These Psalms Were Made For Walking

Some Psalms are known as the "songs of ascent", to be sung by pilgrims while walking up the steep road to Jerusalem for the major festivals. A friend was telling me this morning how he had done this himself earlier this year, an experience which had changed his understanding of the Psalms forever. But it turns out most of the Psalms have a sense of movement about them.

For example, what comes to your mind when you think of Psalm 23?

From Ashes to Hope

This week I went to York Minster to start Lent with the beautiful ancient ceremony which gives Ash Wednesday its name:  receiving a cross of ashes on my forehead. Why ash? Because it is a symbol of mourning and mortality, given to each person with words echoing those I last heard at my father's funeral in late December: "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return". To many, Lent is a time of giving things up, of disciplining the body and reflecting on our frailty and failures. While this is valuable, it raises the question of what the purpose of discipline actually is. What are we training for? 

In her sermon, the Dean encouraged us to think differently about Lent: rather than trying to punish ourselves because we are not perfect, let us put in the effort to pursue excellence.

Acomb Garden pitching for funds at York Soup!

It's been an exciting month at Acomb's community garden project. We have been selected to pitch for a grant of £1000 at York Soup, a new initiative by York CVS where 100 people donate £10 and over a soup dinner on 25th June listen to 4 great local causes make a pitch for the money. There's still 30 tickets left, so get yours today and come along to support us!

We're fundraising for the next stage: installing full disabled access so that everyone can get involved (it's really sad for all of us that our friends Gerry and Denise can't join in because the only way into the garden is via steps). We also want to construct a meeting room/log cabin which will be the heart of the garden, for making tea, holding events or prayer times and including a tool store as well.

In the Footsteps of St Cuthbert

Waves crashing around the rocks at Amble.
Coquet Island is behind the rock

My visit to Northumbria at the beginning of May was shaped by its connections to holy places and people that played a part in the history of how we came to know Christ in Britain. We stayed in a B&B with a view over the bay including Coquet Island, where Cuthbert once lived as a hermit until he was persuaded to become bishop of Lindisfarne. We walked along the bay to Alnmouth, where the ancient church in which Cuthbert was ordained bishop has now been washed away.
 A highlight of the trip was a visit to the Franciscan friary at Alnmouth (which I had heard much about from friends who are members of the Third Order of Franciscans, following the way of St Francis in everyday life under vows but not in a residential community). We had tea and conversation with a range of people staying with the friars as a retreat house, before evening prayer filled us with a sense of peace and the presence of God. St Cuthbert in particular resonates with me, and I read much about him before my birthday trip to Durham a few years ago to see the Lindisfarne gospels.
One place remains to be visited on another occasion: the holy island itself, perhaps next Easter with thousands of other pilgrims.

Acomb Garden: Inspiration From Helmsley

View of newly planted wildflower
meadow, with hedge now starting to
grow and lawn laid!

 As the weather has improved, Acomb's community garden is starting to take shape as you can see in the photos here. Many hands made light work of planting a variety of flower seeds in the wildflower meadow on Seed Sowing Saturday in April, while leaves are appearing along the lines of veg (supplemented by any unsold plants from the church plant sale on 9th May, which raised a fantastic £850 for the charity Madalitso in Malawi - more on their stories here).

A couple of new fruit trees have been planted along the boundary fence which will soon come into leaf (though we'll be lucky if we get any fruit this year). A generous gift of turf has meant that Janette now has a good lawn within her new hedge (where a large patch of brambles once stood!) Apart from that, the patient work of weeding and digging continues, with a growing pile of bricks and other obstructions removed from the soil. It has been a very dry spring, so the garden team has been popping round at regular intervals to water different sections of the garden, especially to encourage areas of new planting (our best protection against weeds is vigilance and planting things we WANT to grow in their place!)

Springing Into Action on Acomb Community Garden

As the days get longer, work continues on the Acomb Community Garden project at Acomb Methodist Church. After successful work with a digger and tree surgeon in February, the focus has turned to preparing the ground and putting some shape to the garden at the beginning of the growing season.   

