A little self-care

Tonight is the dark of the moon - last night I could feel the last of the moon "buzzing" and it was so unsettling. Tonight, after a long walk in the park in the sunset with daughter, I am collected and calm. I have kitty company and the silence I have craved all day. 

I've found myself making some interesting decisions lately. Making choices for me, to explore parts of me, or just do some things that make me feel grounded.

One of them is booking a ticket just for me for Johannes Moser's cello recital at St Andrew's on the Terrace this Sunday: he's playing three of Bach's cello suites (1, 3, and 4), which I completely adore. I am taking myself off to the concert by myself, as I am not going to miss a chance to hear (some of) the suites live. Yo-yo Ma has released a third album recording of them and is now touring the world with the suites again - if he comes here I'm going, no matter where I might have to go to hear them. My lovely brother sent me a live recording of Yo-yo Ma playing all six in a row as part of the Proms season in London a few years back and it is absolutely my go-to music. I love Bach in any form and for any reason, but the suites are special. I came late to them - I forget how I came across them but they have captured my heart. 

Other things are booking to go to the Women's Spirituality conference in Christchurch in November - the flight times are pretty ugly but I wasn't going to miss that one. I didn't ask anyone either: I just told hubby I was going! I have read some of the papers from the original conference 30 years ago and I really want to network with other women who are exploring what spiritual living might look like in the 21st century, when it seems that all we have gained in the last 40 years might be lost again. 

I've also joined a Tai Chi class at work - I did Tai Chi at a previous job and really liked it. This class runs in lunchtime once a week (which is better than after work for me) and the two I've done so far made me feel so energised and so grounded - I was sparkling full of energy and ideas in the afternoon! I may need to book out the afternoons after Tai Chi for project/high concentration work to make the most of that!

Hubby and I are continuing to enjoy Ceroc dance on a Friday night - we'd missed a few classes due to being sick and it was so good on Friday to get back to class, catch up with the friends we're making there, and get back on the dance floor! 

Another thing I've done is book out every Friday as a no-meetings day next year - either to work from home or do concentrated project-type work or study. With the pace of change heating up next year, it seemed the sensible thing - take control of my diary before other people got near it! I suspect those Fridays will become really important as my uni papers begin next year too - also a scary thought but another thing I am doing for me. 

The most interesting of those things is entering direction again.... I am really looking forward to company on the way, especially as I am travelling "home by another way". 

Discovering a feminine Godde

“And the Lord said…” preached the priest at the parish I was attending, and suddenly, everything changed.

“Why does it have to be “the lord”?” I thought. “We know God is above and beyond gender, but I only ever hear God referred to using male pronouns and male terms. Can God be Mother as well as Father? Can God be … Lady?” That thought was the beginning of the seismic shift in my theology, my practice, and my life.

Until that moment, I had lived my faith in a conventional (but hopefully courageous) way. I studied English Literature and Religious Studies in my BA, and then went on to complete a Bachelor of Ministries degree from the-then Bible College of New Zealand, with a focus on spiritual formation. During my time at BCNZ, I returned to my Anglican roots, and was Confirmed as an Anglican not long after I married my husband in 2001.  

I joined the Third Order Franciscans not long after we married, and I transferred my vows to a Benedictine community a few years later, as I found the Benedictine vows of stability, conversion of life, and obedience to God a much easier fit for a married woman than poverty, chastity and obedience! Our daughter, then aged 4, assisted me at my vows by vesting me in the Benedictine habit – she has grown up with a mother who works fulltime, is married and a nun, and is quite happy with all of that, as is my husband who is my strongest supporter!

Fast-forward five years. My small family were attending a small Anglican church and living our lives as a youngish couple with a small child. Everything was seemingly normal. I was reading voraciously, as is my lifelong habit, and one of the books I read around that time was Sue Monk Kidd’s The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. And then, from left field, comes this thought: why do I never hear God addressed by female names? And following on from that, what is wrong with being female, that (according to Augustine and other male early church leaders) means women cannot be seen as imago Dei, fully created in the image of God as women?

St Augustine said that,

“Woman does not possess the image of God in herself but only when taken together with the male who is her head, so that the whole substance is one image. But when she is assigned the role as helpmate, a function that pertains to her alone, then she is not the image of God. But as far as the man is concerned, he is by himself alone the image of God just as fully and completely as when he and the woman are joined together into one.”

I dived into the most serious theological and historical study I had ever done (including the six years I spent doing my degrees) – certainly the most fraught. This felt like a life-or-death situation – the life or death of my ability to respect myself as a woman, the life or death of my ability to connect with the divine.

Is there historical and theological support for calling God by female names?

To my great delight (and relief), there is ample biblical, theological and historical evidence for addressing the Most Holy by female names. I discovered that the translations made of the Bible had frequently changed female names for people, as well as mistranslating female terms and names for the divine. For example, the ancient Hebrew “El Shaddai” is usually translated “The Almighty”, assuming that the term derives from shadad, burly or powerful, or shadah, “mountains”. However, many Hebrew scholars now understand that El Shaddai derives from Shad meaning breast – El Shaddai therefore translates as the Many-Breasted One. The ancient habit of translating the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name for God, as “LORD”, further reinforced the incorrect assumption that only male language was acceptable to name the Most High.

The usage of “Father/abba” to relate to the Holiest is only used 4 times in Mark, 15 in Luke, 49 in Matthew, and 109 times in John (the Gospels were written in that order, from around 60-120AD) - surely a sign of a growing community usage, rather than Jesus’ actual words. Given the Gospels had earlier sources now lost to us, it is possible that the term “father” was used infrequently by Jesus, and was then latched onto by his followers as a quiet and subconscious way of reinforcing the Graeco-Roman worldview of men as pater familias, the head of the household, and its use encouraged and strengthened through the years by those reinforcing male leadership and power.

I came to understand that, if we only use male names for God, then that subtly implies that only men are made in God’s image. When we use only male terminology for God and for people in our liturgy, worship, preaching and teaching, we subtly reinforce this incorrect, outdated understanding of God and imply that maleness is “normal” and somehow being female means we are less.

Theologically, we understand that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, and as omnipotent and all-powerful, God will not be limited by gender, and nor should our language for God put God’s power and presence in a box of limited male terms. St Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) called God Mother in her sermons; so too did Julian of Norwich (c1342-1416). Yet despite extensive biblical, historical and theological evidence, including discussions within our own Anglican tradition in New Zealand and overseas over the last 50 years or more, we still continue to primarily name God by male names.

I began to look closely at the liturgy and Bible translations we use. I translated the entire Benedictine daily prayer cycle into gender neutral and expansive terms (where female and male names are used equally) for my own use as a Lenten devotion in 2014. I then tackled A New Zealand Prayer Book/He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa. I wrote a version of the Eucharistic liturgy p.404 that removed all male terms for God, replacing them with female or gender-neutral terms. Not being a priest, I was not able to use this, but it was an exercise in trying to find out what it might feel like to be in a liturgy where God was addressed openly as Sophia, Mother, Lady, She. I began to look for versions of the Bible where the names for God were not changed, and discovered both The Inclusive Bible, and even more powerful, The Divine Feminine Version of the New Testament, and began to experience the scriptures with a new voice.

I found that I could not keep silent about the explosion of love that I had felt since I had openly embraced calling God by female names – my favourites being She Who Is, following Elizabeth Johnson’s book of the same name that was the beginning of the strong theological backbone I needed, Sophia (the Greek translation of Hokhmah or Wisdom), and Mother or Lady. I began to think about Jesus as the incarnation of Holy Sophia in the continuation of the Wisdom tradition, which a lot of scholars had identified, and reflected that the Holy Child could be thought of as the Child of the Mother. I began to discuss my discovery of She Who Is with others.

And that’s where things got complicated.

