St Non's Day 2nd March

near the ruins of St Non's chapel

Up on these cliffs, a woman gave birth alone in a storm. As a young woman she had entrusted herself to a community that somehow didn't manage to protect her from rape by a local wealthy and powerful visitor. Pregnant, she found herself excluded from the same community. During labour she leaned for support against a rock which bears her handprint to to this day, and although the storm raged, around her, a ray of sunshine comforted her. Where she gave birth, a spring appeared. Where humans let her down, God, through nature, responded to her with kindness.

the handprint stone?

The story of Non, a 'Celtic' Christian nun from Pembrokeshire, warns those of us who enjoy a 'Celtic' flavour to spirituality, away from romanticising the past. Non's son is David, who became patron saint of Wales. David is widely celebrated, his mother less so. But David became who he was through Non's single-parenting. When he reached a suitable age she had him admitted to a monastic school where he learned his faith. She then returned to her own vocation and returned to monastic life herself, travelling as far as Brittany to establish communities of her own.

St Non's chapel

 St Non is  celebrated in a stained glass window from the chapel at the site, the lower panel illustrating her journey to Brittany - with David. (Somehow, the romanticism has crept back in.)
Behind the figure of Non is what looks like a railway tunnel. This is the stonework built up around the spring which became her holy well.

 The housing of the spring is just large enough for a person to crouch inside, should they wish to. Pilgrims used to come here for healing, to douse themselves in the cold water. Many came not over the clifftops, but by boat, mooring at a nearby cove where the rocks are the colour of blood ... an earth reminder of birthing, of endurance and sacrifice that is characteristic of Non's life.

a possible mooring place for pilgrims near St Non's holy well

I see in St Non, the story of a woman who defined her identity not by her suffering, but her sense of  self-worth as a person in relationship with God, despite everything life - and other people - threw at her. Because of this, somehow, she seems to have worked some alchemy with all the pain and betrayal she must surely have experienced, to become someone capable of leading and inspiring others - or you might say God worked the alchemy in her. Her story is important, we need to know that she suffered, as many suffer today, but we also need to know that her life experiences did not destroy her. In her own life she experienced renewal. That gives me hope that the same can be true today, for the many who live through ordeals of their own.

ruins of the old chapel at St Non's

WHO DO YOU SAY THAT I AM? an 'attractive and challenging' Lent book

ripening grain, Northumbria, looking over towards Holy Island

I was very pleased to be asked to write a Lent book for 2014 by Kevin Mayhew. I decided almost immediately to anchor it on Mark's Gospel, which was the first gospel to be written and which portrays a very 'human' Jesus in a very real context. I wanted to open up some of the clues  to his real-life situation hidden in the text, at the same time expressing something of my perspective on him: a rather 'shamanic' Rabbi living at a very troubled time, who communed with the Divine alone at night on the hillsides or in the wilderness, and who talked often about the countryside he and his followers walked through, to illustrate his wisdom. I especially wanted to emphasise the women's voices in that walk from Galilee to Jerusalem, and to bring out Jesus's use of the grain cycle in his teaching, with respect to his own life, death and rising. We tend to associate Jesus's death with the lambs sacrificed at Passover time, but forget that Passover was and is also an agricultural festival of the Mediterranean spring barley harvest. The fields would have been full of ripening grain, soon to be reaped, as they made their way south.

I was also very pleased that the Church Times recently published a great review of 'Who do you say that I am?':

'Who Do You Say That I Am? is a sustained exploration of the identity of Jesus, largely based on daily passages from Mark. It particularly draws on the social geography of the Bible, sets Jesus in the context of contemporary Jewish teachers, and draws attention to less prominent actors in history, among them women. 
The author's comments are attractive and challenging, and quite often move away from the text into areas for wider reflection. Each day, Annie Heppenstall also supplies a short monologue in the voice of one of Jesus's followers. This offers an imaginative alternative in a more Ignatian register, as with Jesus's mother to Peter: "I've given up wishing he might build a home and get a job, so you offering to make him a shelter and expecting him to be grateful - don't you know him yet?" 
With its optional extra Bible reading this would not be a lightweight choice, but it would certainly reward those who follow its journey - with periodic diversions - towards Jerusalem.'
Philip Welsh, Church Times

So, if you haven't got your guide-book for Lent yet, want to get one for a friend, have never used Lent as a time to reflect on Jesus and the Easter story before, or see yourself as outside of Christianity but interested in a 'different' and earth-spirituality-friendly perspective, here is an 'insightful and enriching' (as the blurb says) opportunity to explore Lent 'as never before.' It's available widely on the internet, the publisher's link is here.

somewhere near Bishop's Castle (it's me!)

