Hardcore Calling

If you say "vocation" in a church, chances are people will think priest 'minister'. If someone comes forward claiming a sense of calling, invariably they are saying "I think I want to be a vicar". Vocation and ordained ministry have become synonymous (more often than not).

Oh that it was that simple. 

I don't deal with vocations in the way some of my colleagues do. I don't have to read the fine print and the words between the lines with those who feel that inexorable pull from God. Maybe one day I will, but not now. Now, I regard it as a tough job and one where I would struggle. 

Today we remember Simeon ('the Righteous', for there is a panoply of Simea), the old geezer of Candlemas, the fella who just happened to be stood there when Mary and Joseph carried in that peculiar little bundle of out-of-this-world new life. With Simeon, we then witness a hardcore calling, an extreme vocation. 

The thing with Simeon, is that his calling was there from before his birth, placed within him by God as he was formed in his mother's womb. This is, I believe, where all callings are placed - whether we care to take any notice or not. His calling was not to pop down to the nearest clerical outfitters for an array of Fairtrade poly-cotton tunnel-collar sky-blue shirts. His calling was not to move into a generously proportioned vicarage or take the keys to a marvellous edifice. 

Simeon was called by God to receive that Christ child - and then, basically, to die. For Simeon, his vocation to was wait an entire lifetime for the moment that may or may not happen in his dying days. When we think "vocation", we think beginnings, new directions. For Simeon, "vocation" meant fulfillment, accomplishment and endings. God, having filled the old bloke with the Holy Spirit, had kept him alive so that his eyes may see the child, the Messiah. We know that it all worked out perfectly for Simeon, for our Bible tells us so. But imagine waiting seventy, eighty or ninety years for a single moment that may or may not happen - a moment that you feel called to enter. 

Callings are universal - which is to say that all people have a calling placed upon them from God. Some listen, some can interpret that, many mis-interpret that, but some are the hardest callings of all. May Simeon become your Patron Saint. 

The Challenge of Choice

I think it is perhaps fair to say that a great deal of what we choose is done so for selfish reasons. There is no judgement placed in that. That it is so is why acts of specific altruism are so memorable, that good deeds are (for the most part) the choice of exception not the matter of the norm. I include myself in this, of course.

We live in what many term a 'Choice Society'. We can design our lives from the beginning to the end. We can almost design our babies and purge those that don't reach the desired standard. We can choose how many we want, their names and how they live while in our care. We can even choose to make babies to fix existing siblings. We can choose work, or not. We can choose relationships, or not. We can choose faith, or not. We can choose to defy the effects of the passage of time with mechanical and chemical intervention. We can choose to sue those flawed humans that don't get that right for us. We can choose to eat ourselves spherical or to starve ourselves stick-thin. We can choose to abide by promises we make, or not. We can choose to deprive others of their possessions or health. We can choose to consume toxins beyond safe levels. We can choose to live and we can even choose to die. We believe too, that it is our right to make these choices. 

Speaking only for myself, but as a litmus test for many normal humans (quieten down before you even say what has just popped into your mind), I fail to make universally good choices. If I am fortunate, I can live through the effects of a bad choice or decision, and if I am even more fortunate than that, will hope that no-one else was damaged by my flawed choice. It is part of being human, so nothing too surprising in any of that. The fact remains, though, that I cannot guarantee that every choice I make is a good one.

We are now past Christmas as we rest here in the Feast of Candlemas. The story of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple is an anecdote for choice. Mary and Joseph had a choice to take, or not take, their firstborn to an old geezer in a Temple. Imagine expecting new mums to go through a Rite of Purification these days and you will have a mighty cohort from the NCT on your door-step! And then we will reach Lent, a period of de-choosing in many ways. Lent is a time of self-emptying, self-sacrifice, rejecting pleasures, adopting the burden of more prayer and fast. Lent rides against everything that our modern society stands for. 

I should say, too, that I am a believer in human choice. Many is the time when you will hear people of faith saying that 'God told them to N...'. Even Howard Camping, the false-Prophet of the non-starter Rapture blamed God for not stopping him from his foolishness. This line of thinking to me is faith based abdication of our rights under free-will. We choose, not God. God will guide, but rarely will God do the big Lottery Finger in our decisions. I have sat in some Christian circles and felt, quite sincerely, that I am surrounded by God's Own Puppets. I don't believe in a God like that, but rather God who walks alongside us in all our choices, good or bad. In the same way I cannot blame my mother for my poor choices in my younger years, but can be glad she was there to help me mend the damage. 

