Three steps back and One Giant leap Forward.

When I was in Yr 9/10 or thereabouts I remember my geography teacher saying to me "You are going to be one of two things, a Nun or a Mother". Two vocations that on paper seem too black and white to mix, however I think I might just have found the grey area. I am a Mother, of that there is no doubt. But a Nun, not quite. The reality is that I am married to a newly Priested Priest, my life is centred around the Church and Prayer. The grey area.

It was said to me by someone on Saturday evening, the big change was the one last year this one will be nothing. I simply replied that on the contrary this year is everything! For my husband it is a journey travelled for at least fifteen years, quite possibly longer. It is a search for who you are and what God's purpose for you is. For some the purpose is complete at the Diaconate, for others it takes this step further. To take the extra step, is not a non-step. It is the big giant step to the rest of your life and beyond. You are a Priest, ontologically changed forever, your identity invisibly altered by the sacrament of Ordination by the grace of God. It is no small step.

So on Saturday night we gathered friends, family and parish, to witness this wonderful and moving occasion. For those of you who read this blog regularly, I am sure the question on your lips is did you cry? Yes, of course I did. It was truly moving, to watch my husband be zappped (my children's description not mine) by a Bishop and have important Priests from his journey lay their hands on him. He has become part of an apostolic line of succession. From the time of St Peter through to today and on into the future. A truly humbling thought when you consider the vastness of what he has taken on.  If anyone says ontological change is not real,  they should have seen my husband this weekend. There is a transformation within him, that can only be described as the Grace of God at work. He seems more himself than he ever has, so completely at home bringing Christ into our lives.

To kick start this fantastic journey of ministry, we invited friends to partake in his first Mass. Friends from the three major back steps in this journey, some from Chelmsford, some from Durham and finally from Oxford to. These three elements combined are what have produced the Priest the Church has now. I may be more than slightly biased but I believe he is gift to the Church and a good gift at that. I would like to gratefully thank all who have had a part in forming who he is today. You are part of that gift, you have given him the skills, the knowledge and the doctrine to enable him to minister in the Church.

Vocations to the Priesthood are a rare and should be a most valued gift not just by the Parish to which they serve but to the wider Church. Without them we would be but lost sheep with no Shepherd. So I would like to thank all those who are prepared to sacrifice so much, that are souls may not wander down the path to damnation. For all those ordained Deacon and for those Priested, you have my prayers. They are long days ahead, but they are days full of Christ and his work.

As for me and my Geography teachers assessment of my vocation, he was right in a way. I am called to a life in service to God, but that of being in service to a Priest and my children. My life centred on prayer, inspired and guided by prayer, that I may be all these four people need in order to go out and fulfil their vocations to. This is who I am, and this is what I am most happiest doing.

So for all that is past and all that is yet to come, Deo Gratias.

One year in

On this weekend last year I watched my husband ordained into the Diaconate. In a weekend that was filled with chaos and joy. The good news is we have survived the first year and this evening he will be ordained into the Sacred Priesthood.

I have learnt several things this year:-

1: Never ever think that your children will not embarrass you in Church. Over the course of the year they have informed the Sunday School teacher the Holy Spirit is vodka, told a parishioner that I put Rum in his water bottle, run out of school shouting "I will murder in Church tonight" and various other incidents that are amusing so long as they are not your children. I must also point out that I do not put Rum in his water bottle and we are a virtually teetotal household.

2:The kindness of people in our Parish is amazing.

3: Being married to a Deacon you get to be part of some truly enlightening and fulfilling events, some of which are joyful and some are not but you see a difference being made.

4: You find God really does know you better than you know you.

I feel tremendously blessed to have been supporting my husband in his ministry and to have been part of this fantastic community. Like all journey's the road has not always been smooth and there have been many twist and turns. The most important reminder I have had this year is "trust". Learning to trust in God, I am beginning to think is a life long journey for me. But I suppose every journey into faith is a life long one, we can never know it all and nor should we. 

To serve God humbly, faithfully, obediently and sacrificially. This is what my husband is called to do tonight. He will tonight be blessed by God and tomorrow he will go out into the community and bring Christ's body and presence into our lives and the lives of many others. I only hope I can be the support he needs as he goes into all his tomorrows. 