There was a lot of support, often from older Christian friends that had gone through the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, several of whom had been closely involved with the Anglican Church and the Prayer Book Commission. There was also stonewalling, accusations of heresy, and refusal to engage with the theology and history, particularly from some male priests who clung to patriarchy like a ragged, worn-out old blanket that they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, let go of.

I tried everything. I spoke, with love, to friends and acquaintances at churches – my own and others. I spoke with my husband and daughter, who have both journeyed with me on this discovery of She Who Is Godde (the term I now prefer for the divine – it is an old medieval spelling for the divine, and is completely neutral with no male connotations such as “God” has). I spoke with passion to our churchwardens and parish priests, describing my journey and trying to engage with them over the theological and historical information I had gleaned through at least five years of intensive study, prayer and reflection.

I felt unwelcome in regular church liturgy because I only ever heard Godde named by male names, and that no longer named my experience of her. I changed the words when I was singing hymns (first resigning from the church choir) and participating in liturgy, substituting she for he so I could be present in church. When I used a female name for Godde, Sophia, Holy Wisdom, when leading intercessions one Sunday in 2016, I was formally censured by my parish priest and removed from all rosters in the parish where I, and my dangerous ideas about Godde, might be expressed publicly. Patriarchy was rampant.

I did find allies – people that felt the same as me, who had sought Sophia/Wisdom and found her, as we are enjoined to do in Proverbs and Wisdom. They helped me keep up my courage. In the end, in desperation, I sought a meeting with our People’s Warden asking what I could do, as our parish priest completely refused to engage in conversation about this topic with us. The Warden recommended we put motions to our parish AGM – which we did, seeking removal of male terms when the whole of humanity was meant, and seeking education for the parish and changes in our language for Godde in church.

So how did it all turn out? Well, the parish priest would not allow the motions on the naming of Godde to even be put at the AGM (giving us no warning of this so we couldn’t even amend the motions) and refusing to allow discussion on the naming of Godde. I wasn’t even allowed to speak to the motion I was trying to put (which had been notified to the parish according to the correct protocol, three weeks before the AGM). The priest tried to undermine the motion on naming of people by putting a much weaker motion from the chair, but at least there is some intention to remove terms such as “mankind” and “man/men” when they are intended to refer to all people. The motion on educating the parish on the female names for Godde was passed, after my husband spoke with calm eloquence, identifying that his experience of the journey was that knowing Godde by male-only terms was missing so much of the richness of Godde’s nature.

And where does that leave me? I am still reading, still researching – trying to identify what it might do to the way the church treats people, the way Christians treat people, if we viewed Godde as our Mother. How might we respect her world, if we thought about it as birthed by her? How might we show love one to another, if all of our people could see and hear of Godde in terms that show that, no matter what flesh you are born into, you are fully born and bearing Godde’s image? I am still lighting candles of hope in her name, praying in the stillness of the night sky, walking the beach and hearing the water crash on the shore, filling her footprints left there by some other person who walked before me and carries her name.

I am calling out her name in the world, and naming patriarchy and misuse of male power wherever I see it.

I cannot un-see or un-know what I now know, the experiences of her love I have had. My image of Godde is forever changed – much bigger, wider, deeper, more beautiful, richer. I am a different person since I encountered Godde the Mother, Godde the Creatrix, Godde the Incarnate Child, Godde Holy Wisdom. I have found my image was in her all along – I just couldn’t see it, because the language we use for God told me that only men were made in God’s image. Women were only mothers, not fathers – but now Godde is my Mother I can find myself in her.

Sophia prayer

One of my distinct frustrations at present is the invisibility and lack of resources for liturgical exploration of Sophia. Part of my vocation as a Benedictine is to pray the Opus Dei, the work of God - usually known as the Divine Office or breviary. Those of you who follow the blog (I have followers?!) will know that I've been trying to find resources for Sophia-prayer for some time. The most recent foray into an expansive language Office was from the Order of St Helena, which I used for a while. However, somehow it didn't seem to truly fit, although it gave me some very good ideas.

The next step, which was suggested by one of my Brothers in the Community, was to create my own version of the Office. Purists among you will now be shouting that the Office is the "official prayer of the church" and therefore shouldn't be tinkered with. However, praying the Office as I currently have it is an exercise in trying not to grind my teeth to the gumline, through frustration and anger over the misogynist language used for God - which hardly helps me connect with the One who truly Is! The pattern of each service of the Office is set historically so putting together a Sophia version shouldn't be that tricky (just time consuming!) and I am going to use the lectionary for the readings, so I don't fixate on the readings I like and ignore the bits that are harder for me.

The first step was to find a four-week psalter pattern, which sounds significantly easier than it was. The complication comes when you consider that Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox all number the psalms slightly differently - RCs and Protestants both have 150 psalms but they're "chopped up" differently; the Orthodox add another one and have 151. I needed to find a Protestant arrangement as my translations were all numbered that way! I also wanted to make sure it included all of the psalms, including the so-called "imprecatory psalms", because I think it's more honest to human experience. I think I cracked that one, finally.

Step two: which translation of the psalms? Should I re-image a known translation into Sophia-language, use the OSH psalms, use the NZ Prayer Book psalms with changed language, use the psalms from the Inclusive Bible.... ?

This was a source of extreme teeth-grinding, until about a week ago I googled "sophia psalms" in sheer desperation. And I think I found a treasure! I stumbled across the blog of Mother Laura Grimes, an Old Catholic Bishop and feminist, who has taken the 1979 Book of Common Prayer version of the psalms and made them Sophia-centric. And they are beautiful. And bless her, she's made them available to others! I have always loved the way the BCP psalms flow, as they were written for singing, and she's captured that.

The neat thing is that Mother Laura has also created a Sophia little office and rosary! I've ordered those too and am excited to explore her work. Here's hoping....

Homesick for pilgrimage

I've often wondered whether it was possible to be truly homesick for a place that isn't really home. Last night, I got my answer: absolutely.

Part of our trip to the UK was a pilgrimage. We visited three cathedrals and several holy sites while we were over there. We started our pilgrimage on Christmas Day in NZ's northernmost Cathedral, Holy Trinity Auckland, which was pretty special as it was 200 years to the day since the preaching of the first Christian sermon in this land. We continued it with English cathedrals and holy places.

York Minister is jaw-droppingly beautiful. The feral GPS took us right into the centre of the old city within the walls - to the point that we nearly ran into the pedestrian-only zone through the Shambles (oops); but as a way to see the Cathedral, driving up Museum Street to the York Information Centre pretty much can't be beaten. The Minster just loomed up out of the frost, with the morning light behind it, shimmering on the golden stone, and the Heart of Yorkshire tracery in the Great Window catching the sun. Inside, it's even better. I literally had to scrape my jaw off the floor when we walked into the nave and looked up. I have never seen anything so lovely as those pillars of stone reaching for the sky, and the gilded bosses and ribbed ceiling. We did one of the guided tours, which was very interesting but quite long. I loved the crypt, with the tomb of St William of York (very simple, a single block of stone with a candle burning on it), and the ancient paintings. We went back later on that day for evensong in the quire. Candles, choir (a visiting choir - the Minster's one was on holiday but they were very good), and that thunderously gorgeous organ. Worship was a whole body experience: the feel of the organ, the smell of wax and candles, the music, the silence. Prayers offered for the prayer intentions left in the Minster. Very down to earth and grounded in reality, even in the midst of the glorious music.

Sheffield Cathedral on New Year's Day: very quiet and peaceful. Reminded me a lot of the feel of Wellington Cathedral of St Paul although it's much much older and looks nothing like Wellington's "big pink sarcophagus"! It's not one of the "famous" ones but it was very lovely. We liked the fact you could see the Norman, Gothic, and later additions very clearly, and it had a gorgeous chapel to the Holy Spirit that I particularly liked. It also had the coolest of all the nativities we saw: made of Sheffield steel, about 1.5m high, and somehow the makers had made that steel very winsome and gentle.

