Category: Vicar’s Letters

Dear Friends,

Thank you for your warm welcome – after 7 years living in Istanbul it was time to ‘come home’. By the time you read this letter I will have been home for about two months. I am living in a home that I have owned for 14 years but only lived in for 4 years. One chapter has closed and now it’s time for a new chapter living nearer to family and friends.

There is a sense that I can echo T S Eliot’s words (from Little Gidding Part V):
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

Moving back to Istanbul was a time of exploration, of getting to spend time with Turkish friends, making new ones and being part of both a Turkish and English language Anglican Church. I am conscious that although I have returned to my home that a lot has changed in Burley and in UK which I am learning about as I unpack my shipment from Istanbul and settle back into life here again.

Over the last four years I have written a history of Christian women who have lived in what is now modern-day Turkey. Women who span the last 21 Centuries. I am in the process of publishing the English version on Amazon and will let you know when that is published. I embarked on this project knowing of a few well-known Christian women from the area. My book tells the story of about fifty-three women who have lived in what is now Turkey. In the first century, Turkey was known as Asia Minor and with other provinces was part of the Roman Empire. Constantine the Great was proclaimed Emperor of the Roman Empire in York – his statute which is outside York Minster marks that fact. He eventually became sole Emperor and moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople, a city we now know as Istanbul. He established his city in the fourth century and oversaw the Council of Nicaea that met at Constantine’s insistence, to clarify Christian belief. On most Sundays we say the Nicene Creed which was a product of that church council.

During the last few months I have enjoyed joining St Mary’s for Sunday services and after church coffee time by zoom. It has helped me get to know the church again and learn about your lives here. Thank you for welcoming me warmly to those zoom sessions.

I have enjoyed the teaching about prayer and intimacy with God. We all struggle with being intimate with God and the sermons based on John Eldridge’s ‘The Sacred Romance’ were a challenge to my way of knowing God. The Spanish mystics, in their desire for intimacy with God, were taken up with the Song of Songs, an Old Testament book, that describes the yearning of two lovers for each other. It is also a picture of our yearning for God and his desire to be known by us. One way of becoming more intimate with God is to learn to be silent in God’s presence. To set aside a couple of times a day when you sit in silence in the Lord’s presence. Learning to listen for his voice and to feel his presence with us. Start with just five minutes or less and gradually increase the time you spend in silence. I use a timer to tell me when my time is up – it saves paying more attention to the clock than to the Lord!

Someone shared with me the following parable about listening:

A young ruler is sent to the master to learn the basics of being a good ruler. The master sent the young man into the forest and tells him to return only when he can describe the sounds of the forest. When the young man returns, he describes the sounds of the birds, the crickets, the leaves rustling, the grass blowing, the bees buzzing and the sound of the wind in the forest. The master tells him to go to the forest again and listen to what else he can hear. For days, the young man sits silently in the forest listening to the sounds he heard before; then suddenly he begins to hear faint sounds unlike those he had heard before. The more carefully he listened, the clearer the sounds became. The feeling of enlightenment enveloped the youth. “These must be the sounds the master wished me to discern,” he reflected.

Quickly he returned to the master and reports what he heard, “when I listened most closely, I could hear the unheard – the sound of flowers opening, the sound of the sun warming the earth, and the sound of the grass drinking the morning dew.” To which the master replies, “To hear the unheard is a necessary discipline to be a good ruler.”

This story can be applied to our desire to learn to listen to God. It takes time and intentionality to learn to listen and hear God. It is easy to give up and think we are getting nowhere but just by giving over a few minutes a day we can gradually learn to listen to and hear God speaking to us, meeting with us and reassuring us of his presence with us and with our world. The prophet Elijah met with God on Mount Horeb. He heard what the bible describes as ‘a sound of sheer silence’ (1 Kings 19:12). A dramatic encounter.

