quiet

spent the day yesterday more or less in silence - no radio or iTunes - and enjoyed it.
heard birdsong and distant police cars and builders doing stuff up the road and kids playing in their lunch-hour.
found it hard to be still in myself though - i'm too used to thinking about stuff; as sue likes to remind me, my head is full of rubbish...!
so no great insights here, just that i need to practice silence much more - to spend more time in the quiet, to learn how to be still.

song for my funeral = 'down there by the train' by tom waits

si

resolve!

happy new year!

i have already broken my first monk-y resolution - namely to get back into the habit of my weekly post here and to stick with it.
ah well...

meantime i've been looking back at the things that we said that we'd look to do in 2007, and which we'd gently hold one another to account for - maybe we can talk them through when we next meet. for my part i started to get somewhere with silence and solitude and the work-life balance but then totally lost the plot sometime in the summer.
ah well...

so this year the aims are as follows -
1. to add another song to play at my hopefully-not-very-imminent funeral each time i post here. for starters - 'vapour trail' by ride [though i'd like the version by trespassers william played too, please]
2. again, to lift up my head, both metaphorically and physically. it occured to me today that it'll mean that i step in some poop along the way, but it's worth the risk.
3. watch at least one film a week [on tv if not at the cinema. we don't make the most of film4]
4. to read the bible. not all of it. maybe just the gospels, for starters, over and over.

Memories

My dear Grandma - Phyllis Melville Richards - died yesterday evening around seven. Thankfully we've been prepared for her death, and since she reached the impressive age of ninety-nine, the overwhelming emotion is one of thankfulness: for her long life and the years she's influenced our lives.

Death holds a different sort of sadness when someone has fulfilled their "allotted" time and lived a good number of years. But it's still sad when I think of her previous vibrancy and energy: I want to be able to return to some of those moments in my past and re-live them with her - to remember. It seems like a long time until I'll see her again.

God be in her understanding, in her eyes, in her mouth, in her heart and in her departing.

When I pray those words I see her blending with the colours of the sky, the earth, the sea and the sun... I see her soul soaring like a swallow into the blue, blue expanse of eternity. I feel like she knows I am here and she is there. Whether or not we are together - we are at least not completely apart. Whatever that may mean.

Listening prayer

That thing you said Si about prayer being more about listening than saying - that makes a lot of sense.

I once read a whole book on listening prayer. I remember it being brilliant but suggesting quite a time-consuming method of ensuring that one was praying in a listening manner - something to do with a ring-binder and writing lots down I seem to recall...

I think it's more helpful to use the simple structure of the 'Jesus' prayer or our 'God be' prayer like you suggest.

I'm currently reading another John O'Donohue book - Anam Cara - (which translates as 'soul friend'). It has a lot of lovely illustrations of how Celtic Christians did things like prayer - just the sort of thing we love at 'monks'. I might have to bring it along on Monday...

In the meantime. I'm going to keep praying and listening and drifting and listening and soaking and praying and thinking and listening. Hopefully some sort of rhythm will emerge out of the melange of meditation. One day.

Esther

more prayer thoughts...

i like what you're saying about the prayer esther...

i'm finding myself praying the jesus prayer quite a lot - 'lord jesus christ, son of god, have mercy on me, a sinner' - and at random times too...
i'm also doing the breathing thing with it [breathing in = 'lord...god' and out = 'have... sinner']
getting into that rhythm really helps somehow - it works for me with the 'god be...' prayer too...

i really like the idea that prayer is about saying as little as possible, and listening as much as you can. with some things that i'm praying about at the mo, i have absolutely no idea what to ask god to do, and so it's comforting to have the repetition of a set prayer... you can just bring the situation to god and trust him/her with it...


si

God be in my head

I've found the prayer useful too recently...

When there's no words to face a situation with, you kind of have to rely on the simplest of structures and let them hold you - like this prayer does.

