Wide Horizons

Tasting Life

2011-12-30T10:48:00.001Z

In this book I offer ways of reflecting on some Lenten themes - drawing closer to God, discovering more about ourselves, understanding how God might be encouraging us to move forward in our lives. There's a reflection for each day of Lent. Starting with a light-hearted news item, each day's thought then leads into a comment on one of the weekly themes – Choosing, Living, Longing, Loving, Growing. Each brief thought ends with suggestions for personal reflection under the headings Rejoice, Reflect, Remember, Resolve. I hope the cumulative effect of these reflections will lead us into savouring life's riches even more fully.

Click here for a sample day's material. For more information, visit www.tasting-life.co.uk

The book costs £9.99 including postage. The daily thoughts are also available on a 2 CD set priced at £19.99. To purchase using either PayPal or any of the cards pictured,click on the buy now button below.

Caring Together

2011-12-29T18:17:00.000Z

My latest book is a guide for groups of people who want to share their experience of caring. If you are a carer, or if you are caring regularly for someone - a family member, friend, neighbour or fellow church member - then, you'll find in the book material to help you reflect on the process.

The book's best used by a group but if there isn't one near you and you're not in a position to get one going, or ask someone else, perhaps from your church to do so, then there's plenty in the book for you to think about on your own.

I've also put together a website which provides additional material and explains in more detail what's in the book. It's www.caring-together.com. Or you can see a sample session and buy the book here.

Welcome

2011-10-17T09:46:00.012+01:00

Here you'll find information about my publications. Some of them have their own website and more information is available there. I hope you'll find something that appeals to you.

The Silence of Christ

2011-04-27T15:09:00.000+01:00

In the Revelation to St John the Divine, the crucified Jesus, the Lamb that was slain, removes each of six seals from a scroll. Finally, when the seventh seal is opened, symbolic of the end of all things, there is silence in heaven. There was silence too at the beginning of all things. In those timeless, space-less moments before the Big Bang, there was eternal stillness. Our beginning and our end is silence.

Silence is important to us. For example, without the spaces between words, language would become an indecipherable jumble. It’s the infinitesimal silences our brains automatically insert between words which gives them sense. The silences give the words meaning.

For Jesus on the cross, it was the other way round. It was his words which gave his silence meaning. According to Mark and Matthew, Jesus was on the cross for 6 hours and in all that time spoke only four Aramaic words, words of desolation and despair, why have you forsaken me? Luke and John of course inherited and passed on other traditions about what Jesus said on the cross but even with them, there’s no doubt he was predominantly silent. It’s the few words he did speak that help us discern the meaning of Christ’s profound quietness.

Some silences speak for themselves. As someone fortunate enough to do my working with words in a study overlooking the sea, I know what R.S.Thomas means when he starts one of his poems:

I look up from my book,
From the unreality of language,
And stare at the sea’s surface
That says nothing and means it.

Words do sometimes feel unreal or at least superficial, no more than skin-deep. But the sea, as with many other natural phenomena, though it says nothing, draws us in to the wonder of its reality, deep, as the psalmist puts it, calling to deep. In the same way, the silence of Jesus calls to us, invites us in, beckons to us. It speaks to us of his reality and bids us become part of it.

There’s a story about Mahatma Ghandi that shows how silence can do that. During his visit to London in 1931, he wanted to meet Mary Hughes, a social worker in the city’s East End. The only day they were both free was the day of the week Ghandi always kept silence. But the two met and without a word passing between them, they each felt drawn into the other’s silence sufficiently to go away refreshed and inspired by the exchange, perhaps more so than words could have achieved.

Of course Christ’s silence was not of that sort. Part of it would have been because the sheer exhaustion of dealing with such pain left him with no energy to speak. He must have been totally absorbed in his own struggle. Though the other gospel writers tell us of Jesus’ ability to think of his mother, Mary, and the penitent thief, the picture we get from Mark and Matthew is of Jesus silently coping with his own physical agony and emotional anguish as he feels God has deserted him. It’s not actually a silence into which anyone would want to be drawn unthinkingly but as Christians down the ages have testified, on this day in particular, when we respond to the invitation to allow our silence to be drawn into his, we meet him at a depth deeper than words can fathom.