Grace Dieu Priory was not on our original itinerary: my sister-in-law suggested it as it was just up the road from their place near Loughborough. We got there by a very cold walk through English woods in the snow, which was interesting in itself: I was quite surprised by the lack of undergrowth, bushes etc - just trees, and they seemed fairly widely spaced. I don't think it was deliberately planted but it had a "managed" feel. The priory itself is a ruin, but it was beautiful. The stonework was all iced with thick snow, and the walls rose out of snowy fields. The late afternoon light was very kind to the stonework, and the whole place had a kind of breathless hush, almost as though it was waiting for something. It had the feel of a "thin place": it knew it had once been holy ground, and the sense of consecration was still there. It was very cold! Having the deep snow helped the sense of hush too. The pond beneath the priory was frozen solid (small daughter threw a good-sized rock just to make sure and it skidded for several metres!).

Most people wouldn't consider Stonehenge a holy place, but I do. Most modern scholarship seems to think that it, and the landscape around it, was holy to the prehistoric peoples, and that Stonehenge was a place of worship. I certainly sensed that when I was there: It is so old, so unbelievably old, and it was in use for over 1000 years for whatever the ancients did there. It has left a mark on both the physical landscape and the landscape of Spirit. I spent some time trying to listen to the place (rather difficult when it's swarming with tourists!). I got the sense that Stonehenge isn't quite sure what it is anymore, but that when it's quiet, after dark or at the turnings of the year, it would go back in time a long long way. It would be a place of awe, and to me, that's what worship is: finding the awe, the marks of our recognition of the numinous, in places, times, music, art, and people - the places where God has touched us and we have touched God.

I suspect the National Gallery isn't on a list of holy places for many people either, but there were so many wonderful works of art, many of them altarpieces or great artist's explorations of religious themes that it was definitely part of our pilgrimage. So many artists, so many places to go in the world through the art, so many themes of love and beauty, power and betrayal, peace and war and everything in between. Highlights too numerous to mention, but seeing Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael in the same building was pretty amazing, not to mention Holbein, Constable, Turner, Degas, and a whole lot more.

Westminster Abbey was a different kind of holy: the holiness of the ordinary, the holiness that we find through living our lives and contributing to society. It also turned into a very personal moment, when I found a shrine to one of my ancestors, and the tomb of another (a Dean of Westminster). Did not expect that at all! Partly because of the number of people there, it was hard to get a sense of the Abbey as a working church, except at the prayers on the hour (when one of the Canons requested everyone to be still for a few moments while they offered prayer). We didn't go to the prayers at St Edward the Confessor's tomb, although I did spend a few moments reflecting there. I found it hard to get a sense of the architecture too, because there were so many monuments and grave markers - I found some old friends, like CV Stanford, Howells, Dryden, Keats, Shakespeare, and rather endearingly, CS Lewis (no Tolkien though). Also Queens Elizabeth and Mary (in a shared grave, rather beautifully). Henry V, and Henry IV.

The jewel in the crown, and the finale of our pilgrimage, was Canterbury Cathedral itself. We were staying in the beautiful, peaceful Cathedral Lodge within the precincts of the Cathedral - it was tasteful, comfortable, and luxuriously beautiful in a very understated way. What was amazing was how the noise of the city just disappeared when you went through the walls into the precinct. The old city walls are stone and incredibly thick: the grounds are almost silent. The Cathedral opened on us like a revelation as we came through the gates from Quenensgate. After a very late lunch we went in. The sense of prayer and Presence hits you the moment you walk through the doors - there is a holy hush in the building not of any person's making. It just is. We were blessed enough to arrive about 15mins after Saturday evensong had begun (we got there about 3.30pm), so there was a tide of glorious music and resonant organ everywhere. We went to explore the crypt, beginning with praying at the Martyrdom of St Thomas Becket, and then visiting the various chapels in the crypt - all with evensong washing over us, even through the thick stone of the ancient Norman crypt. There are some very ancient wall paintings in one of the chapels that gave us a tiny sense of the riot of colour the Cathedral would have once been, but it was the atmosphere of the place that kept stilling us. The place where St Thomas' body lay, in the Chapel of St Mary of the Undercroft; the place where his tomb was before they built the shrine (that Henry VIII pulled down). The single candle that burns where the shrine once was. And of course the tomb of Edward the Black Prince. Over 1500 years of continuous prayer has marked this place. The very stones pray and praise.

The next day we went to choral eucharist there, in the quire, with the light blue and gold and red through the stained glass. Incense. Singing. Organ. Psalms sung to chant like I've never heard them before. Processions of readers, the Gospels, holy gifts. Receiving communion at the High Altar of Canterbury Cathedral. The taste of port on my lips, the holy body and blood. More singing, and hearing the purity of those boys' voices soaring in the Anthem.... Prayers, very down to earth, for ordinary blessings, ordinary pains, ordinary joys. Being encouraged to pray the Lord's Prayer in our own language - I started in Maori but got lost amongst all the English! Blessing the water for the holy water font. Finishing with Psalm 150 for the Recessional, soaking the stones in praise and prayer yet again.

And at the end of the service, gathering with Canon Nick in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Undercroft for our pilgrim blessing, giving thanks for the journey we had made and the one we were to make home. Holding Canterbury specially in my heart, trying not to cry as we left. None of us wanted to leave. Trying to carry Canterbury with me, St Thomas, the Martyrdom, the crypt, and the praise soaked into the stones.

Can I be homesick for a place I don't belong to? Yes, I can. I'm homesick for Canterbury. I am homesick for the Presence of that place, for the stillness, the silence, the beauty of the worship, the smell of incense, the thunder of the organ and boys' voices soaring in praise. Beautiful stone and light and glass. The warmth and kindness of the welcome we received from everyone. The place of martyrdom, destination of millions of pilgrims like us through the centuries. The place marked by God's presence and our recognition of God's presence.

Now I need to find those places here, find a way to bring it home to smalltown New Zealand, land of sheep, green fields and bright sunshine. It's going to be a long job.

A modern day pilgrim

Pilgrimage.

The word sounds a bit old-fashioned, a bit musty, a bit redolent of old schoolrooms and tattered copies of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—those wonderfully funny (and sometimes slightly naughty!) stories told by a group of pilgrims in the Middle Ages, travelling together on the famous Winchester-Canterbury pilgrimage route to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket, the murdered Archbishop of Canterbury. How could this possibly be relevant in New Zealand in the 21st century, so far from all the famous pilgrimage routes of Europe (and the theology that said that pilgrims earned merit in God’s eyes by visiting holy places)?

We decided to find out. We joined a pilgrimage organised by Whakatane Parish to the sites associated with Wiremu Tamihana and Tārore: one of the first converts to Christianity in the 1830s, the peacemaker during the Waikato Land Wars; and the little girl who was murdered at Wairere Falls, and whose copy of a Māori translation of the Gospel of Luke was stolen and touched the hearts of her murderer, her father, and the great chief Te Rauparaha with the message of holy peace.

I began to better understand those pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales: travelling together on a bus wasn’t quite the same as riding on horseback, but the same sense of camaraderie and enjoyment, the same urge to tell stories, to learn about each other, seemed to be as present in these modern-day pilgrims as in the ones in Chaucer’s time. Partly it was a way to pass the time between sites, but it was also a chance to find out how we came to be there, to get to know each other, and to share our joy in God’s love.

Praying at the very simple little grave of Tārore, standing next to that little white cross and picket fence out in the glorious spring sunshine of the Waikato is probably a different experience from praying in the chapel of St Thomas, but nevertheless, it was a “still place”, with all the wildflowers blowing in the breeze and the sun soft on our faces, and the sense of this small girl’s love for God and message of gentleness and forgiveness close all around us. We could see the Wairere Falls directly across from her grave, some 10-12km away, and had a sense of the sad journey her father had to bring her body home and his own struggle not to seek revenge for her murder, but to be faithful to the way of peace he had chosen.

