The Two Become One Flesh

"'A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh.  Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

A proud father moment!

One God In Community

The Christian picture of a Trinitarian God does have some important consequences.

A key implication is that the Trinity in some way reflects an important property of God's nature: that he is in an essential way relational; that community is somehow central to the creator of the universe.

One has to be really careful here, of course, not to go confusing a Trinitarian picture of God with some kind of cosy human family gathering. God is much, much more than that; but it is likely that He is not less than that.

Notwithstanding the Western Church, over recent centuries, slowly but surely moving to a focus on individualism and on each individual's relationship with God, the pattern of the Bible is very different.

From Genesis, where it is not good for man to be alone, throughout the Old Testament, with its emphasis on God's dealings with His people, to the New Testament, where the story moves from Jesus with his disciples, to the Spirit working in and through the Church, Jesus' body, the Bible is about communities of people following (or not) God.

One way of presenting the 'big picture' of the Bible is about relationships: broken in the opening chapters and being restored by Jesus' sacrifice and the power of God's Spirit. Relationships between people and God, between people and other people, and between people and the natural world, God's creation. These are still issues in our world today - the Bible story doesn't end with the final page of Revelation, it carries on through the lives and work of Jesus' followers throughout history - until the day Jesus returns and makes all things new.

I would argue that this is how you can tell the true Church, Jesus' real followers: are they in the business of restoring relationships or of harming them? Not that even the best churches don't make mistakes and wander off the path, but one can still question both the overall pattern, and the quality of the hopes and dreams of the members: do they build up and welcome in, or do they knock down and exclude?

The Bible tells us that "God is love", and love is the essence of true relationship. If God is love then his followers must also be love, and must ensure that their understanding and practice of that love follows the radical patterns laid down by Jesus. Love isn't about gooey feelings and sex, but about genuine and practical care for someone else, backed with a willingness to sacrifice oneself to meet their deepest needs. To love is to to take up one's cross for the sake of another.

Love starts with loving God with all that we are, continues with loving our neighbour as our selves - even when that neighbour is strange, foreign, or in some other way 'alien' - and ends with God's people loving one another.

Remember that God's love for you is far greater than any human love.

God loves you, He died for you: he is on your side. God is not out to get you, He is out to save you. But He always gives you a choice: love respects freedom of choice. As a parent of young adults I suspect I have a very faint insight into how hard that must be ... even for God.

Mark: Provoking A Reaction

Click to see the original by Gun Legler

In chapter 1 of Mark we saw Jesus starting his ministry: moving quickly, urgently to tell people good news about God and about his kingdom, and illustrating that in his actions. He called disciples and they followed, he healed people and set them free, and multitudes came out to see him. But as the story unfolds we see other reactions.

Soon the grumbling starts.

Jesus doesn't just heal a paralysed man, he tells him his sins are forgiven: he has been set free of more than just his physical need. The religious leaders see that as blasphemy.

Jesus calls a tax collector - not just a collaborator but also unclean, a sinner under Jewish Law - who follows him, and invites his friends to meet Jesus. The religious people complain.

Jesus' disciples collect grains of wheat as they walk through a field and eat them. It was a Sabbath so the religious leaders object.

Then Jesus heals a man with a withered hand ... on the Sabbath ... in a synagogue! He challenges his critics' toxic views on religious duty, then shows what is right by healing the man in need. Jesus is angry and upset at their callousness; the religious leaders are incandescent and start to conspire with those in power to destroy Jesus.

Jesus and his message provoked reaction, but not always a good reaction. Jesus seems to have set out to bring people's deeper selves to the surface, whether that is a deep need of healing and acceptance, or a deep antagonism to anything which disrupts or challenges a set worldview.

One of the big challenges for any who wish to follow Jesus is how to balance humility with conviction, how to listen respectfully to others whilst challenging what is wrong and sharing hope with those in need, especially with the excluded and the disregarded. Part of doing that, it seems to me, is being aware of who Jesus helped and affirmed and who he challenged.

Jesus consistently reaches out to the excluded and the powerless, those who are despised. He equally consistently attacks those who would exclude, those who would delay healing, and those would highlight their own importance by putting others down.

In today's UK, especially after recent elections, popular attitudes to immigrants and to Muslims spring to mind. In much of the church, although less so perhaps in the UK as a whole, exclusion based on gender and sexuality remains an issue.

