Author: jessicafoster3

A day at the spa – a new way of doing faith?

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A few people I know choose to spend retreat time at spas, so I thought I would give it go and combine something I need with something I love. However, for me, it did not really work, but it did give me my third business idea.

I think, what we really need here in Birmingham is a spa, just like the one at The Malvern which is after all situated on a retail park. It needs to have  indoor and outdoor space, serve a range of foods suitable for people of different faiths and be prepared to run single-sex sessions for the bulk of their opening hours.

Because what I discovered by trying to go on retreat at the Spa was that it was not a place of solitude and rest but a place of conviviality and stimulation. In some ways the day had a bit of a liturgy  although the congregation is never gathered but left to explore stations of relaxation, de-tox and refreshment either alone or with friends. However the design of the place certainly means that gatherings do happen in jacuzzis and steam rooms and saunas and massage racks (far more pleasant than it sounds.).

I even managed to find a spa-evangelist on the sunbed next to mine who nearly persuaded me to become a member! (Not that it is hard to sell me something.) She told me about group socials, training in mediation and special classes I could go to – so for members of the spa I was merely visiting  it was a lot like church.

And there was a deacon! Most of the staff were very polished and seemed to be employed for purely decorative purposes. But amongst all this slightly cold perfection was Linda, whose lovely face was not plastered in make-up and whose uniform was a pair of trousers and a polo shirt. Her badge said ‘spa assistant’ – the least glamourous title assigned throughout the building. But it was Linda who rescued me when I didn’t have the money to leave as a deposit for flip-flops, it was Linda who offered to fetch me a glass of water when the bar said they didn’t serve it and it was Linda who noticed I was leaving and asked me if I had enjoyed my day – and then waited for the answer. I really wanted to recruit Linda.

Its odd that as local pubs close, High Street gyms open. Corner shops are replaced by coffee shops and delis where people can gather and find company. But I think a Birmingham Spa could add something special to the mix. I could imagine amazing conversations unfolding in the soothing bubbles of the whirlpool, honest struggling for truth in the heat of the crystal steam room and perhaps time for contemplation in the new  subtly-lit relaxation room. So, once again, I am looking for investors and once it’s built I’d be more than happy to be a deacon/chaplain there – but sadly I don’t think I’d  be as good  as Linda.

Neighbours

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Chatting in the wee small hours at a party recently we fell into conversation with a psychotherapist. When a friend helpfully revealed I was at ‘vicar college’ , her reponse was immediate: ‘Change to psychotherapy while you have the time, if you are a vicar you’ll have to love your neighbour and that is too difficult.’ Had it been earlier in the evening I might have pointed out that as a Christian psychotherapist or Christian anything I would remain obliged to at least try and love my neighbour, however difficult.

Loving your neighbour is one of those principles that is generally accepted to be a good thing in theory. But I have to admit in practice it is quite hard. We have reasonably near neighbours who between their kids, pets, electric tools and loud phone-calls outdoors make our garden pretty much unusable. We are on nodding terms but underneath the thin veneer politeness there is a (probably mutual) seething hostility.

Last night at an event hosted by Islamic Relief to celebrate their 30 years of work and launch Ramadan, Professor Timothy Winter gave a brilliant exegisis of Surah 41 with a particular focus on verse (or ayah) 34: “And not equal are the good deed and the bad. Repel [evil] by that [deed] which is better; and thereupon the one whom between you and him is enmity [will become] as though he was a devoted friend”  Or as the Bible says is 1 Peter 3 v 9: “Don’t repay evil for evil. Don’t retaliate with insults when people insult you. Instead, pay them back with a blessing. That is what God has called you to do, and he will bless you for it.”

So just as Professor Winter urged Muslims to respond to Islamophobia with mildness, kindness and patience so to I need to work on my response to my actual neighbour (who are clearly not evil, merely inconsiderate). I don’t know why it is as hard as it seems to be to put the theory into practice.

When we first moved in here our Muslim neighbours whom we now know quite well – offered us food and friendship before we offered them anything. They had no knowing what attitudes they might encounter from us but they were prepared to take the risk. I hope they feel that risk paid off!

I wonder what I can risk in order to offer some genuine friendship to the family down the road? How do you offer friendship when you don’t feeel friendly? Do you need to like your neighbour in order to love them?