But for now all I have to say is "Deo Gratias"

Gimmie, Gimmie, Gimmie!

Those of you old enough and/or Abba inclined enough can at this point rest easy. I am not about to write a blog post about my having a man after midnight. I am, however going off in a completely different tangent to talk about prayer.

We are all more than used to walking into a shop and in essence saying "Give me", though I am sure we are all much to polite to use those precise words. Having requested our product, we expect to be given exactly what we have asked for. Then should we get home and find that our product is broken, the wrong colour or just not what we expected. We go back and expect the shop to provide us with what we wanted or give us our money back.

Then we come to sit, kneel, lie, curl up or however you particularly like to pray. Much like when we are in the shop, we come with a lists of requests for God. Our list of demands, fix this, do this, I want my life to go this way and not that etc. I sit and kneel, often ( more often than is perhaps acceptable ) forgetting the giving thanks and asking for forgiveness and just demanding what I want in my life. Very often these are not request for me specifically, but those for family, friends and parishioners.  It is very easy to fall into the trap of expecting our prayers to be answered in just the way we would want.

It is very rarely the case that our prayers (or indeed much that is concerned with our Christian lives) ever really goes just the way we want. Now here comes the crux of the problem. We have no shop to take our grievances too.Therefore we have no way of changing the thing we want changed. It amazes me, just how quickly I can get frustrated when things do not go my way. I get angry with God, the people involved and then turn in on myself for being so selfish in the first place.  I have often wondered whether this tendency in me has been harboured by the modern expectation culture or whether this is a conflict that many have had throughout Christianity.

Now I could end this post there and it would sound dreadfully negative. It would feel as though prayer and faith, did not work and were essentially useless. But being me, I am not going to end it here. Prayers may not be answered in the way we want them to be. They are answered though.

Sometimes what we think we need, is very different from the experiences we actually need to learn and develop in our Faith.  Sometimes we need to experience disappointment and doing so can lead to some miraculous discoveries about yourself, your faith and others. Yes, I get angry. Sometimes over the most petty and selfish of things, sometimes over things that are really significant. Yes I throw my toys out of the pram, I am who I am. I believe passionately and when I am seemingly let down I am similarly passionately angry at life, God and all. However I have grown to value the points at which my prayers have not been answered in the way I wanted. Those times have taught me much about sides of me of which I am less than proud. They have forced me to stop and think about what is really important and what I can do to change that. They have led to my eyes being opened and discoveries in my spiritual life. They have also taught me, how invaluable my friends and family are. There are different ones for different situations, each of them a sounding board  that calms me down enough to show me or help me to see the way through.

Disappointment, helps us value the times we get what we want. Without it we would be smug and comfortable and never be inspired to help others in their sufferings too. Prayer works, just not always in the way we would like it to. But I can assure you your life is much richer because of that. So next time we have a list of demands, let's be thankful to God whichever way it turns out. Because (to steal a line from The Great Exotic Marigold Hotel ) "It will be all right in the end. If it is not all right, then it is not yet the end".

That is what faith and prayer is, an acceptance that at the end all will be well. We will be born again into new life, through the sufferings of Christ. We to must suffer, for only then we will truly understand the greatness of the gift that we will get when we reach the end.

Corpus Christi

" And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.”  And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it.  And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many."  Mark 22-24

From this last meal that Jesus shared with his disciples to the Eucharistic sacrifice at our Altars today, bread and wine have been declared to be the body and blood of Christ. They like us, gathered round a table and shared a meal. A meal that has been repeated among the faithful for centuries. 

Today is the feast of Corpus Christi (Christ's body), but what is Christ's body and where does it fit into our lives? First and foremost Christ is in the Blessed Sacrament, this is Christ's body. So today we go to Mass, we gather round the table facing East  gazing towards God and break the bread. The body broken for us, is distributed among us. Then having partaken of Christ, we will be given a chance to spend some time with Blessed Sacrament held out in procession. Christ's body showing us the way.

