More than Writers

Image by sebastiano iervolino from Pixabay   I fled liturgy when I was young. Non-liturgical worship just seemed more sincere. Being inspired on the spot was surely better than droning words read off a page, and the mandatory church services of my upbringing seemed dull and flat compared to the more vibrant styles that came to attract me. I will grudgingly admit they could have been described as happy-clappy, though I drew the line at the more wavy-ravy direction that some of my more zealous friends went. Call it growing up, or healing, whatever, but I am increasingly coming back to it. (What can you call a medium-to-high Anglican church with processions and sung eucharist? Amble-candle?) Perhaps it’s just the editor in me wanting to interrupt one of those improvised prayer sessions that go for the world record of using the word “just”, and suggest that maybe they should write it down beforehand: it can still be Spirit-inspired, you know. It’s not just the aesth...

  He has many Names And the greatest of all is Love. Love came down at Christmas Love all lovely, love divine. Love, He is Love. Love incarnate Love clothed Him with human flesh. Love planned it before the beginning of time. Love humbled Himself and crept silently, yet powerfully, into a troubled world. Love challenged hatred, fear, shame and oppression. Love took a willing girl and grew within her. Love spoke to a troubled man and calmed him to obedience. Love drew shepherds in wonder and kings in worship. Love opened His arms wide and embraced a world yet to know Him, giving all of Himself. Love that was, and is and ever more will be. Love that saves, redeems, restores and sustains. Love that embraces us still, every day and into eternity. Love came down at Christmas. Wonderful Love, we embrace you, we bow in reverence before You, we worship You, we give ourselves to You. HAPPY CHRISTMAS, AND A BLESSED NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL!

One of the things I have been missing most during the lockdown and the ongoing restrictions is singing with my brothers and sisters in church services. There is something about corporate sung worship that I really love. Music and singing help me to draw close to God. I love to sing about my love for him, to worship him in that way. The right tune combined with the right words can be truly awesome! Worship, of course, is more than just singing. Worship is what we do with the whole of our lives. Everything we do, say and think should be an expression of our worship to God. But there is something special about sung worship – something powerful about gospel truths put to music. At an online prayer meeting last week, we read together the words of a well-known worship song. (Not quite the same as singing them, but I wasn’t about to do that on Zoom!) It led into a beautiful time of prayer and worship.  Now, of course, song lyrics do not replace Scripture. That goes without saying....

It’s not empty. Psalm 122: 1 I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go into the House of the Lord.” The eight people in the old East End Church were all getting on in age, but they were kneeling once again. They had received the letter they dreaded, which said the doors would soon close and they would no longer be a church. “Lord, please send us some people. We need numbers in this place or the diocese will close us.” Even the oldest of men were about in tears. Years before, the fathers of this small group once stood on the roof of the church, picking up incendiary bombs and tossing them into the Thames. Blankets had been slapped on tiles and stones as they smacked down flames. World War 11 did all it could to take them down and destroy the building, but still they held weddings and christenings and remembered to take communion. As this kneeling group now prayed, on the far side of the city a Bishop was pushing up his sleeves and lambasting the news from the Mayor of Londo...

I sometimes think about words and get completely blown away. It's pretty much impossible to come to an exact number of words in the English language. The Oxford Dictionary estimates that we have 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. But we can't know exactly how many words we have - for example, do we count 'dog' as one word or one of a few - it can be a verb as well as a noun, after all, and that's before we start with plurals and tenses. However many, what strikes me is that we as humans are able to express ourselves in such a crazy multitude of ways. We don't just like something; we admire, we love, we adore, we cherish, we relish, we prize. (And that last isn't just a verb, either!) Our ability to convey such depths of emotion and describe our thoughts is unique to us as the human race, created for so much more than survival. We're created for beauty...

                                                       Adultress by Guercino, 1621 Tim*was in my class for three years altogether, and I got to know him quite well. The bane of some teachers’ lives, I actually found him very likeable. At fourteen he was much like any other lad, spiky hair and freckles, hands habitually in his pockets as he sauntered round the school with a cheeky grin. He had assumed the role of class clown, and took it upon himself to make some wise crack at every possible opportunity. But there was no malice in his mischief, even though some of my colleagues found him too disruptive for their liking. “Why do I have to take Religious Studies, Miss? I ain’t gonna be a vicar.” He said it so oft...

Last Wednesday I went to a dance as worship evening. I'd signed up for it a few weeks previously, then had a minor panic: 'What have I done? This is my worst nightmare.' I was always the kid in PE at the back of the room doing as little as possible in a very unco-ordinated, awkward sort of way. Ladies in graceful, flowing costumes demonstrated and talked about portraying biblical truths in dance. I was drawn even while thinking, 'But I'm not a dancer, I'm a writer.' The next day at home I decided to try it out. I put on a familiar worship song and slowly danced around the room trying to express physically what I was feeling spiritually. I was surprised at what happened. I enjoyed it. I sensed God enjoying it. It felt intimate. Some of the personal things I was expressing are known only to God and me, history between the two of us alone, stuff that means something to us. I realised that it doesn't matter how graceful I am or not, or whether ...

Gentle readers, may I beg your indulgence with this post; I set out to write a psalm, without first making much of a study on how the psalms were written, and I know that there are scholars among you who know and understand things like structure, metre, the little couplety thing that many of the psalms have and so on.  This will clearly fall far short. My offering below is probably neither a psalm nor a poem, but a kind of outpouring from the heart in the rough style of the psalmists at their most raw and un-poetic. I don't think God is offended by the awkward and unskilled, and this felt important to me. It just wanted to be said. As a writer who has - and is - struggling to understand what I am called to do, to find a niche, so stop speak, this seems the very bottom line in why I keep opening my laptop and stringing words together even when frequently I feel like giving up for good. I have tried so many different things, nothing seems to fit, and I come back time and again to...

On the first Sunday of the New Year – New Year’s Day, as it happened – we listened to a song in church which you can also listen to, here , and by a slightly convoluted train of thought it set me off pondering the political and social situation both in Europe and America, and noting the similarities with the England of the mid-eighteenth century. At that time it was said that England was heading for a revolution every bit as disruptive and bloody as the French Revolution, but it was averted by the spiritual revival that took place because of John Wesley and some of his contemporaries. What excited me about this thought was that it was not simply the arrival of a charismatic figure or the sermons he preached that changed the nation. It was the many individual lives, transformed and going back to their homes and streets and workplaces to live out the Kingdom of God that reformed the nation. I later learned that at a time when the population of Britain was around twelve million,...

I’ve worshipped God in inner city and country churches, cathedrals, abbeys and, as part of the Baptist Caravan Fellowship when I was growing up, during services held on a field!  The latter were lovely if the weather was right.  We moved indoors if not.  This was usually inside whoever owned the biggest caravan awning!   One of my favourite memories from that time is of an Airedare cocking its head and howling  when the trumpet was played.  Music critics get everywhere… Harvest Overview Harvest Pulpit Of course true worship isn’t dependent on the building but I was taken with my church’s recent Harvest Festival service.   I suppose it’s because there is farmland around the village where my church is located so I literally see the connections between farming and food.   It’s too easy not to see how blessed we are.  The fact there is a greater distance between seeing food produced and it ending up on plates isn’t go...