The stained glass windows in All Saints’ Matamata commemorate both Wiremu Tamihana and Tārore in a stunning, modern style. There she sits, at the base of the Falls under the kowhāi, with tui and piwakawaka (fantails) fluttering about her, reading her Gospel. Another window nearby shows St Francis preaching to the birds of New Zealand that same message of compassionate love and peaceful courage.

St Thomas à Becket has had pilgrims coming to his grave for nearly a thousand years, after he was murdered by a greedy king for standing up for the faith and the church of his time. Tārore died in 1836, on her way to the mission school in Tauranga, after it was moved from the location near her home, and her grave has been a place of prayer ever since.

Both Thomas’ and Tārore’s stories inspire us to journey with them in the way of God, the way of compassion and love, the struggle to forgive and find peace even in the midst of bitter pain and loss. They tell us that listening to and learning from the saints who have gone before us is important—not to put them on pedestals, but to hear their human voices, their frustrations and their triumphs, and inspiring us with their steadfast courage in the face of loss and risk as they travelled with God in their own day, and as we travel with God in ours and find our own courage and hope with them.

Pilgrimage in 2014? Oh, I think so.

This article first appeared in the St Luke's Parish (Rotorua) magazine Reaching Out, St Luke's Day/Advent edition 2014

Plain speaking and a bit of digital spring cleaning

Regular visitors will notice that the blog has had a bit of a facelift. It had had the same layout and template for a couple of years so it seemed appropriate to have a little spring cleaning.

Some of you may wonder about the slightly changed title: "Pachyderm: home by a different way". I am still drawing inspiration from elephants, those wonderful, enigmatic, courageous creatures of the wild, but this is my blog and my story, and I am exploring new ways of being and travelling. Hints of this have already started to show on here, but let us be plain. I have begun to find Sophia, the Wisdom who is God, She who Is, who gave the Christ to us as her greatest gift. I am slowly trusting and allowing myself to travel with her, and listening as she begins to make herself known to me.

The God of my ancestors-in-faith, Hildegard, Therese, Thomas Merton, and many others, has slowly led me to understand that the image of the god that gets handed out in church is a lie. God is not male. God is not exclusively masculine. The Holy Spirit is Holy Sophia. The Creator sang for joy as she built the world. The god I have been shown in church over the last 25 years or more is a fragment and a construct of a patriarchial world that dominated women's experience and buried our stories, hiding the essential truth of God as both/and: God beyond gendered language and experience.

However, for me, here, now, I need to hear from the Creatrix, who gave the Christ-Sophia, who brought forth life from the darkness and beauty from the seed. I need to listen and hear that tiny voice that has been stifled throughout my life and in the life of the church, and find the loving face of the Holy One who sings new words in my woman's heart. I need to hear her voice, and allow myself to hear it, and trust that I can find the God who is love, above and beyond all things, who draws near to me in my own experiences, who made me in her image and likeness, and who shows her face to the world through me.

The image of God is far more than two men and a bird. And I intend to discover some of those lost and lovely names for God facing us that have been intentionally hidden from me.

So there you have it. Plain speaking for something that is anything but plain in experience.

A taste of Benedictine hospitality

Some people would think that the name "the Community of Solitude" is a bit of an oxymoron. How can you have a community of solitaries, or have solitude when you're a community? I must admit there have been times I have asked myself that too. I understand a little better now. 

The last week of July was the Convocation of the Community in Minnesota, USA. We were the guests of St John's Abbey, a Benedictine Community in Collegeville (home of the Liturgical Press - the joke in the community was that it had to be be a Benedictine abbey because it had two bookshops as well as the library!). The setting was beautiful, but the convocation even

The huge bell tower at St John's

more so. 16 members of our Community gathered, sharing the daily Office with the monks of St John's (singing the Office with over 120 monks in choir four times a day is something I will never forget), meeting, talking, praying, laughing together, going for walks, and just being together showed me how rich and how deep our COS community life is. We have a "virtual" community most of the time, sharing our lives through our prayer, email and skype, but seeing them face to face and sharing their hearts was a gift I treasure. 

Our solitude enriched our time together: we shared the "fruits of our solitude" at the dinner table, in our meetings together, and in our general chats. 

We each pray the Office ourselves, but sharing that prayer together made it immeasurably richer and deeper. I use the Breviary of the Order of St Helena in my private Office; the St John's one was different to what I am used to but doing it as a corporate community activity changed it in ways I didn't expect. 

The stained glass in the Abbey church

The pace St John's chant the psalms is a lot slower than I am used to, and it took a bit to get used to. However, I began to find that giving the psalms space like that allowed them to speak more deeply. I also appreciated the sermons of the monk-priests of St John's during the daily Mass: they were very short (no more than 5-10 minutes at the most) but they were profound in their meaning. 

Statue of St John in Abbey church baptistry
(courtesy Br Thomas Andrew COS Cam)

The best one came for me on the feast of Sts Joachin and Anne (parents of the Virgin Mary), when the priest reflected that he had had the same Gospel reading just two weeks' previously: the last time he preached to the Community! He then reflected that our monastic lives are like that: recircling around the same truths, coming closer and closer like a moth to a candleflame. We persevere, as he said, "in the good days, and bad days, and sometimes just days." That phrase captured everyone: choir is a very solemn, beautiful, formal place but there was a ripple of smiles as everyone there completely understood what he meant. Often it is just days, when we walk faithfully, but may not see too many results. It's like the light moving through the stained glass: it looks different at every time of day, but some days it stands out more than others. Some days the Office is full of light and life and joy: other days it's an act of sheer faith to keep going, keep praying, keep singing, keep hoping. 

The stained glass in the Abbey church, viewed from the monks' choir
This is completely huge - this photo cannot capture the size and majesty of it.

St Benedict with his Rule and the ravens

I found myself profoundly touched by the art around the Abbey. It felt like the fruits of the monks' contemplations was made physical, made visible, for us all to share. The fierce St John in the baptistry stood guard over the entrance into the church, but the gentle St Benedict in the Abbey university grounds invited us in to share with him in his hospitality, life, and love. He looked young, passionate, warm, and caring: inviting us to share the feast of his Rule and the richness of study and prayer and laughter. I liked his rolled-up sleeves: Ora te Labora: prayer and work (or to work is to pray).

One thing I found quite amazing was how much fun we had together. It started from the moment I was met at Minneapolis-St Paul Airport (after a 36 hour journey!) by two of my Brothers, and it didn't stop all the time we were together. There was a lot of "monastic humour": one of my personal favourites was when we were having a COS photo taken after Office one night. The person taking the photo couldn't figure out if it had been taken because the camera didn't make any noise: one of the Brothers piped up, "That's because it's a Cistercian camera!" 

Returning home, all 36 hours of it, was quite tough. I was glad to see my family again, but I had grown even closer to my monastic family than before and I miss the regular prayer in choir at St John's, shared with the St John's monks and my own Brothers and Sisters. But I return to my cell, and keep the faith quietly in the regular things - the "just days" of my life - and find in those things the courage I need to keep loving and praying, being faithful in the big stuff and the small daily things. 

I suspect there will be more "fruits of solitude" from my time at Convocation popping up. I had to make a start with the simple basic things, and I promised some of the photos!

Romuald and Wordsworth

St Romuald's Brief Rule says, "Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it.... Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what their mother brings them." In that being is peace. The world may come with us into our cell, our place of prayer, but when it comes with us it comes into the paradise of God's grace, and wonderful things are possible there.