Then having spent this time in Christ's presence, we as a community are broken and distributed among the places from whence we came. We become a symbol of Christ's body in the lives of others. For those who have no faith we are the closest they will get to seeing Christ in their lives. Every thought, word and action we take into their lives, is an example of what we think Christ to be. 

We are one body because we all share in one bread. We are part of a body that has been in existence since the sacrifice of Christ for us. We are part of a body that will continue into the future as every Mass is offered. We are but a heartbeat in the history and the future of Christ's Body. When we go out into the world, this is what should be on our hearts. When we have this in our hearts, hopefully it will make it onto our lips in all we say and all we do.

I would like to leave you with a final quote, from Mahatma Ghandi

"To believe something and not to live it, is dishonest"

Behold the Lamb of God

As Mass concluded last night, I had three children captivated and entranced by what had happened. No, not every service has quite such a welcome reception but a friends first Mass, did. My daughter moved to the end of the pew within the first few minutes to watch avidly, the proceedings of the many people whom she has shared various parts of our life in Oxford. At the end eager to receive her first ever first blessing she wanted to bypass the whole church.

When we as adults talk about Mass, it is often referred to in a very non committal way and without any real enthusiasm. Then we ask ourselves, "Why does the younger generation have no interest in the Mass?"  My children are different I know they are. They live in a family where Mass is not a boring requirement, but something that is talked about enthusiastically. All the sacraments are talked about in this house, they are discussed alongside all the other day to day topics that we care about such as Doctor Who. We talk about them in discussions about modern everyday things that we all enjoy and look at how our faith and the sacraments relate to them. Therefore, they are no longer irrelevant but relevant and applied to life.

The sacraments may mean we have to sacrifice our time. However, we sacrifice our time to watch television, read books, play golf and go to a concert. Why? Because we believe that the are beautiful and worth it. The sacraments are not just magnificent to behold, they are contact with the divine. They are where we and God interact. In the Mass there is glorious music to worship God and a chance to be in the presence of Christ. In confession while we may come with heavy hearts, we leave free of our sinful chains. In Baptism we are welcomed into a family and in Confirmation we strengthen our bonds and commitments to this family. It seems to me that they are as captivating and time worthy as any book or concert.

Another thing to consider when we talk about the Sacraments. When we partake in the Sacraments, or indeed come to Church or just praying at home, we are making time for Our Lord in our lives. We are all to willing to disrupt our lives for the most menial and trivial of things and yet, when it comes to making time for God. God is our father, if we do not make time for him how can we expect our relationship to become something exciting and relevant. God is our saviour, our leader, our comforter. God is in everything we do and say. We should be willing to get to know him better, to share our lives with him. For someone who was once prepared to give up his son for us and our salvation, we should at least be willing to give time to receive the sacraments.

Next time you as a family come to discuss going to Church, approach your discussion from a sense of wonder and respect for the awesome gift that is given for you. Enthuse about the miraculous presence of Christ before you. Then maybe you and your children will feel more like coming to Church and it will seem less of a chore.

Last Sunday when it was time to approach the altar for communion my daughter grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the Blessed Sacrament. What a difference it would make to your life and to mine, if we could all approach God with such simple enthusiasm and desire to experience God and to know him more.

I believe in order to understand

"I yearn to understand some measure of your truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand"

Anselm of Canterbury

I have heard many times at debates over when a child should first receive Communion, "But they are not ready, they do not understand". It is true many children may not understand, but how many of us can say  as adults we truly understand the mysteries of the Eucharist. A child in their innocence will believe whole heartedly in the sacrament. Just as Anselm said in the quote above, they believe in order that in the fullness of time they might understand. If only as adults we could quite so freely say "I believe" and mean it without any second thoughts.

One of the main differences between the East and the West churches, is that over the centuries the West has developed it's theologies through philosophy and the East through tradition and ritual. One seeks to find the answers by finding meaning through applying modern thoughts, the other through finding meaning in what it already believes. There are benefits and flaws to them both and has lead to two very different styles of Church with the same teaching at the centre.

