When necessary, use words...

I have never been in the zone like yesterday night. Everything from the last few months (and some things from way further) just came together at that point in time and made sense. I wasn't preachy, I didn't even say much at all, but by the end of the evening we were giddy with laughter and delight.

I have seen, not so long ago, an elderly priest entrust himself to disease and ultimately also to death. It was the most loving and trusting thing I've ever witnessed. I can't believe I was there. I don't feel worthy to be around so much of the real deal.

Now I don't need to relate that event in order to bring about its trust and delight. Such events become part of me after a while. I just need remember this trust. And bizarrely it enables me to enter doubt, pain and ambiguity without freaking out too much. After a little while you feel that trust too. I caught it from the old priest and you caught it from me.

OMG OMG OMG !!!

I struggled not to fall down on my face right on the road in Durham and utter nothing but "Thank You God, we Love You the best we can!" for the next thousand years (and become a beautiful set of nondescript atoms in the process).

I could not believe the relevance of my months of doubting, until I had a chat someone with (possibly) terminal cancer who shared the very same doubts.

When I'm nothing but a collection of atoms of dust, cremated by fire or just eaten up by worms, I believe that the God who created the whole entire freaking universe will say: "Danielle, my Beloved, Come out"!

I believe that with popes, I believe that with bishops, I believe that with drunk nobodies. I believe that with anybody who would believe (or even attempt to believe) that with me.

God loves sinners.

God wants to spend eternity with sinners like you and like me.

And... Guess what? God will.

Clergy wife 101: learning the (very) hard way

I'm booked in for confession next Wednesday.

I was having a hard time pinpointing my latest collection of sins. Mostly laziness, things left undone or not done well, quasi nonexistent evangelising, a good hundred tiny lies and cheating on the train a couple of times.

And then today something cropped up that left me speechless and wanting to give up trying to be a Christian and just plunge head on into endless despair.

The kind of massive sins that makes you cry out "Oh God no! How could I do that? Why am trying so hard to do the right thing all the bloody time and then go on to sin like I'm the devil incarnate? How could I be so self-involved that I did not even notice I was commiting a sin so huge that I would never be able to forget it?"

I'm not very good at socialising after church. Mostly I want to ponder my own thoughts. Chitchat with the card-carrying Tory old ladies used to bore me to death.

I got a bit better and I now make sure I eat something sugary before church so I'm not grumpy as hell when coffee time comes.

I do engage in chitchat, sometimes inadvertently dropping the f-word, or even launching into a tirade about why Karl Marx was right. The parish tolerates me well enough because they love my fiance.

A few times, a guy that comes fairly unregulalrly asked le if H and I wanted to visit him at home, because he was having trouble coping with his wife's illness. "I'm her only support" he said, "it's really hard".

So after church I would tell H. "Look this guy wants us to go have dinner sometime because his wife is not well at all". H said well, it's not my parish, I can't do visits, that's a job for the priest in charge, we'll have to ask him for permission. So I said yeah but someone's got to go.

Not that I remembered the guy's name, or asked for his phone number or anything.

I guess you can all see where this is going...

The guy asked me and H. over for dinner three times over about six months. Each time I said we'd try to organise something.

H. and I had this somewhere at the back of our mind.

We also had a lot more on, including crazy work deadlines, someone jumping in front of a train right in front of H.'s house, a young cousin of mine getting kicked out of his prestigious university and needing a weekend of TLC, and two separate wedding ceremonies to organise.

All the while, I was battling a serious onslaught of nihilism and completely lost my footing.

This morning the guy came to church and wept the whole way through. His wife had just died.

Which part of "my wife is dying, I am on my own, can H and you come to dinner" did I not understand? Three times in a row? Over several months? We let the guy's wife die without support for him, without support for her, and without extended sacraments.

Damn my overblown sentimental piety!

I think I'm going to give Eucharistic adoration a miss this week. I'm stunned and I can't quite believe the inequities on my own hands. I never thought I'd be someone to neglect her neighbour to such an extend. To let down the Church I love.

And all the way I was trying so hard, I was wanting so much to serve, to be an "Instrument of His grace" and all that jazz. Cheating on the train was pretty harmless, considering...

I'm gonna hang out with my ol' mate Kind David tonight and afterwards live with the shame until the end of my days.

I guess there are worse activities than picking songs for one's wedding in sunny France...

And this one is just stunning...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtcLOJLF2T8

IMHO, it's worth learning French just to get Brel's lyrics!