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
John 12:24 NRSV

snow and ice

setting sun near river Cole

We are approaching what is, as a friend reminded me, on average, the coldest day of the year. As a family, we have also just celebrated my son's 18th birthday. The first time I remember taking him out, as a new baby, was a walk in the snow, all that time ago. I carried him in a sling and walked so, so carefully, down to the park behind our house.We haven't had any snow yet this year, and I haven't really missed it, but all the same, looking back over my photo collection, the snowy ones do have a certain magic.

frozen bucket of water with leaf

There's an old rune poem written in Anglo Saxon, that describes the ice:

Ice is so cold!  immeasurably slippery,
it glistens like glass, a precious jewel,
a floor wrought of frost, beautiful to behold.
 (my own loose translation)


Frost has a capacity for bringing out the jewel-like, helping us see differently, so we notice things that would otherwise be unremarkable:

such as dead cow parseley heads ...












A spider's web ...

an ivy flowerhead ...


so many intricate details.







As it happens, my nostalgic scroll through eighteen years of winter photos is timely. Tomorrow I am welcoming a group of students to our home and sharing something with them of living appreciatively amongst a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood. I'm going to share a little, as part of my presentation, about the 99 beautiful names of God (which I have blogged about previously in 99 Beautiful Names ...). One of my long-time favourites is 'Ya Musawwir', Oh Fashioner of Intricate Details ...' Through meditation on the name we are inspired to marvel at the intricacy of patterns,

A spiral of blackthorn

 the wonder of colours,

 the detail, the fascinating beauty all around us.











Ya Musawwir calls for us to stop and notice how incredible the natural world is. Stopping to notice the beauty is one of the 'meanings' of Isa, the Ice rune of the poem above. it's one of the things I've often found myself doing, in 18 years of bringing up a young person to adulthood. Isa is sometimes interpreted as a frustrating rune of standstill, as the ice makes travel difficult - and how we all want ot keep rushing about! But life is so fast paced these days - it's interesting that it's still nature, be it snow or carrying a precious new babe out into the world for the first time, that slows us down to stop in awe every now and then.

'When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, 
the moon and the stars that you have established,
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?'
Psalm 8:3-4

The Name of Jesus

page from Lindisfarne Gospels showing Anglo Saxon translation

An exploration into Anglo Saxon over the last few years, revealed a surprising little gem: the name of Jesus got translated by meaning rather than by an approximation of phonetic values. So instead of something that sounds a bit like 'Jesu' or 'Yesou' or 'Yeshua' or 'Joshua', as we get so often in translations around the world, Anglo Saxon departs completely from trying to replicate the sound, and gives 'Haeland'. (The 'a' and 'e' should be stuck together in a dipthong pronounced 'a' as in 'cat' but I can't work out how to do that on this blog site). Haeland means healer and thus rescuer from harm, a save-er in the sense that a firefighter, a surgeon or a lifeguard might be seen as a save-er. In the Gospels, Jesus is normally described doing such 'middle-earth' works, although the accounts may take on a metaphorical spiritual dimension for the reader, such as when Peter tries to walk on water, sinks, and cries out 'save me!'. (Matthew 14:30)

The Harrowing of Hell from the Melisende Psalter

For some with a concern for spiritual affairs beyong this middle-earth as Anglo Saxons called it, the concept of save-er, one who saves another from harm, becomes saviour, with a more spiritual connotation of survival in a blessed state beyond this life. The Christian concept of 'salvation' emerges gradually, it is not fully formed in the writings of the New Testament and has different emphasis in different periods of church history. In Anglo Saxon Christian literature, for example, we find an account of Christ's harrowing of hell: he courageously rescues departed souls by fetching them out of their shadow-world of joylessness and bringing them to heaven.

