad been a small and makeshift Church long before, somewhere (they don't know exactly where) along the Sandleheath Road , but it didn't survive the turmoil of the Civil War in the 1600s.
After that to get baptised or married entailed a long walk to Cranborne. Carrying the dead for burial would have been a weighty labour of love.
God, of course, is not confined to any building, no matter how beautiful or useful. If we are to think big, however, we need something small and accessible to prompt us. A Church building is there to point beyond itself to the God who is present within, and beyond, all things, all people. Perhaps that's why they often include a spire, even if only the pointed bell turret of our Church, to point us beyond.
We wish God's blessing on the Congregational Church as it embarks on rebuilding its Chapel and expanding the facilities that can support its ministry in today's world. At St James' we are asking, can we imagine ways to take the Church outside the walls? Can the village school, can other places, be a new venue for encountering the God who - in Jesus - goes where the people are, not where they .ought to be? Beer and carols in the Sports Club bar ... meeting to discuss the Bible in the Churchill. .. why not?
Through all such explorations (in which we will be helped by a Parish Community Worker whose work among us will begin this autumn, we hope ) our Church building provides a continuing bedrock of prayer and God's presence. You are very welcome to join us as we celebrate the anniversary of our dedication on Sunday, 6th June7 at 10:30am . After the service we will step out to dedicate the recently laid York stone paving by the entrance and then proceed to offer prayers in the new car park.
Times -and needs -change: cars replace clogs ... but God -and the eternal mystery of love -abides.
Yours ever,
Vicar Philip
May Letter
Dear Friends,
Rising early, I come into the kitchen and boil the kettle.
Through the window I see the big morning sun climbing above distant woods. Over my cup of tea, I begin to notice the busy activity around our makeshift bird feeder. It is a square of wood resting on top of the presently unused dog-run and my daughter has sprinkled generous birdseed on it.
The greenfinches seem to be its most frequent visitors, flashes of yellow wing-strip as they forage. Sparrows that nest in my roof are bolder but less colourful. A nuthatch, though small, seems to scare away most other birds. Goldfinches find little there to interest them but graze the nearby rosemary, casting careless, blunt glances. Blue tits and great tits and coal tits appear in the intervals. A blackbird makes a brief appearance, his attendant offspring already larger if less sleek than he: they demand that he feed them. Then the jackdaws strut onto the scene and all else flees. Their muscular grey necks and dark beaks as intimidating to other birds as a hoody or balaclava might be to us…
It is an intriguing, absorbing world, so separate from ours and yet so similar. Its hierarchies are not so dissimilar to ours. There too there is great beauty amid gross selfishness. Character – timid or brazen, aggressive or retiring - is writ large.
* * * *
A General Election is imminent. I hope many will vote. Here in Alderholt I have, with support from other Churches, arranged an ‘Open Forum' for candidates and am grateful to them all for their involvement. I hope this event will, in a small way, help our village feel that it matters within the political process. Whatever the outcome of the vote, we know that life will not change magically, for the better or for the worse, not in simple and immediate ways. Politics matter, but cannot change our human nature.
Contemplating the bird table reminds me that to be human and wise means remembering we are not so different from the animals and birds…and it means remembering why we need to overcome the selfishness that is engaging in them and hopeless in ourselves. We need to learn to share the feeding table, to find a way for finch and jackdaw to share the same small world.
* * * * *
The sun has risen. It is time for me to go across to Church, its old key heavy in my hand, to unlock, ring the bell, and pray. I thank God for the busy, delightful birds. Their selfishness is right and proper for them. I pray that we might all find some way to be properly human, to be what we are meant to be. According to the Bible it may not be easy. It requires saying sorry, being changed and born anew. It means admitting who and what we are, and being open to what and who we are meant to be.
Happy foraging!
Love, Vicar Philip
April Letter
Dear Friends,
I don't usually watch TV.
Maybe Match of the Day, til I nod off by the fire…
Old Beatles' films at Christmas, of course… That's about it.