View over the garden following clearance and levelling

There are two reasons for this approach: firstly, as this is not a domestic garden there is no automatic "permitted development", so planning permission is required to install structures or hard landscaping such as paths. While this is achievable and unlikely to be refused, it will take time and require fundraising to support the production of detailed plans for the planning application. 

The second reason is that we are currently tendering for the ground source heat pump (see previous post here - further updates to be published soon!) This will require drilling and pipe installation, but the exact location of boreholes/pipework will to some extent depend on the chosen contractor so it is wise to allow the garden to be shaped around the boreholes rather than vice versa.

Holiness in Action: Were you there?

Fellow blogger Beth Routledge has been writing eloquently this week about our need to live out the drama of Easter, to experience the emotions and set the reality of God’s story in our hearts as well as our heads. Holy Week starts with Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem in time for the Passover feast, where Jesus and his whole community were not only a retelling of the story of the Jewish people being liberated from slavery under the Egyptians, but reliving it with unleavened bread, sandals on your feet and ready to leave quickly to start a new life in freedom.

Indeed, the story began long before this point as I have been reminded by following the tradition of reading Luke’s gospel from start to finish during Holy Week. After Jesus’ closest friends realised who he really was and Peter declared he was the Messiah, he started telling them what would happen to him but they couldn’t take it in. He set his face towards Jerusalem and there are 12 chapters of story telling what happened along the way – challenging stereotypes with stories like the Good Samaritan and the prodigal son, staying with friends like Mary and Martha and teaching the crowds who came to see him.

Holiness in Action: God at Work

"People go out to their work and to their labor until the evening” (Ps. 104:23). 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it another way: 

"After the first morning hour [of prayer], the Christian’s day until evening belongs to work." 

Indeed, for many of us a full hour to pray before our work starts would be a blessed luxury! This balance of our time has been the same for centuries. When the Benedictine order of monks was founded on the principle of "work and prayer", where work informed prayer and vice versa, without holding one of these to be more important than the other. But have we lost this perspective today? Do we instead consider them to be totally separate activities?

Many people put a very hard distinction between work and prayer saying "I can feel God close to me when I'm in church, but God can't really be interested in what I do all day, can he? It's only what I do to pay the bills." But the Creator of the universe delights in what we do, because our work reflect the image of God himself as we engage in creating and maintaining order and beauty in God's world. 

So does God care whether the trains run on time, or if a whole community like Western Cornwall are cut off by rail because of a collapsed sea wall (as happened at Dawlish last year)? Does God care whether the law is upheld, justice is done, people are served, children are educated?

In the Footpaths of the Pilgrim Fathers

The Pilgrim Fathers museum
in the oldest house in Leiden
(built in 1372)

Ask most people round here to name three Dutch cities, and you'll usually get some combination of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Delft and Den Haag (aka the Hague in its anglicised form). This means when I tell people that my parents live in Leiden, the next question is always "where's that?" (It's about 20 minutes south of Amsterdam and east of Den Haag).

To be fair, I didn't know where Leiden was either, until my parents moved there 5 years ago, so I thought it was time to share a little of Leiden's rich history. Leiden is an ancient city at the place where a river splits into three branches. To the extent that any river in this flat land can be said to flow (rather than simply resembling a wide, deep canal), the city is encircled by two branches of the river and the third runs through the middle, facilitating trade. Of course, this means a lot of bridges (engineer's paradise!), some of which can open to allow tall boats through to the markets.

It turns out that one thing Leiden is famous for is the Pilgrim Fathers, who settled in the city between 1609 and 1620 as refugees from England in search of religious freedom for their Puritan faith. Last week we visited a tiny museum behind one of the main shopping streets, housed in the oldest house in Leiden (dated via tree rings in the oak beams to 1372). 

Fairtrade history in the Netherlands

Yesterday I visited a little piece of Fairtrade history: while visiting my parents in Leiden, we visited the Wereld Winkel, literally "world shop". Wereld Winkel was the world's first ever Fairtrade shop, founded in the Netherlands in 1969 and now has 250 branches across the country. The focus was upon fairly traded handicrafts that give people the chance to use traditional skills to create products for the Western market. However, this was relatively limited in its impact at first, since a lot of learning was required on both sides to predict what people wanted to buy (with variable strands in fashion) and to achieve the quality that consumers desired in return for the slightly higher price. 