Haeland is a statement of belief: Jesus exists in these Anglo Saxon translations as 'the one who heals-saves'. This is close to how Jesus's own Jewish contemporaries would have encountered the meaning of his name, but not quite the same. The name of Jesus in Hebrew was at the time a common name and made up of Yah and shua. Yah is a shortened form of the holy name that was not to be spoken, (Exodus 3:14) and refers to God as revealed to Abraham, Hagar, Moses, Miriam and other ancient founders of the faith: God Most High, God who made heaven and earth. Shua means something very like the healing, helping work of Haeland. 'God is our help', or 'God rescues', or 'God saves', are possible translations. Jesus's name is a statement about God - the God Jesus asked people to devote themselves to. The Anglo Saxon translator works a subtle sleight of hand and attributes all helping work to Jesus himself, not the Deity of Hebrew scripture. Some might say these are one and the same entity, but many would argue that it's more complicated than that.

We are often unwitting hostages to the interpretations of translators.This brings me to an interesting book I read recently, 'A Native American Theology', by Clara Kidwell, Homer Noley and George 'Tink' Tinker. The authors talk about a passage that has been used oppressively by white colonisers, to frighten indigenous people into thinking they have no option but to convert. The passage in question is one quoted quite recently to me by an evangelically minded friend, as the reason why, in all conscience, he finds it very difficult to make room for other faiths. I wondered whether he had read the whole passage in the original Greek at all, as it makes a difference. Here's an English translation of the key verses:

let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth ... There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.’ 
Acts 4:10-12 NRSV

Fragment of Greek papyrus

That sounds pretty authoritative, doesn't it.  But the Greek word sozo, here rendered 'salvation' and 'saved', is in the same episode, which involves a man's lame leg being healed, understood to mean physical healing, restoration to wholeness. Suddenly the translator jumps from bodily wellbeing to spiritual salvation, with, it seems, little justification except that he or she is reading back into the text a theology of Christian salvation that was not fully developed at that time. So first, this is primarily an account about a healing controversy and a dispute about the fact that it happened on a Sabbath day. 'Yes but it's still the name of Jesus that effects the cure,' you might say. It's still 'by no other name ...' Well, OK, but what does the name of Jesus mean? As I said above, it points to God. It means 'God saves / helps / rescues.' Depending on your outlook, that may or may not be Jesus, and to many but not all Christians that's exactly what it does mean -  but it does take the wind out of the sails a bit. The passage becomes less oppressive, easier for a person of another faith or spiritual path to find room for manoeuvre. As the authors of A Native American Theology put it,

'So it has always been in our ceremonies and among our healing specialists since time immemorial. The power to heal always comes from the spiritual energy of Wakonda, even when particular individuals have been identified as the vehicles through whom certain kinds of healing or help can be facilitated. Yet the missionaries have used this story to proclaim to us a self-serving untruth, that God has only spoken to them and only communicated through Jesus.'
p.75

I know a lot of Christians do hold onto this passage is Acts 4:10-12 as a reason for exclusivism - even the ground of their faith, and I appreciate I will press buttons by flagging it up as a misleading, even oppressive text, in the way it is usually interpreted. But it's a wobbly rock to stand on as a foundation for faith. The text is not as clear as translators would like us to believe and indigenous peoples are not alone in having been persuaded out of fear, rather than making a choice based on love and personal calling. Personally, and it's been said many times before, I think it's time for Christians to look again at the history of colonialism, conquest and coercive conversion in the name of Jesus and look again at texts like this, and just pause, just listen to what is really being said, what following Jesus is really about, and what we really mean, how we can  say what we mean without any violence. I don't think most Christians wish to be oppressive or oppressed, but sometimes it happens anyway.

