Greenbelt 2013

main stage communion on Sunday morning

I’ve just come back from Greenbelt feeling stiff and tired. I don’t like camping. I don’t like the noise other people make when they are in their tents and think no one can hear them because they are “inside”. I don’t like sleeping on the ground or portaloos, or even queueing for the loo. I don’t like not being able to shower. Ok so I could shower but it would mean getting dressed first, walking to the shower, taking off clothes and trying to hang them where they won’t also get showered, putting said clothes back on again after and then having nowhere to hang my towel up after. I go 4 days without a shower: lots of wet wipes and body spray!!

So why do I endue Greenbelt? Because I like it. I like the atmosphere. Its ok to be there and never go to a single talk and anything at all. I like the fact that the whole thing isn’t about expecting God to get on and do things while we all sing happy clappy songs or go about our regular lives, but is about how as Christians we should be looking at issues of injustice and seeing how God expects us to do something about it, either in our regular lives or stepping out. It is about seeing how we can change the whole world. It is about how amazing God is for loving everyone; the losers, the freaks, the middle classes, the working classes, those who get the issues and those who don’t, the gays, the lesbians, the transsexuals, the heterosexuals, those who’ve admitted to following Jesus and those who haven’t, the tattooed, the pierced, the Muslim, the Jew,  the Buddhist, the Pagan, the Protestant, the Catholic, the young, the old, those who are open about who they are and those who want to pretend they are something they are not. I love the fact that Greenbelt isn’t about the great things God can do but about how great God is in loving us all.

I had a great time too. I was volunteering in The Tank and was part of the one-stop animation team. I was the only one who’d done it last year but everyone else joined in and we muddled along nicely and had a great time. In total over the weekend there were 9 children’s sessions and 3 adult sessions. We all “worked” for about 6 hours a day supporting and helping. It was fun. I like the volunteering as, for me, that is an important part of who I am and why I go to things. I have grown beyond just being able to go and get.

I got to take communion with a group known as Grace, where, along with 1-200 other people, we were encouraged to look at vulnerability and breakthrough and God’s vulnerability. I saw various bands: Why? who were one of the first Christian bands I ever bought, great hip hop; The Temperance Society who were a very loud rock band; and King Kool who were an awful middle age rock band. I heard a great African man tell his life in poems against the background of dealing with his father having just had a stroke. I joined with a friend and her friends and most of the rest of the Greenbelt

Beer and Hymns at the Jesus Arms, Greenbelt

crowd to take communion on a slightly drizzly Sunday morning. And I finished the weekend, before Ian came to pick me up, with Beer and Hymns.

This year the weather was much kinder than last and I didn’t have to wear my wellies at all even though we did have a bit of drizzle a few times.

Also this was the first year I came on my own. Tabitha couldn’t make it as she was volunteering on a children’s camp till the Friday and slept all weekend. I must say I was a bit nervous beforehand of not having anyone to go to anything with, to share things with, but in fact I loved it. I loved the whole thing of being able to potter round and make decisions at the last moment, and then change my mind if I got bored. I went to a couple of events where I got bored or tired and left halfway through. I didn’t have to check if anyone else cared whether I stayed of went. I caught up with friends too when I wanted to, managing to have a pint in the Jesus Arms and talk continuously with one friend, covering loads of ground in just half an hour. And also got introduced to other people, but I found I didn’t need to “cling” to anyone as I was content on my own. Is this a sign that maybe I’ve been journeying to this whole thing of “love your neighbour as yourself” that I have reached a point that I don’t just love myself but am also content with myself and my own company?

Friends

I have friends for different parts of my life, which is why I like the idea of Jesus being a friend.

I have lots of friends but that is because I share certain parts of what I do and who I am with different people, and that is because they are different people and can input different things into my life.

I spent 3 nights with a friend who is very open and can seem very blunt. She understands parts of me others don’t get, and will also be very honest with me about things. I like her for that. I’ve just had lunch with another friend who shares all her stories and reminds me of what I was like when I was her age. It’s nice because I don’t feel old and wise just amazed at the person I’ve become, and impressed that she is walking through it better than I did. Maybe it helps her to know that I’ve been there and survived. I’ve got friends who I know through church, through home school, through being married, through various other parts of my life that support and guide and help with those parts of who I am. I could spend ages just listing all the friends I have and the great things they input into my life, but I won’t in case I miss someone out and I wouldn’t want to hurt a friend – not intentionally – so to all my lovely friends out there “I couldn’t do this without you” (“this” being life)

But I’m sad when I lose a friend, someone who was significant to me and shared a part of who I was. This friend hasn’t died but just decided to do a major change in her life and has moved on and away. I wonder if she thinks I disapprove of where she’s going with her life. As a friend I don’t think that is my role to approve or disapprove, but as a friend I would say if I thought she was being unwise. Maybe she’s afraid of being told she’s unwise. For me a friend is open and honest and trusts her friends. This person was closed about what she did, wasn’t honest about where her life was going and didn’t trust to share it with me. It’s sad. It’s sad to lose a friend by her lifestyle choice but it is also sad to lose someone who spoke into my life, who had a role to play in who I was and decisions I made. She may not have know that, but she did.