Max Havelaar, the first Fairtrade mark

York is home to a groundbreaking Fairtrade shop too: Shared Earth was founded in York as one of the first UK retailers to follow in the footsteps of Wereld Winkel in 1986, with a similar range of wares: predominantly craft items and clothing.

One major change in buying habits over the last 45 years was the move towards Fairtrade food as well as crafts: firstly long-life products like tea, coffee and chocolate and then more recently perishable items like bananas. Initially, fairly traded tea and coffee were only available in ethical shops like the Wereld Winkel or via stalls like the one I set up at my church aged 17, because there was otherwise no way for consumers to tell whether food sold in supermarkets or elsewhere was fairly traded. 

Holiness in Action: The meek shall inherit the earth

This is the second in a series of Lent meditations considering the concept of "holiness in action" - how do we apply Jesus' teaching to today's world? 

This week I read a passage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's writings on the Sermon on the Mount which I found very challenging. Jesus said:

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Matt 5:5

But who exactly was Jesus talking about and how should we apply this principle today? Bonhoeffer wrote that the meek are: 

"those who renounce all rights of their own for the sake of Jesus Christ. When they are berated, they are quiet. When violence is done to them, they endure it. When they are cast out, they yield. They do not sue for their rights; they do not make a scene when injustice is done to them." 

I am not sure that I agree. Was Jesus meek? While he went "like a lamb to the slaughter" and championed non-violence when Peter tried to free him by cutting off one of his assailant's ears, his previous form was distinctly combative. Does a meek person go to a respected rabbi's home to declare that his host and others at the table were like "whitewashed tombs" that made great effort to be outwardly holy but were rotten underneath, doing nothing to help the poor or support people in their faith?  

Holiness in Action: For the Love of God

"How great is the Father's love that he has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!" 1 John 3:1

Welcome to the first of a new series of weekly reflections for Lent about faith, work and sustainable living inspired by Wesleyan theology.

John Wesley founded the Methodist movement with his brother Charles in 1738 after a deep experience of the love of God which John later described as being "strangely warmed" (my friends in the Cambridge Methodist Society at university had hoodies declaring that they were instead "warmly strange"). 

My husband is a local preacher, and has been telling me for years of the riches to be found in Methodist theology about “holiness in action”, or applying faith to real life. This Lent, I’m taking up the challenge: to read all of Wesley’s 44 sermons (now available to read online!) and explore what they can teach us today. 

Acomb Garden: The Transformation Begins

Digging a trench for
the hedge

Last week I wrote about my church’s dreams of transforming an overgrown patch of unloved ground behind church into a “quiet garden” for retreats, contemplation, encouraging wildlife and growing food. Having emptied and taken down a set of old garages to make a way in and transferred a defunct greenhouse to a friend’s garden (awaiting some new glass), today we made a start on clearing the wilderness. I was pleasantly surprised at how much we managed to do in a morning, with about 15 adults and 5 young people (one very young indeed – Micah didn’t do much other than look cute!) 

By 1pm we had chopped and cleared large areas of brambles (opening up the bottom corner of the garden for the first time), trimmed low-hanging branches from trees and seriously pruned back the bushes and generally created a much bigger space to work with. This is the stuff that memories are made of: working together for a common goal, laughing together as we learn new skills and create something beautiful, eating together when we were done (the local chippy got lots of business today!)

A Journey of Transformation at Acomb

Acomb Methodist Church is celebrating its 50th anniversary with some big dreams to upgrade facilities to serve our community in York for the next 50 years. This includes renovating the entrance, replacing the boiler with a new ground source heat pump and transforming the small wilderness behind the church. In place of weeds, we want to create more than a garden: a community space for growing food and a space where people can enjoy retreats and quiet days, or just come and reflect in a place of beauty.

