northumbrianreflections

What you say is not always what is heard and is no guarantee of being understood.

Driving to a restaurant for lunch, the front seat passenger, turned and asked me, “Roy are you having any problems with your parrot in this hot weather?”  “No,” I replied. “I haven’t noticed any changes or difficulties.” She went on, “I was just wondering; it’s just that mine has been really playing me up and I thought it must be to do with the hot weather.”  We proceeded to have our lunch, got back in the car and after a little while one of the other passengers, who’d been relatively quiet, thoughtful, leaned forward and said: “You know, I have never known anybody who owned a parrot and here I am sitting in a car with two people who have parrots. It’s amazing. What do you think is wrong with your parrot?” she asked of my friend. I chuckled out loud and explained to the amusement of everybody that we were not talking about tropical birds but rather the hands-free car kits! What was as funny as the misunderstanding was the fact that this person had spent the last hour and a half thinking about what kind of people we were as parrot owners.

I suppose it’s the beauty, complexity, delight and danger of language that  it poses a threat of misunderstanding. Quite often when I’m teaching or preaching I ask people, “ Do you know what I mean?”. When lecturing it is easier for people to respond but I wish more people would do it to preachers because I often find myself listening and thinking there is a huge discrepancy between what the preacher thinks they are saying and what people are hearing and understanding. I can recall with some horror, experiences in my own life, particularly in earlier years of ministry, when with good intention I have sought to share the good news of the faith with people, only on reflection coming to realise that how that message was received was neither good, helpful or or life changing. I am so grateful for the experience of being part of the Northumbria Community. Companions and Friends, together with family, other friends  and many people I know who don’t share the faith, have kept me from being cocooned within the narrow confines of a religious environment. One of the effects of this has given me a heightened awareness of how religious language, ‘in house’ jargon, allegedly understood Christian words and phrases can however well-intentioned, actually communicate either nothing or at worst, undermine the most godly and good intentions.

I was on Teesside yesterday. Back speaking at a church in Stockton, an area that I know well from the time when I was privileged to be the pastor, the first full-time pastor of a council estate church in an urban area.  The area suffered the consequences of Thatcherite policy that decimated communities and damaged so many people in the process of brutal change, lacking in compassion and devoid of justice, fairness and care for the poor. Unemployment trebled in four years, leaving over a third of the working population destined for the scrapheap, surplus to requirement, many skilled and semiskilled, hard-working people, who couldn’t ‘get on their bike’ and afford to move to more affluent areas where opportunity beckoned and work was available. Instead they saw their communities dissolve into hopelessness and helplessness, the breakup of family life, the loss of aspiration among the young, rising crime rates and increasing physical and mental health problems for growing numbers of people of all ages within the region. The words of the then Prime Minister, entering Downing Street to commence their term of office, were those of St Francis of Assisi,  where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Somehow, for many communities, many in the North particularly, but exclusively, those words got lost in translation.

I am writing this sitting in the bay window of Letterfinlay, looking out over the lake at Ballydugan in County Down, Ireland. It was here in this house that Shirley and I lived for a year back in 2007/8. The sun is shining, the skies are blue, all around us are signs of summer. It is very beautiful but like so much of Northern Ireland it is also a paradoxical place. We’ve watched and marvelled at the birds on the lake, the rabbits running in the meadow below the house and seen teems of fish in the shallow waters by the foreshore. The potatoes are growing well in the vegetable garden, (oh how we miss the lovely flowery delicious tasting potatoes that come from this part of the world), the hens are settling into their new coop and butterflies are flitting from flower to hedgerow.  Then an act of violence; nature reeking its savagery on the idyllic scene before us. A magpie swoops into the bush and kills a young baby bird. For food? No, just an act of violent brutality. They are like cats, those natural born killers, who kill thousands of birds on a systematic and regular basis, (why don’t owners put a collar with a bell on their ‘doted upon’ carnivorous mammals, thereby giving the bird population at least some chance of living beyond infancy?).

