The road goes ever on

‘You’ve come on Curry Wednesday!’ they tell me when I drop in to the church office for a chat. Simeon Ewing and Fiona Waite have recently joined the youth team at Hilton Church, managed by Youth Pastor Jonathan Fraser.

I’m preparing an article about their work for the church web-site, and we have a wide-ranging conversation about the children and youth activities they’re involved with in church and community. Simeon is the church’s Children’s Worker; Fiona a ‘Ministry Apprentice’ working with young people in the church and in Hilton generally three days a week, while studying at Highland Theological College the other two days.

And Curry Wednesday? Each Wednesday one of the team prepares an Indian meal which the three of them share, as a means of building their working and personal relationships.

I’m always fascinated to hear different people’s experiences of Christianity, and so I asked Fiona and Simeon what faith is like for them.

They spoke about coming to faith. For Fiona, it began when she heard ‘about the Bible in a different way that actually related to my life’ and ‘about having a relationship with God.’ For Simeon there was a particular place and time. At the age of just 4, he tells me, ‘I committed my life to Jesus.’ He’d seen his parent’s faith, and, he says ‘I knew there was some decision I had to make to start the journey myself.’

Both believe that God speaks to them. God is heard in ‘a very strong sense’ or impression that a particular course of action is right; in ‘an inner peace’ about the way ahead; in the awakening within them of words from the Bible; in the advice of others when somehow it makes a home within them; in a sense of ‘conviction’ when a wrong decision has been made.  

Both believe that God is leading them through life, though they admit to taking wrong turnings along the way! This journey has both an outer dimension of work and learning and relationships, and a closely linked inner dimension of developing and maturing faith.

I think all of us as Christians reflecting on our lives will find those elements present: a coming to faith; a sense of God ‘speaking’ (however that works in our experience); and a conviction that God calls us on a journey of being and becoming.

Fiona and Simeon’s words encourage us, but we don’t need to feel we must have exactly the same beliefs or identical experiences as our fellow-Christians – although some Christians give the impression at times that their particular way of believing and experiencing is the only ‘correct’ way, the only way God accepts.

But in fact we all have different personalities, different backgrounds, different experiences of being parented, and we all belong to different traditions within the Christian church. And so our expectations of what encountering God ‘feels like’, and the words and ideas we use to describe our beliefs will be different. We are each unique, and the Father of Jesus comes to each of us in ways utterly appropriate to who we are.

Perhaps we don’t speak often enough in church about the terrain across which the journey leads many of us. We find ourselves reluctantly moving from a place of security in a particular set of long-held beliefs, to a place where we question everything we have ever believed.  Eventually we arrive in a wider place, still rooted in our faith in Christ (in fact more rooted than ever), but comfortable now with unanswered questions. We look across church and world seeing no longer ‘them’ and ‘us’ but increasingly simply ‘us.’

We discover that people in faith traditions outwith Christianity have very similar experiences to ours although they do not share our faith in Jesus Christ. Are these experiences false, or is Jesus bigger than we had ever imagined, connecting deeply with people who do not yet recognise him?

Simeon and Fiona are near the start of their journeys. I am impressed by the authenticity of their faith stories, the reality of their joy. And impressed too by the love which they have for children and young people. ‘I want to tell them God loves them,’ Simeon simply.

I am convinced that love is the most important thing, and that God looks not so much at the specifics of our beliefs, but at how well we reflect the love of Jesus Christ.

We can’t go it alone on this journey, but we support one another as we travel in Love, and into Love. It’s impressive to see the bond which Jonathan and his team have. Curry Wednesday. A kind of eucharist in tikka masala, pilau rice and coffee.  Thank you, Father.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 17th March 2016)

Ministering in weakness: the power of story

In a recent sermon our minister, Rev Duncan Macpherson of Hilton Church Inverness described a recent experience of burnout, and his gratitude to God for rescuing him when he was ‘in a pit, sprachling about in the mud and mire.’

He was preaching on Psalm 40 – a testimony from many centuries ago of God’s rescuing intervention. Using the words of the Psalm, Duncan says that God ‘set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.’

He described the extreme tiredness which crept over him in August 2012, a tiredness which neither holiday nor rest could lift. Unable to sleep, battling constant exhaustion, barely able to walk. It seemed his ministry might be over. ‘Is there a way through this, or am I destined to stay in this pit of exhaustion and tiredness for ever?’

He described the agonised questioning (‘Where is God in this?); the anger he felt at himself and others; the self-reproach.

And he told us how, like the author of the Psalm, he grew aware that God was with him as he slowly journeyed back to health, and realised that the richest treasures are often found in life’s dark places.

To stand up and be as real and vulnerable as Duncan was as he described this painful journey takes both bravery and humility. Duncan shared as he did for two reasons. Firstly, to encourage those of us who are currently struggling in dark places (and which of us is immune from times of darkness?): we are not alone; God is with us in our pain, and therefore, hope remains.

And secondly, to demonstrate that there is unique power in a personal story, honestly shared in spoken or written words or in whatever ways of sharing come naturally to us.  Psalm 40 has blessed and encouraged God’s friends across the centuries. Today our stories bless and encourage those around us. As Henri Nouwen put it ‘we minister above all with our weakness.’

The better we know and understand the true significance of our stories, the more real and therefore powerful our sharing becomes. Gaining this discernment is harder than it seems. We re-shape our personal stories as we get older, to present ourselves in ways we are comfortable with.  But which version of is truest?