Perhaps that’s because our silence is often of a similar sort. Most of us have griefs about which we don’t speak: pain from years ago that’s too old to refer to aloud but which is often in our minds, pain which is too personal for anyone else to be told about, pain we daren’t put into words in case it makes it more painful, pain because of something we wish wasn’t true and speaking it might seem to make it so. Christ’s desperate silence on the cross reaches out to our speechless depths and in the meeting, we feel known and understood.

In a way too we can feel release. It’s true that according to Mark, Christ only spoke four words. But that wasn’t the only sound he made. Just before he died, he gave a loud cry. It’s almost too painful to imagine the sound of it as it shattered his long silence, a cry possibly of anguish and torment, maybe of sorrow and anger, perhaps of release and completion. Luke alone of the gospel writers gives words to this cry: Father into your hands I commend my spirit.

If we have entered Christ’s silence with our own, perhaps we could allow that loud cry of Jesus to be a cry for us, a cry which takes our pent-up suffering, our distressing secrets, our fear of letting out our pain, a cry which picks up the silent suffering of the poor and the oppressed from generation to generation, a cry which as it echoes round the universe puts the world’s pain and ours into God’s hands.

Perhaps that was the moment when there was silence in heaven: a silence no longer of despair and desolation but one of trust and of hope. In such silence is our beginning and our end.

The Heart of Christ

2011-04-27T15:04:00.003+01:00

“Take my mother home with you” says Jesus to John. What an effort of will it must have taken to think of her needs when his own were so profound. No doubt he too would have been happy had he been able in that moment to go home. He hadn’t had a proper home for years. He’d sacrificed for the sake of his ministry that safety, that intimacy, that space to just be yourself, which home symbolises and at its best makes possible. And now in his final agony he must have wished it would all end and he could have that peace.

Most of us will have experienced times of stress when all we’ve wanted is for it to end and for us to get back to the safety and comfort of home, of life’s familiar pattern. Exhausted and anxious, we’ve felt too weak to see it through. A breathing space would be nice but better still a magical ending to the pain and a return to the kind of welcoming embrace our mothers might have given us with a reassuring ‘there, there’. Perhaps the nearest Christ got to that on the cross were the words of the penitent thief, a stranger who against the backdrop of the cat calls from the crowd and Jesus’ internal struggle, offered recognition of who he was and what he was going through: Remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Of course it isn’t only when we’re under pressure that we need to feel we belong and are loved. It may well not be a particular place, more likely it’s a particular person or group of people who make us feel that we matter and that kind of acceptance is crucial in the whole process of discovering and believing in ourselves. In the Hindu tradition, it’s said that the child in the womb sings: Do not let me forget who I am. But the song after birth becomes: I have forgotten already. Particularly in contemporary society we need constantly to be checking we know who we are and often it’s in coming to the place or person we experience as home that we remember.

Christian spirituality invites is to find our home In Jesus. “Rock of ages, cleft for me let me hide myself in thee”, “Jesus lover of my soul , let me to thy bosom fly”, “Jesus grant me this I pray, ever in thy heart to stay”: just some of the hymns which remind us that the heart of Jesus offers us refuge from life’s storms. That’s a poetic way of speaking of course but the belief’s based on the profound historical truth that it wasn’t only in his life that Jesus opened his heart to embrace people. Of the words that were added later to the tradition of what Jesus said on the cross and which are recorded by Luke and John, three of them show Jesus opening his heart, to his mother Mary, to the penitent thief and to all those who contributed to his dying, Father forgive them. As Jesus’ physical heart struggled to continue beating, his compassionate heart continued to hold others’ needs in its embrace.