The world is too much with us, and sometimes at the moment it feels very much too much with us. Wars and rumours of wars, fear, hatred, death, loss, pain, grief. What can I do in the midst of so much suffering? My little efforts feel like less than the widow's mite. But I need to remind myself of what I am, of who God has asked me to be: to dwell in my inner place as if it were paradise and wait there. Even though it feels quite often as though no-one else has turned up - to wait there is a gift and it is paradise. My inner cell is the doorstep to heaven and I should be content to sit and wait there, whether there is sunshine or rain, and know that the world I have put behind me is part of me and is waiting on the doorstep with me, gathered to paradise in my heart.

But no-one said it would be easy. As one of the monks at St John's Abbey preached, in our monastic round of rediscoveries and re-echoes and revisiting the same truths day after day, "we have good days, and bad days, and sometimes just days". And quite often its raining on the doorstep, or it's cold, and frequently it is lonely and dark and dispiriting, and sunshine and light and love seem like a distant dream. A long obedience in the same direction, as Eugene Peterson called one of his books, requires sitting on the doorstep even in the winter when the snow is piled so high we cannot see over it and springtime seems a million years away.

But then there are the days when the daffodils are dancing in my garden and the first of the tulips are poking through the ground, the sun is warm on my back as I do a bit of weeding, and the tree down the road is pink with blossom: to sit on the doorstep of my heart on those days is easy and the whole day bubbles with a deep and subtle joy, even when the world is too much with us and seems to be falling around my ears and I don't know what to pray or to say or to do to help. Maybe it's enough. I pray that it is.

She who is - for me

It doesn't seem like nearly a whole month since I last blogged, but the calendar tells a different tale!

The usual lots going on, but there is one thing that I'm thinking about a lot. In my last post, I talked about some niggles I was experiencing over the naming of God and the location of women's experience in our history and traditions. I have continued to explore those issues. Hubby and I are reading She Who Is: the mystery of God in feminist theological discourse, by the wonderful Sr Elizabeth Johnson. Her book is a comprehensive theological and biblical analysis of images of God, testing the hypothesis that there are images of God that are feminine in our tradition, the biblical text, and classical and contemporary theology, and more importantly, that we need to recover these images because our language defines our experience. Women cannot experience the wholeness of the imago dei, bring made in God's own image, if they cannot find language for God taken from our experience as women.

I was willing to test this hypothesis, and I found, to my surprise and my joy, that the text, history, and theology fully supports images and language for God that is female. Wisdom, the Spirit of God, is consistently spoken of as "she" in the wisdom literature. El Shaddai is an image of God as "the breasted one" (from shad, breast - an alternative extraction can also be from the word for mountain -which looks like a breast!). The Spirit of God hovers over the face of the waters like a mother bird. God gathers us under her wings like a mother bird gathers her chicks. We together raised an objection in that Jesus refers to God as "abba" - "father": but in the analysis of the biblical texts, Jesus calling God father is used '4 times in Mark, 15 in Luke, 49 in Matthew, and 109 in John' (Johnson, p.81) - which when you lay these alongside the dates of the creation of the gospels, shows clearly that this usage is reflecting a growing tradition rather than necessarily the actual language of Jesus himself.

We're only halfway through, but already I find a change in me. Finding and using the images of God as mother, as Sophia, as She who Is, is invigorating my prayer and my understanding of myself as being the bearer of God's image and likeness. A flawed mirror I might be, but at least I can reflect, in my whole person and in my essential femaleness, God's wholeness and essential nature as divine, beyond gender and containing the fullness of femaleness and maleness. I am in God as God as in me. God, the Breasted One, Sophia, the creator of all, the one who breathes fresh life into the world and its people, is the ground of my being, and she is the brightness and love and joy and wisdom of this world.

I have moved, too, from my previous version of the Divine Office (Benedictine Daily Prayer, that I had been using since 2012). I found suddenly that I kept getting tripped up in the language and imagery for God, and it was interrupting my prayer. I discovered that the sisters of the Order of St Helena had retranslated and re-imaged their Breviary to find expansive language for God through a process of over 20 years - not just replacing "father" with God or gender-neutral pronouns, but truly looking for the images of God that have always been there but hidden. And bless them, they made their work available to others. The Monastic Breviary (available now only in pdf) even includes their chant tunes, and shows the years and years they spent with the texts, praying and chanting them, trying to find the right words and feelings and expressions for God's grace that does not use masculine pronouns or images for God. And the result is stunning. I haven't felt so joyous in my prayer of the Office for years. I've used many versions of the Divine Office in the last 15 years, but this is probably the most influential and the most beautiful.

I have also found The Inclusive Bible, another 20-year translation project undertaken by scholars of the highest order, seeking to do justly by the text and images of God, male and female. That only arrived yesterday, but again I find myself approaching the texts with joy again. I read through the first 15 chapters of Genesis last night, and I was stunned. I am extremely familiar with ch.1-3, having spent a large chunk of time in my Judaism studies with that text, and another large chunk when I was at theological college studying the Pentateuch. I've read it in Hebrew and in many different English translations, analysed it, pulled it apart, theologised over it, agonised with it, and lived with it in a scholarly and personal way for long enough to recognise when the scholarship is good. And the scholarship as shown in this translation is superb. It captures the wonderful word-play of the Yahwist author in ch.2-3, and shows the grandeur and beauty of the Priestly author of ch.1. All of this, and it reads aloud beautifully. I also dipped into several of my favourite NT passages to compare the translation, and I love it.

What's more, I read some of it aloud to small daughter tonight, and it was amazing to see her eyes light up like stars. She heard her own experiences reflected in the biblical stories for the first time, and it was a beautiful thing to see.

So, can my image of God expand? Can I reflect more of God if I break the patriarchial idol of masculine language for God? Yes, and yes, and yes again. I can find more of God, more of God's nature, more of God's essential goodness and being-with-us, if I allow myself to trust that female images and language for God are essential to allowing myself to see God's fullness of work in the world, in and through us. I only hope I am up to the challenge. Sophia, She who Is, the ground of my being, the source of life and truth, wholeness, healing and challenge for the whole world, the God who holds the universe and continually breathes it into being. It's going to be an interesting journey!

CMIOSH

In my last post I mentioned that I had just completed the peer review interview for Chartered Membership of IOSH, the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health. I was notified yesterday that I was awarded my professional grade and am now CMIOSH. It felt pretty good - I have been working towards this for many years and it was good to be recognised as a safety professional by my peers in the industry internationally. A real confidence-booster, that!

So, what does it mean for my practice? Not a great deal, on one hand, but on the other, potentially quite a lot. It doesn't change the way I work, creating fit for purpose health and safety management systems. It doesn't change my deep desire to contextualise safety practices to particular workplaces and cultural expressions (I am currently exploring with a client what safety management looks like in a Maori cultural setting and it's wonderfully challenging and exciting - I am learning a lot!). It doesn't change my passion for good root cause analysis of accident factors and strong corrective actions that are aimed at organisational factors, good contractor management practices and so on. It doesn't change my need to keep growing and expanding my safety knowledge - a lifelong practice.

What it may change is the possibilities. New doors may open because I am CMIOSH that were closed to me before. New opportunities may arise. I can work professionally anywhere in the world now, and CMIOSH has a professional standing that is understood almost everywhere.

The interesting thing is that I have often found when I've completed a major process, such as getting my degrees or GradDipOSH, that either just after finishing or at graduation there was a tremendous sense of let-down and loss. It was over. All that hard work, done. Nothing to take its place. I don't feel that about CMIOSH. Instead, I sense possibility. Newness. Opportunity. I trust that I am honest and courageous enough to open myself to those possibilities, and grow in my understanding and practice of health and safety so that I can help my clients to send their people home safe to their loved ones, every day.

We will see.

Monica Baldwin and the beginning of the journey

I have been re-exploring a favourite (and somewhat obscure) author: Monica Baldwin, niece of Stanley Earl Baldwin, three-times prime minister of England. I first stumbled across Monica in a school book bin when I was about 14, with her fascinating book The Called and the Chosen: the diary of Sister Ursula Auberon, Abbaye de ka Sainte Croix, Framleghen (1957) was being sold off for about 30 cents from the school library. 

