No word has come ...

Today is Day Fourteen for Rima. Or Zero Days left of Border Agency grace remaining. The Facebook entry from Alison says so much: 'Today our home is no longer safe.'

In such a moment 'homes' often become no more than 'houses.'
but I cannot bear the imagining of Rima Robert and Alison being without a home ... left only with a house. The foundations of hospitality go too deep in them in their place of belonging for 'home' to be lost.

As I prayed for them all today it felt to me as if a robber had posted a calling card through their front door and said 'I might be back anytime soon.' This may be an unfair image for the UK Border Agency or the Home Secretary but it is what came to me. And it came on the day when Wales celebrates its patron Saint, David. It seemed significant that Robert and Alison live as a Columban Home ... offering sanctuary ... as part of their commitment to the Rule of the Iona Community and it seems to me that whether it was Columba or David no-one I know is more in need of the protection of the saints, the angels, and all the host of heaven than this family. If St David could make the ground grow beneath him so better to speak to his congregation ... perhaps another miracle today ... that the words and prayers of those who have written and petitioned and spoken out would be raised high so that those in power and authority could hear better and respond well by doing what is right...

So today I did in private what I managed to avoid twice in the pulpit yesterday ... I wept for them. Psalm 121, the text for yesterday evening, promises that God will watch over us ... not that no bad thing will happen, but that God who made both heaven and earth is present even in the apparent absence ... in the darkness ... in the silence ... and so I bowed and knelt and offered my hopes and fears but as RS Thomas once said: for one who knelt no word came.

Except perhaps the word to keep on kneeling
and believing that goodness remains stronger than evil

If anybody's out there ... help!

I am never too sure who reads this blog (if anyone) but if you are then please do not just read it, today i am asking that you do something too. Something that could radically change three lives for the better. Those lives are Robert Swinfen, and Alison Phipps, friends of mine in Glasgow and Rima. This is Rima's story.

Rima, now 17 years old, arrived in the UK in March 2008, fleeing persecution in Eritrea and then racist neglect, destitution and physical harm in Italy. She came to stay with Robert Swinfen and Alison Phipps in Glasgow in March 2009, and they have become a close-knit family unit. Rima has a strong case for asylum from Eritrea, but under the Dublin Regulation is now liable to be returned to Italy.

She has come to love Robert and Alison as her Dad and Mum, and they have very strong parental feelings for her too. For the past year they, with some help from friends, have provided her entire support as if she were indeed their foster daughter. Rima is extremely vulnerable and in need of a secure family to recover from the trauma and chaos of the past three years of her life. She is doing very well, but is far from ready to live on her own and both wants and needs to continue living with her British Mum and Dad. Rima is now in real danger of being forcibly taken from her home in Scotland, in the next week, sent into Yarl’s Wood, and then deported to Italy.

You can make a difference by writing to your MP, MEP and the Home Secretary or even just by signing an on line petition to get the Home Sec. to intervene in this case to allow Rima to remain in the UK because she now has many strong relationships and a foster-family who will continue to support and love her for as long as she needs.

Rima will be 18 on 1st July this year, but the trauma and upheaval which she has suffered mean that she will need to be part of a family for some years to come. It would be so cruel to tear her away from parents for a second time, repeating the trauma from which she is beginning to recover, and so I am asking that you do what ever you can to help her to stay in the UK.

Please go to www.ipetitions.com/petition/rima and www.ncadc.org.uk/NCADC-Campaigns/rima/html or email me if you want a sample letter to send to the relevant people which you can do on line by http://www.writetothem.com/.

If you feel unable to do any of that and you believe in prayer, then please pray.

High Heels or Trainers

Yesterday I was sitting in St Giles Cathedral Edinburgh having a quiet moment or two, marvelling at the sunlight coming through the stained glass windows and how quickly the early morning sounds of the city disappear in sacred silence when I became aware of a teetering muffle behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and watched as a women in high clicky heels tried very hard, (but unsuccessfully) not to break the quiet. In fact the more effort she gave to hushing her steps the less she seemed to achieve.

I am not sure what it was she wanted to preserve from disturbance. Not my silence, I doubt thtat she had noticed me. I wonder did she fear that her stillettoed reverberations would awaken the holiness of God or perhaps the holiness in herself.