So in a moment if we respond to the invitation to come forward to the Cross in an act of devotion, we’ll be coming home. Coming to that place where we know we’ll be safe, held and loved. Coming to that place where we are most truly ourselves. What G.K.Chesterton said about art, is even more profoundly true of the cross: 'We have forgotten who and what we are. But here we remember what we have forgotten'.

Finding our home in Christ leads us to want to offer a home to others. The Persian Poet Rumi uses the same image of hospitality and welcome when describing a human being who is most truly human:

"This being human is a guest house. A joy, a depression, a meanness...comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all, even if they're a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in."

What he’s describing is someone who’s open to receive all that each day brings. Sometimes that’s an awareness of inner defects – our meanness, shame, joylessness– but we can accept these failings when we feel safe within the heart of Christ. Sometimes these visitors who seek entrance to our lives are other people, people who bring with them dark thoughts, a crowd of sorrows.

The welcoming heart of Jesus embraces all who seek entry, he invites in the sorrows of the world, all its deceit and malice, and so devastating is it that, on the cross, in the imagery of Rumi’s poem, it empties his heart of its furniture. Yet it’s a heart like that that we’ll develop once we allow ourselves to find our home in the heart of Christ. Then we too become people with big hearts, welcoming hearts, we become people who do not fear, even in the middle of our own difficulties and at the risk of ourselves being emptied, to open ourselves in love to the pain of others.

The Gaze of Christ

2011-04-27T13:05:00.014+01:00

Those who’d followed Jesus from Galilee didn’t want to leave. The spectacle being over, everyone else went. But they remained, watching. The face they now looked at, though, was lifeless, the gaze a blank. How different from the attentive, loving gaze they’d come to know so well. What a contrast this bloody death mask was to the life-giving, healing look Jesus had so often given people.

Valentine Dikhoul was a circus performer who fell from a trapeze and broke his back. In his wheelchair he began experimenting on himself with various exercises, gadgets and electrotherapies. Eight years later he was back in the circus ring…but not fulltime because he was also starting the Dikhoul Rehabilitation Centre in Moscow. Here the techniques that had led to his own healing were offered, with extraordinary success, to other paraplegics.

I mention this today though because of one part of the technique he developed he couldn’t practise on himself. Whenever a therapist at the Centre worked with a patient, they maintained as near to constant eye contact with them as possible, ‘as if infusing them’, one of them said, ‘with willpower’. This was especially true when the moment came to try and take that first step. The powerfully built Mr Dikhoul would sit in front of the patient’s wheelchair, hold their hips and engage their eyes. It was that gaze which many afterwards said had enabled them to take that first cautious step.

Jesus’s look too was part of the process by which he brought people wholeness. It was the same look, we may imagine, that God gave each different aspect of creation as one by one he looked at them and saw they were good. People didn’t need to be ill to benefit from contact with Jesus. As his gaze searched the depths in people’s lives, they found new riches in themselves they hadn’t seen before. As T.S.Eliot puts it in relation to roses, they ‘had the look of flowers that are looked at’.

St John of the Cross wanted to emphasise that this gaze follows each of us all the time. ‘God’s gaze’, he wrote, ’works four blessings in the soul: it cleanses the person, makes her beautiful, enriches and enlightens her’. We all of us live all the time within the range of Christ’s loving, longing look. We may not always know it even though we may get an occasional reminder, like when in a restaurant you suddenly realise someone is looking at you.

This was the look those friends of Jesus perhaps mourned as they looked at his now lifeless face. They thought it was gone forever, though in fact in only a few more days they’d be bathed in it again. Maybe though, it wasn’t so much a look from the past they struggled to imprint on their minds for future recall but a more recent one, a look from the cross, from the midst of his suffering, Perhaps even in the midst of his own struggles to breathe, to bear the pain, he gave them one last longing look. If so, I suspect that look would have had a different, even more profound quality.

Back in 1994, the television dramatist Dennis Potter was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg. He was dying of cancer and he spoke of how imminent death helped him see everything much more vividly. ‘The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous,’ he said. And of the blossom on a plum tree in his garden he said, ‘instead of saying: Oh that’s nice blossom, I see it as the whitest, frothiest, blossomist blossom there ever could be.’ Imminent death brought everything into a new focus, he looked with a new and deeper perception.