I have had other friends who’ve moved away or I’ve moved away from, some of whom if I see again we catch up where we’ve left off. The reason we’re not in touch is time commitment or just that locations don’t make it so easy and one isn’t so keen on emailing or facebooking. I have friends I don’t see from one year to the next. In fact some I haven’t seen or heard from in a couple of years, but I know the friendship is still there. But that is because when we do see each other we are open, honest and trust each other. For me when that goes I have to grieve the end of a friendship. This hasn’t happened very often but when it does it hurts just like a death.

I miss this friend and I’d like her back, but I fear if she comes back just that little bit of trust will be gone – maybe forever. Of course I forgive her and will continue to forgive her, but things change.

I suppose bringing this back to being a friend of Jesus, the great bit there is that He will never leave me, because He promised that, and I can tell Him everything about every aspect of my life – because He knows it already 🙂

How Do We See God?

I was going to blog this morning about Friends, following on from Jesus being a friend, and I might later if I get time but today’s meditation from Richard Rohr fits so well with the quote from George Mueller yesterday that I want to share it.

Unfortunately, in the West, prayer had become something functional; something you did to achieve a desired effect—which too often puts the ego back in charge. As soon as you make prayer a way to get what you want, you’re not moving into any kind of new state of consciousness. It’s the same old consciousness, but now well disguised: “How can I get God to do what I want God to do?” It’s the egocentric self deciding what it needs, but now, instead of just manipulating everybody else, it tries to manipulate God.

He is talking about Prayer and Contemplative Prayer at that. This is a way of communicating with God and learning how to have relationship with Him. It’s as much about listening as it is about telling Him what we want. No don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against praying and asking God for things that we want and need, things that we believe will make the world a better place, but often, like Rohr says it is putting us in the centre. E.g “if I pray in this way and declare this then this will happen/so and so will be healed/so and so will get enough money/etc/etc”

Now God is our Father and we should say what we want, but I suspect like most parents He knows what we want before we ask. He knows cancer needs healing. He knows when someone needs money. And sometimes He does provide without us asking. But I think it needs to be much more of this hanging out contemplative praying, hearing The Father’s Heart. I know as a parent I’d be really fed up if my kids only spoke to me when they wanted something, especially now they are more mature. But even when they were little I loved the times we would just snuggle down together and they would chatter away. Now they are older I love the meals together, the phone calls, the texts, the coffees, where they chatter on about their hopes and dreams, the things that have wound them up, the things that have made them happy. These things make me know I have a relationship with them. I’m still parent and they will always be my children, but it is moving into a sort of friendship relationship, but still with that subtle difference with them than I have with my friends.

I think God wants us to chatter to Him. I think He likes it when we tell Him our hopes and dreams and then together we can share ideas about how to deal with that. Of course that means I’ll tell Him about my friends and how I’d like to see them helped, but then my kids do that to me. In fact recently my daughter was concerned about a friend of hers and I turned my whole schedule round to help and support this girl. I did it as much for Tabitha and her peace of mind as I did for her friend. I think God does that for us. So I can say to Him things about the struggles my friends are having with their illnesses, their losses, their parents, their children, their finances, and I suspect God turns His schedule around to help my friends out. But it is different than asking and expecting. It is much more like George Mueller and the knowing that I can tell God anything and He will work it for the best.

I wonder if we talked about how to grow that relationship with God if more people would be able to stay with Him, but when we talk about a god-who-answers-prayers, which so often He doesn’t, then people are sceptical. When we hear that God doesn’t answer because we didn’t pray in the right way, didn’t have our hearts right, doubted, and all the other unkind things people say when the fairy godmother doesn’t do His stuff, then we get disillusioned and don’t want in this any more. I’m sure George Mueller prayer for his wife. He was amazing and never asked for any support and yet fed and supported hundreds and hundreds of orphans via the needs that came in when they prayed. Here was a man who did believe in asking for things and yet had such a relationship with Father God that he knew that God would always do right.