I pray it all the time at the moment... sometimes I drift halfway through and outside noise drowns out the meaning but then I come back to it and start again. Sometimes it becomes almost circular and I go round and round the same lines like a buddhist chant,. Sometimes I say 'her' head or 'his' eyes or 'our' departing. I think about the people I'm praying it for.

Mostly I say 'my'. Mostly I'm praying it for myself.

in my heart, in my thinking...

i'm still using the 'god be...' prayer and finding new depth in it...

the hardest line for me has been 'god be in my heart and in my thinking'

i love the idea that the way that you think is an attitude of the heart, rather than of the mind... it explains why it's the place in the prayer where i've struggled most.
my thinking is so ingrained, my attitudes have become so well rehearsed and self-justified and reinforced and entrenched down the years; they're second nature.

[it's not called a mind-'set' for nothing...]

and yet i think that i am being challenged and changed. moving up here to leeds and the things that we've experienced since we've been here through revive and now this monastic stuff have been a big part of that process... my thinking is [painfully slowly] changing. what's that line from the psalms? '...create in me a new heart, and renew a right spirit in me...'
i think it's happening...

si

A short addition

Changing

Porcelain skin and sapphire eyes
A voice I remember best in song
Hands that conjured tastes and melodies
A brain brim-full of irreverent rhymes

You’ve become full of years now
And your hands cannot conjure anymore
But your words still glimmer and twinkle
And your determination remains sure

I think of you as simply changing colour
Blending with the sky, becoming brightest blue
Absorbing the emerald of the greenest hills
Catching sun-fire: turning yellow, red, orange…

I think of you as stepping into star-shone light
Into the pool of a golden shadow
Where a person’s truth lies and
Where your soul survives after your body dies

04/10/07

Welcoming the night

I wish I knew how to encourage someone to welcome the night. I wish I had the words to say and the strength to impart.

I know someone who's nearing the closing of the day, to the welcoming of the night. I wish I could be with her to at least stand and face the darkness by her side. But it's probably not my place anyway. And I could probably not find the words or the attitude or the compassion or the courage to be truly there.

It may be that she holds on and doesn't go straight away. I'm not sure what she'll decide. Maybe this time next year she'll still be here - holding on to her piece of light. To the patch of experience that she knows. But the night will still be there, and I will still want to be there facing it with her.

I'm reading John O'Donohue at the moment, he writes this, among other things, about the journey of death:

"At the time of death, the soul knows how to protect its precious cargo. While death will stop and empty the body, the soul will ferry your essence into eternal life. Not one moment of you will be lost in the crossing. Eternal life is the province of the soul, this is where the soul is at home. For your soul then, death is indeed a homecoming"

I hope she knows this. I pray she may know this.

"...it's like deja vu all over again..."

heh heh - like everyone except esther, i've got out of the habit of posting these past two weeks...

and so even though i've not much to say for meself this week, i'm writing this now, just to get back into routine...

actually, routine is what i need right now. re-establishing the silent prayer time to begin the day. learning to find time to end each day with prayer too would be good.
getting my eating back right again [i've slipped back into snacking recently...!]
and starting to exercise - that's still left undone on the 'to do' list...

post-greenbelt i'd promised myself [and sue, and the kids] that i'd get the amount of work i was taking on back down to a manageable level, and that it wouldn't take over our lives any more; but to be honest it's not really happened.
last week i found myself cancelling a nite out at the very last moment to stay up and draw stuff instead, and this week i'm already facing up to three deadline crises between now and the end of wednesday...

so that's me at the mo; despite my very best intentions, still wrestling with the old work/life balance...

si

Time to grow up?

Well once again, I've faced the supervisor gauntlet and come through the other side, relatively unscathed...

It turns out however that the chapter I've been working on would have been better crafted had a silver-back gorilla been given the task and told to write about the first thing that came into its head. So I'm back to the drawing-board and preparing to work like a mad-person (or like Si at least) for another 4-6 weeks at which point I'll have to get ready to leave the country again in a little over a month - as soon after New Year as possible.