We are now in the long season of Trinity, with only the Feast of the Transfiguration, as a notable festival during this season. Trinity finishes with us celebrating ‘Christ the King’ on the last Sunday before advent. The liturgical colour is green – the leaves, the grass, the plants are green and the green shoots in spring indicate growth. I believe that it is good to see Trinity as a time of growth, perhaps in a way that we don’t during the other seasons of the year. A time of steady growth through the spring, summer and into the autumn. A time perhaps for some of us to grow in our experience and knowledge of God through learning to listen to God in silence.

May we have a growthful and exciting Trinity season as we listen and respond to ‘the sheer silence’.

Ros

Dear Friends

I wonder what you have put your hope in this year. For most of us it has been an incredibly hard year and although we may remember some positive moments from last spring, where everything stopped, the sun shone, the birds sang and we clapped for the NHS on Thursday evenings, the reality of the hardship of this last year is immense. The separation from loved ones, the huge increase of mental ill-health and suicide rates, the economic turmoil not seen since the years after the second world war. Most of us in Burley have been incredibly fortunate and there have been some wonderful initiatives to support the vulnerable and strengthen our community, but no one has been immune from the detrimental effects of the pandemic. It is very important to acknowledge just how hard it has been and how our levels or resilience have been worn down.

I have to admit that there have been many times over the last 12 months when I have felt desolate and barren. I have allowed my perspective to be influenced by what I have seen and heard all around me. That spirit of death and diminishment has been literally spewing out of every media outlet continuously and I have often found it hard to hold steady when the spirit of uncertainty and fear has been so pervasive.

However, I have feen forced to ask, with the psalmist, where does my help come from? And the answer for Christians for 2000 years around the world has been and continues to be, Easter hope. Christians are called to be the people of all hopefulness because we know that death has been defeated and that God is more than able to bring resurrection out of the most traumatic and devastating of situations.

The Bible tells us that we can essentially live with one of two opposing worldviews. You can either live with hope in “the world”, where evil and darkness is always rampaging, where we try and fix the ever-increasing list of social ills in our own strength, relying on our good, but inadequate understanding of the universe and our part in it. Or we can live with hope in a “Kingdom perspective” where we put our trust in the creator of the universe, where we can allow our lives to be formed and transformed by Jesus Christ, the author of life and where our spirits can be inspired by His Holy Spirit. The key difference between people of these different worldviews is not moral but lies in the foundation of our hope.

Of course, I am not saying that only Christians can have hope! In fact, there is much in our human endeavour and courage, in our reaching out to others, that offers hope. But I would say that we are all able to access the divine spark which is part of our DNA; Christians believe that everyone is made in the image of God and therefore there is a rhythm of hope that we all can tap into. However, as a Christian, I know that Jesus has defeated the power of death and so I can live in a more intentional rhythmic participation with heaven. When things are going wrong, as they undoubtedly do, I know that God can and will intervene. I know that he can bring healing to those who are ill, peace to the worried, he can break the power of bondage to the addictive behaviours that many of us are seduced by. I also know that when I am feeling desolate and barren, that is not the Spirit of God, but the spirit of the world around me.

Paul, the writer of many of the letters in the New Testament, claimed that if the resurrection of Jesus wasn’t real then he would be a complete and utter fraud and our faith would be utterly futile. C S Lewis said something similar; “Christianity if false is of no importance and if it is true it is of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

At St Mary’s, in collaboration with Love Burley, we are running an Alpha course starting on the 14th April. If you are wondering whether there is “more to life than this”, whether you have questions about Jesus, about his death or the power of his resurrection. Or if you want to know more about a worldview that gives you, not only hope for the world beyond death, but also a huge amount of hope here and now, come and join us on zoom for our taster session. This question is of infinite importance and most of us, if we are honest, have never really thought to ask it.