Quand on n'a que l'amour
A s'offrir en partage
Au jour du grand voyage
Qu'est notre grand amour

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Mon amour toi et moi
Pour qu'éclatent de joie
Chaque heure et chaque jour

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Pour vivre nos promesses
Sans nulle autre richesse
Que d'y croire toujours

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Pour meubler de merveilles
Et couvrir de soleil
La laideur des faubourgs

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Pour unique raison
Pour unique chanson
Et unique secours

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Pour habiller matin
Pauvres et malandrins
De manteaux de velours

Quand on n'a que l'amour
A offrir en prière
Pour les maux de la terre
En simple troubadour

Quand on n'a que l'amour
A offrir à ceux-là
Dont l'unique combat
Est de chercher le jour

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Pour tracer un chemin
Et forcer le destin
A chaque carrefour

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Pour parler aux canons
Et rien qu'une chanson
Pour convaincre un tambour

Alors sans avoir rien
Que la force d'aimer
Nous aurons dans nos mains,
Amis le monde entier

Servanthood for beginners

A few years back, H. had the food he offered to someone who had asked him for money thrown back at him in his parish office. He wasn't very impressed, and this topic still crops up regularly in our conversations.

My point is: if they asked you for money why did you offer food?

His point is: I can't support an addiction to drugs or alcohol that any money will most likely fuel.

My point is usually then: actually you don't know that. And even if you're right, you've just robbed that person of their dignity and completely destroyed any chance of further dialogue.

Recently, my brain has been fairly obsessed by the topic of servanthood. I mean I'd been mulling it over for something like 6 months and my thoughts still seem to go nowhere creative. But let's apply it to this situation. If the Queen asked you for money you would not offer her food because it would not be your place to judge. So I decided to apply my servant-of-all obsession to the random street encounters in the streets of Leeds where I get asked for money quite a bit.

Once I fell back into the old mistake and invited a guy who was sitting on a street corner next to the Roman cathedral up for dinner. He said defensively and quite dismissingly "I'd just like some change please". So I said, of course, I'm sorry, and gave him some money. I thought "great, now he thinks I'm one of those mindless punctual dogooders, I bet they're dime-a-dozen in Leeds".

I've bumped into him quite a few times since and have always given him a quid or two since, absolutley unquestioningly, just in sheer obedience, as if it was the Queen asking. He's taken a total liking of me and recently even opened up to quite an extend. I'm the passerby who obeys him.

The other day, I did not have any change and said so. He replied by saying with a huge smile "that's okay, you're alright, you always give me lots!!!"

And still, I'm tiptoeing there. Because none of the dozens of "solutions" I think up in my PhDed head everytime I'm sitting in a boring work meeting may not be appropriate. I guess I'll continue to serve, and to listen too...

David E Jenkins is awesome!

Despite all the crazy wedding preparations and the last minute work things before we set off, I took the time to go and listen to David Jenkins preach and have a bit of a chat with him after the service.

That sermon, reflecting on his relationship with God after a life of ministry, was the most moving thing I've heard in yonks, I had to remind myself that I did not have a tissue and so could not bawl out without making a huge mess of myself. It was hard, especially since the guy himself fought back a few tears, wondering if this was one of the very last time he would address the people of God in this way.

If you haven't read any of his work, jump on the stuff at once. I'm just finishing "God, Miracle and the Church of England" and it oozes love, just like the guy himself does. If somebody in my neck of the woods has had a full on, lifelong love affair with God, it's that old Jenkins who lives a few miles away. I begged the sermon printout right off him (after all, he's got the original on his computer) and I got an autograph on it too. Which will now live right next to sister Helen Prejean's between the pages of my bible.

I'll leave you with a passage from his book that was exactly what I need to hear these days:

...the Greek actually says that the father [of an epileptic son] bursts out and cries, "I believe, help my unbelief!".

The father's faith was not falling short. He had faith because he had glimpsed something in Jesus which he longed for for his child. But he did not have faith because he did not dare. It was too much to hope for. "Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief". No falling short. Surely that is much more like what true faith is really. Risky commitment to a glimpsed possibility in the face of reasonable human hesitation about whether it is really possible [...].

Talk about falling short reminds me, I fear, of those somewhat alarming sects or individuals who seem to want, so to speak, to blackmail you into hyping up your faith on the grounds that, if you jack it up, the faith pressures will somehow compel God into a miracle. Here faith comes dangerously close to being an attempt at manipulating God.

But real faith surely is something very different, the sort of thing you have and do not have, and that is whay you go on having it. Afterwards the disciples asked him privately, "Why could we not cast it out", and he said, "There is not means of casting out this sort but prayer."