Living life to the full

Last month, on this page, I wrote about death and the effects of grief on us when someone whom we love dies.

As well as bringing sadness and pain, the death of someone we love can also bring into sharp focus the idea of our own mortality. As we grow older, it is something of which we become more aware. Rarely do young people, unless the have been faced with death or live with a life-threatening illness, think about their own lives as limited.

But part of maturing and growing is that we become more aware of the fragile nature of human life. Thinking about our mortality can help us to reflect on how we wish to use “the time left to us here on earth”, as a prayer in the modern-language Church of England funeral service puts it. That prayer seeks God’s wisdom and grace “to use aright the time left to us here on earth to turn to Christ and to follow in his steps”.

We can choose one of two ways to live. Charles Kingsley summed it up well in the names he gave to two of his characters in his book The Water Babies: Mrs Be-done-by-as-you-did and Mrs Be-as-you-would-be-done-by. The former punished those who had acted badly; the latter was a nurturing mother figure who treated others as she wished to be treated herself.

The idea of the Golden Rule - treat others as you would like to be treated - appears to have been first articulated by the ancient Greek philosophers, but it is an idea that appears in many philosophies and religions. Jesus said: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Matthew 7.12).

Following the Golden Rule and the Two Great Commandments that Jesus gave his followers - You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and You shall love your neighbour as yourself - is one way of approaching the time that is left to us in a positive way, that will bring joy and encouragement to others and provide us with stability and hope.

The funeral-service prayer talks of following in Christ’s steps. These three sayings provide us a simple way of doing that. It’s all so very simple - and yet sometimes so hard to live out. No wonder the prayer asks for God’s wisdom and grace!

With best wishes, Sarah

Grief and pain

The month of April this year falls entirely within the Church’s Easter season. This extended period helps to remind us that Christ’s resurrection is not just an event that happens one day, but that his life and power remain with us.

So it perhaps seems strange that the focus of my thoughts this month is death. It is little surprising that I have thought much about death in recently. Between January and Easter Day, I conducted more funerals in the benefice than in the whole of 2007; some of my closest friends have also been coping with bereavements following deaths of those whom they love. In the midst of life, there is always death and grief.

Some of the funerals I have taken have been almost straightforward, in the sense that the person who has died was seemingly at a natural end to their life - they had lived many years and died peacefully, ready for whatever comes next. There is sadness, but grieving family and friends are able to reconcile themselves to living with that.

But others have followed tragic events or led to young children losing parents. Some have been so sudden that relatives and friends have struggled to understand why or have faced relatives and friends with the suffering and pain of someone they love - something that is hard for anyone to experience.

Because Christians believe that death is not the end, there can sometimes be a tendency within the Church not to face grief properly. Yet, we only grieve because we have loved. Love is a great and wonderful thing, but it makes us vulnerable too. When we love, we open ourselves up to pain as well as joy, and the pain of death is often a very deep one arising from the separation from the one we love. That pain can be overwhelming.

Death raises all sorts of questions. It leads to agonising cries of Why? Sometimes it sparks anger and rage against God or the one who has died, feelings of abandonment and desolation, deep sadness and confusion. This is all natural, but often people are ashamed of sharing these thoughts with God in prayer. God can take it! God is bigger than our grief and more loving than we can imagine. And, though we may not be aware of it, God will be there alongside us, sharing in our suffering and pain. God knows what it is like to lose a beloved child. Let God share your pain, and hear your anger.

With best wishes, Sarah

Signs of life

One of the things that I love most about life is that whatever age you are there is always more to learn and discover about the world around.

One of the things I have recently learned and been fascinated by is how traditional hedging is done. Although I grew up in a village with at least five farms, I had never before witnessed hedge-making. The new hedge in Reed churchyard is definitely worth a look. It has brought a wonderful open feel to that part of the graveyard and is a work of craftmanship. (Tip: try going up there when the sun is setting on a clear day - the skies are wonderful.)