One way or another we will seek to answer our questions as we get older. The ability to just simply accept what is, diminishes with more we learn. There is a caution in the Bible about this though, Eve sought more than she should. We can take the analysis of our Faith too far. We can seek to impose our own desires on God's words. We can make the teachings of Faith fit into our lives, rather than our lives fit into the teachings of our faith. Put another way, we seek to apply our understanding in order to believe, rather than believe to understand. 

Faith is a powerful and emotive subject. For us all it means something different, mainly because we are all different. It does at times seem remarkable that we can all agree on anything at all. However we do all have a creed on which we do all agree. It starts with those magic words "I believe". 

They really are fantastic words, at many points in our journey we say "I believe", in God, in Jesus, in the teachings of my Church.  Do we really honestly mean "I believe" or do we mean "I believe in God so far as this is what I would like my faith to mean" Tomorrow maybe we could try waking up and saying take the "understanding" and the "me" out and replacing it simply with "I believe". Take each encounter of the day in this frame of mind. So that when we meet the challenges of life, instead of thinking what is the minimum of what we can do within the realms of my faith, let us do the most our faith demands of us. We do not need to understand why, that will come with time. We do need to believe that is the right thing to do. If we believe with our whole hearts, then others will see Jesus in our hearts and in our lives and maybe just maybe take him out into theirs.

How do I know God is real, Mummy?

At my daughter's bedtime the other night, she turned and asked me "How do we know God is real?"
I had to answer "We don't". I can not prove to her he is there, I can not show her he is there. There was no other answer to give. I went on though "That is why we have faith. Faith means we believe in something even though we can not prove it. That is why it is such a special relationship." She went on,  "How then do I know he is there?" .
"You do not know he is there, you believe he is there. You trust that he is there. That he is always there. He never leaves you, never changes, he just is."

I treasure these moments with my children. They are moments among the chaos that is my family life that remind me just how special our children are. They look to us to show them the way, but more importantly than anything else they trust us to show them the way. Trust comes so easily to a child, from the moment of birth they trust and depend on you to do all that they need. They grow up and slowly the cycle changes and they start to become the leaders and others start to trust in them. Sometimes along the line through this cycle of trust, is sometimes damaged. Trust becomes something we only give upon evidence that it will be upheld. We lose the innocence of unconditional trust. It is true that along our lives we receive bumps and bruises, the unconditional part of us becomes reticent, not just in trusting, but in love, hope and faith too. For example it is becoming more common for people to draw up a set of pre-nuptial agreements. Not only pre-empting the ending of this love, but also showing how little we have learned to trust. A relationship that should be based on love, trust and hope in the future, has already on paper ended all of those in advance.

Why do we become so cynical as we grow up? Why do we find it harder to accept what can not be written in black and white. When we become cynical, we become defensive, try to shut out all that might just hurt us. In doing so we shut out life.

Faith in God is a huge leap by modern faith standards. So little black and white proof and so much of it based on the fantastical and divine. If one can not totally trust the human standing opposite them ready to dedicate their lives to them, how can we expect them to believe that God is real. The task of convincing them that God is real, that faith and the Church are good things are hampered like much else by the Churches unreliability. The Church like, most other things is run by humans. Humans make mistakes, in doing so they damage the trust that is given to them. But the Church is still here because God's message is greater and better than us.

Finding faith, is hard. When you have a faith it is often because you have dug very deep inside yourself to find the confidence to take a leap. Yes the jump is a long way down, yes we may get hurt along the way but we decide to give it a good go. To find it we have to spend time listening to God's words, listening to God's actions in the world, spending time in the presence of the sacraments, spending time in prayer and discerning our own path through what is set out in front of us.

To have a faith centred life, we must have a God centred life. To find a way to a God centred life, we must have a prayer centred life. It is hard to fit it in, for many years prayer for me was grabbed in thoughts, wishes and thanks sent up to God as I tried to make sense of three small children. Now they are not so small and I have more time. My prayer life has more structure and I have more time to discern what is ahead of me. The one thing I do know though is if you have a faith in God, you learn how to trust again and when you learn how to trust, you have hope for the future both in our earthly lifetime and beyond.