Either way this well posed icon of fashionable elegance seemed less in balance with her location than the curly haired three year old who refused to be shushed into being quiet by her father. As he whispered to her 'shh ... its a church... you have to be quiet' she climbed on a pew and decalimed with free abandon, 'Why do I have to be quiet when its pretty.'

Well that made up for missing Radio 4's Thought for the Day.

But she had more to offer.

The slip-slapping footsteps of this lassie as she then out-manouvred her father and cheekily ran towards a side chapel somehow seemed more at home with the joy of holiness than the self conscious tiptoing of the earlier lady. But for all that I'm sure God found pleasure in them both ... I know I did.

Ssshh ... its the sound of God

A few years ago I was fascinated by a radio 4 broadcast featuring Noirin Ni Riain, renowned Irish singer, talking about theosony, the sound of God. She spoke with passion of how we learn to be silent and listen with the ear of the heart.

I contacted her as she said that she'd just completed a PhD in Limerick on this theme and i was able to get a copy. It is a powerful piece of theological reflection but to my knowledge it has not been more widely published. So I was happy to discover that her autobiography has just been released by Veritas books in Ireland.

I have just finished it and apart from making me nostalgic for an Ireland I never really knew, it also many theological and spiritual insights that made me stop for a moment or two: including this one.

'No two silent listenings to the inner voice of God's self-disclosure are the same either. The God who reveals will be known not only in names but also silence. This silence does not reduce God to absence or mere emptiness, but is fullness, which is a Trinity of Persons. It is almost as if the Trinity is not composed of just three parts but of four: the fourth is the silence that reveals the triune God to the universe and wherein cosmic sound disappears into the silent mist. Human silence, which human ears can perceive, arises out of the silence that cannot be heard, yet which is drawn back to the world by an organic momentum. The Word is the fruit of the silent seed of Divine/human encounter. To taste the full fruit is to taste the revelation of God in and through the dialogical Trinity' (p78)

It's a sin ... or maybe not ... please convince me!

Yesterday I did something I've not done in a very long time ... its been about fifteen years or so since I last enjoyed this particular pleasure and it felt so good to do it again but I'm not sure if it was a sin.

I ate a Nestle's Kitkat.

For a long time now and for the much documented reasons of some of Nestles ethical policies I have avoided their products where possible. Hardly a huge sacrifice in the plethora of commercial alternatives but some products were missed more that others, a certain chocolate bar among them. But now the long lamented Kitkat has gone Fair trade. No less a man that the Archbishop of York John Sentamu endorsed the move so I thought to myself that can't be bad ... in fact, I reasoned I almost have a moral duty to make a purchase to applaud them for their actions and encourage them further down the road of chocolate fairness.

But now, wrapper in the bin, crumbs licked off my fingers, I am thinking that while KitKat may have gone Fair-trade and proudly sports its new ethical credentials with the obligatory advertising logo, but the Company haven't reversed the policies to which I have long objected. In which case what has really changed? Is this all no more than marketing smoke and mirrors? What does it mean for the Fair-Trade Dairy Milk now that Kraft are taking over? I know there is lots of chocolate on sale who's company credentials are more sound ... most of it tastes great in the mouth and in the Spirit too but then again that Kit Kat didn't half taste good. That said, perhaps it's 'mea culpa' on the ethics and so it may have been the last one that I eat for some time yet. Unless you all convince me otherwise.

Papa Don't Preach ... or maybe do ... really I'm not sure.

I am not sure what to think about the Pope's latest comments. What about you?

Usually I blog here with fully formed opinions or at least considered reflections ...

now I only have a bunch of questions.

As an clearly intended attack on the equality legislation that seeks to bring much needed justice for gay and lesbian people in many places in this country, I am not happy with what the Pope has said. Such equality is long overdue. I make no comment here on whether it should apply directly to Church except to say as someone who does not like the state interfering with religious liberty I kind of understand where the Pope is coming from as well. I value the freedom of conscience that I, my congregation and others in my denomination enjoy. There is a self determiantion (albeit a covenantal one) that has long stood up for its convicitons. But historically the Papal position has always been tied to the Power and Authority of Christendom and to the conflicts and / or alliances within that structure that can be made with the Secular Powers nad legislature. And that's where we part company. My tradition (at its best) has been ever been a dissenting or confessing one, we have historically has come under persecution from such powers adn authorities, religious and/ or state, and many followers have paid the price of their convictions.