In order to make the hedge, a lot of wood needed to be cut down and pruned. At the moment, the hedge looks somewhat bare, but soon the leaves will grow again and it will turn green, and provide shelter and homes for birds and insects alike.

The life that the hedge will foster reminds me a bit of the Christian story of Easter. In order for life to develop in all its fullness, what was there before need chopping away and pruning. Many bits of wood needed removing totally, while others were bent and shaped to enable the hedge to be formed. There was life there before, but the quality of life that the new hedge will bring will be more abundant.

Easter is the season in which Christians celebrate the abundant life of God, brought about through the resurrection. Of course, life existed before then, but we believe that the resurrection enabled us to see more of God’s true life, a life that is positive and embracing of all, a life that is of a quality that only God can bring about.

That life begins with God’s love and acceptance. As I write, the countryside is bathed in sunshine and springtime. It is easy to feel truly alive at times like this, and we find our spirits buoyed by such lovely weather. But, when the sun goes in and our lives cloud over, we can be comforted by the fact that God’s life, that abundant life, continues, and is based not on our feelings but on God’s constancy and faithfulness.

I hope you will join me in celebrating that this Easter.

With best wishes, Sarah

Lent

Lent starts early this year, almost as early as is possible.

Over the centuries, Lent has been a traditional time for stopping and taking stock of one’s life and faith. It is a time for self-reflection and penitence in preparation for Easter. It is also a time when Christians reflect on their life of worship, prayer and how they live out their faith.

Faith is something that affects the whole of one’s life. What we believe in - whether that is the Christian faith or another faith or whether we are uncertain or have no faith at all - has a bearing on the rest of our lives. How we think and how we act is often dependent on what we believe.

For a Christian, faith is about more than going to church on Sundays. It is about being disciples of Jesus and living as his followers from day to day. For me, a “professional” Christian, my life, my work and my faith are very much bound together, but it can be less easy for those who work the outside the Church to see how it all fits together.

So, starting in Lent, there will be a series of occasional talks at the 10.30 a.m. service in the sermon slot given by Christians working outside the sphere of the Church. On the first Sunday of Lent at Reed, Peter Gough, known to many of you, will talk about how his faith and his work as a GP connect. On 9th March also in Reed, Rachel Harden will speak about her experience of working in the media. Rachel is a journalist who trained on a local paper in south London and since then has worked on the Liverpool Daily Post. Over the past three years she has contributed to the BBC RaW campaign (which helps people improve reading and writing skills) and currently also works for the Church Times. Later in the year, there will be other speakers, so do look out for them.

I like the phrase I came across about Lent on the internet last month - “disciplined excitement”. Lent is a time of discipline, but only because through it we can strip away the things that clutter up our lives and stop us from recognising God’s gifts to us and come back to the heart of what faith is about - God’s love for the world. That is not a static thing, and as we discover more about where God is at work, we can be caught up in the excitement ourselves.

With best wishes
Sarah

A new year

This letter comes with my best wishes for a happy and peaceful start to a new year.
The pattern of services in the benefice will be changing slightly this month. This has been precipitated by the retirement of our Reader, Arthur Brignall, which has meant that we have had to alter the Sundays where services in two villages were taking place at the same time.

The basic pattern will mean that Barley, Barkway and Reed will each have one 9 a.m. and one 10.30 a.m. Parish Communion a month. On top of this, Barkway’s BCP Evensong will continue as normal, and Barley will have a 5 p.m. service once a month, the form of which will vary. Every other month, Reed will have a third service. Barkway’s Discover Sunday continues as does Barley’s Church Mice.

This new pattern is not set in stone, but seems to be the best way forward at the present time. A number of people have worked on it, including myself, the rural dean and the churchwardens. Please talk to me about it once it is up and running, if you have any views. There will also be opportunities for special services, particularly those relating to Church festivals.