The reason I have to leave so promptly is that I've been told I may have to spend 8 months rather than 6 months gathering my data as 6 is just not enough. This would be fine (ish) if it weren't for the fact that one of my oldest friends is getting married August 2nd and I was planning to be there. I may not be able to be there now.

Yesterday as I reflected on the interesting turn my life seems to be taking (i.e. I'm having to put work before my friends and make choices based on prioritising work rather than my relationships) I realised that actually this is something a lot of people have to do and it's a little bit about growing up. I'm not saying I want to always put work ahead of my friends - in fact it's something I want to avoid doing as much as possible. But it's good to learn a little bit about working really hard and what that actually involves. It's a fairly new concept for me I have to say.

I'm not sure what God thinks about working hard. I think it can be a valuable and a dangerous thing and maybe God sees it both ways. For me, right now, I think it's part of a steep learning curve that seems to have characterised the last 11 months of my life. It's a good curve but a slightly daunting one at times.

Thursday

Well it's Thursday again... I forgot it was Thursday last Thursday so I did not blog. However I've remembered this week...

I was recounting the story of Esther to some friends today. Kind of to explain why I was called Esther and why it was a bit of a churchy thing (what with my parents being fundies - ho ho ho). So anyway, I was telling the story to them and emphasising just how misogynist it is: how the king is a bit of a woman-hater what with him divorcing Vashti for standing up to him and then treating the local virgins like cattle etc. And so of course they were saying 'oh how awful - what a terrible book'. And I was momentarily sad. But at the time I didn't think about why. Until now...

Now I realise I'd quite like to tell them about some of the good bits in the Bible. I'd like them to know about how ground-breaking it is - I'd like them to hear some of the best bits: Isaiah and his fasting, Song of Solomon and his passion, Paul and his grace, Jesus and his "the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed"...

I suppose that's why we still do stuff like the Advent thing. So that we can remember the bits of the story that we love and celebrate them in art and music and words.

So I was thinking about that. And it made me feel glad that I am part of a something that enables me still - after all my doubt and all my cynicism - to enjoy the story of God and Jesus and the Church, at least when I'm not denigrating it that is!

PS - updates

If you log in to blogger, you can set one of the settings so that it will email you whenever there's a new blog post - that way you never miss any - I'd recommend it! ;)

Learning

Just a quick one to say thanks to my fellow monks for being there - you are providing an incubator for a new and improved James (I believe!). I have been reflecting today on what we learn, and what we do with what we've learnt. It seems to be that God is using monks as a tool to work changes in me (slowly but surely!).

An example being that through monks I have become aware of my own chatter (spiritual, emotional and psychological noise) which I believe makes sense, but is in the main useless, and generally quite harmful to mine and other's well-being too. This manifests primarily in what I say, and I am increasingly open to noticing this, and being challenged on words and their underlying attitudes.

So thanks monks. Looking forward to seeing you soon (Monday?) and wish that it were still school holidays so Eddie and Joe could come and play on Wednesdays!

Love to all,

James

ps...

...have look at this if you have a few spare minutes.

ghostshrimp are a sort of loose collective of creatives with a truly beautiful website and although there's no particular christian or faith perspective there, i love the call to be radical and to live counter-culturally. reminds me of the message of david dark's 'everyday apocalypse' book.

anyhow, i love the final lines of the manifesto post linked above - that's where i want to be.

si

rambling late night post...

[...for this post i was going to pose the question 'will god do?' - heh heh - but then i decided that was a bit flippant so i won't...]

anyhow, amen from me to james' response to your post esther - i like what he had to say about the dance. i guess i'd want to say that god's will for us is maybe more about who we are becoming rather than the specific things that we choose to do... [as the old song goes, 'it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it...'?] i know that i'm always banging on about 'being' over 'doing', but i do think that it really applies here...

meanwhile, i was talking with sue earlier today about how we might be able to involve the eddie and joe a bit more in our monkstuff - and about how as a group we could indulge our creative sides a bit more with liturgy and stuff... maybe that's a conversation that we can share when we next meet'n'eat...?

si

Does God will?