And so I suppose I think that if the law of the land demands of me something which i believe to be unconscionable and a fundamental point of my essential confession of Christ as Lord then for sure I will protest the law in its making but if it then is passed, then there seems no alternative but to break it and suffer the consequences. I am not so sure that this is the case for me in this surrounding debate although it may yet prove to be so for my denomination. And I'm not so sure that the Pope is advocating large-scale Catholic civil disobedience here either. Although I will confess that prospect is appealing to me not least for the precedent it might set for other matters and the shift that it might herald in how the Church behaves.

Either way it does look like the forthcoming Papal visit will draw people, their energy and resources into choosing one side or another, pitting them against each other, which is the thing that saddens me most when there is so much good that might be done in the world if we learnt to work together.

Money money money

The world's leading bankers have arrived again at Davos in Switzerland for the World Economic Forum. They are there to argue the case that what they call heavy handed financial reforms will delay or even hamper the green shoots of global economic recovery.

In 2009 not so many of them made the trip: maybe they felt chastened by the fact that we the public of many different countries round the world had had to bail their business out with public finance that might otherwise have gone on healthcare or education or reducing climate change. (or perhaps it was because their expenses had been capped)

But with governments declaring that "we want our money back" and threatening to do so through curbs on trading, taxing bonuses and in other ways clipping the risky wings of banking, the bankers have turned out in strength to say 'touch us and it all comes down around you', or words to that effect.

I don't claim to understand this all (but they do and look where that has got us). I have enough trouble keeping track of the twenty pounds I got out yesterday from the ATM. But I have two words of caution ringing in my ears as the bankers seem to think that their world should stay they way it is.

The first is from George MacLeod in 1968:

Something needs to be done about the money boys who run our world. It is urgent that the whole issue of international monetary finance be reviewed.
Have you ever queried the bankers? I have. Try the lower echelon of banker, and most of them will say, ‘These things are too high for us, we cannot attain unto them.’ But a small minority will whisper, ‘You’ve got something there boy; isn’t it exceptionally cold weather for so late in the month of May?’

Try the upper echelon of banker. I have. I wrote to the top man of a London bank, a charming man, asking his comments on a similar document to the Haslemere Declaration. He replied that the figures were inaccurate. I immediately asked which figures but had no reply.

They are in training for the job of international bankers. They know what is good for us. Don’t consult us, the paltry crowd. But do they know what is good for us ... Or are they sowing the seeds of the next war?

The others words come from Alice Walker and a poem that in some ways sadly didn't make the final edit of my thoughts on BBC Wales this morning:

We alone can devalue Gold
But not caring
If it falls or rises
In the market place.
Wherever there is golf
There is a chain you know,
And if your chain
Is gold
So much the worse
For you.

Feathers, shells
And sea shaped stones
Are all as rare.
This could be our revolution:
To love what is plentiful
As much as
What’s scarce.

Reverse Course

My thoughts on BBC Radio Wales this morning went something like this:

Good morning: I was about eleven when a group of us spent a day learning to canoe. By the evening we were sure that we had mastered it and we were bold enough to think we’d not get caught, if later on, we sneaked down to the lake and had another go. Well we made it to the jetty undetected and I was daft enough to climb in first. I’d only got one foot in the boat when my comrades had the bright idea of pushing it into the lake.

The problem was my other foot still planted on the shore. As my right leg travelled onto deeper water and my left leg tried to remain just where it was, the distance uncomfortably increased. Decisive action was needed. I lunged toward the shore and caught hold of the jetty. But to my horror the canoe maintained its course. I ended up horizontal to the water, stretched out like the Severn Bridge, but with no such means of support. An inevitable disaster ensued.

I thought of that this week when I heard how the gap between the richest and poorest people in Britain has increased again. This has been going on for forty years and so I wondered just how long can those with plenty, distance themselves from those in need. How long before society is simply stretched too far?