But I was hooked – riveted – by a recent series about the mysteries of the solar system…
The scale and the distances are overwhelming. From our star, the sun, to the earth is 93 million miles. Pluto is 40 times that distance. The sun's influence and gravity extend many, many more times. Yet our sun and its solar system is only one among millions of others in our galaxy, while that galaxy, it now appears, is only one among billions of others galaxies, each with their millions of stars with (we can only assume) each its own solar system…
Whether life exists elsewhere remains for me a puzzle. On the one hand, there are plenty of places out there where it might occur…but on the other hand the TV programme reminded us how extraordinary, fragile and perhaps unique is the balance of factors that sustains life here. We must – as so often – simply wait, and wonder…and at the end of all our wondering, what mystery of love beyond love may await us? So, such TV programmes are not for me contrary to faith. Rather, they open my mind to bigger possibilities than we normally dream of and God, as the Bible somewhere puts it, is he in whom all our possibilities find their ‘Yes!'
While space probes now explore Mars and the moons of Saturn, there remain undiscovered lands close to home. Our human hearts are strange and sometimes alien places and yet the perfect ecosystem for growing care and kindness. No astronaut has so daunting a task as he who would plumb the depths of the human soul. The Hubble telescope, orbiting the earth, can look back across millions of light years through space, but no instrument has been devised that will survey the truth of a person's life.
One person I know, however, has stepped into our humanity and seen ‘what is in man'. One person there is who understands us, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. One person goes to all lengths to find us and bring us home. One person traverses even the frontier of death, a painful and lonely death, to reach and rescue us in our greatest need. One person enters a garden in the darkness before dawn and quietly speaks our name, our own, truest name, so that our lives may be refreshed in love as fields are refreshed in Spring.
An amazing universe out there…and the even bigger universe that is within. It's enough to make you wonder…
To you all, however you celebrate this lovely festival: Happy Easter!
With love,
Vicar Philip
March Letter
Dear Friends,
The Bishop of Salisbury is ‘resigning.'
He prefers to use that word rather than ‘retiring' as he does not wish to suggest he is going to put his feet up from now on. He will be 68 this year and suffered a stroke from which he has made a full recovery, but with diminished energy.
Bishops have much responsibility and much authority – but little power. They cannot order their clergy to do things they don't want to. They can lead by their example, they can inspire by their words, they can (and must) support by their prayer – but they cannot impose by their will power. So, they need wisdom, patience, a strong faith – and a sense of humour.
Bishop David has, since his arrival in 1993, been a superb bishop of Salisbury . His sermons can, I admit, be less than exciting. His addresses to clergy meetings and to synods, by contrast, inspire confidence: he never speaks down, he speaks from the heart and he tells it how it is.
He combines oddly contrasting styles. To some he can appear rather ‘old-school,' a little too much the ‘Lord Bishop.' At other times his informality and generosity to all are utterly delightful. On his first visit to my Vicarage, when I asked what he considered an interesting question, he swung his legs around and reclined along the settee to consider his response. One can see how he gets on famously with our linked diocese of Sudan : despite his slightly posh manner (and those buckled shoes he used to wear) he has a very un-English and very attractive naturalness about him. Perhaps this has helped ensure that Salisbury diocese is largely free of the divisions that sometimes feature in national or world coverage of the Christian Church. People who disagree with him tend still to respect and like him, partly because he quite evidently values and trusts them.
When he came from Portsmouth Cathedral to be our bishop I was already a little biased in his favour. My eccentric but delightful Godmother was amongst many vulnerable elderly people there whom David had quietly supported. He and his wife, Sarah (whose excellent and generous cooking is legendary), would collect her and others to give them Christmas lunch. I reckoned that any friend of Aunty Phyllis was a friend of mine.
Most of all, I have come to know him as someone I can trust, and turn to in a crisis. Colleagues say the same. He has given sterling support to so many clergy, but also other people and many who have little or no connection with any Church. When I need to write to him on any matter, I sometimes throw in a mention of a recent sighting, perhaps of nearby nesting peregrines, or marsh gentians in flower. He welcomes such ‘un-churchy' digressions and considers them important. Here is a man whose vision of life is founded upon Christian belief and prayer – but who is therefore open to the riches of God to be seen in all people, all creativity and in the world's wonder and beauty . No wonder he intends to go on working, making music, and enjoying life.
Typically, he has asked that in place of a retiring gift we should support the Church in Sudan . Bishop Gwyn College in Juba is being rebuilt after the civil war there as a place to prepare lay and ordained pastors for what is one of the fastest growing Churches in the world. St James' Lent Charity therefore will be given to this project. Gifts can be given via Churchwardens or brought to Church at Easter. There is a ‘Gift Aid' form elsewhere in this Parish News.
With love, as always,
Vicar Philip
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
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