Thinking over these questions during a night of caffeine-induced imsonnia, it dawned on me that the answers probably lie in Jesus’s commandment to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. (If the constant sound of a dustbin lid being banged on concrete counts as persecution.) Theologian Ann Morisy says prayer is a rehearsal for the moment we are called to perform so I hope if I can pray enough, I might have the lines I need when the opportunity to perform arises.

But if not, it is good to know if I don’t sort out the relationships on our street – at least I can become a psychotherapist!

Places of Change

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Today we were running a workshop on Places of Welcome – the network we are helping to develop of places across the city that offer conversation, hospitality and basic information for a couple of hours of week.One of the participants mentioned that the place she worked was a ‘Place of Change’ and she wanted to see how that connected with a ‘Place of Welcome.’

I found the connection really interesting. In a way we aim to be places of change too in that those who arrive feeling isolated, lonely and unable to contribute find themselves connected, accepted and able to participate. One of our principles is to keep the lines between guest and host very blurred and to encourage all who visit a place of welcome to make some sort of contribution to its running whether that is helping with the washing-up, baking a cake or opening up conversation with newcomers.

The place of change our workshop member was talking about was much more specific and purposeful. It was a place where young people were found routes into employment, training and independent living. But I wondered if that sort of change can happen without being welcomed, without being known and appreciated before being ‘sorted.’ Or if we are too welcomed, if we belong too much and we are too secure, does the incentive to change disappear. I sometimes think I am least ‘changed’ when I am with my parents and in-laws – I seem to stay stuck as I was 20 years ago!

I think the Christian theologian Miroslav Volf’s idea of a ‘Catholic Personality’ sheds some light on this. In his fascinating  book ‘Exclusion and Embrace‘ he describes the catholic personality as being enriched by others and reflecting multiple others in a particular way. He says that being born of the Spirit creates a fissure between the Christian and their own culture through which they ‘other’ can come in . ‘The Spirit unlocks the doors of my heart saying: “You are not only you, others belong to you too.”‘

So when we can distance ourselves from our identity, perhaps our family ties and our comfort zone we make room for the ‘other’ to enrich and change us. This seems to make sense of some of the difficult passages in scripture when Jesus seems to dismiss his earthly family to make room for the new ‘others’ that have become his disciples.Or the bits that tell us we cannot be a disciple without hating our parents.

Preaching on the Holy Spirit this week I was struck that the gift of tongues given to the disciples in Acts had a very practical purpose. It meant that people from different cultures and ethnicities could understand each other and speak the truth to each other. Our churches could become places of welcome and change if they help us to make space for the stranger or the ‘other’ and welcome them so deeply that our very character and personality is changed.

Maya Angelou seemed to be thinking of something similar when she wrote her poem – Touched by an Angel. Its how I concluded my sermon and I’ll give her the last word here too.

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love’s light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

Wasting time, shoulder to shoulder

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Its odd how you mainly hear what you want to hear or what you are already thinking but  the main things I took away from the Mission Apprentice Day held in Birmingham were that wasting time with people is never a waste of time and it is easier to build relationships shoulder to shoulder or side-by-side than face to face.

(Mission Apprentices are people who have been attached to 7 churches across the city exploring how to connect churches with their communities in a number of ways. The two year programme has been carefully evaluated and the  findings were presented on Friday.)

I ended up having the same conversation at the Dave Andrews day in Birmingham held last month which inspired lots of us to think again about our involvement in communities. We talked how in relationships with teenagers great conversations happen when you are driving them somewhere, cooking, playing football – sit them down for a serious talk and you’ll get nowhere. Somehow conversation is much easier when its not the sole purpose of a meeting. Shoulder to shoulder is far more comfortable for us than face to face.

When Dave was last here about three years ago he talked about the differnce between the Yiddish words ‘schmoozing’ and ‘maching’. He said we need both but one is informal and involves barbecues, coffee shops and pubs. The other is more formal and involves starting groups or new initiatives. He added that schmoozing happens most when we are young adults and then disappears when family and work pressures kick in so middle-age is generally a time of maching. Schmoozing often begins again when we retire but in the times between we need to nurture it as it generates deeper personal relationships. You can read more about this in his book, Out and Out: Way-Out Community Work.

I think some of the success stories we heard from the Mission Apprentices on Friday arose because they had time to schmooze. I also wondered in the back of my mind if vicars generally get sucked into maching leaving a deacon free to schmooze – I will test that out over the next few years but I hope its true – bring on the coffee shops and barbecues!