(the photos in this post are of pages in my 'Bible Manuscripts' British Library address book with thanks)

Winter Solstice

Solstice 2010, labyrinth by Annie, Ray and Luke

I always try to mark the Winter Solstice somehow. The other year ( and I mention 2010 rather than other years because I've got photos!), unable to get the the event I'd planned, we decided to look for the creative potential in the snow that had stopped us travelling, rather than the obstacle it had presented, and went to the local playing field to map out a labyrinth.

me at the centre of the solstice labyrinth

I am drawn to labyrinths, the journey inwards, the pause at the still centre, the journey outwards, inner world, outer world ...

There was a stillness, a sense of slowing down or standstill that year; nobody was going anywhere much because of the weather - or at least not without great difficulty - an 'Isa' or Ice-time perhaps, for the Rune-lovers among us.

This year was different. I was very aware in the days preceding the 21st December, of the dominance of the night, as I spent each day around twilight and first darkness on the motorway, driving to and then heading home from visiting my Mum who is in hospital.  The first night it was just dark and blustery, but I was relieved she'd been admitted, and the moon was full.

full moon near Stokesay 2013

Clouds unvelied the moon at intervals, reminding me of her quiet companionship, and all seemed hopeful. The next night, Mum's condition was troubling me greatly. A storm whipped up, rain slashed at my tiny car and huge lorries thundered past like monsters, splattering my windscreen. I felt alone, vulnerable, sad, afraid; tears welled up and made visibility even worse. The words of a verse from a psalm became my mantra, chanted over and over:
 'Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me, for in you my soul takes refuge.
I will hide under the shadow of your wings until the destroying storms pass by.'
Psalm 57:1

It's a verse I  have been wearing in a capsule round my neck ever since our visit to Glastonbury during the October storm. I love the image of hiding under Divine wings. It's a post waiting to be written another time, and the inspiration for  my'healing book' title, 'Hiding in God', and part of its contents.

It seems I'm in the middle of a storm at present. I felt reassured by the one in October because we personally were hardly troubled by it, despite the fact that we were camping in a field. Somehow it passed us by with little more than a teasing rock of the campervan. The next morning, the sky was the brilliant blue of perfect clarity.

Chalice well blackbird

Yesterday, the day of the solstice, I pulled into the hospital car park as robins and blackbirds put their hearts into the closing songs of the day, from the nature reserve right next to the car park. I watched through windows as the light gradually diminished, pleasantly pinkish. A large part of me yearned to be outdoors in the cold fresh air, surrounded by the comfort of trees. But no, indoors was where I needed to be: outer world, inner world, outdoors, indoors, there are labarynthine times for both. The corridors and stairwells of the hospital are the pathways inwards to the safe refuge where Mum is being nursed. We wait to hear when she will emerge.

Driving home in full darkness, watching the solstice minutes, 5.17, 5.18, 5.19pm pass by on the car clock, I was accutely aware of journey. Cyclical journey, life journey. I could see the ring on my finger - a yin yang symbol, which I put on specially that morning. Change comes like the moon in the deep darkness of night. It's not been an easy solstice, nor the most well-planned for, but it's been a significant one.

 a raindrop, Meanwood park

Spiritual Ancestors and Advent

I've been thinking lately about ancestors. It's something that came to mind partly through OBOD reading and reflecting that I've been doing as part of my exploration into earth spiritualities. Both the liturgical year and many following an earth spirituality path spend the days at the end of October and the start of November thinking about those who have gone before us, our own departed loved ones, and people special to our own traditions. It is a time where many take time to pause and remember, and many feel a 'thinniess', a closeness to a spiritual dimension beyond our own, free of the limitations of time and place. The church honours this time with All Hallows eve (Halloween), All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day. For others, Samhain (on Halloween) provides the focus. For the church, this comes before a period of further reflection on ancestors in the lead up to Christmas, which we are in at the moment - Advent.

sorry don't know who artist is

Thinking about ancestors led me to my own family tree, which Dad researched comprehensively on the Heppenstall side: a line of brick-makers, iron foundary workers, railway plate-layers and other labourers of the industrial revolution, living often in poverty, faced with tragically high infant mortality, supported it seem, by a faithfulness to Wesleyan Methodism. It led me right back to the beginnings of humanity itself, a fascination with ancient civilisations, and peoples living before any cities were ever built or farms farmed ...
It led me to our even older shared genetic material with other creatures ... fish even ...  And it led me back to the stories I love of Celtic saints. Hopefully some of the Celtic saints ideas will process themselves into the chapter of a book. But, as Advent reminds us, there's also the ancestors we've adopted (unless we are of Jewish heritage and upbringing), if we follow the Jesus path - the ancestors of the Abrahamic faith described in th Bible.

