The cost of community

Recently I have been re watching the X-files on television. It is a drama of its' time reflecting the ridicule one might have experienced if you believed in aliens or government conspiracy. The extreme things, things that involved a little bit of faith without an awful lot of evidence. What evidence there is, is often hidden, incomplete or vague.  Special Agent Fox Mulder is ridiculed, laughed at, isolated, shoved in the basement and given a scientist to rationalise his wild theories. However his scientist began to see the glimmering truth of the subtle clues in front of her.
Now twenty years later it is probably more acceptable to believe in aliens than it is in God. Alien life forms of some sort are at least a statistical possibility. There is science to back this up and we have even started to go out and look for them with probes on Mars. Such a short time but how the world has changed and how it has not. We are still inclined to ridicule those who believe things we feel are a bit quirky and out there. We marginalise those we do not understand, those who are different. We stand in judgement on those who are too fat, too thin, too brain, to dumb, to rich, to poor, to hard working or too lazy. There is no pleasing everyone or indeed anyone. We all have a clear idea of what we want from society and society has conditioned us to expect what we want to be delivered to us on a plate. If it is not we feel that we should have, we complain and get compensation for anything.
We are never responsible for what goes wrong. It is always someone else. Our own actions can not possibly be contributing to all that is going wrong. We are right, they are wrong. The tolerance we give is only to those who believe the same as us, everyone else is wrong and must be eliminated.  The small matter that this is in fact the reverse of what tolerance means is just ignored.
We can not go on like this. We have to learn to embrace our differences. Society requires each and everyone of us warts and all. We all make society work. Just because we disagree, does not mean we have to turn in on each other and create a loathing of each other which in turn causes us to dislike ourselves. It is a vicious cycle, that will tear society at its' very fabric. Community is based on a love of one another, a gaining of knowledge of each others beliefs, faiths and ideals and learning to share those in a tolerant society to the benefit of all involved. To compromise and accept involves sacrifice. It involves allowing ourselves to become vulnerable and open to hurt and maybe even death. Each human being that walks this planet is worth the same as every other one. None of us are better, though we maybe inclined to think we are. Seeing our own worth and allowing ourselves to value the contribution to society we make, allows us to see the small contributions others make. Slowly step by step we begin to understand the value of community again.

An Iconic Advent

I have not been around much recently. I seem to have been some what swept up by the comings and goings of life. The times I have been able to sit and reflect have been few and far between. But now is the season of Advent, a time set aside for reflection. A few weeks when we should try and hit the pause button, slow down and focus on the magnificent and humbling gift that is about to enter into our lives. One small tiny little life born in a manger vulnerable and defenceless, that will with time will become our salvation.

There seems to be a hundred and one examples of what Christmas should mean to us all going round. But to me there is nothing more iconic about Christmas than the Nativity scene.  I choose the word iconic deliberately, it is an image to be respected and revered. It is a leading example of all we should hold dear at Christmas and not just for the light of the world at the centre. The illustration, known so well to us all, is the image of a family, turned towards and centred on Christ. No matter how many thousands of times I have seen this image in it's many guises, both gaudy and plain, I never tire of it. Never cease to find a new message in it. It is a calling to all, to take your family, be with your family, share with your family and focus all those wonderful gifts and blessings in on Christ. My favourite images are those of a kneeling Mother and Father, these to me symbolise more than centring just the amazing in on Christ. To me it symbolises us as we come through our Advent pilgrimage to kneel at Christ's birth in prayer and thanksgiving and also maybe in fear and sadness asking the saviour to light the path to our own salvation.

I know there are many references of what Christmas means in today's world, which bits of secular life best reflect the Christian message in the modern world. I can not hope to compete with the great and glorious theological minds of our Bishops and their clergy. But for me this image of family is best reflected not when we gather to watch TV, hide in our phones or open our gifts. It is when we gather to share a meal. No matter how grand or how small a meal we have, the fact that we gather at the table, face each other, share one thing between us, talk, love and essentially break bread together, we share this image of family far better than at any other point this season. It is a starting point, for all the other love, sharing and giving we should do at this time of year. Both our Christian family gathered at the altar to share our meal and our own immediate family gathered round a table. Neatly poetic, neatly reflecting each other and the image of the nativity, a family centred on Christ that will turn and share his light with the world so the family gathered at the stable may grow.