The United Benefice services are also set to continue but on fewer occasions than previously. I hope that with fewer of these services, more people will make an effort to attend them. They have, sadly, been the Sundays of the month on which we have had fewest worshippers in church. There is a great joy in coming together with people from different churches and villages to worship - I hope that you won’t miss out on those opportunities.

Of course, all services in the benefice are open to everyone each Sunday. Many people prefer to worship in their own village, but it is always a joy to see people crossing boundaries to worship in a different church or congregation. Sometimes we need to make our worship of God more of a priority and our attachment to a particular building less important - the exciting thing is that when we take risks, God often reveals himself in new ways in our lives.

With best wishes, Sarah

PS A year ago, I challenged you all to take on something creative in 2007. I thought I should report that I took my own advice and have been learning how to play badminton.

Watching and waiting

Although this is the December issue of The Diary, it seems far too early to be writing about Christmas, even though the shops have been telling us to do just that since about August. (Because of deadlines, I’m writing this on 10th November).

Christmas starts early these days. Few families or communities or even churches confine their celebrations to the Twelve Days themselves. What this means is that the season of Advent becomes harder to keep. If we are not careful, Advent becomes a time of rushing about buying presents, planning meals, arranging visits to family and friends, singing carols and celebrating long before the day on which we remember Christ’s birth. Many people want nothing else. But others find themselves wanting something more.

For Christians, Advent is a time of watching and waiting and preparing for the coming of Christ. It is a time not only of preparation for the arrival of the baby Jesus in the manger, but also a period in which we can focus on preparing for the return of Christ and the final triumph of good over evil.

How we prepare will depend on many things - our lifestyle, our temperament, our experience of God and so on. Keeping Advent offers the space to reflect on how we can prepare spiritually for Christ’s coming; it can help us to find time for God as we race around. It’s all too easy to prepare for Christmas without giving thought to why we are celebrating. No birthday party happens without the presence of the one whose anniversary it is; how often the child in the manger finds himself omitted from our festivities!

Advent offers Christians a chance to stop and reflect. Many others find the idea of some space in the midst of the frenetic activity in the run-up to Christmas helpful. We have beautiful countryside around us; we have open church buildings; there will be many services in churches and chapels across the benefice. These can provide the space that we need. Even a snatched five minutes of peace and reflection can help us gain a sense of balance again. Or why not visit the crib exhibition in Barley church in the first weekend of December? A reminder of what it is we are awaiting.

With best wishes, Sarah

Remembering Past Pain

In September this year, while on holiday, I paid a visit to Auschwitz -Birkenau concentration camp. It was a harrowing experience - one of those places that stunned me into silence because of the horror of what went on there.

Keeping Auschwitz open as a place for visitors allows people to pay their respects to those who suffered so much because of Nazi rule, enables us to remember horrific events and to educate this and future generations so that such atrocities can be prevented from happening again.

For those of us who have not directly experienced war, it is too easy to forget the impact that conflict has on individual lives. The thing that affected me most in my visit to the death camp was the enormous pile of suitcases in a large display cabinet. For me, they turned the masses of people to whom they belonged into individuals. Each case had a person’s name inscribed on it and the place from where they had come. From then on, in my mind, the victims were no longer anonymous, but individual people with names and families and homes, whose lives had been destroyed by the power and oppression of others.

The trip was a sobering reminder of what humans can do to one another. What horrifies me is that oppression and violence still remain in our world. Power continues to corrupt those who have it. The scale of the Nazi cruelty was phenomenal and nothing compares with it, but we all know of countries today where people are oppressed and unable to speak out without disappearing or being killed. Zimbabwe and Burma spring to my mind immediately.

Each year in November, we hold Remembrance Sunday services, which help us to recall those who have been willing to sacrifice much for the good of others, to thank God for our freedom and to pray for those currently serving in our Armed Forces and support services around the world. Perhaps this year we should also commit ourselves to speaking out on behalf of those whose voices are not heard.