I found myself going back to something I wrote a while back:

One of the things I love about the Bible is how full it is of human beings like us, who struggle to understand life in relationship with one another and with God. A gread deal of the time, like us, they get in a mess. These people are our spiritual ancestors. Like us, many of them find themselves feeling threatened, hurt or ashamed, and their response is often to run away and hide - from human beings and from God. But there is a repeating theme in the Bible: when people go into hiding, God seeks them out, not to destroy them because of what they have done, but to bring them back into the fullness of life...
God knows their hearts and reaches them through dream, through strange natural phenomena, through angels and other people, through Jesus himself. I think there is a vital message of grace for us to draw hope from: God does not give up on us, whatever misfortune has happened to us, even when we are inclined to give up on God.
(an extract from 'Rejoice with me!: hope for lost sheep' by me, p.28)

Whatever challenges I am facing, there have been people before me, whether in my family or in the big picture of my faith or the bigger picture of humanity, who have faced something comparable - or something worse - but whose struggle with it has entered into the whole struggle of what it is to be a human being at all, trying to survive, to allow another generation to survive, to live as much as possible, given the constraints, with integrity. There's a sense of companionship in this which has surprised me, a sense of continuity and connection with the past, and the people of the past who shaped the world and our own identities today. 

There's a line in the Apostles' Creed, which has come alive for me lately - 'the communion of the saints'. Most people whose stories have been handed down to us, are not 'saints' in the normal understanding of the word, any more than we are,  but their whole endeavour to just keep going day by day, is enough. There's been a great deal of suffering, we've caused a great deal of suffering, some of those in the past in their inability to see the future have caused us a great deal of suffering today, but looking back and looking around too, something about the dignity of just being human still shines through - sometimes it seems against all odds. I live in hope that it's the dignity that will win through to give us a future.

rainbow near Whitby Abbey

Mother Earth Father Sky

chapel within a small and old church in Exmoor

I confess I haven't been to church all that much in the last six months since Dad died. I have been finding the 'Father God' language of liturgy and many well-meaning believers' vocabulary a real obstacle: muddling up paternal mortality with the eternal divine just wasn't working for me at all. I've never been all that comfortable with it anyway. Whenever I heard 'our Father,' I couldn't get past the fact: 'my father is dead.' It all felt quite Nietzche-esque, and existentially unhelpful.
In that time, a time where of course my Mum's needs came into sharp relief, and my relationship with her changed and perhaps deepened, the divine feminine became more real and more important to me; often it seemed as though a loving presence was saying, 'Don't give up on me, I can be Mother as well, I can be whatever allows you to relate to me in love...' I've described some of my journeying deeper into the Feminine Divine in other blogs, such as Rock Mother and St Non's Holy Well. Although often hard work, this has been an enriching time that has allowed me to listen to and engage warmly with, and felt ministered to, by the spiritual journeys and wisdom of others, especially of an earth-spirituality inclination - Pagan.  I was, or so it seemed to me, finding 'Christ in friend and stranger' at a time when I was struggling to find the consolation I needed to hear from some of the sources I might have expected to find it. Here is a verse from the well-known prayer of St Patrick, the Lorica:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

But today Ray was preaching and presiding in an Anglican church not far from home, so I went with him very readily, sure of a good sermon and a sensitively offered liturgy. As usual we arrived early so he could get ready, and I picked a pew with a view, beneath a radiator.
Even though it's not a church I often visit, I had a strong feeling of having returned home after a long journey. The question quickly came into my mind, 'How might this place look, not through eyes brought up in the Christian tradition, but through eyes more used to an earth spirituality outlook?' I looked around.
Such a one might, for example, hope to find animal guides or totems. Why yes, a dove, at the highest point of the stained glass window above the altar; a glorious eagle in flight for a lecturn. I couldn't see a lamb, but there could have been one, or a lion - or both - or  if it had been a much older church, a whole host of different creatures carved in woodwork and stone, all with their special significance, from pelicans to panthers, hares to green men  (which I've also blogged about). Maybe the 'totem' in this place might be seen as a dove.

two angels from the church at Stokesay, Midlands - spot the dove

...

