starting over after such a disastrous easter

finally

finally Bradley Manning, who's been kept in appalling conditions at Quantico for ten months, has been moved to another prison. This at least gives some hope that he may be able to lead a slightly more normal life now - although we shall have to wait and see on that. I have been so disappointed that Obama has allowed all this to happen during his presidency. He promised so much. . . . .

a quote from the group today:

if we refuse to take the risk of loving as Christ loves, we will still eventually end up with what we resisted -- suffering. But the suffering that comes from resisting the cross is fruitless, empty, and despairing, while the suffering that comes from embracing the cross leads to the joy of the resurrection, the joy of love and new life."

It isnt that the 'suffering' he speaks of is necessarily permanent or even extended: it is simply a question of needing to face truth which may or may not involve suffering - we just cannot be sure either way.

Last year at a mass one day the sermon was replaced with the monologue of a child who had been aborted. I was so angry about the emotive manipulation that I came as close as I ever have to walking out.

I have several problems with the almost violent objections that the church has to abortion.

The first is a biological one. I do not understand why the moment of conception should be considered so overwhelmingly significant. Surely it needs to be seen in the light of what is happening in the lives of the individuals concerned?  I can understand why the church teaches a responsible attitude to intercourse: from little acorns  . . . . I can also understand why it teaches the holiness of the moment of conception - to the Christian.  But it needs to remember that such notions have no meaning to those without faith: the faith has to come first, not the morals.

My second is that it seems to value the new life over the old one: if the mother is at serious risk then why isnt an abortion justifiable?  How can you weigh one life up against another when it isnt your own life that is at stake?

Following on from that, it upsets me when I see the church meddling with the lives of those who have no faith and, in this context, with the lives of women who have no faith and who may already be in a terrible and vulnerable predicament. 

It isnt to say that the church should not proclaim loudly the holiness of life, and teach that abortions should not be for selfish reasons but then it must allow people to make up their own minds - especially those women who have to make life-changing decisions on sometimes profoundly difficult and complex grounds. 

At that point, when the woman is at her most vulnerable,  the church needs above all to be both compassionate and gentle, not censorious, vindictive and even aggressive.

I read that Daniel Maguire (a professor in Mikwaukee) has been censured over his point of view regarding abortion (presumably by the American Catholic Church) and I decided to check out a little of his writing on this subject.

The only moral decision for an abortion is a pro-life decision. There are many life values and sometimes other life values supersede the value of a fetus.

Cases from real life speak louder than books.

Case # 1: A woman is two months pregnant when she discovers she has cancer and needs chemotherapy. The chemotherapy would be fatal to the fetus. She decides on an abortion. If you were that woman or if this woman were your wife, your sister, or your daughter, would you be pro-choice for that abortion?

Case # 2: A woman, in spite of her best contraceptive efforts is pregnant. She has a serious heart condition and two physicians tell her that continuing the pregnancy would be likely to cause her death. She choose to abort. If you were that woman or if this woman were your wife,your sister, or your daughter, would you be pro-choice for that abortion?

Case # 3: A woman who suffers from a serious bi-polar condition discovers she is pregnant. The medicine she requires to be functional would damage the development of the fetus. She chooses abortion. If you were that woman or if this woman were your wife, your sister, or your daughter, would you be pro-choice for that abortion?

If you were at the clinic when these women came for their abortion, would you join the pickets in insulting them and calling them murderers? Or would you see women who made serious decisions for pro-life abortions?

I know what my own answer would be.

Misrata

wading through oceans of negativity today. in search of you, neglected again this week. I know for certain how much I rely upon you and yet still I tend to run - in search of a different sort of freedom: an escape into illusion and a deadend. I know this and yet still I run there. .  . .

yesterday's post is, as my posts mostly are these days, badly written and, as usual, full of non-sequiturs.

just one point about negativity though: the negativity I am wading through today isnt just mine. As from my first days here, I am bound to share the negativity of the people around me - particularly because of the position I hold. My prayer then is probably less about my own negativity than I realise.

If this is really the case then it does explain a great deal about why it has been so immensely difficult to stay here. It also helps me to put my own sense of inadequacy (so profound at times) into a better context. 

All the more reason for persevering I think.

a day at a time . . . . . . .

I wasnt surprised by the manhandling of Muslim women wearing veils in France the other day. France is a strange mix of freedom and constraint - as of course is Britain. The Tablet puts it unusually strongly today and I have to say I  agree that they should, although I couldn't myself get worked up about it. I suppose that is because I dislike the veil myself, seeing it as a polemic rather than an old custom. It's something new: something somehow slightly threatening and that is why the French have wanted to ban it. The ban is so obviously provocative and could lead to really serious problems so I hope it is repealed quickly. I know though that it will never be banned in the UK and that, in turn, makes me aware of just how much I personally have changed since I was first in Iceland in the 80s. At that time I was fairly anti-British. I was looking for another homeland and I did fall seriously in love with Iceland at the time - mostly individuals of course. Now, although I am not proud to be British, I can say honestly that I don't mind being British any more. If I have to belong to any country I'd far rather it was Britain than, say, the USA or Australia . . .  or France come to think of it. . . . . or Iceland . . . .