By the end of chapter 3, even Jesus’ own family have turned against him, as they say that he's out of his mind, and they come to take him away. Jesus responds by saying that those who follow him are his true family: “whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” The rule of God overrides even ties of family.

At the time Mark was writing terrible persecution of Christians in Rome had divided families, both by setting them against one another, and by people having family members murdered. Mark is quoting Jesus's words as comfort to those who are bereaved or estranged: one of the roles of the church, Jesus' body, is to be family to those who have lost their families, to be brother, sister, mother to the lost and the alone. It is not just physical healing that Jesus brought then, and wants to bring now through his followers.

You can find the chapters of Mark I have been talking about on the Bible Gateway: Mark 2 and Mark 3 (in the occasionally idiosyncratic NRSV translation).

What is your reaction to these stories? What impression do they give you of Jesus? How would you feel if you heard and saw these things?

Note: A quick mention of the "unforgivable sin" referred to in Mark 3:28-29, as people sometimes get worried. Imagine you are lost at sea in stormy weather, about to drown, when the air-sea rescue helicopter comes out to rescue you. If you are so convinced that all helicopters are instruments of the devil, out to do you terrible harm, that you desperately and successfully fight off your rescuer, you will drown. So it can be with those whom the Spirit would save.

Fifty-Six Weeks In The Year

In a church year, that is. Kind of.

The official church year begins at the end of November, with Advent: the season of preparation for the coming of Jesus. That makes reasonable sense: Jesus is the centre of the Christian faith, and we have a big celebration of his birth on December 25th, so a four-week (actually four-Sunday) time of preparation and anticipation takes you to a starting point of (this year) November 30th.

The run up to Christmas is typically terribly busy, often stressfully so, and then Christmas itself can be fraught with family hassles, or lonely with the lack of family hassles. All of this can help us to connect with that very first Christmas. Joseph and Mary trying to cope with a new marriage, with Mary's first baby on the way, and with the knowledge that family and neighbours are all very aware that the baby is expected a lot less than nine months after the marriage, probably also aware that it is not Joseph's. Imagine the small-town attitudes responding to that.

Then the Romans throw a spanner in the works by making everybody travel back to their family town: all the way south to Bethlehem in Mary and Joseph's case. As if they haven't got enough to cope with. Then when they get to Bethlehem - their family town - their family don't want them: nobody has room for a young pregnant girl, about to give birth. Family problems and loneliness in a single hurtful package.

If Advent is the beginning of the church year, when is the end? People will often say it is the week before Advent: the feast of Christ the King (in those churches which have this sort of church year, of course). Except that, after celebrating Christ's Kingship, you then need to prepare for his coming back, as king, to rule here on earth, to put things right and to reign in justice and power. We do that at Advent too.

So Advent is also a time to consider and prepare for Jesus' return. and a time to think about death and resurrection, judgement and restoration. The details of when and how this will happen are deliberately vague in the Bible - which doesn't stop sects, nutters, obsessives and successful American authors from fantasising about it - but we do get told the result. People will be raised to life and renewed, God and Jesus will come to live on earth, and the earth will also be cleansed and renewed.

Somewhere in the detail left vague and ambiguous in the Bible is 'hell': the fundamental question of what happens to those who aren't raised to life and renewed. My take is that we eventually face a fundamental choice: do we want to be a part of this renewal or do we not? Why anyone would choose to face the 'second death' rather than allow God to renew them I don't know, but I guess a part of respecting someone's humanity is to give them that genuine option.

God's kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven, just as we regularly pray. All that we have done which is wrong will be cleansed and forgotten; all that we have done which is good will remain as part of Jesus' renewed kingdom. We will live together in Jesus' presence with peace, justice and purpose.

So you end up with two seasons of Advent overlapping: one at the beginning of the church year and one at the end. Advent is just under four weeks long (depending which day Christmas Eve falls upon) so that makes a tad under fifty-six weeks in one church year. QED.

Stressed Ramblings

In the middle of last month I received a letter threatening legal action over an old blog post. I found it extremely intimidating, making threats and demanding money.

In a way this gives me insight on a more emotional level into the situation some of my customers have found themselves in. They receive a phone call out of the blue, claiming (in effect) to be from Microsoft, telling them they have viruses and could be disconnected from the Internet, and charging for the 'service' of removing said (non-existent) viruses. Computers are not these customers' comfort zone and they get very worried and often end up making payments which, with a cool head and time to reflect, they would never normally have agreed to.