Jesus on the cross was about to end his human life. Perhaps he too, though his pain was not controlled as Potter’s was, saw what he was leaving behind more vividly. Maybe he looked at those he loved even more dearly. If so, there’s no reason to think that that intensity of gaze, even more profound than that during the rest of his earthly life, isn’t the look he gives each of us now in his risen life. It’s a gaze which embraces the nowness of everything about us and celebrates how wondrous we are.

As we came forward to the cross just now in an act of devotion, one of the things we might have imagined was that the one on the cross centuries ago might still look at us, and look with love, mercy and wonder. He does do that. We live all the time under the eyes of one who loves us with a passion and delights in who we are. His dying symbolises the intensity of that love and seems somehow to deepen the quality of his gaze. One reason he died was that people wouldn’t believe him when he said they were loved without having to deserve it. Today we say boldly that we know we are. And we delight today in the beauty Christ’s gaze both celebrates and elicits.

Tasting Life

2010-02-03T10:58:00.016Z

In this book I offer ways of reflecting on some Lenten themes - drawing closer to God, discovering more about ourselves, understanding how God might be encouraging us to move forward in our lives. There's a reflection for each day of Lent. Starting with a light-hearted news item, each day's thought then leads into a comment on one of the weekly themes – Choosing, Living, Longing, Loving, Growing. Each brief thought ends with suggestions for personal reflection under the headings Rejoice, Reflect, Remember, Resolve. I hope the cumulative effect of these reflections will lead us into savouring life's riches even more fully.

Click here for a sample day's material.

The book costs £9.99 including postage. To purchase using either PayPal or any of the cards pictured,click on the buy now button below.

The Heart of Christmas

2009-10-14T21:36:00.007+01:00

This little book offers ways of reflecting on the meaning of Christmas for our daily lives. There's a topic for each day of Advent with suggestions for how to use any time of quiet reflection you can grab from the busyness of this time of year.

The book costs £8.99 including postage. To purchase, using either PayPal or one of the other cards pictured, click on the Buy Now button below.

A sample day's reflection from "Tasting Life"

2009-08-27T09:04:00.014+01:00

Ash Wednesday

The annual professional food photographers’ international competition is a feast for the eyes. In a photograph of anchovies swimming in champagne, you can almost feel the fizz in your mouth as each bubble sparkles. It competes with one of mussels lit up in a heavenly haze. Jean-Louis Bloch-Laine, France's leading food photographer, says “culinary photography is no longer there simply to show what the meal should look like but to whet the appetite, to transport the taste into the mind.”

That’s just as true of presenting a meal as it is of photographing it. Any chef or cook wants to create a meal that looks as well as tastes good. But visual gorgeousness isn’t enough. A meal which is presented with every attention to aesthetic detail yet tastes indifferent leaves the diner unsatisfied. Ancient wisdom remains valid – the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

During Lent, Christians remember Jesus going into the desert. He wanted time to review the various ingredients that might make up his life and decide what God wanted him to create out of them. The wrestling and struggle he experienced there gave him integrity. What people saw in him reflected who he was inside.

Lent is a time for us to review what makes up our lives. The choices we make, how we live, love and grow, what we long for, are some of the ingredients. This book will encourage us in the coming days to savour again those things which make our lives taste good. But it’ll also remind us that what we serve up in our lives can’t just rely on the ingredients or good presentation. We want to create from what we’ve been given lives of integrity and depth, lives which give us, and offer others, a real taste of what’s good about living.

Read: O taste and see that the Lord is good. (Psalm 34.8)

Rejoice: that our lives present us with so many experiences to learn from.

Reflect: Is there anything about me that’s more show than substance?

Remember: that God understands my inner strivings and can help me make the best of them.

Resolve: to notice what’s going on inside me as well as how I feel on the surface.