she (5minutefriday)

Joining with the writing flash mob that is Five Minute Friday at the home of the lovely Lisa Jo Baker. #FMFparty

Five minutes on She

We often have the pleasure of knowing some remarkable people (we as in anybody, not just us personally.) One particular person in our life was Vi and she was already old when we came to know her, the sort of age that always made children gasp in disbelief.

She loved Jesus first and foremost and everybody loved her. Her face lit up when she was with other people and that joy spread infectiously, melting the meanest. Her prayers were like desert rain even though she was very self deprecating.

With failing health, at events she would often upstage everyone else by needing medical attention, either from a doctor friend or sometimes an ambulance would be called due to her advancing years. She often forgot to drink enough anyway and in her excitement of being with people, she would frequently eat too fast, or have just a little too much wine..

On the weekend of her 100^th birthday, she joined with us, her Jesus family at church. After the service we were to troop across the Car Park into the little hall to light the gargantuan birthday cake and sing our birthday wishes to the lovely Vi.

As we rose from our seats after the final song to make our way, music started. There was only ever going to be one song that could be played that encapsulated the moment and the person so perfectly.

silver celebration (a letter to the fly on the wall)

So, yesterday friends of ours celebrated their Silver Wedding. We, a small crew of friends and family assembled in the gloriously named Dog and Hedgehog. While we were arriving from the different places we call home, we broke and ate hunks of bread that had been dipped into bitter olive oil and sharp balsamic vinegar.

Not long after we sat down at the long table, flies started to appear. It bizarrely made eating indoors feel more like we were eating al fresco. But wine was flowing and beautiful food was beginning to arrive and so the insects were relegated to the league of minor occasional irritation.

'A day to remember all the good things' said my friend in her later speech, quipping that she had not had the opportunity twenty five years ago and was sure as anything going to make up for it. They had chosen to gather us, we who have weathered good times and bad, sometimes together, sometimes in our separate lives. To sit with them, break bread, drink wine and share delicious food. Applaud, cheer and celebrate all the goodness.

Flies on walls over the years have witnessed the joy and sad of the years of the collective; the illnesses, the births, the bereavements, the weddings, the broken relationships and the enduring.

Most particularly with our friends we have shared the goodness and pains of times in church leadership. Times of difficulty are more recent and therefore in sharper focus. Things go inexplicably wrong and are horribly messy, the wailing that no-one else understands, periods of dark doubt, and baggage of unmet expectations. At times closing in like hordes of insects, the overwhelming noise of buzzing is too hard to bear and their sheer numbers close to snuffing out the Light.

A short nod to those things too, in the conversation at the table, but an acknowledgement that they have shaped us over the years, not defined us. The fact is that the ones that matter are the ones who have remained.

Later when leaving our friends house the sky had darkened, the weather had closed in and a short, torrential downpour had started. As we drove west the Scotsman was momentarily struggling to see clearly through combination of heavy rain on the windscreen and the bright sunlight shining through ahead onto the wet road. He glanced in the rear view mirror and commented that I might like to look behind at the rainbow. Right over the place where we had just driven from, enhanced by the darkest of brooding grey skies was the most brilliantly clear rainbow.

Linking up with Ruth & Sabrina at #LettersTo (at Sabrina’s place this week)

#lentphotos - 31 - more temptation

Let’s just say when I started doing the #lentphotos project I expected it to be a bit of creative fun using photography, a medium I enjoy using.

Because it is not technically a ‘giving up’ activity I was actually quite blown away by how profoundly these verses in Romans 7 resonated for today’s prompt.

God is at work in a deep way and for that I am thankful.

#lentphotos - 16 - a blessing

(in which I encounter a holy muscle rub)

Chapel, Clare College, Cambridge

Clare College is one of the most musical colleges in Cambridge and its choir is internationally recognised, having performed all over the world. A famous musical alumni is the composer and conductor John Rutter and much of his music has been performed in this place.

A number of years ago I used to sing with a chamber choir based in Bracknell.  In 2003 we were preparing to perform John Rutter’s Requiem at the acoustically sublime Douai Abbey near Reading.  It was the first time I had really come across Rutter’s music and the Requiem is a particularly gentle and introspective setting of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass. Clare College Choir had done their recording of the same work with Naxos in this very building nine months previously.  (This particular CD is dedicated to the memory of Rutter’s son Christopher who was tragically killed in 2001 while he was an undergraduate student at Clare College).

Around the time I was learning the piece with the choir, the Scotsman’s ministry at the church we were at was coming to an end.  It was not particularly happy time and the church were running out of money to be able to pay him a salary.  We had to make a decision to move at a very awkward time for our eldest son’s education, so it was an all round difficult time for us as a family and I felt the heaviness of depression taking up residence for a season. The peacefulness of Rutter’s music was a source of much solace during this period.

When my mum died in 2008 we were looking at music to play for her funeral in the church and at the crematorium, as she and Dad had not planned anything.  It seemed so right with her gentleness as a person to include a piece by John Rutter and the work we chose was the serene Gaelic Blessing. The setting was played by Hade Edge Brass Band (strange as it may seem to some, brass bands can and do play beautifully and lyrically.)  One of our sons played in the band and mum loved to attend their performances when she could, in spite of the limitations of  her illness.

On a visit to Cambridge the following year we stumbled across a signpost to Clare College (it is tucked away down a side street in between the big guns of Kings College and Trinity College).  The whole college is beautiful and peaceful, including the gardens on the other side of the River Cam. In the chapel I truly felt a blessing that day, the weight of some of those knotted stresses of the previous six years being soothed by a divine shoulder massage.