I've avoided thinking too much about what or how or whether God wills certain things for us in recent years - it just seems to be unlikely that God would have a detailed specific plan for every human being that ever existed... And I've never been keen on the inevitable follow-on thought that once the plan was missed - one would have lost one's way irrevocably.

Of course a sensible conception of God's will probably doesn't entail such a precise determination of destiny anyway but it remains a concept that occasionally troubles me - does God will things for me?

Today I was despairing about my work - feeling like I just can't do what I've got to do and wondering how I ever got myself into it in the first place.

There have been moments - one of them during a Catholic mass on Easter Saturday in a small village in Bali - when I've felt transcendentally sure about the 'rightness' of what I'm doing at the moment, but generally I assume I was lucky to get the funding and happened to be in the right place at the right time. However, while I am currently questioning my ability to do what I am doing - there is some comfort to be derived by imagining that somehow it is 'meant to be'... because if it is 'meant to be' then surely I'll be able to do it...

Of course now that I write that down I realise how silly it sounds. Why should I be doing something that's 'meant to be' anyway... life is mostly about learning from whatever circumstances we find ourselves in - most of the world's population don't have the chance to wonder if what they're doing is 'meant to be'. They just have to get on with it!

Maybe that is just what I should be doing - learning from this experience however hard it is because if God does 'will' anything for me then learning is probably in there somewhere, right? Hmmm... I could do with some divine intervention though - anyone? Anyone? Anyone?

'sbeen a long time...

feels like a long time since i last posted here - i guess that pre-greenbelt everything got a bit lost in the deluge of stuff that i was trying to get ready for the festival weekend... wish i could say that post-greenbelt i was living out a much better work-life balance, but there's still a load of stuff to do on the desk and the pressure won't be off for another week or so... sigh.

anyhow, here are a couple of thoughts that are occupying my mind coming back from greenbelt.

the first is a quote from a service by a group called the garden - "prayer is god on his knees longing for us to do something"

the second is a general wondering whether christ'd be happy with what st paul did with the message, whether the religion that's grown up around jesus' teaching and the institutions that claim his name are even remotely what he had in mind during his ministry.

i know that's kind of heretical, but i'm enjoying kicking those ideas around a bit...
see you all tonite, monk-y chums!

si

Cheating again

Once again, I'm going to use the words of someone else as a source of blogging inspiration - good old real live preacher: he's a gem. Follow the link to read one of his latest entries - he's just such a good writer and expresses things that I would love to be able to say if only I had thought them first.

http://www.reallivepreacher.com/node/1400

Thursday has come very fast. I have lots of work and feeling slightly swamped. Greenbelt seems a long way away.

Hope

I've only just remembered that today was my day to blog. This, therefore, will not be terribly well thought-through. Nevertheless, I feel inspired.

I am writing some little story/meditations for Greeneblt at the moment and I've been trying to think of something to write that hits the nail on the head to capture the essence of the mustard seed story/ies. I asked a friend tonight in the pub what she thought. She said that recently she had been thinking about hope, hope had led her on to faith and faith to the story of the mustard-seed (she was thinking more about the moving mountains parable not the kingdom of heaven being like a mustard seed one by the way but there're vague similarities)...

This resonated with me because the story/meditation I want to 'capture' most is the one about an old slave woman who hears Jesus and understands him with total clarity. I was trying to think about what the mustard seed might say to her... I think it has to be about hope. I'm not sure if it's theologically sound or if it will totally make sense but there's just something about the concept of 'hope' that I want to portray to people about Jesus and his mustard-seed meanderings (no disrespect meant).

The last few days I've been feeling lost and hope-less, hope-bereft. Today I feel more hope-found and hope-full. Of course life isn't always hopeful or very nice, certainly not for old slave women... But there's just something about the concept. There's something about the mustard-seed... There's something about hope.