Our next round of Near Neighbours grants open on Monday. In the last round we were able to support around 140 projects in Birmingham that brought people together both to mach and schmooze. We have got some new areas now and some ongoing support available to all our old areas. There’s a lot going on in this city at the moment so I really hope the grants are well used and people of different faiths can find the time, that will never be wasted, to hang out, shoulder to shoulder with their neighbour and continue to build the trusting relationships that knit our city together and deepen our appreciation of one another.

Heavy-headed and heavy hearted

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I got back from holiday yesterday to discover a good friend of mine who is busy learning English and looking for work had been sanctioned for a month because she had not actually applied for any jobs. There were two reasons for this: firstly because she had been ill with flu’ for a good fortnight and secondly because she had not seen anything that she felt she was qualified for. When I chatted to her today she told me her head was very heavy.

Sanctions are my absolute pet hate. I do not understand how they are legal or considered humane. They trigger a spiral of events that leaves someone penniless and hopeless and they send anxiety levels shooting through the roof. They must cost far, far more than they save in healthcare and in criminal processes as they leave people with very few options other than begging, borrowing or stealing.

A sanction means that your ‘benefits’ – the money with which you can just about buy food and pay bills is stopped. This triggers automatically a stopping of your housing benefit so you are left unable to pay your rent. And just to cap it, your council tax benefits stop too so suddenly you face a large tax bill. In our Hunger Journals in which we collected stories from people facing food poverty, sanctions were often the thing that tipped people people into crisis. (You can read stories from the Hunger Journals here)

So imagine for a moment that English is not your first language. You receive endless, long complicated letters which basically say you will have nothing to live on. In order to appeal you need to ring premium rate phone numbers and hold for a very long time and work your way through extremely complicated documents. Your options are limited. You are left bewildered, angry,  and punished for something you did not know you had even done. (My friend was following the advice given to her at college). You fear that you will be evicted from your house and you have no way of buying food or any essentials. (People surviving on benefits do not usually have savings) I am ashamed to live in a country that does this to people.

As a Church we can offer some support to people like my friend but not enough. What I really want is to be able to offer her a job and I, for the first time in my life, wish I were a successful businesswoman. I wish we could run social enterprises that offer my friend decent contracts of work and an environment that would build her confidence.

My daughter keeps telling me to launch my pet business idea – called Pants by Post. I (for some strange reason) think there is a market for personalised pants as presents – Happy Birthday pants, Good Luck pants, Get Well Soon pants etc etc. I mean who would not like to receive cheerful underwear through the post. How much more useful is a pair of knickers than some twee hallmark card. I think Pants by Post could be Interflora for our generation – but that’s just me.  If anyone wants to invest in my pants idea I would be thrilled! In fact if anyone knows anyway of finding employment for my talented, reliable, honest, kind and generous friend I would be thrilled.

In the meantime I take courage from this poem by Dorothee Soelle

 

I believe in Jesus Christ

who was right when he

like each of us

just another individual who couldn’t beat city hall

worked to change the status quo

and was destroyed

looking at him I see

how our intelligence is crippled

our imagination stifled

our efforts wasted

because we do not live as he did

every day I am afraid

that he died in vain

because he is buried in our churches

because we have betrayed his revolution

in our obedience to authority

and our fear of it

 

From Credo by Dorothee Soelle – you can read the whole poem here

Why I couldn’t sleep last night…

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… it wasn’t just a caffeine overdose. Lying and thinking over my day I felt saddened and anxious by two entirely separate but related incidents that happened yesterday. The first was voting – no big deal in a way and a well-worn habit of trotting to the local school, saying hi to friends and acquantainces and feeling glad that I live in a well-ordered democracy. But this year the ballot paper took me by surprise. Lists of candidates belonging to parties whose main policies seem to centre round xenophobia and prejudice against immigrants. And in  some wards near me – one of these parties has come second, taking the place of the party of protest. 89 new council seats for UKIP. How has this happened? How have our major parties become so unappealing that these fringe parties now have a veneer of acceptability.

One the same day I was chatting to a friend of mine, a priest I admire greatly who is black. She was telling me that she recently led a service in a middle-class white church and after the service one person had told her she had good diction (no-one has ever told me that) and three people asked her where she came from.

We talked about that question for some time and I really understood, perhaps for the first time, how it feels to be asked that question so often. It’s effect is to  literally put someone in an outsider’s place ( and make them feel they are not welcome in a ‘white’ place).  It implies that some roles, some spaces and places are for white people – they belong to one group of people. The attitude that only some people belong diminishes us all.  It is the attitude that Jesus challenged most often in the pharisees – at one point calling them ‘Whited sepulchres.’ No-one has privilege around God – that is a basic.