The government’s definition of impoverishment is a relative one: where we draw the poverty-line is dependant on the average income of our nation. As that changes so does our understanding of who is poor. So, poverty in Britain looks different to somewhere else like Haiti, even before the earthquake. But how we care for those with little, wherever they may be, ultimately defines who we are. And nothing is more suggestive of a dangerous malaise than the simple truth that the rich are continuing to get disproportionately wealthier.

The bible recognises that taking care of the least of us is not just a matter of political expediency. It’s not even about economic justice, important as that is. Closing the gap between the haves and have-nots is about our spirituality. Because it is not money, but the love of it that can corrupt our living, whether we are rich or poor. It’s the misplaced adoration of pounds and pence that can make us indifferent to the plight of others, trapping our Spirit within a poverty of heart that becomes the root of all our problems.

Something must change:

not just in government or banking

but in us and what we value

if we’re ever to close the gap and change the course of what we have become

I'm (not) walking in the snow

It's been a while since i blogged, something to do with spare time going on a catalogue of things that broke down, inc: my desktop PC, the washing machine, tumble drier (I know its bad for the planet) the car (also bad) the electrics dying in the house, and then a leak in our kitchen ceiling this week. But all that is over now (i hope) and we had a great walk round the Museum of Welsh Life on Saturday, where there was still snow piled up high and out of the way. It reminded us of all the fun we'd had with snow over the festive period.

I remember the first time my daughter really encountered snow.

‘Oh … wow’, she said and then, proud of some recently acquired knowledge, she pointed a finger and proclaimed with certainty, ‘White!’ Snow was a wondrously strange new object to behold, a fresh mystery to be embraced, one that made her shiver for an instant and then ran between her tiny fingers. I was just happy to see her sense of wonder in God’s creation.

The next time Niamh saw snow outside her window we were impressed that she remembered what it was called. This time the conversation went:

‘Oh … wow! … Snow … White.’

Apart from making me look for seven dwarves, I was again impressed with the wonderment she offered to the falling flakes of white that gathered on the ground. While grown-ups were worrying about journey times to work and if the Gritters had been out, (and I know these are legitimate concerns) she was more than happy to welcome this occasional but spectacular visitor back into her life.

Snow fell again just before Christmas in 2009 and it was half-way through January before the thaw set in round here. During that time Niamh went walking in the snow, slipped and slid across the snow, threw balls of snow and built men of snow and eventually … she kind of became bored with it. Snow became a part of every day, taken for granted, no longer greeted with cries of ‘wow!’

Sadly, many of us do the same, and not just with the snow. We loose a sense of wonder with the world that God created. We hurry past sunsets and primroses, and forget the excitement we once enjoyed by chasing squirrels. The world becomes, as some say, dull as ditchwater; though as any naturalist will tell you, that too is teeming with exciting life. Some of us loose our sense of wonder with the church, this wonderful family that God has called us to be part of and which He’ has chosen to show the world His love. And some of us loose our sense of wonder with other human beings: equally made in the Image of God, we quickly reduce them into ‘interesting or boring’, ‘beneficial to my purpose’ or a ‘hindrance on the way’. And so we easily forget that every person whom we meet carries in their living something of God’s glory and reveals Christ to us.

As the days go by we need to keep alive our sense of wonder. I am reminded of the poet John O’Donohue who once said:

I would love to live

As a river flows,

Carried by the surprise

Of its own unfolding.

It's a season not a day.

For a couple of years now I've been going on about (some might say moaning about) how Christmas is a season ... not just one expectation laden day. In a December post I mentioned how our Renovare group had had some conversation on how to make this actually happen.

Well as so often in my life, it was my wife that made it happen.

On Christmas Day I received twelve envelops, one to be opened on the appropriately allocated day of the festive season. Each gift referenced the spiritual meaning behind the original Catechismic Twelve Days Poem and also managed to incorporate one of the 6 streams of Spirituality that feature within Renovare (http://www.renovare.info/streams) ... so on one day I got a new bible, on another I got 50 trees in a threatened area of forest, then there were the onion bulbs, the fairtrade chocolate bar and who could forget the pan pipes. Most of this unfolded on the beautiful, if snowy, Isle of Bute (plus a quick trip to Colintrive for festive jazz) and amounted to a wonderful Christmas Season.

Only 350 days before we get to do it all again!