The Called and the Chosen was a watershed book for me. I was young, impressionable, and trying to find my way in the world. I was also a member of a deeply Protestant, non-conformist church that still had a strong distrust of all things Catholic. However, I have always had a driving interest in history and simply could not accept the implicit teaching of the church I belonged to that nothing interesting happened between the Acts of the Apostles, the Reformation, and now. 

Monica's book, telling the story of a young woman who entered a convent and then the things that she experienced there, made a deep impression on me. The diarist, Sr Ursula, describes things that I had never experienced at the time, such as the liturgical wonders of Christmas midnight Mass, and the experiences in contemplative prayer. I was entranced. I read and re-read it, feeling for Sr Ursula as she struggled with her vocation and eventual choice to leave the convent because she felt she was called elsewhere and needed to be honest to that call - but with a huge sense of peace because she made the right decision. 

I lost the book for many years after lending it to a friend who didn't return it (why is it that people who would be horrified at the idea of stealing anything else think it's okay to steal books?) and only found another copy with great difficulty some 15 years later. After this, I discovered Monica Baldwin had written two other books: the properly autobiographical I Leap Over the Wall and Goose in the Jungle, where she details her own exodus from the Canonesses Regular of St Augustine after 28 years (1914-1941) and how she adapted (and didn't) to a completely different world and kind of life. In these books she continues to explore what it meant for her to pray, and to find God - the convent was not the right place for her, but she began to explore the ways that the world around her could lead her towards God. 

Thinking about it, Monica Baldwin probably had a lot to do with my own vocation. She helped me see that lots of the things I was longing for actually had a place in church (gorgeous music, silence, prayer, contemplation - none of which fitted in the places where I was at the time) and that what the Celts called the book of nature was more rich and subtle a teacher of faith than anything produced by fallible humans. The Anglican church became the place where I could place all of those parts of my disparate nature and they could all find a home - and unlike Monica, I found that all of them in the end led me to the religious life, firstly with the Franciscans and then the Benedictine Community of Solitude. 

So, even though her own journey into the convent ended with her gathering her courage and leaving, Monica's journey through the convent and into the faith of the everyday has inspired my own. 

The valley

Last time I wrote everything was looking up. I was about 6 weeks post surgery, had the final surgical signoff from my surgeon, energy was returning and I was enjoying being back at work.

How things change.

Healing from surgery has continued but quality of life hasn't. I seem to have entered one of those terrible acute times, such as I haven't had for probably 8 years or more, certainly since small daughter was born over 6 years ago and I had mirena #1. So what went wrong? I haven't the faintest idea really: all I know is that that terrible, chronic pain has returned, the kind that grabs me right down deep in my abdomen and savages me like a lion over a kill. What's worse is that I appear to have had a bad reaction to the major medication my surgeon gave me, the one that was supposed to reprogramme my brain about chronic pain. Hubby and I can date the increase in fainting and the dissocation of this from pain squarely to when this drug got to full strength in my system, and it had got to the point when there wasn't a day going by when I wasn't severely dizzy or blacking out. Horribly embarrassing and really getting in the way of life.

But now, guess what? The pain is back (because I'm carefully stepping off the pain meds - carefully and slowly under medical supervision because the side-effects of stopping can be awful), and I seem to be existing on a diet of strong painkillers. Thank God, no trips to hospital for morphine yet but suspect it's only a matter of time. Nearly needed one on Monday night: hubby and I were watching the end of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in preparation for release of The Hobbit: An unexpected journey when the pain hit me hard - got to a 9/10 on my personal pain scale. Not fun. I told hubby that if my selection of prescribed painkillers didn't work within 15 minutes I needed a trip in the ambulance - he would have had to stay behind because it was late and small daughter was asleep.

My doctor had told me not to drive while coming off the meds and so my boss picked me up on the way through on Tuesday morning: I nearly didn't go because of the night before but I had no way of getting hold of him to tell him not to divert because he has no mobile reception at his place and I didn't think he'd appreciate a call at 5.30am waking all the rugrats! I went in, slightly uneasy about what the day would hold: and rightly so - the pain hit me again mid-morning and plastered me over the floor. My poor friend who has helped me so often this year got another one of those panicked texts and he found me again - this time though it was because of the pain not the drugs. I think I scared him this time: he's never seen me really sore and it got to an 8.5/10. I suspect I very nearly broke his hand when the highest pain peak came. The national safety manager (my dotted-line report) happened to be on site on Tuesday and fortunately I'd just spent a few minutes filling him in on how bad it had become before we went into the ops meeting that I had to leave because the pain had got unbearable, and then he came in when I was busy breaking my friend's hand, so he knows what it's like too. As much as anyone can who is outside of it.

I have spent most of this week working from home, since the unfortunate pain/fainting episode on Tuesday. I have an appointment with a pain specialist here in Rotorua on Monday and I hope he has some answers, or at least some ideas. At present I need a huge cocktail of painkillers just to get out of bed in the mornings and I am struggling mentally too. Mornings and mid-afternoons are worst. In between I can more or less function and manage to get some work done. Work has been amazing: I was really worried that they would figure out that having me there was actually a risk for them, but when I finally broke and confessed that fear to my boss and my friend (who's part of the management team with me) they both said that there was nothing to worry about there.

What bothers me most is that I seem to be running out of options. My surgeon in Hamilton discharged me saying that there was nothing more he could do for me surgically, but left me on this medication that has messed me up. All my other surgeons were hugely supportive all the time: they did surgery but it was secondary to the long-term management options. I'm not sure whether he's into long-term management but he's left me in a huge mess because he's discharged me without making sure that I'm actually doing okay. Which I'm not. I don't know whether the pain specialist can manage the other issues around hormonal changes/endometriosis or whether he's just pain - but I do need him and hope he's got some new ideas for dealing with the pain because I'm very nearly at the end of my tether. My GP has been wonderfully supportive: she's referred me all over the place and she's managing my withdrawal off the chronic pain meds. The issue there is that if I come off too fast it could trigger some extremely unpleasant and dangerous effects; and as I come off the pain increases. Lose-Lose.

Hubby is looking pretty tired too: it's always hard on him because he knows there is nothing he can do and he just has to sit by and watch, and get his hand broken. Or so he thinks: his support means more to me than I can say but it's hard because this messes with my moods and emotions too, so I get down very quickly. I wish there was a way out of this. I am trying not to hope too much for Monday's appointment with the pain specialist but even a reduction of 30% in the pain level would help a lot. At least it might make me functional, mostly. Less drugs washing around would be nice too....


I rang an old friend of mine to talk things over with last night because hubby and I have been chewing it over until we're both sick of it, and my body/mind is so messed up it's hard to think straight anyway. My friend had a couple of good ideas and anyway it was just nice to talk to someone who's known me for ages and ages (longer than I've known hubby), who's seen the acute and chronic phases and knows how much they hurt - and who just cares and is happy to let me unload some of the stuff in my head. The Community knows too, and one of the Brothers that I am particularly close to knows the whole lot - I dumped on him too. He knows about chronic pain because he's got it too - he had heart surgery just after I transferred my Profession (although we'd been talking for months before that so I knew him quite well by then) and we've grown very close over the years.

Thank God for my holding cross: it's a fairly solid chunk of rimu shaped to fit my hand, made personally for me by an old friend from St James' who is now dead. It lives in my pocket and I love holding and praying with it for other reasons, but it's amazing when I'm in pain: a rosary would smash with the force that I grip this thing with and yet it's fine.

We hold hands

I realised tonight that it is nearly 2 months since I last posted here. Apologies, dear readers! There is a reason....