What about Spiritual guardians or Powers ? Well, there were Pre-Raphelite (I thought) paintings of beautiful humanoid beings with wonderful wings and auras of gold, communicating with people or watching over them, mediators of something beyond us ... 
What about the ancestors? Again, carvings and pictures of holy people from the stories of the Bible and the Christian tradition abound, and of course many respectful and loving memorials to the dead of the community over the years, their names all around us inviting remembrance ...
What about life itself and death? What else but the representation of a young man giving himself up to a terrible ordeal for the sake of  others ... death, as brutal as it can be, but holding a hope of something more, an empty tomb, a gleaming, empty cross, brass glowing in the candlelight.

And what about the Mother (not that I'm suggesting that the feminine is only 'divine' through materninty)? Well, to the right was a chapel with a permanent focus on the mother and child, and to the left, a banner on the other side of the church bearing the same icon and the heartening inscription of solidarity, 'Mothers' Union'. But what else about the Mother?  I cast around for more.

in a church at Bishop's Castle

As I looked about me, the red brick of the walls said 'earth baked in fire!' The pillars said 'tree trunk!' The wooden roof beams said 'tree branches!' Carvings of foliage, a vine on one of the altars, flowers surreptitiously away from display but still present (because it's Advent), a beautiful water feature at the door, the glow of many candles ... the all said 'Beautiful, elemental life in abundance!'

This interior is earth, and here we sit, being earthy, within this earthy chamber we have made to shelter us, surrounding ourselves with images of creation. Here is the Mother.
 In Hebrew, 'earth' is a feminine noun, eretz; in Greek, 'creation' is a feminine noun, ktisis, it's us, all that we are and know is of Her. So we come here, we of the Mother's body, to remind ourselves that way beyond us, earth had its awesome beginnings in the reeling infinity of the universe. We come to look beyond ourselves as well as within, to wonder, to be grateful for the sunrise, the astonishing - and continuous - way that heaven touches and warms and enlightens earth and our hearts and makes life possible. Rising Son for rising sun - for what direction is the church pointing to, with its altar and lovely coloured glass window? East, to greet the rising sun. What, indeed, are we waiting for in the time of Advent, that is not represented by the return of the sun's strength at the winter solstice, days before Christmas day? the term 'Sky Father' comes to mind. 

Sky and earth ... Shrophshire last summer

There's a quote attributed to God, in Jeremiah 23:24 - 'Do I not fill heaven and earth?'
This is no dull earth simply to be exploited and from which we should try to escape in order to attain the heavenly; it's a vibrant, amazing creation already infused with the Spirit and the Wisdom of the Divine - Great Spirit. A visually, symbolically rich church building such as the one I was sitting in proclaims this in its orientation, its architecture and ornament. God is not simply and unattainably 'up there', but here, around us - and mysteriously - within us, within the very fabric of our being ... and I haven't even bugun to touch on the mystery of the Eucharist ...  We don't have to divide up body and spirit, earthly and heavenly. God fills all, even us, even bread and wine. We don't need tiresome arguments about God's gender - God fills all, transcendent and immanent.

Somehow I feel more at peace than I have for a long time, I'm not fighting the language so much today. I can hear the words about the Father, because I can also sense the Mother all around; there is One. Yes, I'd like more acknowledgement of the Feminine Divine in Church; no, I'm not advocating nature worship, rather, nature respect, but in this place I feel that 'She' hasn't been banished. I don't feel quite so defensive on 'Her' part as I did yesterday or the day before, and interestingly, that's because I allowed myself to go exploring the places where 'She' is celebrated more directly, and came back to find Her valued in different - if unspoken - ways.
Blessed Be.

vine at Edgbaston Botanical garden