And some of us tell, and try to live out of stories which are not genuinely ‘us’. I may model my life on what I believe others expect of me; what I think I ‘ought’ to be; what I assume the false hard-taskmaster image of God I carry in my heart demands of me.

I suspect Duncan’s telling of his story would have been very different before his Psalm 40 experience – he mentioned his lack of awareness of what an over-busy life was doing to him, hinting that he was blind to powerful drives hounding him to self-destruction.

Before I can tell my story authentically I need to hear that story. I discover my identity and my story as I listen to my deepest self. For there, beneath all the storms of guilt and delusion whispers the voice saying ‘This is who you are! This is the path I have for you to follow.’

And once I have heard that voice - I believe it’s the voice of God -  I realise I’m free to choose to be who I am called to be; to choose the story I am called to live. And it’s not easy for some of us to choose – the dark place can become so familiar that the freedom on offer seems risky and scary.

Duncan chose freedom: adopting a less pressured lifestyle; concentrating on things he alone can do, and leaving the rest to others,; drawing inspiration daily from other struggling pilgrims in the Psalms.

It’s important not just to discern and then to share our own stories, but to listen to other people’s stories as we’d like them to listen to ours – non-judgementally;  open and attentive. Some will speak of finding God in the darkness, other of feeling abandoned by God and of abandoning faith in return.

And we listen, and we wait, as a faithful friend listened to and waited with Duncan during his months of darkness, and as Duncan now makes space to journey with others.

All our stories are provisional, and will be fully understood only when we meet the great Storyteller in another place.

Duncan's conclusion had authenticity and power because of what we'd heard earlier. This was not a theoretical statement of belied, but a dsipatch from the front line. 'I can stand here this morning and say 'God is good.' We worship the God who hears our cries, who lifts us up, who gives us a new song to sing. 

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 8th July 2015)

The God-goven power of imagination

At the start of the day, we were asked to tie a piece of string loosely round our neighbour’s wrist. We were at a retreat at Hilton Church, reflecting on the theme ‘Extraordinary God in an ordinary life.’ It was led by the writer Merryn Glover, and by Church of Scotland Mission Development worker Steve Aisthorpe, both from Badenoch.  

The string was a reminder to each of us to ‘stay awake’, open to the whisper of God in one another, in the words we read and listened to, and in the ordinary things around us – the bread and wine, the beauty of the garden, the autumn sun shafting through the window.

Bishop Mark Strange gave the same message at Inverness Cathedral on the 1^st Sunday in Advent. ‘Stay awake!’ he urged. Christ has come; Christ is with us; Christ will come again.

I’ve been thinking about the fact that artists at work often feel they’re not so much creating something new as uncovering something already there. There are innumerable ways of combining the notes on a keyboard to create a new tune, but to the composer it can feel that all the possible melodies are already present, waiting to be discovered.

I believe imagination is among the most wonderful gifts God has given us, and that the correct use of it is key to staying awake. We are people of imagination, because God is a God of imagination, for God imagined the universe before it existed.

Merryn Glover quoted Albert Einstein: ‘There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.’

To live the latter way is to use our imagination – not in order to see what is not there, but to truly see what is there.

Imagination reveals what lies behind the surface of things, enabling us to see new possibilities and different ways of doing things, to forge new connections, to be makers and creators, to enter into the experiences of others, to enjoy poetry, music and drama.

But the gift can be wrongly used. A darkened imagination led to Auschwitz and its gas chambers, to the atomic bomb, to countless evil and destructive actions. If deployed unwisely, imagination can ensnare rather than liberating us, as when we imagine that the worst will happen.  Unwilling to face reality we can misuse imagination to hide from the facts.

Here’s an intriguing question: does our imagination actually change things? Well, imagining a better future certainly empowers me to live hopefully and positively. But you sometimes hear it suggested that we can ‘ask the universe’, changing by using our imagination things which otherwise lie beyond our power to change.

But if that’s true why are there times when despite all our prayer and agonising and imagining nothing changes? It seems to me that the only wise way of using the gift is to remain awake to God, asking God to prompt our imaginations, showing us things God has already imagined, the combination of notes which God has already heard, the futures in which God is already present, the dreams of God whose hour has come. These are the dreams which, when we enter into them imaginatively, are fulfilled.

We might think that God’s imagination is limited to religious issues, but in truth God’s dreams are holistic – there is nothing good which we can dream as cooks or architects, as cross-stitchers or engineers, as scientists or play-leaders, as ordinary folk wanting to bless others and make them happy, nothing good we can dream which God has not already imagined. So God doesn’t just give us imagination, but also guides our imagining – if only we stay awake.

God prompts us at this time of year to look at the Baby in the manger, at once ordinary and extraordinary, and to awaken to God’s imagined future – a new heaven and a new earth – and to our role in bringing that future closer through transforming the world smile by smile, sacrifice by sacrifice, dream by dream.

We need to seek reminders to stay awake which are as powerful as the piece of string round our wrists that day at Hilton. It’s significant that we tied the string on one another’s wrists, for we stay awake best when we are members of an expectant community, encouraging one another, transformed ourselves and transforming the world we live in as together we catch sight of God’s imagined future.

And yet each of us must find our own way. Merryn Glover quoted Rowan Williams – ‘With every person there is one way in which that person can show the life of God – and that person only.’ And we find that way in awakening to God’s imaginings for us as individuals.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 11th December 2014)