My last post identified that I was about to undergo major surgery and that I had a very short time to prepare for it. I was feeling extremely unwell during those last few days leading up to the surgery - I think I fainted about 3 times that week and lost a day or two in hospital. The surgery itself was done in Hamilton, about 1.5 hours from here, and I was in for about four days - the drive home from Hamilton was one of the least pleasant trips I've ever had!

I had a month of working from home as and when I could - my colleagues got used to getting email from me with very odd timestamps, because I did what I could as I had the strength to do it. Fortunately a lot of what I had to do could be done at home, and I was able to do short stints on site after a couple of weeks (with hubby playing chauffeur!). I got my final surgical clearance this week just gone and am now starting to get back into full hours at work. My stamina still isn't wonderful but I manage that as best as possible.

All of this has caused some interesting reflections. I am well aware that my body is a bit munted, and that no matter what they do surgically it will never be fully right. 20 years of living with endometriosis has taught me that. Brother Pain has been such a constant companion that it is hard to imagine life without it, and it has certainly shaped my attitude to others who are suffering. I have been learning again to pray by holding on - that there is absolutely nothing I can do to make myself worthy of God's love.

Prayer doesn't have to be words or pictures or contemplation. It can be simply hanging on to God's hand in sheer desperation when there are no words: when all you can do is hold on and scream, not even finding words to cry out for mercy. I can hold God's hand, knowing I was with God in the beginning and he was with me. I can hold on, saying nothing because there is nothing that needs saying, nothing I can say. We can hold hands. Nothing I can do can make me worthy of God's love, and even missing an Office or giving up in despair because the words are smearing on the page will make God love me less! Nothing I can do can separate me from God or take God's hand from mine - even when I can' hold on because I have no strength to do so, God does not let go of me.

One of my friends showed me this without even knowing it. A few days before I ended up in surgery, I fainted at work (for the third and most serious time). I was in a meeting and felt horrible: a whole heap of pain and I was losing the words other people were saying. One of my friends (who was sitting next to me) touched me and asked me if I was okay (apparently I was white as a sheet!) and I asked to be excused as I felt terrible. I went into my office to lie dawn for a minute to try to get myself together and felt myself falling even though I was lying down.... I woke up enough to text my friend in the meeting (we had arranged an emergency code in case I needed help at work) and he came and found me.

I remember coming to and seeing him there, sitting on the floor next to me, and I felt him holding my hand. Most of the time, my hand was limp in his - when I faint from the pain, I can still sometimes hear voices and the sense of touch is the last thing to go. I could feel his hand - I couldn't grip his, but I could feel him. When the pain came I tried to break his hand though! To finish the story, he helped me take what painkillers I could when I woke up a bit, and then waited with me when I fainted again, until I came to enough to get in the boss's car and get taken home.

When I thought about this afterwards, it became a symbol of God' love. I could do nothing. I was completely helpless. My hand was in my friend's but I couldn't hold it. He held me. God, through my friend, was holding my hand. Nothing I could do could hold on to him at that point. God held me. Even when things are really bad, God holds us. We hold hands with God, we are contained and wrapped in his love, even though we might not feel it or know it, even though we might be completely absorbed by our pain or our depression or the dark night of the soul, or.... God just is. And we are because God is. And we are wrapped and held in his love. We hold hands.

Community musings

One of the joys - and really scary things - about being part of a very young Community is that all of the traditions of that place are still being established. I had a long talk with one of our senior Brothers today - partly it was a catchup (because I've been a bit out of the loop with the move and all), and part of it was discussing where the Community of Solitude is going in the next little while. We're growing at a phenomonal rate and we've spent a lot of time putting in the structures that support this growth. What we're now exploring is what it means to be a dispersed Community - very much part of each other's lives but living separately. How do we support that over time, as we grow? How do we walk with those who are discerning whether this is the right place for them, given that mentor and novice are often thousands of kilometres apart (or half a world, in the case of me and the rest of them!)?

I have a lot of thinking and praying to do on this one. I have been a Guardian for coming up three years now (it's gone very quickly, trust me!) and our Constitution states that we can only serve in any office for two consecutive terms of three years, to make sure that we've got fresh blood and fresh ideas coming into the leadership of the Community. I was and am honoured to be chosen to be Guardian but want to make sure that as the Community grows, we're laying the groundwork for those who will step into those roles. COS is not about the Founders, or me, or any other single person. It's about God's shared call to each of us, and how we explore that call together. Dispersed community has its challenges - but then so does living in community too!

I have been loving exploring our current Community study book, Monastic Practices, by Br Charles Cummings OSCO (another Trappist! I love the Cistercians!) - a gentle, clear, incredibly inspiring exploration of the lived wisdom of monastic activities. Yes. he's cloistered, but I'm loving taking his words (and he uses words beautifully) and thinking about how that works when you're not cloistered. Interesting times ahead - but for another time, as it's almost midnight and I have work tomorrow! That's what happens when I start blogging about something I really care about late at night....!

And surviving

It seems like ages since I posted here and it probably really is. Lots of reasons, a lot of which are linked to not having access to a computer very much outside of work.

How to summarise the last few weeks? Busy. Insanely busy. So much going on at work over the last month, to the point that I was wondering if it would ever stop.... The job is seriously big and I've only begun to touch the fringes of it. It feels a lot like firefighting most of the time, but apparently things should calm down soon. I hope so!

On the personal front, we had the in-laws (outlaws?!) come and stay last weekend, and hubby's brother ands sister-in-law also came down from Auckland for the day. We went up the gondola and down the Luge, which was huge amounts of fun.

I discovered one very cool thing up here. There is a Benedictine monastery about 20mins out of town here: it's a daughter-house of the Tyburn nuns in London, and apparently there's also a house in the Bombay hills just out of Auckland too. We went out there this afternoon and it's beautiful. It's a lot closer for retreats than Kopua too, although I loved going to Kopua. We met one of the nuns today and had a walk around the grounds. I'm looking forward to retreating there!

Well, not much else to say and something weird is going on with my blog format so I can't see what I'm typing, which is awkward. More soonish!

Tears, laughter, and goodbye

Today was the liturgical farewell for our Bishop Tom Brown, who has been the Diocesan Bishop of Wellington for 14 years and was the Assistant Bishop here for 7 years before that. Bishop Tom Confirmed hubby and me; he has been a source of personal encouragement in my various vocation wanderings; he has ministered to us, laughed with us, rejoiced with us when our small daughter arrived; he has been a friend and a leader. I will miss Bishop Tom!

It was a wonderful service. The music from the Cathedral Choir was outstanding as usual. We had a sermon from Archdeacon Judy Hardie; speeches from the Chancellor, Ven Robert McClay; the ex-Mayor of Wellington, Kerry Prendegast; and Archbishops Phillip Aspinall (Brisbane, Australia) and David Moxon (Waikato and Co-presiding Bishop of New Zealand). I thought the Chancellor was a little long-winded, but the two Archbishops were fabulous. Serious, beautiful, funny, engaging. Bishop Tom had the right of reply, and he was also engaging and wonderfully funny. One joke he made really stuck with me: his small granddaughter was looking at a book on Christianity he had on his coffee table, and asked him seriously, "Are you a Christian?" Apparently his son said, "It goes with the job description!"

It was sad to see Bishop Tom lay his crozier down on the altar for the last time, and weird to have the blessing given by Archbishop David instead of Bishop Tom. When Bishop Tom was escorted to the cathedral door by the Dean the thought occurred to me that maybe they were making sure he left! One lovely thing happened as they were escorting him out: some of the young people had gone up into the roof and dropped what looked like hundreds of large pieces of coloured confetti - but turned out to be coloured notes written by the children of the diocese. What a lovely idea!

We finished with a barbeque (how Kiwi is that!), and then came home. It was long, but it was lovely. And now the waiting time, the interregnum, begins. I am awaiting the arrival of a packet from the Electoral College next week with information on the candidates....

