Finding space to meet the other whoever he or she or it is

Revd Archbishop Rowan Williams

By chance and good fortune, I happened upon this talk by Rowan Williams and Ben Quash which happened just recently at St Martin-in-the-Fields.  It couldn't have been by chance actually because it was so much the message which resonates in my own heart but which I couldn't have found the words to formulate in the way that Archbishop Rowan and Revd Professor Ben Quash did and which that Church of the ever open door allows.  It is about how we should encounter that which we think is other than ourselves, other races, other sexes, other colours and of course, other religions without relinquishing our own identity.  Such a great question and they answer so well.  Perhaps this was the answer to my prayer to the Absolute, it expresses a way to find the space which is without colour, race or religion, without prejudice or partiality, outside our everyday world and to find the way to ease the constrictions which can be felt when differences bind and don't celebrate otherness. 
If the stone placed on Peggy's gravestone worked, this was pointing the way to the answer

offering it through Aunt Peggy, a good woman

There is a story of an orphan in India who desperately wanted to go to School but he had no money to pay.  He asked a wise man what he should do and the answer the wise man gave was this; write your request in a letter and put it in an envelope addressed to God, the Absolute, the all knowing.  The boy did this, he followed the suggestion and then he waited.  That letter went to the sorting office and the sorters were uncertain what to do so they gave it to the postmaster (a most important position then when there was no internet)!  The postmaster asked if they could find the boy and bring him to his office.  They found him, the postmaster adopted him and sent him to the best school. That boy became a judge.  The person who told me this was actually told the story by the judge!

Shingle Street, white shells and stones amongst the others

Now the person who told ME, suggested that when you had a problem you just couldn't see your way to solving, that you offer it to God, to the Absolute, to the all knowing.  I have a problem, one that can't seem to be resolved so I took a beautiful white stone collected from the beach at Shingle Street and I wrote on it.  I wrote my prayer asking that there could be resolution to the problem and then I wondered what to do with it.  Just over the wall from my house, there is a beloved Aunt's gravestone. She was a devout Roman Catholic who, as a young woman had faced incredible obstacles, helped Allied servicemen escape from Belgium, been interrogated by the Gestapo, escaped herself over the mountains and come to England, married an English escapee and lived her life in Suffolk, much loved by family and friends.  Her gravestone has an inscription which is the motto of the Comet Line, the line which took servicemen and helped them escape.  Its meaning is Fight without Blows.

So, I am fighting my problem which is a little war of truth and untruth with a prayer which I hope that Aunt Peggy will find and present the message on the stone to the nearest angel to take straight up to the highest Authority for help.  Go, Angel Go!

Seeing through her eyes

Getting used to being a Grandparent who plays cards!

I watched as the car drove away.  The two of them, two grandparents like us had been staying here for a week with their large family joining them for different days and nights.  They came from Cornwall and it was a big effort to drive all that way to Cambridgeshire and back and they weren't young.  They were the same age as us and we had so much in common.  Numbers of children and grandchildren, similar family holidays involving sea and sand and walking and swimming and climbing.  She, the grandmother was the one who caught my eye as the car drove away; it was the look in her eye, a yearning it seemed for the times when they were all around her and she was mother.  Her look caught my eye because I recognised so clearly some of what she was perhaps feeling.  Time passing and everything changing, babies becoming toddlers, toddlers to children, children to teenagers, teenagers to students, to careers and partners and their own babies coming and becoming the toddling ones.  I had watched the grandmother as she played with the small children, watched her shepherding them up the ladder to the wendy house, watched as she pushed them on the swing, watched as she sat with them inside playing games and colouring pictures of cows and goats and gruffalos!  She loved having them here and it was clearly a wrench to go.  I watched as the Grandpa rather tenderly opened the car door and in she got, he driving, she looking out and perhaps both of them remembering how they had packed all those children when they were small into the back of the car and taken them on holiday, taken them to school, and then maybe to university and then watched as they graduated, cheered as they got their first jobs, invited the girlfriends and boyfriends to join them for lunch and then hoped that they would be happy if they married, would be able to withstand all the pushes and pulls of life and the ups and downs of their families.  Hoped for the best for all of them, loving being with them, sad to leave, sad to go home to the house and garden in Cornwall and there to wait for the next chance of seeing them all together again.  A mixed feeling but maybe now they are settling down to Sunday television, they are over the sadness and have spoken to all of the now grown up children and heard they are all alright.  They have slotted back into their lives again.  That's the way it goes but we, the grandparents didn't think it would ever happen to us, we thought we would be ever young.