Not just one life, every life

Almost 11 years ago I gave birth to my second son. He was a perfect little bundle of joy and compared to my older son his birth was easy. We sat and cuddled him beaming with joy and pride. However he had a slight whistle when he was breathing, gradually this got worse. He was whisked away and put in an incubator. Next to all the tiny premature babies, his massive 10lb figure looked to healthy and out of place. He was vulnerable though and they watched turning up the oxygen as his saturation fell. Eventually the identified the problem as a tension pneumothorax. They put in a chest drain, but this did not work either. So in the middle of the rush of post pregnancy hormones they took my precious child to another hospital. Both my husband and I followed. The problem however was sorted and one of the scariest 48 hours of our lives was over.
As the anniversary of his birth comes round again, we found ourselves anxiously watching monitors again. Hoping and praying that the medication will work and his breathing will normalise. It is a sudden awakening to just how lucky we are to have been given the gift of three children and how fragile that life is. Watching your own child struggle to breathe, whilst watching others washing up on a beach with their life extinguished is of course a difficult thing to see. The death of those children is tragic and wrong. The simple fact though, is that they were not the first. They are not the only children to die, they are just the first that washed up near our doorstep.

Our country now so suddenly moving to help these vulnerable people, is a good thing. Though slightly ironic that at the same time our politicians are debating on whether we should be allowed to kill our own people. We seem focussed on one set lives and one issue. Why are we so determined to fight for these lives, when we have watched others raped, masssacared, be-headed, tortured and bombed? Why fight for those when we want to kill those who become a burden in our country and those unborn lives that might make our own lives difficult. Why are some lives more important to us than others, why do we want to fight for some and destroy others. The answer is we want to do what makes us feel better. It makes us feel better to offer a home or throw some material things in their direction. It is a short term solution to a long term problem. Absolutely we should welcome them in and give them homes and love, but it is not going to stop people drowning trying to get here. It is not going to stop people suffocating lorries as they are trafficked into Europe. It is not going to stop those that can not leave Iraq, Syria and all other tormented countries from dying. We have to solve the whole problem and protect as many lives as we can from the Evil that is creeping not very subtly into the world around us.

When Christ knocks on our door he is not in just the most emotive headline story, he is in every vulnerable life. We have to be able to see him in every life, not just the convenient ones. Welcoming Christ in is not meant to be comfortable or easy it is meant to be hard. Every life is a gift from our Eternal Father, from the unborn one to the terminally ill one, each one needs our love and our protection. Can you see Christ or are you going to ignore him?

In the face of terror

I have been sitting here this morning sewing my sons badges on a blanket for camp, just as my Mother had done for me. On the telly I have been watching a docudrama about 7/7. The programme is just on in the back round but it is enough to make me think. I remember to, this day and what I was doing that day. I had our young baby and small toddler at home, I sat down with a cup of tea and put on the news. I texted my husband at work in Durham and then in turn checking all our family were safe in London. But what if I had not had an answer, what if the phone had been silent. It is a thought that none of us want to have and an experience no one should ever have to experience. Sewing these badges on, stitch by stitch keeping our family together both past and present, I don't want to go there. I can not even begin to imagine or feel what it might be like. Yet this grief that is not mine and these events I did not live through are making me cry. So many questions, why did they, how could they? Will we ever learn? What causes such hatred? They are questions none of us can answer, but that we all ask.

Not quite ten years on from this atrocity we all stood and prayed for more victims, of yet more terrorism. At precisely midday last Friday, when I was in Leeds. The city stopped.  The bell from the clock tower echoed around the buildings as we all stood remembering.

