A confused Christmas?

 

 Well it’s only 7th day of Christmas but my local supermarket express store is selling Easter Eggs and here I am trying to write a  sermon for tomorrow – the First Sunday after Christmas, New Year’s Day and the Circumcision and Naming of Jesus all rolled (excuse the easter egg pun!) into one.

At the moment all of these themes are unravelling in my head but at the same time weaving into knots of confusion. Reflecting on the past week or so it could seems like there have been at lot of separate strands battling for prominence at different times and in different ways, and perhaps the only way to survive was to keep them  all in separate boxes.   Which is what I did,  for  sometimes the demands of trying to weave them all together can seem to be too much for body and soul.

But I know in my heart that doesn’t work for I awoke on the last day of this year feeling not a little fragmented.   So it’s a day of steadfastly trying to weave together again those strands of my life that make me who I am and who I am becoming, and I thank God for…

- an intergenerational family, spread from Aberdeen to Ancrum with a rogue (not literally) nephew in Oxford and all the joys and demands of this, not least as we have our first Christmas and New Year without my mother, who died in Octber and  was, and still is,  much loved by all four generations

- a church family among whom I have the privelege to exercise my priestly ministry and live out my life as a vulnerable human being.   It is though quite often a struggle with consistent understaffing at various areas in our common life,  and the past three months have been particularly tough as we are “in between” stipendiary associates, and the additonal clerical support I had of  five non stipendiary priests when I arrived in the summer of 2007 now numbers just one!   We are in no sense a clerically dominanted congregation but priests are very important in a worshipping community that has the sacraments at the centre of its daily life and for particular areas of pastoral care and support.  www.christchurchmorningside.co.uk

And then of course there was my beloved cat, Charlie.   My faithful companion for the past five years was spooked by fireworks on Christmas night and it was as if he had vanished off the face of the earth.  As I reported on facebook and twitter (@secsem) three days of search ensued ending, thankfully, with a successful dramatic capture involving myself, my son, my eldest granddaughter, a couple of 6ft walls, a run down garden with a number of derelict buldings and my youngest granddaughter’s Disney Princess Torch. It was indeed all worthy of an episode of Rev

So it’s time to take all of these things out of their separate boxes and weave them back into the me that is me and,  like Janus,now that I have looked back to look to the new year.   And I do so with hope and confidence and look forward to a continued shared journey family and friends and  the much anticipated arrival of a new stipendiary colleague.  Welcome Pip!  (still five days to go but who’s counting?)

Oh………and of course there is still the sermon to write for tomorrow…………..

 

 

Grounded

    Time is a funny thing.  I never seem to have enough of it and now, with a long awaited trip to Aberdeen to see my son and his family postponed because of the red severe weather alert,  I’m not sure what to do with this unexpected time I now have on my hands.

In one way I feel I have been robbed of time for which there were clear and good and fun plans,  and on the another hand I feel I have been lumbered with at least several hours of time which I’m not quite sure what to do with,  but must put to good use.

So what to do?  Catch up with the endless pile of paperwork?  Clean out some kitchen cupboards?  After all it’s such a sin to waste time is it not?   But “waste it” is just what I’ve decided to do for, I tell myself, perhaps thinking such a thing is a sin in itself!

So far then I’ve enjoyed a delicious consolation snack lunch at La Barantine, a French cafe in Bruntsfield, written this blog and then will catch up with some programmes on iplayer.

Hopefully this evening or tomorrow morning driving to Aberdeen will be possible.

Remembering on Remembrance Sunday

 

We didn’t just remember this morning -though I think we did that with dignity and “syle” – we also thought about what remembering means.

It is not just calling to mind something that happened in the past.  It means something more like: making present a past reality for the purpose of benefiting from it today.

Think of the eucharist “do this to remember me” – the word used to encourage us to make present in our midst, the life and death of Jesus so that we might be inspired and encouraged to enter more fully into the life he offers us.

But today day we also remembered the lives and deaths of the millions who have died in wars -  and not just the millions, but also the individuals – for each one had a past, and a  future that was taken from them and from the family, friends and colleagues who mourn for them.

I chose to wear a red poppy today in remembrance of them because we cannot and should not deny the bloodiness and human cost, both military and civilian, of war.  Poppies were the first flowers to grow in the earth of the soldiers’ graves in Flanders,  and for many decades now it has been the ubiquitous symbol of  remembrance,  and will have been worn by millions of people over these past days.

At the end of the poem In Flanders Fields,  written by Canadian physician and Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae in 1915 are the words:

If ye break faith with us who die

we shall not sleep, though poppies grow

in Flanders fields……….

How best can we keep faith with those who have died?  If our acts of Remembrance are to be of worth we must not just call to mind the appallingness of their suffering and their deaths,  we also need to do that for a purpose.

And how better to also to honour the efforts and suffering and deaths of those who are risking their lives today in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places round the world, than to commit ourselves every more fully to ways that truly make for peace.

And that is why I also wore a white poppy today, peeping out behind the red.  We may not be called to fight on the battlefields and in the streets of our world,  but we are, each one of us, called to enter into that costly struggle for peace.The pursuit of peace is a call to persevere in prayer, to strive for justice and to willingly share one another’s burdens.