But it’s not ….

Fat Fowl, Bradford on Avon, where we often meet for coffee, chat, cry and laugh

Last Saturday I met Belinda’s new man. He is really lovely. She is really  happy. I am really happy for her. I came home and cried.

Here is a man who has given my dear friend hope for the future, who last year had no hope and actually I was worried on how she would survive. I wrote this poem for her 30th birthday in December:

Zero years

Her birthday’s here, the big 3 – 0h.

She wakes alone on this auspicious date.

A brief moment of solitude,

Is that him she can hear in the shower?

But no, the quiet rushes in.

The bed is cold,

the shower silent.

The realisation comes flooding back –

This will be her first birthday alone,

her first birthday as a widow.

The tears are shed, the pain remains,

She is empty like the zero of her years.

Will anything ever fill her life again?

She rises and steps in to the shower on her own

 

And now she’s got this lovely man, who knows and understands all she has journeyed through over the last few years, because with Jon it wasn’t just the last few weeks but there had been a long time of problems and issues. His had been a mentally disturbed life, which we could all see when we looked back over it with hindsight. Now here is is with hope, still with tears and still with pain, but there is hope. She is not journeying alone. Her brother is getting married next weekend and when it was announced she was dreading it but now she has a lovely friend to celebrate it with. She has someone to step into the future with.

We all don’t know how long the relationship will last but whatever happens she has hope, hope that she can have a relationship, hope that she can stand tall, hope that she is normal.

But I cried. Why? Because lovely though Alex is he’s not Jon. It brought back the most amazing bitter sweet feelings. I’m so pleased for my lovely dear friend but so miss my other lovely dear friend. It hurts.

And also selfish as this sounds it made me miss my sister more. I know Alex isn’t Jon but I know that Belinda now has a partner/boyfriend/maybe husband in her life, and yet I will never have another sister. That is gone forever. A friend of mine has just had her parents die within 10 days of each other. Her and her siblings are clearing out the family home. I will never had a sister to do that with. It is self-pitying but often I think grief if like that. We do grieve the person who’s died but we grieve for ourselves and the loss we have to carry. I’m sure I’ve said before about the young friend who is dying of cancer unless God intervenes. Tabitha asked why if we believe God is so awesome and being with Him is the most amazing thing why we want this lovely young woman to live longer on this earth and not be with God in Heaven. Why? Because we are selfish and don’t want to have to face another loss.

So I’m pleased, oh so very very pleased, for Belinda. So much so I feel my heart will bursts but I am also selfishly sad for the losses I have to walk through and the gaps that are in my life.

Here is a great quote from George Mueller that all us Christians could do with learning to live by. His wife, who he loves dearly and who he says is his greatest delight is dying and he says:

…if it is good for me, my darling wife will be raised again; sick as she is. God will restore her again. But if she is not restored again, then it would not be a good thing for me. And so my heart is at rest. I was satisfied with God. And all this springs, as I have often said before, from taking God at his word, believing what he says

That isn’t to say that he didn’t pray for his wife to be healed but that his trust was in the fact that God knew best and would heal or take as He (God) saw best. How many of us really trust God that much? How many of us really want God to do the healing thing and keep that promise, but not the ‘works all things to the good for those who love Him’ (Romans 8:28)? God isn’t a magician. He isn’t a ‘tame lion’. He is wild. He is awesome. And in all that He can be trusted. I want to get to that place George Mueller was at where I can trust God even when He doesn’t do what I want.

So for now I wrestle with being so pleased for Belinda and yet so sad for my/our loss.

Finishing

I’ve got a large pile of books by the side of my bed, many in a state of having been started then discarded for something else. Some are there intending to start but …. Last night I set about finishing them, or deciding I was never going to finish them so would give them back if borrowed from someone else or put them back on the shelf. Why did I get them in the first place?

Actually I think I suffer from a book poverty spirit – the fear that one day there will be no books in the world apart from what I have, or that someone will have taken all the good ones and I’ll be left with rubbish. I think, deep inside, I have a fear of having nothing to read. Maybe there is something to it. I spent a year travelling in my mid-twenties and did suffer from book deprivation. There are only so many books you can carry and travelling seems to involve a lot of sitting and not doing anything, so a lot of reading can go on. When travellers get together it is easy to spot the readers because they will quickly steer the conversation round to books and then the swapping will go on. A bit like when someone is trying to suss out if someone is a Christian, and there are code word said that reveal all!

