Jameswoodward’s Weblog

Queen Anne’s Ride, dating from 1708, is a grand avenue similar to The Long Walk, also three miles in length, but unlike its more famous counterpart, it features only a single row of trees on each side. It runs south-west towards Ascot. In the 18th Century it was known as Queen’s Walk, the name changing during the nineteenth century.

    A local furore erupted in 1993 when some of the older oaks adjacent to the A332 road to Bracknell were felled in order to restore The Ride. The Association of High Sherriffs had provided 1000 oak trees for the avenue, celebrating 1000 years of the office of High Sherriff. Many residents misunderstood the project and complained about the felling of the older oaks, but in truth it was an example of how Windsor Great Park is managed with an eye to the distant future, the restoration project being undertaken for the undoubted pleasure of visitors to the park one hundred years from now, and more. Even in the 1880s and 1890s trees in the ride were reported as dead and dying, and so this regular replanting is a standard task in forestry.

  Queen Anne’s Ride makes a splendid walk in the summer, from Queen Anne’s Gate, at the end of King’s Road, to the boundary of the Park near Ascot Heath and the Racecourse, famous for Royal Ascot Week, passing by The Village, within The Great Park.

Little patches of grass disappear
In the jaws of lusty squirrels

Who slip into the spruce.
Cars collapse into parts.

Spring dissolves into summer,
The kitten into the cat.

A tray of drinks departs from the buffet
And voilà! the party’s over.

All that’s left are some pickles
And a sprig of wilting parsley on the rug.

When I think of all those
Gong-tormented Mesozoic seas

I feel a ripple of extinction
And blow a smoke ring through the trees.

Soon there will be nothing left here but sky.
When I think about the fact

I am not thinking about you
It is a new way of thinking about you.

Suzanne Buffam, Vanishing Interior

28th August Mattins St Georges Chapel Windsor (Jeremiah 15. 15–21 Matthew 16. 21–28 )

‘Those who want to save their life will lose it’ (Matthew 16.25)

 I remember going to a Ruby Wedding party in my last parish and delighted in the way the couple seemed to be able to laugh at themselves and each other in the thank you speeches. We were treated to this one liner – “My husband and I have managed to be happy together for 40 years. I guess this is because we’re both in love with the same man.”

Do you love yourself? This morning when you looked at yourself in the bathroom mirror what did you see? A contented self? An ageing self? A fearful or angry self? Who are we – what are we? What might it mean to die to self?

When I was in Chicago in 2008 I occasionally worshipped with the Quakers. I picked up a leaflet “How To Be Miserable.” It gives this advice, “Think about yourself. Talk about yourself. Use “I” as often as possible. Mirror yourself continually in the opinion of others. Listen greedily to what people say about you. Expect to be appreciated. Be suspicious. Be jealous and envious. Be sensitive to slights. Never forgive a criticism. Trust nobody but yourself. Insist on consideration and respect. Demand agreement with your own views on everything. Sulk if people are not grateful to you for favours shown them. Never forget a service you have rendered. Shirk your duties if you can. Do as little as possible for others.” What do you see in that mirror?

In the Gospel reading we are challenged to a self denying living and loving, to abandon a self will seeks to manipulate others, preoccupied only with its own power and with creating and defending its worth. This is a radical call. Taking up the cross asks us to be real and vulnerable, to be loved and loving. There is a cost to this. This passage does not call us away from what it means to be a human being, but causes us to be truly human, to find our true selves in God. By abandoning our false selves. Loss and gain is what this Gospel living concerns itself with. Clearly we are being encouraged to aspire as to what will be of gain. The true nurture of self is to love ourselves as God loves us. It is serving the false self that is selfishness. Caring for oneself as God cares for us means opening oneself to God’s love as the life and energy of the soul. That love will expand in all directions: towards ourselves, towards others, towards God. When Christianity is perceived, as teaching that we should ignore our own interests, there is deception and untruth. The Gospels appeal to people to recognise what is good for them; what is gainful. The answer lies in a revolutionary thought. I find myself we find ourselves, when we allow ourselves to be loved and to love and to abandon the effort to manipulate that love from others by playing games and exercising power.

 All of us have had our fair share of serving the false self. We all build up facades and hide behind them and it’s difficult to change. Threatened, shrivelled people hide behind massive artifices which have enabled them to survive – they do not need judgement and attack. They need – we need – tenderness and understanding. In this short passage we are confronted with ultimate issues which affect the world of the individual as well as the world in which we all share. Love sets us free to love and to lead in serving and to find fulfilment in such giving which characterises the life of God revealed in Christ. This is our journey and our journey’s end.