With best wishes
Sarah

Common heritage

I recently visited the Sacred exhibition at the British Library in London*. It’s well worth a visit. For the first time, treasured texts from the Jewish, Christian and Muslim collections at the Library were displayed together, with some from other institutions as well.

The books, fragments and scrolls were arranged thematically. This highlighted some of the things that the three faith traditions hold in common, and showed how in times past they influenced each other.

So often in discussion about religion - or in other areas such as politics - the focus is on where people disagree. We all know that many wars have been fought by people of faith seeking to defend what they hold dear, when it seems threatened.

But all too rarely do we concentrate on what we hold in common. The exhibitions sub-title was “Discover what we share”. At heart all three faiths share belief in one God, whom they believe has revealed the divine nature in the world. The three faiths, in many places, have similar moral and spiritual teaching. They all have sacred texts. There are differences in emphasis and interpretation, of course, but that happens between adherents of the same faith as well as those of different ones.

In listening to those of others faiths, we often learn about our own, but more importantly we can begin to build bridges between people and challenge the many stereotypical, but often false, pictures that we create in our minds. It’s all too easy to think we know what someone else is thinking without really taking time to listen to them and their tradition.

In a world where religion is often used to divide people, this exhibition was a wonderful example of how it can also bring people of different traditions together.

With best wishes
Sarah

*(open daily until 23rd September)

Celebrating the saints

In July and August, the three churches of our benefice all celebrate their patronal festivals. A patronal festival is held on or near the feast day of the saint after which the church is named, and is an opportunity to remember and give thanks for particular faithful Christians of the past - in our case: St Margaret of Antioch, St Mary Magdalene and St Mary.

The word saint is used in two ways. First, it refers to all Christian people. We find it used in the Bible in this way on a number of occasions.

The designation Saint is also used for specific people who have lived out their faith in outstanding ways. They are people who responded to God’s call on their lives, often undergoing great suffering in the process. For instance, Margaret is said to have been persecuted by water and fire before she was beheaded.

Not everyone will receive the title Saint, but there are many saintly people who serve God and others because of their faith. Some will have names that are well known, such as William Wilberforce or Mother Teresa. But many others will remain unnoticed and unsung, though the work that they do might have a profound effect on the lives of others. I’m thinking of people who work for aid agencies and for causes such as trade justice and against people trafficking.

Many of these people will do so because they are people of faith, who are following Jesus’s commandments to love God and to love our neighbour. The story of the Good Samaritan reminds us that the definition of our neighbour can be a very broad one, certainly not confined to our next-door neighbours or even those in our own community.

As we celebrate the lives of saints who have made a difference to the lives of others, we are reminded that their lives are examples for us to follow.

With best wishes
Sarah

Judging others

Last night, I watched the final of The Apprentice on television. I don’t watch much TV, as I tend to have meetings most nights, but I became rather hooked on this programme - normally taped and watched via the video while I do the ironing on a Sunday evening!

What fascinated me more than the tasks themselves was the people involved in them. Some I liked; some I took against, one in particular who was prone to catty comments about the other contestants behind their backs. It left me thinking about how we make judgments about other people.

With people that we know, we tend to judge on the basis of our direct experience of them. On the whole, if someone is friendly and interesting, we like them and wish the relationship to continue; if someone we meet is rude or unhelpful, we tend not to like them so much.

Television often skews the real picture, and portrays people in such a way as to produce an effect that the programme-makers are looking for. I don’t know through watching The Apprentice what the people are really like, only how they have been portrayed. But how do we make our decisions about other people? It’s worth thinking about.

The Christian view is that all people are created by God and therefore have value and worth. God loves everyone. Jesus gave the difficult commandment that we should love not only those whom we like, but also our enemies. We naturally gravitate towards people who share our interests and values, but how do we treat those with whom we violently disagree or who live in a way that we don’t like?

Love can change people. Jesus’s love for the unlovely transformed them into new people. Our love for those whom we struggle to like can also have a transforming effect - on them and on us.
With best wishes
Sarah