When these atrocities happen, we are drawn together, almost pulled together like magnets. The hatred and fear that causes these massacres of human life, always end in love. Those of us that are left, answer with love, courage and bravery.

These incidents happen so infrequently here. In other countries they happen almost daily. People's lives are lived constantly in fear. They have no strong army force or world class police force to protect them from 95% of the terror that could come their way. They watch friends and family blown to pieces. Fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, raped, beheaded and tortured. We are losing hundreds of young people to these countries to be radicalised and commit these atrocities to others.

We don't have the answers. However many people we stop or destroy or imprison, evil will still exist. While there is free will, some humans will always chose evil. It is the inevitability of the human condition, we are all unique therefore we are all different and will take a different approach to morality. What we can do as Christians though is show the world is not all bleak. We can answer the hate with love. We can bring compassion into daily turmoil. We can bring peace into anarchy. Even if we touch just one life, we change the whole of their world. If we can do just that we have made a difference and that person will take that out with them. Remember it, talk of it and maybe show others a bit of Christ's love too.

We can be the beacon of light in the darkest of places because we are part of the light that conquered all that is dark and evil.

Your life and my life

After receiving the Blessed Sacrament this morning, my daughter grabbed my first finger just she had as a baby. She held on so tight with grim determination to never let go. In fact as babies all my children did this for the first few months. Their first way of communicating faith and trust in me and my husband. They knew even then that we loved them and would protect them no matter what. We needed no one to tell us, we just knew we were responsible for this tiny defenceless life. When you conceive a child you feel instantly a surge of love and responsibility of the likes you have never felt before. It is perhaps the first sense you have that life is a valuable, precious and irreplaceable gift from God.

Once we have the value of life revealed to us, we begin to understand the sheer burden of responsibility we have. For it is not just this precious bundle of joy we are responsible for. As Christians we are responsible for the respect and upholding of all life. Different to that unique and ultimate bond we have for our children, it requires us to give of ourselves none the less. God came down to us on Earth and demonstrated once and for all, the value of life and the responsibility we have for it. The actions of humans caused his death, yet he sacrificed everything in order to show us the totality of his love and forgiveness to us.

Everything on this planet has been given to us from God. Each and every life from the tiniest insect to the largest living thing on earth. We should not need to be told to respect them. Governments should not need to force us to help them. It should come to us as a second nature. Sacrifice of ourselves and our comfort for the sake of others is meant to be the point of our faith. We are meant to love one another as he has loved us. When someone knocks on our door, we are meant to welcome in whoever stands there waiting.

We have become so self orientated that I think very often we lose our way slightly. We are surrounded by the message self is more important. How we feel, what we think is right, what we want is more important than the good of the many. Our lives have ceased to be God centred. Life centred. Truth Centred. It is ME centred.

If ME is all we are responsible for and ME is all we look after, then we disorder the delicate environment around us. We destroy communities, we destroy ecosystems and we corrupt the planet with our own self centred greed and we leave nothing for our children and their children's children. It will be gone.

It frightens me sometimes, that the very life I feel so defensive of  faces a very different life to the one I had, as does their children. We have a responsibility to live a Christ like life on this planet. If we are to truly honour our baptismal and confirmation vows, it is an essential part of our lives to sacrifice some of what we have and who we are to protect and nurture the valuable gift of creation God has given us. Each life as valuable as the one before it. Every life is someone's child, someone's flesh and blood and is as valuable as you and me.

Taking it Slow

I know I have not said much recently but I have been taking it slow. SLOW, I hear you say. Yes I have been very slow and this has not left me with more free time but less. This is because taking it slow has not meant sitting around. I have been taking the time to remove the convenience from my daily tasks.I have been making my own pasta,bread,  detergents and cosmetics. It has only by going back to these basics and learning what goes into my food and detergents that I have begun to realise the sheer amount of chemicals we heap into our bodies on a daily basis without even thinking about it and sometimes without even knowing. We are so eager to find the most convenient way of getting what we want, at the lowest price possible, we do not stop to think about the consequences for our own health, the planet or the other living creatures on it.

