Sometimes when I intend to pray I don't so much pray as dutifully get the job done, like drying dishes or washing the car.

Other times life is overloaded with stuff to do and prayer becomes one of those things I do while doing other things, prayer as multi-tasking and God given a percentage of my attention.

Or under pressure send God a text, U R my 4tress[ ]

Then feeling guilty because I don't pray properly (what would a proper prayer sound like) I come across a poem like this and realise again, prayer isn't calibrated on my pious thoughts and wayward intentionality. Prayer is paying attention, in those moments when God is present, and I notice.

Spectrum

A little window, eastward, low, obscure,

A flask of water on the vestry press,

A ray of sunshine through a fretted door,

And myself kneeling in live quietness:

Heaven's brightness was then gathered in the glass,

Marshalled and analysed, as one by one

In terms of fire I saw the colours pass,

Each in its proper beauty, while the sun

Made his dear daughter Light sing her own praise.

(As Wisdom may, who is a mode of light),

Counting her seven great jewels: then those rays

Remerged in the whole diamond, total sight.

The globe revolved subservient: that just star

Whirled in his place; water and glass obeyed

The laws appointed; with them, yet how far

From their perfection, I still knelt and prayed.

(Ruth Pitter, Collected Poems, page 370)

The window is the Daily Bread window in Durham Cathedral, gifted by the staff of Marks and Spencers in Durham. Those who have been in my College study will recognise it. I did a stranded cotton tapestry of this years ago, and the vivid, vibrant, vital colours are themselves a form of praise. The poem is one of my favourites from Ruth Pitter.

Once you've spent a day in Glen Dye, Gerard Kelly's poem is even more impressive as a this worldly spirituality that brings heaven and earth, God and creation, our humanity and the Divine, ecology and theology, nature and praise, into that creative relationship that affirms as good all that God has made. Celebrating the beauty of the earth is just as important as lamenting its brokenness and ours, and an equally valid form of praise as any anticipation of being less than we were made to be – which is human beings who image the life of the Triune God, and whose humanity is taken up by Jesus Christ in the renewal and reconciliation of created existence, and human experience.

  

the very thought

I love the very thought of Heaven:
Where angels sing
In perfect, perpetual choir practice.
Where Father, Son and Spirit rule
Unchallenged
And are honoured in full measure.
I love the very thought of Heaven:
But I was not made
To live there.

I was not made
To walk on clouds,
And bask eternally
In immaterial splendour.
I was made for this green planet:
This tight ball
Of aching beauty,
Alive with the unending possibilities
Of his creative power.
I was made for the sunshine
That blazes through the veins of a leaf
And glints on the tiny, perfect back
Of a ladybird crossing my arm.
I was made to be human
In this most human of places.
I was made for earth:
The earth is my home.
That’s why I’m glad that God,
More than anyone,
Is a friend of the earth:
Prepared as he was to die
For its release.
And that’s why I’m glad
That the magnificent, jewelled foundations
Of the mighty pearly gates
Will be anchored
Deeply and forever
In the soil of earth.

by gerard kelly

Dynamic and erratic,

spontaneous and radical,

audacious and immature,

committed if not altogether coherent,

ecumenically open and often experimental,

visible here and there,

now and then,

but unsettled institutionally.

Almost monastic in nature

but most of all….

enacting a fearful hope

for human life in society.

William Stringfellow, Quoted in Celtic Daily Prayer, page 634

Three things came together today and turned ordinary time into time when the ordinary and everyday, the routine and the easily missed, become for us extended moments of moment, not momentous, but not trivial either.

Sitting in  church looking at a prayer, beautifully rendered in cross stitch, a prayer I use often in worship, and which someone noted down some years ago, and worked in threads, framed it, and gifted it to the church. Now it hangs just to the left of where I sit. It's a prayer about accepting each day as God's gift, to be cherished for the freedom and possibility that every minute brings to us.

On the way to church listening to Classic FM, the second movement of Brahms' Violin Concerto. The gentle melody exudes inner yearning, as if musical notes, carefully composed and skillfully played contain a more adequate grammar of longing, a logic of the heart's desire, a capacity for expression that doesn't need to answer all the deep questions of our existence, but merely to remind us that God has put eternity in our hearts, and yearning is prayer, 'the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed.'

 Then there were the chocolate gingers! My interest in spirituality and mystical theology has never attained that high level of ascetic practices that would call in question the delight, the God given pleasure, and the necessity for my inner happiness, of the combined taste of dark chocolate and stem ginger! I'm struggling to give a spiritual or intellectual twist to this which is just as well. Few things waste good food more than rationalising the joy of taste. I suppose I could quote "O taste and see that the Lord is good"; or compare the rich spiced sweetness of chocolate gingers to the Psalmist's equivalent comment on the Word of God, "sweeter also than honey, and the honeycomb".

No, on this holiday Sunday blessings can be counted. A prayer that receives each day as gift and offers it in worship; music that pulls our hopes and trust upwards in a longing only God can fulfil; sweets, the intensity of taste, spice and sweetness, the pleasure to mind and body that makes us so aware of our physical reality. Each of them a sacrament, a means of recognising in that moment, the presence of grace and the gift that is God and the God who comes as gift. 

Just finished the class on the rediscovery of the Triune God. The discussion on Mission and Trinity was an exciting collaborative hour which eventually produced the theological goods that only come from a class engaged, informed, excited and willing to make space in their minds for new and dynamic thought.

Some of that discussion will continue to niggle away at our theological assumptions and the limitations to our practices and convictions that unexamined assumptions often impose. I have an idea. This is not news, it happens now and again. But the theological goods captured on the whiteboard and preserved on Ipads and emails will make an interesting project for this class to take forward. Except it's the final year class. That's ok – they aren't going to stop thinking, they're going to think deeper, longer and more adventurously out of what they have worked so hard to learn during their journey with us. It would be interesting to see where yesterday's thinking might lead if they continued the discussion on an online blog and developed it into a way of bringing Trinitarian theology, missiology and a Baptist ecclesiology together. Not right away of course – but we may decide on a collaborative project aimed at pushing our own thinking as far as it will go….and then some more…