My advice to my computer customers is always to take time to think about the matter, and to consult an expert (such as myself) if they are concerned. So, after an initial headless-chicken moment, that's what I did over the letter. Legal affairs are as dark, unknown and scary to me as computers are to many others.

Kudos then to E.J.Winter & Sons for advice which I found to be clear, constructive and helpful. A thumbs up also to Harrison's Solicitors in Reading who don't deal with this sort of thing, but helpfully put me onto someone who does.

Meanwhile the empty nesting continues. Our son has started work up in the Midlands, and has now moved into his own rented flat. At the same time our daughter is slowly finding her student feet in the foreign land of Wales. I'm immensely proud of both of them.

Abortion, Contraception, Homosexuality and Divorce

According to the BBC those are the topics of the two-week Roman Catholic synod starting today.
According to the Vatican the purpose of the synod is to discuss the family. Spot the difference.

More specifically, the official title of the meeting is "Pastoral Challenges To The Family in the Context of Evangelisation". To put it in slightly plainer English, this meeting is to look at "proclaiming and living the Gospel of the Family in a credible manner", whilst a second meeting next year looks at "pastoral care of the person and the family".

It is important to note that the preparatory document puts relating the Gospel to the family in the context of "preaching the Gospel to all creation". Unlike much of the comment which has arisen from various pressure groups, this official position does not directly reflect the commonly held church prejudice that focuses on marriage to the exclusion of single people.

The preparatory document lists many new concerns about the family:

The many new situations requiring the Church’s attention and pastoral care include: mixed or inter-religious marriages; the single-parent family; polygamy; marriages with the consequent problem of a dowry, sometimes understood as the purchase price of the woman; the caste system; a culture of non-commitment and a presumption that the marriage bond can be temporary; forms of feminism hostile to the Church; migration and the reformulation of the very concept of the family; relativist pluralism in the conception of marriage; the influence of the media on popular culture in its understanding of marriage and family life; underlying trends of thought in legislative proposals which devalue the idea of permanence and faithfulness in the marriage covenant; an increase in the practice of surrogate motherhood (wombs for hire); and new interpretations of what is considered a human right. Within the Church, faith in the sacramentality of marriage and the healing power of the Sacrament of Penance show signs of weakness or total abandonment.

That's a long list and, creditably, it does not just focus on the concerns of relatively wealthy Westerners.

The classic church response to challenges has been to focus on rules and restrictions: "Thou shalt not". It is just possible that the new Pope's approach over these meetings will be different:

By simply calling to mind the fact that, as a result of the current situation, many children and young people will never see their parents receive the sacraments, then we understand just how urgent are the challenges to evangelization arising from the current situation, which can be seen in almost every part of the “global village”. Corresponding in a particular manner to this reality today is the wide acceptance of the teaching on divine mercy and concern towards people who suffer on the periphery of societies, globally and in existential situations.

"The current situation" quoted being that remarried divorcees are excluded  from taking communion in Roman Catholic churches. Focussing on divine mercy and concern for the marginalised is a new approach (in this context). Hopefully it will lead the Catholic Church, which has around a billion followers, onto a new path which is less focussed on social control than in the past, and more focussed on helping people where they actually are.

Personally I think it would be good to see that extending to an affirmation of committed gay marriages, and an encouragement for such couples to have children - whether by adoption or artificial insemination - and so form the faithful stable families that Roman Catholic teachings say they are so keen on. Although I suspect that would be many steps too far.

Not that a different approach is guaranteed. The (US-based) Catholic News Agency is busy reporting on (plugging) more conservative views on the family and pressing for simple restatement of old teachings. For example:

“Men and women need desperately to hear the truth about why they should get married in the first place,” the letter states. “And, once married, why Christ and the Church desire that they should remain faithful to each other throughout their lives on this earth.” The letter said that men and women need to know that in times of marital difficulty the Church will be “a source of support, not just for individual spouses, but for the marriage itself.”

In other words the pastoral needs of individuals should be secondary to protecting and promoting the institution. The letter they are reporting on also describes marriage and the family as "indispensible", a real kick in the teeth to the vast army of single people who faithfully serve Jesus as part of the Roman Catholic church.

So this synod is an opportunity for a major change of tone and focus for the Roman Catholic church (although not on the underlying fundamental values). However the forces of conservatism and authoritarianism are mobilising to stop that happening.