Are you up for the costly struggle for peace?  Am I?

The pursuit of peace is not a passive activity.

 

Endings and beginnings

Oh dear, I had planned to post a blog every week but am very aware this is only the third since I began blogging over six weeks ago.  Well perhaps I’ve gone for quality rather than quantity!

We kept this morning’s services for All Saints  –  All Souls comes this evening at Choral Evensong.   Our main eucharist was jam packed with the choir in magnificent form as we celebrated this Festival whilst also blessing a new chasuble, rededicating our beautifully refurbished side chapel, baptising Rowan and saying Farewell to Anderson and Rebecca.   As you can imagine every emotion imagineable was employed during that service.

Anderson has been at Christ Church for three years in the role of Associate Priest, beginning on All Saints Day in 2008, and is soon to begin a new life with Rebeccca in Lancashire where he will take up the post of Lecturer in World Christianity at Lancaster Unveristy.   He has brought much to our common life here and to the lives of countless individuals, and we shall miss him very much. 

Presenting Anderson and Rebecca with farewell gifts.

Some of the personal highlights of the past three years for me have been attending Anderson and Rebecca’s wedding in South India in August 2009, and later that same year watching Anderson walk across the stage in the McEwan Hall to receive his doctorate.   

Professionally he has been a much valued colleague and we have shared in countless times of planning, excitement, frustation, sorrows, joys and ordinariness as we have sought to work together, and alongside many others, in the furthering of God’s kingdom in this place.

Whilst saying goodbye to Anderson and Rebecca we feel very blessed to  know Pip Blackledge will be  coming into our midst in a couple of months time in the role of Associate Priest.  Equally good and challenging times ahead I hope and trust!    Pip is currently Rector of St Peter’s Linlithgow and St Columba’s Bathgate, and we look forward to welcoming him with his wife Kate and their son Gavin into our midst in early 2012.

   Pip with Gavin

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laughter, tears and autumn sunshine

It’s sixteen days since my last post.  It’s been a  time full of waiting, sadness, tears and, yes, also much laughter.   Are such things, when they come all at once and in such abundance, the earthly manifestations of rainbows I wonder?   Beautiful, transient and yet also full of poignancy.

My mother died just before sunrise on 8th October with my father at her bedside.  For several days we (that is me, my sister, brother and father) had taken it in turns to sit with her round the clock, my 85 year old father insisting on taking the night shift.   An ever resourceful man he arrived at the nursing home one night to find no-one answered the door bell so he made his way around the back of the building in the pitch dark, we are way out in the countryside here, found the window to Mum’s room, knocked on the window whereupon my sister opened it and he clambered in headfirst declaring, “newspaper headline- octogenerian breaks into a nursing home, that must be a first!”.

The funeral took place on Friday.  The service was at St John’s Episcopal Church, Jedburgh taken by a former Rector and friend and the address was quite aptly based on Matthew 25:35-36.  That was mother.   ( Amazingly enough a friend has something similiar on her Facebook post this morning and it’s copied  below.)  It was a beautiful autumn day, both in the Borders and during the drive to Edinburgh where we then had the committal service at the Crematorium followed by refreshments in Christ Church Centre, where the ministry of hospitality was, as ever, discreet and welcoming at the same time.

Olive Ross Macdonald  19th August 1931 – 8th October 2011.

May she rest in peace and rise in glory.

Littered with rainbows

It all began with a phonecall on Sunday evening.  My mother has been suffering from vascular dementia for a         number of years, affecting her more physically than mentally, and thanks mainly to my father, sister and the superb support from Mum’s social worker and carers we were able to look after her at home until a couple of months ago.

We then took the very difficult decision to move her into a nursing home, and have felt unfailingly blessed by the standard of care Mum has received there.  Last weekend she developed a nasty chest infection, and with her inability to take any food or fluids orally and our decision as family that there should be no “intervention” e.g. drips, the phonecall from sister with this news left me in something of a dilemma.   Should I rush to be at Mum’s bedside or stick with my commitment to travel to Iona early the next morning with a small group from Christ Church?

In the end, after a fairly sleepless night, I set off for Iona at 7am the next morning for what turned out to be a journey of sunshine and showers.  A journey literally and dramatically littered with some of the most magnificent rainbows I have ever seen.    All the time I was travelling away from Mum I also had the feeling I was travelling towards her……. that sense that chronos and kairos are being woven together.

As it turned out I only stayed on Iona for less than 18 hours but it had, and still feels, so right to have gone – spending a short but precious time with our small group and having two unexpected but significant encounters with strangers (but that’s for another blog!).  And so it was early on Tuesday morning I set off on the 10 hour journey back to see Mum.  No rainbows this time, not visible ones anyway, but a sense of rightness in the returning.

Three days on Mum is still with us – very weak, very much here and yet also very much on a journey.  My hope and prayer for her is that wherever she is in that time where chronos and kairos are woven together, it is a journey littered with rainbows.

Susan Macdonald

www.christchurchmorningside.org.uk

twitter: @secsem