What do we see in that mirror? What do we need to do to save our lives? Beware and remember that advice on how to be miserable: “Think about yourself. Talk about yourself. Use “I” as often as possible. Mirror yourself continually in the opinion of others. Listen greedily to what people say about you. Expect to be appreciated. Be suspicious. Be jealous and envious. Be sensitive to slights. Never forgive a criticism. Trust nobody but yourself. Insist on consideration and respect. Demand agreement with your own views on everything. Sulk if people are not grateful to you for favours shown them. Never forget a service you have rendered. Shirk your duties if you can. Do as little as possible for others.”

 Let us pray Father, I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will. Whatever you may do. I thank you; I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, a Lord. Into your hands I commend my soul; I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands, without reserve, and with boundless confidence, for you are my Father. Amen

 Life, after all, is a struggle, a journey in uncharted space, an exercise in both gain and loss, joy and sorrow.

 No life consists of nothing but success and satisfaction, security and self- gratification.

Failure and disappointment, loss and pain are natural parts of the human equation. Then what? What use is an alleluia then, except perhaps to encourage some kind of emotionally unhealthy self-deception?

I believe the earth
exists, and
in each minim mote
of its dust the holy
glow of thy candle.
Thou
unknown I know,
thou spirit,
giver,
lover of making, of the
wrought letter,
wrought flower,
iron, deed, dream

the ordinary glow
of common dust in ancient sunlight.
Be, that I may believe. Amen.

From Denise Levertov, Opening Words

FR DONALD was our Warden for 27 years, and then Warden Emeritus. During the intercessions at Mass he would pray for the Sisters of the Love of God ‘wherever they may be’, and we would wonder… And we could apply the same phrase to him, praying for Fr Donald ‘wherever he may be’, whether in Canterbuiy, Denmark, Wales, or America. He used sometimes to say that his relationship to SLG provided a thread of continuity through the changes in his life; and he gave something of the same to us.

By way of tribute, at this stage I want simply to say that he was a good man. You only had to watch him censing the altar during the Eucharist to see that he was a man of God; God was the heart and centre of his life.

A necessarily hidden but treasured part of his life was his ministry to solitaries, and his understanding of the hermit life. And one of his enduring enthusiasms was for Julian of Norwich, whom he recognized as a great theologian significant for our times. So, having remembered Donald as we have known him, and entrusted him to God as God knows and loves him, let us allow Julian’s words to speak to us:

And I saw quite certainly in this and in everything that God loved us before he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall. And all his works were done in this love; and in this love he made everything for our profit; and in this love our life is everlasting. We had our beginning when we were made; but the love in which he made us was in him since before time began; and in this love we have our beginning. And all this shall be seen in God without end, which may Jesus grant us. Amen.

When Mother Jane died, Fr Donald said to us that when a good person dies, there is a special out-pouring of grace for those who remain. May that be so for all of us now.

Sister Rosemary SLG

For two-thirds of the world, poverty is the order of the day.

 Yet, as Epicurus knew, “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants’ It  is that kind of poverty of which Jesus speaks when he tells the rich young man to “sell everything you have, give to the poor, and come follow me.”

The alleluia that arises out of poverty is not about having nothing; the alleluia is in gratitude for the kind of poverty that want for nothing that does not add to a sense of the presence of God and the liberating grace of enoughness. May we all be so lucky as to have that much. For that we must all shape our hearts in different, more life-giving ways.

For that, we must all learn to cultivate in ourselves the poverty we do not know and grieve the riches that protect us from finding it.

subtle degrees

of domination and servitude

are what you know as love

but love is different

it arrives complete

just there

like the moon in the window

like the sun

of neither east nor west

 nor of anyplace

when that sun arrives

east and west arrive

desire only that

of which you have no hope

seek only that

of which you have no clue

love is the sea of not being

and there intellect drowns

this is not the Oxus River

or some little creek

this is the shoreless sea;

here swimming ends

 always in drowning

a journey to the sea

is horses and fodder and contrivance

but at land’s end

the footsteps vanish

you lift up your robe

so us not to wet the hem;

come! drown in this sea

a thousand times

the moon passes over

the ocean of nonbeing

droplets of spray tear loose

 and fall back

on the cresting waves

a million galaxies

are a little scum

on that shoreless sea

Rumi

Clearly, the purpose of wealth is not security. The purpose of wealth is reckless generosity, the kind that sings of the lavish love of God, the kind that rekindles hope on dark days, the kind that reminds us that God is with us always. It creates in the holy heart a freedom of spirit that takes a person light-footed through the world, scattering possibility as it goes.

The only security holy wealth looks for is fruit of the good business practices it takes to keep on making enough money to give it away to those who need it more.

If my spirit
descended now, it would be
a lost gull flaring against
a deepening hillside, or an angel
who cries too easily, or a single
glass of seawater, no longer blue
or mysterious, and still salty.

From Philip Levine, Holding on