I am (still) writing my sermon for Pentecost and have now read both passages. In Acts the Holy Spirit falls on the disciples and they are able to speak in many languages. This is not a pointless magic trick or God showing off. This is so they can build a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural community of people who are seeking to live like Jesus. In John’s version the Spirit brings the ability to forgive (or not forgive)  – another essential for community building, especially when the community brings people together who are not all exactly the same (and can therefore pretend to get along on a superficial level).

While media headlines stir up suspicion against Muslims and UKIP attracts the Tory vote, the church cannot afford to indulge in ‘parallel lives’ or leave attitiudes of superiority and racism unchallenged. When we live as communities where all are welcome and we are free to learn and teach one another, forgiving each other when we are clumsy, drawing each other into greater love and greater truth, when our Churches model what it means to live together then we will really have, as we say each week, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared for all people.

 

 

Interrupting may be more than bad manners

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Yesterday I heard I was preaching at Pentecost. Today I got to spend all day listening to the wise and experienced Australian community worker, Dave Andrews. Those two things are linked because among the many helpful things that Dave spoke about  were some ideas about the Holy Sprit that I can pinch for my sermon.

Dave helpfully reminded us that the Spirit is not something that arrives in Acts, the Hebrew Bible is full of it and in fact it gets a mention in the first two verses of the Bible – in the creation story when the ‘wind from God’ swept over the face of the earth. Nor it is just in the Church or in Christians. Nowadays we are really keen on the gifts of the Spirit and forget about the fruits – love, joy, patience, kindness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. We certainly can’t claim the monopoly on them!

This week I saw the presence of God in action in a really moving way when I visited a church and met a group of kind, gentle, faithful people who generously offered patient healing prayer to people they know and don’t know because they believed that it could work and in a way it would be rude not to. The gifts and fruit of the Spirit came together in those people who lived their life of faith, hidden and unnoticed, without glory or reward and their offer was incredibly moving.

I am terribly impatient and often I finish people’s sentences and interrupt. There is no excuse and clearly I need to focus on growing some patience (alongside the other 7 gifts) but I think that perhaps sometimes we can see the Spirit or the work of the Spirit as interrupting. Wind and fire would certainly interrupt our church service and on that day when the Spirit came things started to change dramatically. The steady growth of disciples that happened during Jesus’ time was interrupted and 3,000 people joined them in one day. The movement took off and took shape. The patterns they had established were interrupted and new patterns of worship and communal living began to emerge. This is why Pentecost is celebrated as the birthday of the church. (You can read about it in Acts Chapter 2)

Someone said somewhere that our lives in the Spirit sometimes mean that we have to interrupt bad practice. That’s certainly what Martin Luther King did and what Dietrich Boenhoffer sought to do. It could also describe the work of Mandela, Ghandi, Oscar Romero and many other saints. It is clearly not a popular job description as most of those paid with their life or at least their freedom. But  I have so much gratitude to people who are prepared to interrupt the practices that oppress, separate, sicken or terrify people – especially those who do it with so little fuss or expectation of reward.

Dave Andrews said today that the Holy Spirit is God Incognito. I think I need to stop interrupting others and let this God interrupt me from time to time. And once I am used to letting that happen, no doubt I’ll find myself engaged trying to interrupt bad practice in  some small way. (Not that I want to  be killed or imprisoned…) In the meantime – if I have finished your sentence or interrupted your conversation, sorry.

PS Any comments or thoughts that would help shape these random mutterings into a beautifully crafted sermon on June 8th would be most welcome.

On being a Deacon

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I have realised that I have named the blog Distinctive Deacon but not really talked about why or what it means to me.

This week (well a week ago) women across the country were celebrating the 20th anniversary of their ordination to the priesthood in the Church of England. There were some amazing women at that gathering at St Paul’s who faced huge obstacles and opposition as they sought acceptance of their calling to serve as Anglican priests. Some of those amazing women I am really proud to call my friends.

But for many of those women the diaconate (the being a deacon) was where they were parked while the church decided if they thought women could be priests or not. Having been trained and ordained deacon in faith that they could one day be priests they waited in a kind of limbo – unable to preside at the Eucharist or have primary responsibility for the church.

