Jameswoodward’s Weblog

I have just finished a ten day consultation with 24 clergy here in St Georges House – a fascinating and moving journey for us all.

Here is our aspiration as set out by my colleague Hueston Finlay:

To try and speak of God is, unavoidably, to work with words and images carved from the world’s wood, the territory of the familiar.’ Nicholas Lash may be right. But speak of God we must and to speak of him consistently, coherently and convincingly is what we have been called to do’.

During our Core Clergy Consultations participants come together to consider a theological response to some of the issues facing our contemporary world. Each Consultation in the series asks the key question: How do you speak about God?

We wish to encourage ordained ministers from different traditions to come together to enter into lively and engaging conversation.

Such conversation will mean you are refreshed and reinvigorated, ready to return to your place of ministry speaking more confidently and convincingly about God.

I had a fantastic group of clergy and we travelled far and wide – listening, laughing, challenging and questioning one another. We shared our experiences and convictions; our hopes and fears.

Here are a few things that I have learned ( but it will take much longer to process all this) and questions that I shall continue to ponder thanks to my group….

1. Diversity of perspective is an undervalued Anglican strength
2. Words are many, and they have a power to transform
3. Do we really understand our aspirations ? What does God want us to be in the world?
4. What brings us to life?
5. Revelation comes as we struggle with words
6. Difference is always present – it is built into us and community
7. We need to attend to our unease and insecurities
8. We should foster the poetic
9. We should help people always to tell their own truth
10. We should have greater courage to express who we are
11. What we have can hurt or heal
12. Words are soemtimees an escape
13. Playfulness is the space that is more open
14. We should laugh at ourselves more
15. How much knowledge do we really need?
16. We should all manage a less hectic life
17. We should be more realistic about what theology can or cant do!
18. What are th ewords that theology does not yet know it needs
19. Some things are best left to others
20. There is hope for the Church…..

I will pause there and may return ……. but in the meantime Thank you!

The work of the preservation of the Chapel is fascinating. Slowly the Chapel is being restored and at the moment work has begun of the North Quire Aisle.

Scaffolding was erected in the North Quire Aisle in June allowing experts to undertake conservation cleaning of all the stonework in the area. 

The North Quire Aisle remains accessible beneath the scaffolding; it is from here that visitors can see the side chapel where King George VI and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother are buried.   

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the beach,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it’s not;

to squeeze inside events,
hang out in views,
and seek the least of all possible mistakes.

A fantastic chance
to remember, for a moment,
a conversation
with the light switched off;

and, if only once,
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
keep on not knowing
something important.

Wislawa Szymborska, A note

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown –

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind –

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

A poem should be equal to:
Not true

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea –

A poem should not mean
But be 

Archibald McLeish, Ars poetica (the art of poetry)

this blessing
God’s love
calls us
to that elsewhere world
which only lovers
eyes alight, eyes aflame
can see at all.

only those who have
self surrendered:
once, they were flecks of fire;
now, they are
the radiant sun.

Rumi

The most appropriate picture of living is of a spiral of regression and progression.

The child remains in each of us, and from time to time throughout our adult life we move to and from that phase. Sometimes we may appear merely to return to a point that we, or others, have previously attained. But like the spiral, although we may have on one plane come back to where we were, on another we are at a new level.

The description of religious behaviour as merely infantile, with  the assumed consequence that it can be dismissed by those who are adults or mature, therefore needs careful examination. For religious belief and commitment may represent not  escapism by reversion to a childhood state, but a valuable and creative regression, of importance both to individuals  I and to the society or communities of which they are citizens or members

The Church’s structures and intellectual formula­tions may become obsolete but ‘the life of actual loving and caring, guided by tested knowledge, cannot get out of date’.

Such an observation invites assent. But the illegitimate conclusion may sometimes be drawn that there does not have to be a link between the practice of pastoral ministry and the theological understanding that undergirds it. Unless, however, the theology that informs the practice of ministry is recognizably congruent with the theoretical world which illuminates its pastoral practice, the Church will prove hypocritical —that is, as holding at its heart two incompatible ways of thinking.