I am a bit dubious about the operation of the Holy Spirit through church denominations, indeed through organised religion in general, but if ever there was a time for prayer that the Spirit's movement might be truly effective, this is surely it. The lives of a billion people could be affected, for better or for worse.

All Change

We spent yesterday driving down the motorway to deliver our daughter (and a huge pile of stuff) to her new accommodation as she starts life at university. Very stressful and rather teary ... she was upset too ;)

Meanwhile our son, who graduated in July, looks like he has a job and will be leaving home in a couple of weeks. Likely another stressful, teary occasion, along a different motorway.

Then it will be just the two of us, at least during term time. However will we cope, after 22 years of living as parents, first and foremost?

It has to be said that an awful lot of other parents have been through this before us, and somehow survived. It's even labelled a 'syndrome', so it must be serious - and there's loads of advice all over the internet. The Independent has a good article here which ends with some sensible 'coping strategies'.

The site where I got the rather super picture above (just click on the picture to go there) begins with a good description of Empty Nest Syndrome, although by some sleight of hand it ends up plugging a book called Crowded Nest Syndrome. On the way it makes the point that often "the anticipation of children leaving home is more frightening than when they actually do leave". I think for us this rings a bell. And it brings back memories of earlier, similarly scary transitions, like their first day at school, which worked out okay in the end.

At heart I think the issue is about coping with change, especially at a time of life when it seems everything is changing too fast. Except that this always seems to be the way with change: nothing much seems to happen for ages, then suddenly loads of changes pile up on you at once. Leaving home ourselves, getting married, having children - they're all typically at busy times in our lives, they're all times when everything changes, and they are all times when a positive approach really helps.

Take getting married: back in the day a wife used to be known as a 'ball and chain', and my in-laws-to-be were horrified at the idea of their daughter getting married before she had the chance to 'see the world'. Actually, seeing the world together as a couple was a lot more fun. It's a matter of appreciating and enjoying the positives and opportunities that the life change brings.

Similarly with having children. It cut down on 'seeing the world' - so much extra stress and hassle in long distance travel with young children - but there are so many opportunities to do new things and enjoy new experiences together as a family.

And now we are back to being a couple again - but a middle-aged couple this time, with grown up children experiencing their own adventures. I don't know what new opportunities this will bring, but I'm sure they will be there; we just need to be alert and open, ready to enjoy them.

The past is a wonderful (hopefully) part of the way things are, and the future is a great unknown, but the present is an amazing gift, always full of unexpected things, ready for us to wonder at, to learn from and, especially, to enjoy.

Wherever you are, whatever changes you are going through, may God give you the great gift of enjoying your present, for all it is worth.

May 2012 Ramble

I think last month has to go down as being very definitely not my favourite month.

It began (and continued) with my wife hobbling about on crutches, off work and needing to be taken everywhere by car - including extra trips to physios, doctors, scans, etc. Lousy for her, challenging for my CFS/ME. Thankfully she's now working part time - mornings - trundling around on her crutches, although that gets very painful for her after a while.

I gather there are increasing numbers of people being injured by out-of-control dogs in our local parks. It is the old problem of an incompetent and inconsiderate minority messing things up for everyone else - if they cannot control their dog they should keep it on a lead, it's that simple surely.

Having had CFS/ME more-or-less under control for many years now, I have occasionally wondered how far the symptoms nowadays are more down to middle age and physical unfitness. Mid-May I was hit by a virus when my system was already on the edge, and simply crashed. There is a distinctive combination of feverishness, migraine, nausea, hunger and utter exhaustion - suddenly it all came rushing back to me. Now I'm just fragile and sleeping like a toddler (or old, old man) every afternoon.

A fortnight ago my father-in-law (pictured) died; his funeral was last week. He'd been very poorly since last summer, and not at all well for several years before that, so it wasn't really a surprise ... but still a shock, if you see what I mean. Similarly, it was very sad that he's gone ... but also not sad, because he really was not well and emphysema isn't something you recover from. It's amusing to think of him up with Simon Peter: discussing boats, supping fine ale, and setting the world to rights. Then settling down for a good long rest.

The sting in the tail is that it would have been my Dad's birthday at the beginning of the month; he too died of emphysema a few years back. Not good.

Any silver lining to this May? Well, there was the Delain concert I have already posted about, and there was my son home for the final week. We expected him back for his Grandad's funeral, but he suddenly turned up several days earlier than I'd expected; so that was a pleasant surprise.