So, we choose. It is us who choose, not God. We have rights yes, but we are human, mortal, flawed and foolish in our own ways. During the Lent that fast approaches, and on a day when two fearful parents took this strange child to a man they probably didn't know, we have to put down our rights to some extent and remember to replace it with a little humility and know that the choice we make could easily be wrong - and not use God as a celestial crutch or a Omnipotent Scapegoat. 

Watching The World Go By

A little time ago, I was in the house alone. It was quiet, the passing planes seemed a distant memory and the sun poured through many of the windows. The house was suffused with that warm golden light that only morning sun can offer, and all was peaceful. 

As I had a moment to ponder, I sat down and looked out of the window. I watched one of the many squirrels that are resident in our garden busying himself with his nuts (!), the wood pigeons flapping from branch to branch as the parakeets screeched through the relative silence. 

I looked up to see the Airbus 380 ascending in the blue sky above the house (and despite its colossal size and 550 passengers, made its way in the spirit of the peace that was currently prevailing). Up it went, defying the gravity that surely should have prevented it rising! I was reveling in this scarce moment of tranquility, a magical moment when every thing seemed to freeze-frame in a concentrated breathe of perfect grace. 

At the side of my garden and in my direct view is a brick wall, above which passing vans can be seen, or the heads of taller passers-by. As they drove or passed by, I pondered the purpose of their journey - to see friends, to visit the shops, to go to work, to see loved ones, to work off breakfast? I pondered the many many worlds that coincide in every moment and in every place, people passing other people, each with hopes and fears. 

Then one man, as he passed by, looked round as was tall enough to see over the wall. He saw me sat there pondering, yet he looked awkward. I was minding my business and I even smiled broadly in a sort of 'howdy-doody' greeting of sorts. He looked down and scurried off. I wondered if it was the dog-collar, that by some feat of unholy power I was trying to reel him in for the Lord at thirty paces. I had only just moved into the house, so was as yet unknown to people. It's funny how some people are. 

Then to my horror it occurred to me.

I was sat on the toilet and the window was in the room across the hall through the door I had forgotten to shut. New house, new rules!

Shoah

You may remember that I visited Jerusalem about 16 months ago and spent two weeks studying at Yad Vashem, the World Centre for Holocaust Research. It is a place that serves two primary purposes - the first to give the 'memory and a name [yad vashem | ד ושם‎‎י ]' to the many millions of now nameless Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, the second to educate the world about the causes. 

If you want to read a few of my thoughts from that visit, please visit an old blog of mine here. 

I read, watched and listened to many hours of testimony, primary source evidence and the scars left by that tragedy. A few things stuck:

1. The Holocaust ['Shoah' (Ha Shoah, catastrophe |  השואה) in Jewish circles] was unique among genocides because it was a whole-race destruction based on idealism and not on aggrandizement of land or property. Jews dies simply because they were Jews, not because the Nazis coveted the land or wealth of that population.

2. The ideology behind the Shoah has its roots in (among other places) Christianity and the first Christian tragedy of the death of Christ. Martin Luther joined many of the Early Fathers in an anti-semitism that was later nurtured in the heart of an Austrian artist and eventual Chancellor of Germany. Indeed, his book Mein Kampf cites Luther a number of times, regarding him in the light of a national hero. (I ought to note here and now, that the Jehovah Witnesses died in their thousands because they wouldn't support the Nazi ideology)

3. Three groups of people played their part - the victim, the perpetrator and the by-stander. The first two are perhaps obvious, with the third including you and me in this day when people still die in genocides. 

Of the accounts that I heard all those months ago, of all the faces of children I looked at as they played mere days before their screaming agonising frightening execution in the dark, of all the piles of personal paraphernalia that now characterises that event, of all the hours of evidence given by relatively banal civil servants defending their acts of genocide as 'orders', one encounter stuck. That was of a women who sat before us in the room where we were gathered.