But then I got to wonder why I have decided now to set about sorting this pile. Why have I decided now is the time to finish things that have been started a few months ago. Some were started in January. It is because there is another season change in the air. Actually it is possible to feel it in the air. Autumn is coming. The weather is getting cooler. The chances of long hot days are over; not that this is often a facet of a British summer. It is cool in the morning when I take the dog out. It is cool of an evening now. Things are changing. It is time to look to the new “year”.

Actually I often think it would make so much more sense for our year to start in September. This is when everyone goes back to school, college or university. The time of studying commences from the beginning of September onwards. The Jewish New Year is towards the end of September. The end of August/start of September is a good time to reflect and ponder because there is space to do it. Having new year straight after Christmas takes away that time of being able to reflect and ponder because the preparations for Christmas are so manic, and the space between Christmas and New Year is filled with “have tos”.

Perhaps too this year I want to get my house in order for the big change that is coming. Perhaps I want to finish things to be ready for the new. In 5 weeks time Tabitha leaves to go to university. Apart from weeks away, either her or I, she has always been about. The longest I’ve not been in contact with her has been about a week, and now we are often texting during that time. I know we will be able to text and phone when she is at university, but I won’t have to think of her washing, her going to work, of making sure there aren’t too many things in the evening meal that she doesn’t like, not having to think of picking up or dropping her off – at least not until it comes time for her to want

http://www.dailypainters.com

to come back home. It is going to be very odd.

Maybe this is the reason I need to finish what is beside my bed, go through all those half read and unread books, clear out and sort out a bit, to be prepared for this season change, to have a look at life and be ready for whatever this new season will bring?

Internet Dependency

 We have been without the internet for 3 weeks. We have been able to get emails on our Smart phones and check facebook, when needed, but it isn’t the same. Tabitha and I did do a couple of trips to a local cafe to get some internet time (see previous post) but it isn’t the same. She realised how much she dips in and out of internetting and actually isn’t on it continuously like she thought. That was interesting for both of us to learn.

For me it’s been things like not being able to blog, not being able to just quickly check train times, do long emails to friends, and as with Tabitha it has been that whole thing of being able to dip in and out. I even had trouble with a document I was compiling for a history module I am doing over this summer because I couldn’t quite remember exact dates and normally would have had a quick google. And things like shopping, I have realised how much I buy on the internet, or at least google to see if I want it. And even things like changing the dog’s diet has been a pain because I can’t just google what I am meant to be doing so had to read a book about it!!!

It has astonished me how dependent at least Tabitha and I are. Also there has been the TV. We decided ages ago that we would not have regular TV but use iplayer and Netflix to view so that we have to think about what we are going to watch. We don’t watch that much TV but it has amazed me how much I use rubbish TV, that I choose to watch, as downtime. The other night I realised I would have stayed up and chatted with Ian if there’d been some mindless quiz programme we could have watched at the same time. We were both tired and it would have given us something  focus on.

We have become a nation of internet user and this has made me realise how much of one I am. At least normal blogging can now be resumed 🙂 (I have lots in my head so it will come out very soon)

Did Jesus marry Mary Magdalene?

(No pictures today as it all seems crazy and I’m blogging from a cafe so it could be their internet to fault?)

Or should that be – do I care? I picked up, what looked like being a gentle romance with some intrigue and action in it to take on holiday with me, but it turned out to be another of those “Jesus and Mary Magdalene got married and had children” books, with secret documents to be found, descendants of the pair coming together, etc, etc. It was a poor version of The DaVinci Code and Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth.

But maybe it’s where I’m coming from at the moment, doing my dissertation on anti-Catholicism, which makes me see a slightly more sinister side. These books are blatantly anti-Catholic. The descendants of the Jesus/Magdalene pairing are always the ones who know what true love really are and are persecuted for it, and always the persecutors are the Catholic Church. I know that the Catholic Church did murder the Cathars, did awful things during the Inquisition; the list can be very long. But these books always show the sinister Catholic of the present just waiting to get the book/document/code and destroy it so that “the truth never comes out.”

Is the modern Catholic Church really like this? Or is it the things in fiction that perpetuate this view so that when we see something about scandal we automatically believe it to be true because this is where our subconscious sends us?

In every organisation there will be those who are in it for their own ends, whether the Catholic Church, Anglican Church, Banking system, Parliament, Schools, etc, but do we see all of them as evil and not want to be involved with them? No in each, even with banking, we keep on working with what is there and trying to make the best of a bad bunch. As Phillip Jenkins says “Anti-Catholicsm is the last accepted prejudice”. And maybe he is right?