The incident with the magpie, amidst all the beauty of the place and the friendliness of people here speaks to me about those isolated incidents of violence and the underlying threat and simmering unease in some of the troubled communities in Northern Ireland. On our way through East Belfast the other evening, as we travelled to the North coast, we were delayed for a few minutes at a major intersection in an area that has frequently witnessed tension and conflict between Loyalist and Republican communities. Police and their landrovers lined the adjoining street and a crowd of people were gathering. Six teenage boys were standing with their unionist flags in the middle of the road by the traffic lights, watched over by their ‘minders’ on the street corner. It was calm but ugly. The pleasant summer’s evening was scarred by tension in the atmosphere. There are understandable reasons that lie behind such actions, e.g. communities under threat, hostile to a process that has reaped little for some neighbourhoods, inevitably the poor and marginalised, a feeling of injustice etc but there is also a sectarianism that continues to poison the attitides and actions of a land and people that have so much goodness about them. Seeing the flags there and witnessing so many red, white and blue painted kerbstones and unionist flags as we drove through at least a dozen towns and villages on our way to Coleraine I just couldn’t help feeling a deep sense of revulsion.  This might be a stance for the United Kingdom but it is not a sign of the Kingdom of God.

We’ve just spent a delightful few days in Coleraine when I was speaking at the New Horizons conference. The opportunity to speak to audiences of predominantly young people, keen followers of Christ, hungry to hear and respond to God’s call upon their lives was a great privilege. The welcome, courtesy and respect with which we were treated as guests spoke volumes for the warm hearted and hospitable nature of so many people here in Ireland, north and south.

Following the conference we drove down to spend a couple of nights here at Ballydugan and spent yesterday evening with good friends and former neighbours of ours, Dominic and Kathleen and their son Michael, together with Jim and Jeannie, who own Letterfinlay and who carry a great heart for this place, this special place to be used to serve God’s purposes. I would like to feel that we and the Community have made a little contribution to helping them to lay some foundations and explore what this place could become. Many Companions and Friends have been here and stayed at the cottages for a holiday, on retreat, come for a Community gathering or on one of our teams. Related to what’s going on here is the work that we were privileged to be part of in its early days, the founding of the community prayer at Saul. Another sacred place, a place where we have prayed and supported, the repairing of the broken altars, the restoring of the ancient ruins and the raising up of the foundations of many generations. I have just been there this afternoon and whilst spending a few moments in prayer became aware of people entering the church building. I welcomed them and engaged in conversation. Saul is an out of the way place yet a place that God brings people to, a special place. The next twenty minutes saw me in conversation with five South Koreans, a couple from Bangor in Northern Ireland and the guest from a wedding that had taken place a little earlier in the day in the church. Each conversation though short felt important. Why? ~ because of a sense that this place is a sacred place, a telling place, a place of encounter with God and others. Returning back to Letterfinlay and looking out over the lake and holding this place and the people whom God has brought together for his purposes feels very special. At short notice we are shortly to be welcoming a group of people; friends and others whom we have prayed with and got to know whilst we lived here. I’m looking forward to another good evening with good and godly people who counter those incidents that scar the lives and cause a blot on the landscape of this delightful place; this place from where the gospel came to Northumbria.

On my way down to London, I’d stopped to stretch my legs and buy a sandwich at a local supermarket.  It was busy and I tried to find the shortest check-out queue.  I had no problem as it was very obvious; some queues had five or six people, this one had just one lady in front of me.  The reason for this?  The man on the checkout was from Pakistan.  I refused to believe what my intuition was telling me but I wished now that I had captured the scenario on my camera.  He was about the only non-white face I could see and when I said to him, “you’ve got the lucky lane it’s quiet”.  He said, very graciously, “not luck sir” and gave me that look that confirmed we were thinking and witnessing the same thing.  I was appalled and the memory still disturbs me and had I not been there and experienced it I would have found it hard to believe but I do know that underneath the surface of some of our communities there is ignorance, prejudice and excuse the pun, veiled racism that is a worrying feature of modern life in Britain.

It was good to be in London and to be surrounded by so many different people from such diverse ethnic backgrounds.  The cosmopolitan nature of London is something I love.  It reminds me of the rich diversity of God’s world and the universality of God’s people spanning every continent, race, tribe and nation.  I guess I long for the day when there are many more people from different cultures journeying with the Community.