It was my time in Reykjavik and then, later, the choir trips that I organised here that made me change my mind about Iceland, although I was aware before I left in '86 that I could never be really Icelandic. I can also say with some precision when I actually fell OUT of love with Iceland: that was during our second choir tour in 2001. Exactly why is harder to say: Iceland has changed I think, (although it could be more that I have changed).. . . .  Perhaps it is more the fact that I spent seventeen years teaching in the UK after I left Worth and  this must have moulded me more than I realise (just as the navy has moulded Neal without him realising.) Comparing my teaching time there with my teaching time here is perhaps not fair. Crosfields was a wonderful place to teach on the whole although it didnt seem so at the time - not at all typical.

Could I ever fall back in love with Iceland? or with anywhere come to think of it?

I very much doubt it. My whole view of life has changed so dramatically over the past few years. I live so much in the knowledge that nothing stays the same and that the hallo is always followed by the goodbye so I doubt that I could ever fall in love again with a person let alone a nation.

It disappoints me that I have such negative feelings about Iceland though . . . . . or is it the village itself? It's difficult to judge. It is best that I stay on though: I must really give it time. 

Going back over the past few years, I have travelled further than I can really understand: the dark places I have visited leave their mark but I must not underestimate the extent to which my prayer has changed me too . . . . although it never seems to be for the better really . . . . I am much less 'involved' than I ever used to be and this doesnt seem to be a strength - although in the long term I might be wrong to judge myself too harshly about that. . . . .

 I was reading from the Mucknell website a passage by the Abbot who quotes in his turn this passage from Rowan Williams' book 'tokens of trust' which I read last year.

“It means letting go of the images we are used to, moving beyond ideas and pictures of God that belong in our comfort zone. It means letting go of the emotions that we’d like to have, letting go of what we think makes us happy – not to cultivate misery, but to get used to the idea that real joy might be so strange and overwhelming that we’d fail to recognise it unless we’d put some distance between us and our usual comforts and re-assurances. As the prosaic and daily level, it can involve a great deal of sitting there facing frustration and self-doubt of the most acute sort: God calls me to delight and eternal fulfilment – so why exactly am I sitting here twiddling my thumbs, shifting from buttock to buttock, and wondering where and what and who God is?”

He goes on: 

“Bit by bit, the props are being taken away. In the work of one of the very greatest masters of Christian contemplation, St John of the Cross in sixteenth century Spain, the picture is of a journey into deeper and deeper darkness, a sense of being completely lost, imaginatively and emotionally. We face not only dryness and boredom but spells of desolation and fear that can be shocking in their intensity. As John says, we have to pass through midnight before it turns towards dawn. Only when the last traces of self-serving and self-comforting have been shaken and broken are we free to receive what God wants to give us. Only then shall we have made room for God’s reality by disentangling God from all – or at least some – of the mess within our psyches. Prayer is letting God be himself in and for us.”

the psalms, the psalms, the psalms

I won't be saying anything new here now. It's just that it struck me again so forcibly exactly how much of a moulding force the psalms have been in my life.

I don't think that it is any coincidence that my first real conversion happened just moments after singing midday office with the monks at Worth Abbey for the very first time. We (they) were singing parts of psalm 118 I think, but also the first psalms - which seemed to get sung an awful lot at Worth come to think of it and always with the same gelineau tone.

It wasnt the singing, and it wasnt the monks themselves: it was almost certainly the psalms themselves. 
ever since then, the psalms have gradually worked their way to the very centre of my life in you and, I know now, that is where they will stay.
If only those who do not know you could see that the Christian life is not about answers or understanding or wisdom or peace or even doing good things or living morally. It is about belonging.
It is only when we know that we belong that  the rest can follow.


so isnt the "kingdom of heaven" simply the place where we know, without the shadow of doubt, that we really do belong?

on one level the week has been hopelessly chaotic - just like all the others . . . .

over and against this: a growing understanding that a fixed timetable is never going to be possible and is not what you ask of me. 

a sense tonight again that when I can focus upon you the horizon moves to a quite different place. 

it isnt that life suddenly makes sense; more that the seeming nonsense of life - particularly the painful and difficult parts of it (and there are certainly plenty of those at the moment) becomes somehow a fuel which burns bright like a beacon in the darkness.

again and again I discover afresh that my whole spiritual life comes through the psalms - or rather my own participation in them. This amazing little book of prayers and cries seems to be a source of constant inspiration, delight and, yes, love. 

I am coming to realise more and more that what these prayers do is to draw me out of myself into a participation in your life. When I pray the psalms I belong in a way which is often utterly clear to me as I read but which is impossible really to define except in terms of the words of the psalms themselves.

a fountain of joy no less.

It strikes me too - as I underline the word your - that you are indeed the Christ - but that this very word encompasses so much more than anything I could myself comprehend or envisage. (It's been a word I have been wary of for so long.) Christ then as 'anointed one of God'. Presently it makes perfect sense to me (at crucial moments at least) that, in the psalms, I participate in the very life of the anointed one because you reach out to me and share your truth with me in that you help me to reach out to you. It is in the reaching out to you that I am reached by you.

in this way then I see the Christian life as wholely 'action'. It doesnt "happen" without my direct attention and participation. I cannot reach you on a wave of apathy and indifference.

and so tonight, I think, in the midst of so much personal misery (and it has been a miserable year in so many ways - never wanting to face the new day and putting off going to bed as long as I can because I know it leads straight into another awful tomorrow.) (Whether this extraordinary unhappiness is justified or not is probably beside the point). . . .  

 . . . .and so tonight I think I must celebrate a little because you continue to lead me on  through. 

For my part I must try to maintain my focus always upon you and only then can all be well.

This must be my main work