She was a women in her seventies, a retired nurse. She was well dressed, well presented, the happy mother of children (one of her sons was our tutor). She had lived a broadly good life, except for one thing: she didn't know her name. She knew the name that her adoptive parents gave her, a women into whose arms she was thrown (yes, thrown) while her birth-mother queued for her death. She landed in the arms of a stranger who took her in (to their own mortal risk and against vast odds of landing in supportive arms) and raised her as their own. The lady didn't know who her real family were, who she really was. In many ways she still felt anonymous, rootless, the un-murdered victim.

Rarely do we see these people with our own eyes. We read of them in our history lessons or in books that we dare to glance through. This Shoah was real and the victims real. They are still among us today as we carry on with our business. Though they are the 'lucky' ones. They didn't have to dig their own grave before being shot into it. They didn't have to experience that moment when lights dimmed and poison filled the air. They didn't have to regard the taunting eye of a gun chamber or a line of uniformed boys pointing rifles.

This happened in our lifetime. This happened in the age of television and telephone. This happened because bystanders (on all sides) stood by and watched madmen construct vile ideologies.

Which means that it could, just could, happen again (if we let it). 

On this Holocaust Memorial Day, may Yahweh bless, preserve and watch over all those who died because of their heritage, and over us who can never fully comprehend their Passion.

Toning Up for God

...you know I have been going to the gym...

Yes, I have successfully managed to squeeze my corpulent reverential bulk into a gymnasium to a sufficiency that demands the language of plurals. I run some, row some, stretch pull and lift some - then I steam and spa, shower, coffee, home. I have even lost a stone of lard since Christmas, so there.

I used to go to the gym when I was late-teenager and did, believe it or not, sport the odd formed muscle. You'd be hard pressed to discern shape under the blancmange that caresses every inch of my ontologically-changed form nowadays, but aspire I do, and sweat too. 

There are many good arguments in favour of keeping fit as a sort of 'Temple preservation exercise', to maintain the mean-altar that the Lord places in our unworthy hearts. I subscribe, reluctantly, as one who finds it hard to exercise these days. I accept too that as fleshly creatures, we are a complex assortment of the circulatory, muscular, skeletal, endocrine, immune and digestive to name but a few. We make even the most complex computer look like an abacus, and we cannot endlessly neglect our bodies. 

So, to the gym I go in the presumptuous hope and belief that I am doing some good as I fast approach my forties. I don't aspire to a muscularity as offered in the image, or to be able to run a marathon, but simply to live long and live the best I can. 

As I look around the gymnasium, itself set within a Temple of Sport (Twickenham Rugby Ground), I see much that attends to the needs of all that makes us animals the same as lions and tigers. As humans, and as those created in God's image, we are so much more than skin, bone and sinew. We have a facet of our being that sets us apart from all other creepy crawlies and birds of the air - and that is our innate spirituality. 

If I want sodding great big arms, I can sling some iron around. Big arms I gain but to what end? To pull down a steer and bite its ears off? Do big muscles and a thriving blood-system keep us feeling happy? Do they give a sense of wonder in the face of exquisite beauty? Do they help us know God even a fraction more? No, of course they don't. It would be the same as saying that a church is mighty because its roof doesn't leak, or that a bank will never fail because it has modern lifts. We focus on the the tangible and external because we can see results.

But we often neglect the intangible, immeasurable - and I believe increasingly to our peril. 

I have been working on a sort of idea born of the efforts I put in at the gym, an idea that might find life in my church. I believe, quite sincerely, that many Christians privately despair because they think that can't pray or relate properly to God. Of course they can, but that reticence often provides a barrier to the experience. Also, prayer techniques are acquired and learned like so many others. We are creatures of habit, good or bad, and sometimes we just need to be shown a new way. 

I will, in one form or another, be proposing the idea of a sort of a spiritual gymnasium (Pip and Gym?) where all-comers can be exposed to 'exercises' and receive a little guidance and advice (or more importantly, a time and a space). Presenting an opportunity, in a conspicuous form, to maximise on the relationship that is already there and already full will (I believe) give us all a greater ability to receive what is always there in abundance from our Lord. 

Damascus or Psalm 139

Today, in the Anglican cycle of things at least, we commemorated the conversion of one Saul of Tarsus. Flash bang wallop, one very neat letter writer, jail-bird and Mediterranean rambler.

This day, and the readings to which we were treated in Exciting Holiness this morning (fine book, get a copy), brought to mind a small anxiety I have harboured for a good number of years. 