Diversity is I believe something to be welcomed for it reflects both the nature of God and the created order.  It is one of the things that I love about the Community; that we are a diverse group of people, covenanted together within the love of Christ but drawn from so many different, life, church and spiritual backgrounds.  Not one of us has any monopoly on the truth but we, alone and together, seek the one who is the Truth.

Recognising and celebrating such delivers the heart and mind from nationalistic, sectarian and racist attitudes. I was pretty disheartened this week to read about a café owner in the same county that I’d witness such racist attitudes, pulling up a sign which read:

She put up a sign because she was fed up with people walking out when they saw the colour of her skin!

In a similarly disturbing vein, the sight of sectarian violence erupting on the streets of Belfast in connection with the July 12 celebrations is a reminder that in the human heart there lurks the potential for hatred, violence, racism, sexism and sectarianism ~ all alien to the values of the kingdom of God and the Community’s Way for Living.

It’s great to have the new Northumbria Community website launched http://www.northumbriacommunity.org and it has been a privilege to have been involved in its design and to offer my contribution in a number of ways, not least in this new Blog. The Northumbria Community, like life itself, is rich in diversity and full of contrasts and paradoxes, and so we’ve tried to design a website that reflects this vibrancy and diversity.

I am writing this from the heart of London where in one day I’ve probably seen more people than in the previous month.

I rose early to attend the National Prayer Breakfast at Westminster, which was a very stimulating experience. I listened to Professor John Lennox, an eminent Oxford mathematician who has invested a considerable amount of his time and philosophical expertise in conversation and debate with Richard Dawkins and other secular atheists whose militancy and vehemence towards the church and Christianity poses not only a challenge to believers but I believe a serious undermining of society.

Shirley and I were sitting around one of the breakfast tables with a Government Whip, an Anglican Dean and a delightful woman who had worked for the last 20 years in the Foreign Office in advocacy of minority groups throughout the world. She was an attentive listener and an engaging conversationalist.

There was also a very pleasant lady from the Home Counties (as there always are on these occasions!) who was doing some form of Bible study ministry.  Talking to the Tory minister, we laughed at the irony of the Labour politician who before we listened to the main speaker was asked to pray, as scripture commands, for those in government.  Sitting next to this woman whose party is in government, I was reminded that whilst I would disagree with her on many things and abhor some of her government’s policies, she is a sister in Christ, is clearly very well intentioned and motivated and is a thoroughly pleasant as well as strong woman. I observed how over breakfast she received several texts and also a note from one of her aides who came to the table. Meeting her and four other MP’s that morning was a reminder that these are ordinary people, who in the main are doing what they can to serve the public and make a different for the common good.

Politicians often get a bad press. They are rarely commended or acknowledged for their invaluable contribution to society.  I had emailed one of them last week in the light of something I had heard them say on the radio, never expecting them to reply but was quite staggered to see them come across not only to acknowledge me but also to engage in some conversation.  I had met this MP, now a Foreign Office Minister, some years ago when we as a Community team were at Spring Harvest leading the worship and he was there with his wife and family.  Regrettably he is in the wrong party(!) but is a good man in a key role wrestling with some horrendous issues and to quote him “is almost overwhelmed by some of the evil and wickedness that he is made aware of nearly every day” in his present tenure.

In my email I had indicated how I had continued to remember him in my prayers and occasionally those of the Community’s and he was deeply encouraged by such news.  Our conversation deepened my resolve to continue to pray for him on a more regular basis and to invite you as readers of my blog to remember politicians as indeed scripture commands us, to pray for them and for all who govern that they may know wisdom, justice, compassion and integrity in all who they are and what they do.

It was a beautiful day in London and Shirley and I went for a walk along the South Bank, sat by the River Thames and drank our iced coffees.  We were served by a delightful Scouse lass who reminded us of the realities facing many people and particularly I would argue those in the North, yet again.  She had lost her job earlier this year and came to London to find work which she had secured albeit on slightly more than the minimum wage and was finding it very difficult to make ends meet, living in a one roomed bedsit.  It is difficult but necessary for those in the corridors of Westminster with its beautiful but rarefied atmosphere to keep in touch with those whose lives are so very different from those whom they represent.

Roy

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