We have a habit of doing the same with the our faith. We constantly seek to make Church convenient, shorter and more relevant.  The Church has sought out Fresh Expressions of our faith diluting the Gospel and in some cases ignoring the sacraments entirely. We have diluted what should be central to our faith so much that many people do not understand what should be central to their faith. When you teach people shallow meaningless faith, you will only get a crowd of people who will stay as long as they want to consume your product. When your product ends or changes they leave. Their presence is not based on a faith in Christ or his teachings but on a shallow gimmick. When the gimmick ceases to be useful or changes into something they do not want they leave.

As a Church we need to look back at what should be central to our faith, return to putting Christ at the centre of our faith, mission and evangelism. It is only by spending time encountering Christ, learning the truths of our faith and by sharing them with others. Inviting them to join in our weekly meal, teaching them it's significance, allowing them time and space to encounter his love. This slow steady way of revealing Christ through our actions and his presence is the only sure way of growing the Church in any long time way. Christ is as relevant today as he was 2,000 years ago, he is present in our lives through the sacraments. He has not abandoned us, I only hope we do not abandon him.

When I got home........

Today you came home from your day and found your street gone. In it's place is a pile of rubble and smouldering ruins. In a state of shock you stand there for a few minutes unable to quite process where your life has gone. When you finally realise that you can not stand in the streets with your screaming and confused kids, you try to find a refuge. You are surrounded by destruction and fear. No one knows what to do. You are part of a crowd of hundreds wandering trying to find safety. Money means nothing now, there is nowhere that is safe. You have to keep moving, fleeing from what is around you. Who do you trust and where can you go. You are hungry, cold, frightened and you have nothing left but each other and what you have on.

Has that got your attention. Good.

For many people this living nightmare of hell is all the life they have. They are fleeing people who want to not just kill, but maim, torture, dismember and viciously cause as much violent mayhem as they can. Others live in the middle of war zones, constantly in fear of loosing their homes or each other. Others living in refugee camps that we would not dream of ever inhabiting. Still more live on the streets around us, who but for a few bad choices or mistakes have nothing left but the cardboard box they are sleeping in. We see images and news reports but do we really see. What if it was us?

I have lived two extremes. I have been the very middle class kid at a posh school. I have been the person living off ofthe grace of others, with only enough money to buy 10p crisps for my meals. Fortunately, I did not have to suffer long and with God's grace I got my life back on track. However it gives me a some what unique insight. I know what it is to suffer, but I know what it is to be distracted by the comforts of heating, houses, food and family. It is easy to turn a blind eye when we have comfort to the suffering of others. Yet it is a very thin line between comfortable and losing it all and between war and peace. We are all a ,ot closer to disaster than maybe we would like to admit.

On Sunday we heard how Jesus overturned the tables at the temple. His Father's house had become full of distractions. So distracting that the people no longer noticed what it was they were doing wrong or no longer cared. Our lives are so full of subliminal messages that what we as Christian's know to detract from the gospel. Yet because they constantly bombard our lives we begin to get distracted, then we make excuses and then we forget. We forget our neighbours, we forget our brother Christians.

What is worse than that is we convince ourselves we are doing nothing wrong.  We have our lives, our safety and security, we do not wish to sacrifice. So we sit watch the news, say our prayers and do nothing more. That is not right. Jesus did not come and see us riddled with sin and selfishness and say "Well this life thing is kind of nice, you are not worth the sacrifice"  Jesus used his body as his Father's temple. We tore it down and he rebuilt it in three days. He suffered, was discomfited and he sacrificed. It was not pleasant, it was not easy but we will reap it's rewards for eternity.

We receive Jesus into our lives via the Sacraments. We eat that broken body and that spilt blood, that we might receive God's grace. In receiving that grace we should be willing to share it with others that we might show his love through our actions. It won't be easy, it may not be pleasant but it should involve some form of sacrifice. Not only will we change lives but we will know our God better. It does not have to be much but one extra sacrifice this Lent for those in need, will bring you closer to others and your God.