Briefly on the breviary

Thought it was time for a brief update on my earlier post about the arrival of the new Benedictine breviary (although why it is called a breviary when it's anything but brief at over 2260 pages I don't know - unless it's related to breve as in music. Mmm, might have to check that out...!).

Enough blather. I have been using the new breviary for a couple of weeks now and am starting to get the hang of its geography. It's much easier than it looks now I've actually had a go with it. I've got adventurous and fully observed several feasts (including the Conversion of St Paul on the 25th - this was almost a disaster because I got the date wrong, but I figured it out in the end!). I've also made it work in terms of my time: I'm anticipating Vigils. Just as major feasts have a first and second Vespers, I'm anticipating Vigils the night before (so Wednesday Vigils are done on Tuesday night and so on), followed immediately by Compline. This works well as I have more time in the evenings.

I am enjoying the readings for Vigils immensely: daily readings are contiguous parts of OT and NT books (currently Deuteronomy and I Corinthians), but on Sundays and feast days, the readings are a piece from a Church Father and a Gospel (and they have the correct readings for Years A, B, and C which means I get to hear the Gospel twice for the day). The readings from the Fathers are particularly interesting as my reading in this area was limited to what was required for theology and church history papers, usually segments from particularly argumentative people! We had Clement of Alexandria on Sunday, a piece I hadn't read before, and that was really lovely.

This has also meant that I've been able to use Lauds as my first morning prayer, and I've been doing Vespers in the early evening where it belongs instead of at night like I was doing with my old Morning and Evening Prayer book. I've managed to keep the Little Hours (Terce, Sext, and None) nearly at their right times by doing them at morning tea, lunch, and afternoon teatime. It hasn't worked every day, but it's worked most days. This means that for the first time in 11 years since I first started getting involved in things monastic, I've actually managed to keep the full Hours, all seven of them. It's worked for two weeks, so hopefully I can make it stick.

The interesting thing about this is that I'm finding the prayer slots very easily into my day, it doesn't take a lot of time, but it does help me focus again back on my work and why I do it. It's also feeding into my personal contemplative times as well. These are becoming richer too - the psalms feed the contemplation and vice versa. Balance is slowly being found....

The first of many?

Today has been an interesting day for lots of reasons: some good discussions with my colleagues, a walk in the wind (quite a lot of wind to walk in too), and I finished a report I've been trying to do all week. Given it was my first week back at work I was relatively pleased with what I got done.

But the best bit came last. I got home from work to discover my order from Amazon.com had arrived. Two books: Benedictine Daily Prayer, and Martin Laird's new book A Sunlit Absence. Martin Laird's first book Into the Silent Land has been a near-constant companion for me since Synod 2010, and the next one promises to be just as good.

I spent some time with the new Laird book tonight: this time, instead of looking at contemplative prayer as a series of doors in how we deal with distractions, he's looking at focused attention and the "opening up" that comes through contemplative practice. He uses the concept of the "prayer word" (usually the Jesus prayer) as a focus for attention: not to overwhelm attention but as somewhere to bring attention back to when it wanders - as it does when one prays (distraction is a given!) He uses the lovely image of the videos that play in our heads - emotional reactions, thoughts, replaying situations over and over, but that these videos aren't really us. They're just our constructs of us. I'm not explaining this very well, but it's a concept at the edge of language, and mine isn't all that good anyway!

The new prayer book is a Benedictine version of the breviary, written by a Benedictine oblate and used by a number of abbeys. It's a simplified version (apparently!) of the opus dei, but what's really lovely about it is that it is aimed at an ecumenical audience. There is also full text for the whole seven liturgical Hours (instead of the two I've been doing for the last few years), with full text for the readings for vigils (which I'll have to find somewhere to do - I may swap this and do it after compline rather than in the morning, as mornings are tricky for me!). The "geography" of it looks a bit more complex than the Morning and Evening Prayer I've been using for the last few years though. However, I suspect that with practice it will come to be as natural as the other. I am very excited about the full-text readings though, as these include readings from Doctors and early church Fathers and Mothers, and for the propers for the saints' days there are extensive readings from writings of those saints. Looks fun!

So I have my challenge for the year: a new breviary, with additional Hours (the day Hours and vigils), and a challenge to more regular contemplation. My spiritual director suggested that I find the time for prayer that doesn't take anything away from anyone else, like when daughter is asleep and hubby is watching tv. So, maybe less Facebook this year? Who knows! Anyway, the adventure begins!

Crossing the threshold of life

I've been meaning to properly blog for a while, but haven't had the mental space to do so. Tonight, I'm at home, small daughter is asleep, and hubby is out helping someone with some computer glitch. I'll have the house to myself for a while, methinks!

Lots of things going on since my last proper post, when NZ had just won the Rugby World Cup final (by the skin of our teeth, but one point is all it really needs, hmmm?). Some things of note: my sister and brother-in-law took hubby and I to the Royal NZ Ballet's Meridian season of The Sleeping Beauty last Saturday night. We had spectacular seats, 3 rows from the front, and it was beautifully done. Freshly choreographed for this performance, with amazing sets, and some quite innovative stuff (like the two courtiers for the King and Queen being played by people pretending to be cats - very very funny). Unfortunately, the ballerina dancing Princess Aurora looked a bit overwhelmed by the role (we had one of the understudies) - however, the Lilac Fairy, the Prince, and Carabosse were all amazing. It was the first time I'd seen a full-length ballet live and I loved every second of it.

I've also been struggling with a nasty nasty cold for over a week: the sort that starts with chills and fever, and sticks you with a grotty congestion for ages.... I gave in to it fairly quickly as I knew I was supposed to be flying to Hamilton on Sunday night for work and didn't want to fly feeling really sick, so ended up spending Thursday and Friday last week in bed (keeping in mind I knew we had tickets to the ballet and wanted to be well enough to go to that too!).

Work in Hamilton was good, and even better that I caught up with a colleague I don't see nearly enough, and an old university friend I see even less - although less than impressed that I couldn't get a flight out on Monday and had to stay over a second night. My last trip to Hamilton was a bit of a disaster so I was pleased that things went better this time. I was delivering a new version of our contractor management course that I rewrote recently, and my colleague was sitting in to see how it went as it's a very different approach from what we've used in the past.

However, what I really want to write about tonight is something that happened at church on Sunday. We were celebrating All Saints' Sunday (although technically All Saints' Day isn't until 1 November, we keep it on the Sunday closest), and I was reading the epistle (from 1 John, one of my favourite letters) and praying in the chapel with anyone who wanted it. One of the older ladies in church, who I only properly met a couple of weeks ago, came in for prayer. She told me about three friends of hers: two who have recently died and another who has been told she has only days to live.

Just before we prayed together, the organ and choir were finishing their motet, and it had this amazing fanfare on the trumpet stops. We waited until it was over as we wouldn't have been able to hear each other anyway, but what was beautiful was how it all seemed to fit together. The lady told me her two friends who had died had both been glad to go and she wasn't sad (even for herself), and she was praying that her dying friend would go with courage. We thought about how the fanfare on the organ was like the fanfare that we'll hear when we finally go to God: such joy and delight that we will stand in God's presence and be embraced fully in God's love, and it suddenly struck me all over again how important this all is. Faith is where the rubber meets the road, when we live and when we die, when we hurt, when we cry, and when we rejoice. Going to church is only the practice (sometimes not very good practice at that!) for what we do every day, and more importantly, for how we handle the good and the bad bits, the living and the dying.

This lady herself is probably in her eighties or nineties and death is very much on her mind as well, but she said to me that she knows that she is walking in God's grace and love. I thank God for her faith, and for the reminder that this was for me: what we do is important, and our love and faith and courage change things, particularly when we have to cross that final threshold of death - the door into richer, fuller, more wonderful love and life with God.