So when I say I want to be a permanent deacon some people find it uncomfortable. How it works is that all priests are deacons for one year – a kind of appprenticeship. After a year they are ordained priest but the ‘deacon’ bit stays part of their priesthood and they combine the two ‘orders’ in one vocation. For me it will not be part, or subsumed – it will be my whole calling. I will be a distinctive deacon.

When I first really heard what a deacon is called to do – at an ordination service about 10 years ago – the hairs on the back of my neck literally stood on end.

This is what I heard: “Deacons are called to work with the Bishop and the priests with whom they serve as heralds of Christ’s kingdom. They are to proclaim the gospel in word and deed, as agents of God’s purposes of love. They are to serve the community in which they are set, bringing to the Church the needs and hopes of all the people. They are to work with their fellow members in searching out the poor and weak, the sick and lonely and those who are oppressed and powerless, reaching into the forgotten corners of the world, that the love of God may be made visible.”

There is so much I love about this but  two things stand out. The first is that you do it with others – fellow members – and the second is the phrase ‘forgotten corners of the world.’ There is place for  focussing on ‘low-lying fruits’ – a popular church expression to mean people close to Christianity  – but I also think that God is keen that we get out of our comfort zone and into the dark and dusty corners. And when we get there we’ll be amazed what we find.  I am so glad that this does not say that we take the love of God there because it will already be there – all we can do is make it visible, perhaps give it a name.

When I was exploring all this I was asked where did I see myself in the church building and while many  priests might answer at the altar – my reply was at the door. I see myself like the guys you see on holiday who are outside the restaurant badgering you to come in.

I think this job could be done by someone without a dog collar but I think ordaining people who work outside the church reminds people that their work outside the church is also holy, that the world outside church is holy and that God’s love is not confined to large victorian buildings but is expressed in a myriad ways, by a myriad of people doing a myriad of things.

Female priests anniversary marked

 

A hand on your shoulder

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Yesterday I co-led All Age Worship (family service to those of us who grew up in the 80s) in which we journeyed round the church listening to the story of Jesus appearing to his disciples as they travelled to a place called Emmaus. On our journey we thought about where we found God outside church, in scripture, in the sacraments and in our relationships.

I was a bit worried about this service as usually in our church things are reasonably polished and if I am even just giving out the hymns I write down exactly what I am going to say. This time however we had no time for rehearsals, the service sheets were all a bit of a muddle and we had double the number of people that I was expecting there.

So it was a bit raggedy but for me it was great to be a bit flexible and spontaenous and it gave us lots of freedom. So when I read these questions late on Saturday night in a wonderful book on prayer I had the freedom to include them in our service. unnamedThe questions were very simple – and according to this book they were used by my favourite ever saint, Francis of Assisi in his long nights of prayer in a cave – they were ‘Lord, who am I? Lord, who are you?’

So this was the question I asked at the beginning of the service (without the Lord bit because I would rather use something more open to talk about God)  and as we finished early (no rehearsal and timings all wrong) we had time to talk about them at the end. It was a short conversation but really memorable. Interestingly, people were more willing to talk about who God was than who they were but some of the things that stuck in my mind were ‘the one to whom I can trust the people I love,’  ‘God is love and I am learning to love’ and from an 11-year-old boy ‘God is like a hand on your shoulder.’

Afterwards I heard more answers from people and it seemed the questions went to the heart of struggles faced by women and men, teenagers, children and older people. Now I just need to find the time to start to answer those questions for myself and to live in the loving presence of God who is as close as a hand on your shoulder.

On Being Busy

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Yesterday I ended up being in six meetings (if you include a scheduled phone call that lasted well over half an hour). The first two were probably OK but I realised that even during them I was thinking about what I needed to do next. By the sixth I was hungry, tired and drained and heard myself moaning and grumping to anyone who would listen. (Grumping is not a word but it should be.)

The first meeting was about prayer, how to pray in an interfaith centre. I arrived with my phone and my notebook. No-one else did and I clearly didn’t need them. I realised them I carry them everywhere as a badge of busy-ness because being busy means you are connected and connected means important and in demand.

So even talking about busy is showing off. I think it is an addiction – as is my over-attachment to my phone – and needs discipline for a while so it stops being a habit. So I have some new rules. One day a week with no meetings and no more than three meetings a day. Meanwhile it is time again for my favourite quote from Thomas Merton – I think need to wear this round my neck or perhaps I should stick it over my phone/diary/calendar.

“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist…destroys their own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of their own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

So please don’t be offended if I say ‘no’. I might just be developing my inner capacity for peace…or I might have a more important meeting to go to!!