View from top of garden, where several garages
have recently been removed

We have lots of ideas to be included in the new garden: Fruit bushes, raised beds for vegetables, a children’s area, a monastic cloister, water feature, labyrinth, 2 watertight shelters/ summerhouses, workbenches, seating, craft areas are all ideas we want to try to include. We hope to create a natural flowing space where wildlife will find a home and plants that will create interest throughout the year. But first, we need to make space. We've made a start by removing some old garages and we'll be creating an access ramp in place of the current narrow steps. 

Life in Community - Reflections from LILAC

This is my second post inspired by a visit to LILAC, an innovative co-housing project in Leeds built in 2013 using straw bale and timber construction. Lilac is an acronym that reflects the initiative's three core values: Low impact living (covered in my previous post),  affordable, community. I'll be writing more about the thorny issues of affordability and housing after attending a workshop hosted by Green Christian on the subject on 24th Jan.

When I try explaining Lilac to others, people usually can't imagine what I'm talking about. Eco-housing, certainly, but living in community?

Advent Reflections 7: Finding Our Purpose

 “For we know that nothing we do for the Lord is ever useless” 1 Cor 15:58 

At the beginning of a new year, many of us have hopes and dreams as well as fears for the future. So now seems like a good time to consider our purpose. A sense of purpose can be powerful enough to keep us motivated through difficult times, but it can be hard to find, especially when we are demoralised. The simple fact is, much of what we do feels pointless and too small to make a difference, a drop in the ocean.

Over the Christmas period, we have considered God’s awesome creation, made with love, the frustration of living in a world of sin and death (and the need tolament the tragedies of life) and his great plan for redemption through Emmanuel. This is where the final part of the Bible’s story comes into play for us: the consummation of all our hopes, the resurrection and redemptionof the whole world.

Advent Reflections 6: A Time to Lament

This post is the sixth in a series of weekly posts during Advent inspired by "Holy Boy", a choral nativity which we performed in Acomb on 21st December.

On Christmas Day, I reflected on the importance of joy as part of the Christian life, especially in the context of celebrating together as a whole community and sharing God's joy together. Jesus is born! Emmanuel - God is with us! Hallelujah!
But there is another side to the Christmas story which I want to reflect upon today, the day we remember the murder of the Holy Innocents. The choir that sang Holy Boy with songs of celebration also sang of a family pushed around by the Romans, forced to travel miles to their familial home town to be registered, and the children sang "Bethlehem is a Long Way", which includes the lyrics:

"Fools we are (to travel so far) but we can't stay. Please don't hinder us, we just obey, it's safer that way! We must go because that's what they say, and because what they say goes!"

Advent Reflections 5: Learning to Rejoice

This post is the sixth in a series of weekly posts during Advent inspired by "Holy Boy", a Christmas oratorio which we performed in Acomb on 21st December.
Today is a day for deep joy, as our choir and band expressed in joyful song on Sunday in Holy Boy, and in a variety of carols and readings in York Minster on Monday night, and in Christmas services around the world today. So this is a reflection about rejoicing.
As Christians, we are actually commanded to rejoice (more than a dozen times in Paul's letters, for example). CS Lewis wrote that: "Joy is the serious business of heaven".

Advent Reflections 3: A Song of Mary

This post is the third in a series of weekly posts during Advent inspired by "Holy Boy", a Christmas oratorio which we're performing in Acomb on 21st December.

Having spent a few weeks considering the promise of Emmanuel, the story now moves to a teenage girl in an unknown small town, who has just been told that her life will be turned upside down by being unexpectedly pregnant with the Son of God (and not even married yet! What will the village gossips say, let alone her fiance?)

Renewable Heat for Community Buildings

Acomb - the story so far

What do you do when your boiler is very old and you know that the next time the gas man comes to fix it, it might not recover? Most people would replace it with a more efficient new gas boiler, but the issue is: given that fuel prices are on a steady upward curve with the expectation that this will only get worse over the next 20-30 years, why lock yourself in to an old technology and high bills?
For Acomb Methodist Church, the answer is obvious: power the new boiler with renewable heat. Work is still in the early stages of getting prices, but I thought it would help to summarise the story so far.