That's about it though, in truth. Oh well, here's looking forward to June with optimism and hope. We never quite know what treats might be just around the corner.

Post-Christmas Ramble

Every year since I started blogging I have done some sort of Christmas post, usually something to do with "the real meaning of Christmas". This year I'm a fortnight into January, and my most recent post is still from the 10th December!

It seems to me to have been a very dark midwinter. Extended-family-wise situations have varied between stressful and downright frightening; healthwise CFS has been exhausting; UK-politics-wise has seen a barely veiled policy of favouring the rich and taxing the poor; US-politics-wise we have "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" - tax cuts for the wealthy and persecution for the whistle-blowers (not to mention the division in that deeply divided, and extremely violent, country resulting in yet another shooting atrocity); in Cote d'Ivoire there's another African 'strong-man' who won't relinquish power, financed, in this case, by the multi-national chocolate manufacturers Nestle, Mars/M&Ms and Hershey (although not Cadbury, yet); there are major floods in Brazil and Australia; and clearing up from last year's earthquake in Haiti doesn't seem to be happening.

Maybe, for me, this year's "real meaning of Christmas" is a line from the opening section of John's Gospel: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." Please?

25 Years!

Once upon a time ...

Last month BlackLin and I celebrated our silver wedding anniversary. The weekend before the actual date we had a family celebration: roughly a million in-laws plus my brother and step-mother (NOT the fairy-tale sort, I should point out). My step-mother came over from Ireland, and gave my brother a lift down from Nottingham, so we really appreciated them coming (as we did the outlaws, of course). Since there were lots of kids, we went to the Travellers' Rest in Lower Caversham, who are family friendly and do meals that everyone can eat, and had a really enjoyable evening.

The anniversary itself we stayed in with a Thai take-away, from the Prince of Wales, and watched a film. Then the weekend after we went for a night in the hotel we stayed at for the first night of our honeymoon (now called The Great House, in Sonning). They did us a super room - actually a mini-suite of rooms - which was really good; it would have been pleasant to stay for longer.

Older, if not wiser.

All in all, a wonderful , if exhausting, week. Actually, it was a bit too exhausting really, because the Sunday before the anniversary I was wrecked from the family celebration so I didn't go to church, and they'd very kindly got us some flowers and a present - a bit sad that only BlackLin was there to receive them.

Afterwards, I got Photoshop out and did composites for those who came: a mix of photos from the wedding itself with photos from the celebration, personalised for the recipient, in a simple frame. I was rather pleased with the way they all came out, so I hope they enjoyed them.

Looking at the old photos is a bit sombre though, in some ways. My Mum, Dad and grandmother were all at the wedding, and obviously very prominent in the photos, but have since died. Actually, I'm now older than my Mum was when she went, which feels a bit weird. But there's also a photo of several of the friends who came to the reception, so many of whom we have lost touch with over the years. It's also thought-provoking how many marriages haven't lasted; something of a salutary reminder that we are celebrating good fortune as much as anything else.

Another, less happy, celebration this month is that it is now fifteen years since I got the 'flu bug that mutated into CFS (aka ME over here, or CFIDS in the US). I was last team leader standing on a large development project that had been decimated when a particularly virulent outbreak of 'flu swept through the office. I thought I had successfully fought the bug off for long enough for the earliest victims to start returning before succumbing myself. What I didn't then realise is that the early symptoms of 'flu are actually a side-effect of the body's defenses, so actually all I'd done was suppress my first line of resistance. In many ways that had been a really draining and exhausting year, so my defenses weren't that brilliant to start with. I spent several weeks expecting to go back to work in a couple of days, as 'flu turned into 'post-flu malaise'. Then I spent several months expecting to go back 'in a week or so', as it turned into post-viral fatigue (with hindsight I can see just how scrambled my brains were at the time, because I really wasn't well enough, nor recovering fast enough, to have any realistic prospect of staying out of bed all day, never mind working).

These days the CFS is stable, as long as I don't push it too hard. Of course I do, including over the anniversary period last month - it generally means I take a hit for several weeks or months, but sometimes that is worth it.

I'm wandering off topic a bit, so it's time to go. I do wish you and yours a blessed time over the run-up to Christmas (not to mention Thanksgiving in some foreign climes). If there's one thing musing over an anniversary reminds me of, it's that people matter more than things. Not a particularly original thought, but it does give me the opportunity to describe it as sententious (I've been reading a lot of Brother Cadfael books recently).