May I wish you a hope-filled, resurrection-inspired Easter

Alastair

Dear Friends,

It is our deepest need as human beings to learn to live intimately with God – it is what we were made for. We learn from the opening chapters of the Bible that God created us to be in deep connection with Him and the metaphor used to describe this is walking together in the garden together (which has particular pathos at the current moment when we cannot properly walk together or visit one another’s gardens!). I often wish that my life was characterised by walking with God and talking with him about my dreams, my hopes, my desires and hearing his delight in me.

In the material world we live in, we invest a lot of time and money making sure things around us work to their peak performance and we buy insurance so that if problems occur, we can get them fixed. We can hear when our car is not working properly; there is a rattle here, a squeak there or a red light on the dash-board! If our boiler breaks down we have a service plan to get it sorted and if we feel unwell we know that we need to get checked out by a doctor (unless you are a man or a nurse in which case you will put it off!) But I wonder how much time or money we invest in making sure our spiritual lives are in tip top condition? The pandemic has made us all feel vulnerable in different ways, but one thing is certain; most of us feel significantly more anxious and our fuses are shorter than they used to be. But what do we do with that? Ultimately it is a matter of the soul (or spirit), the heart and we don’t really know who to go to in order to fix that. We are just generally out of touch with our soul and when a huge challenge overtakes us, like the trauma of the pandemic, we are lost. I am supposed to be in touch with my soul (as the vicar!) and yet I know for certain that I am just wishing time away; just get to the next school holiday or to the point where most vulnerable people are vaccinated… longing for Boris to say that we can meet together again!

And so we come to Lent. I would like to suggest that Lent is precisely the moment when we invest some time, energy and maybe even some money to look after our spiritual lives. It is a time to recover what it might look like to walk with God. It is spiritual detox. It is about recognising that some of the things we do every day, often without thinking, are so unhealthy for the soul. It is about really looking at our inner workings and being curious; that is making us anxious, why am I comfort eating, why am I obsessed about image or money or … (fill in the blank). It is not fundamentally about giving up chocolate or gin unless we are, in fact, addicted to those things. It is more about asking what is getting in the way of living a more balanced spiritually-healthy life? what is getting in the way of me feeding my spirit?

I think this year I want to encourage you to think carefully about intentionally adding something to your daily routine which will give you a spiritual boost. One thing I have found immensely helpful is the one-minute pause app developed by John Eldredge . It is simply an app on my phone that reminds me twice a day to have a 1, 3, 5 or 10 minute pause and use some reflective music and a prayer to introduce a sense of peace and serenity into my day. Why don’t you join our weekly prayer course on zoom on a Wednesday evening, or buy the accompanying book, Pete Greig’s “How to Pray.” Buy a Lent book that has a daily reading or a chapter for each week of Lent. Listen to some spiritual music, whether cathedral choirs or Hillsong worship music. I assure you that if you do that and give your heart and soul some self-care you will feel more peaceful, less anxious and more joyful as you go through Lent.

Alongside doing something positive, be mindful about what takes your focus each day and try and reduce the distractions. If you find yourself being sucked into hours of social media or endless WhatsApp conversations. If you watch/listen to the news several times a day. If you realise that your alcohol intake during lockdown has massively increased because it gives you comfort, then be more mindful and reduce it. For me, as well as being mindful about my chocolate and alcohol consumption, I have decided to stop sudoku. There is of course nothing wrong with sudoku, but I know that I am more likely to get lost in a sudoku puzzle than read a book. So I am going to hide my sudoku puzzles and prioritise reading through Lent and see how I feel at the end!

If we are made for a closer walk with God as I maintain, then intentionally thinking about how you are going to move through Lent will be a very valuable experience and will get you ready for the radical, explosive and amazing news of the resurrection of Jesus at Easter.

If you need any help or advice do feel free to contact me and do listen to our weekly service on the website www.burleyparishchurch.org.uk and check out our new podcasts. And of course, I would simply love you to join us for our weekly conversation and video about how to pray on a Wednesday evening. I certainly need that and I think you will find it really helpful too.

Bless you

Alastair