In the main, there are two types of Christian (in this schema): those termed 'cradle-Christians' and those who did all that getting-to-know the Lord stuff at a later age. Put another way, you get your Psalm 139 disciples or you get your Damascus Road disciples. 

This is, of course, a statement of the blindingly obvious. I accept, too, that people drift in and out of faith as their lives peak and trough and that such elasticity is a good and healthy thing. Christianity, in the main, is not a faith of those 'inside' and those 'outside', and that it one of its most gracious qualities. Toe-dipping, running-away-screaming, coming back when the kids grow up, confessing an old faith on the death bed - all these and so many more are ways that as Christ's disciples, we make sense of that journey.

If only it were that simple. Sadly, it feels (I lean on 'feel' as it might just be me) that there is a spiritual stratification in place, surrounding this specific matter. 

I have lost count of the times when I have seated myself in an Anglican Circle in a large room to dissect my 'story'. Largely throughout theological training, but quite a lot since, I found myself doing the 'going-round-the-circle' thing. How we come to faith is up there with our name and some interesting nonsense about how we lived life before we sat in that room, and spill our guts we do. Then it happens.

Person 1: God spoke to me up when I was a terrible teenager

Person 2: I gave my life to Jesus at 6.42pm on April 11th 1976 and it was raining outside

Me: I have always been a Christian since I was born

Person 4: My dad is a priest and I always went to church

Person 5: I answered God's personal call to me after three decades in the wilderness

Person 6: I was a crack addict until I let God into my heart and here I am

All good, no issues. Unless you are sat there in the room. Confessing a Psalm 139 faith is about the same as "I am only here because I can't be arsed to leave", or "Accidental Christian". Confessing a Damascus Road faith is received triumphantly like a hero returning from the field of battle, scarred and bloodied, but alive (and yes, affirming grunts from the throng are audible). I have never given my life to God simply because I didn't ever need to. There were no days before my faith, I was made like this (fearfully and wonderfully?). Sadly, it seems to be the case that you ain't no-one unless you can name the time and place. 

I am no-one. 

Except who God made me to be, and I am happy at that.

Playing The Numbers Game

Last week's Church Times does as it always seems to and got me despondent and mildly vexed in equal measure (in other words, it challenges me to think afresh many things). 

Tucked away on p7 was a little article by Ed Thornton covering 'church numbers', a perennial exercise in poor news made amusing by those trying hard to see the good in all things. Gawd blessem.

Church attendance numbers are, gently, going down. That is not good and news that displeases me. This year has, though, offered news that church weddings are 'up' which is alright innit. Oh, and half a dozen more people worship God in a skater-cafe ice-rink so that is good too. 

I am blessed with a particular autism, and that is a fascination for statistics. I used to discover petty larceny by staring for hours at tables of number in Font 4 in my old job. Church-based numbers are no less fascinating to me, for I am one weird saddo who ought to get a life. 

So, what has happened in 2011? Allow me to be uncharitable for a moment. Fifteen or sixteen disgruntled Anglo-Catholics suddenly changed their sacramental theology and became half-cast half-baked Roman catholics, which is not good. Fear of Breasts in Clerical Shirts, otherwise known as Boobincollarphobia, is a debilitating scourge on many 'traditionalists'. So go they went and went they did. But surely we are laughing in the Church of England because we have the pasta-based Gospel marketting machine reeling people in for the Lord. Yet numbers are still tumbling despite gazillions of people who have partaken of Ruarchioli, so either churches of a given flavour do not complete their registers, or something is not as rosy as we would like to pretend. 

Fortunately, the good Lord doesn't worry like we worry. The good Lord probably doesn't become gussett-rotated (if the Ominpresent Omniscient Omnivorous Lord has such an article of clothing) about numbers like we humans do. God has given us faith, and would direct us to, in the words of my wise and most excellent training incumbent - 'avoid the numbers game'. 

Amusingly though, at the foot of p7, my dear friend had posted a very nice advert for a gathering of WATCH folk suggesting (possibly) that they may be in the wilderness. I encourage them to take heart.  Only twenty-four people go to church, so that wilderness is a very very tiny place. 

Still, the good news is that I have tidied my study. There must be a liturgy for that somewhere!