Prayers after trauma

I was recently commissioned to write prayers for a prayer book. I’ll let you know in more detail when I can. I was given the day and readings for three of them and three I could randomly choose. It came to me to write this one:

A prayer for healing after trauma

Lord of all time, this time is difficult.

My memories rush at me,

or can be buried as my mind manages each day.

I am aware that others have had times like mine, or worse.

But God, it feels as if my experience is utterly unique;

Gracious God, reassure me that this is true, made by you

in rich particularity, no one of us truly like another.

I come to you in hope and despair.

I need to feel more capable, more ready to live my days.

I have tried, listened and prayed so hard and practiced hope.

I sit with you now.  You know that it feels like a last resort. 

I’m sorry. I believe you love me and are happy to be my resort.

Hands open and breathing deeply, I receive your presence.

I am aware of my heartbeat and the opening of my lungs,

remembering you gifted body and mind to feel and think.

In this moment, I am attentive.

In your love I place my history – events I cannot forget.

Help me to hand the terrible power of life events to you.

Loosen their hold on my present and liberate my future. 

Fill me with love to forgive whatever I think I did badly.

Fill me with hope that I may forgive others where I can.

God of all time, heal me of all that harms me

in the whole of my body, my memory and my heart.

I end this prayer in grateful hope.

Lent and Pandemic

Happy blog post title, hm?  Yes and no.  Many of us recoil even from the word pandemic, rightly wanting to mark these odd times simply living as if this strange reality hasn’t touched us yet, or isn’t going to anymore.  This is as good a coping strategy as many and as long as we don’t move to the ‘hoax’ version of truth, we can keep going kindly to us and others and we’ll all see each other eventually.  For others, we recoil from the word Lent, having as it does, layers and layers of meaning, ritual and rigidity depending on how we’ve encountered it. 

As ever, I seek to re-frame; to find the positive reality in the midst of the encompassing reality we’re experiencing.  The pandemic is.  It is simply a reality.  It has been horrible for many, exhausting for even more, tragic for more than that and life changing for all of us.  I’ll seldom teach my project management in a classroom again.  Not that there will be no more classrooms, but because the course is so much better when people who’ve never met before are in their own comfort zones, are with their own technology, have access to their real work files and are not frustrated in finding an unknown venue on top of travelling to it. There have been so many positive developments in relationships and communities of friendship, worship and learning, that I have no yearning to move ahead in time to what used to be. 

Lent, to me, is an annual reminder in the cycle of my memory work with God.  Each year, I cycle from Advent to Pentecost stopping in Lent to remember.  It is that particular season when I revisit the political upheaval caused by a revolutionary prophet, come to name the painful truth inside societies and religions then and now.  Some society and religious people are proud of themselves, believing their own myths of wealth and equity, while so many in their midst know poverty as a life-long sentence.  Lent is reminder time and I live it by laying down the things which worry me and I can’t change – a bit like the strategy to avoid the word pandemic.  But as I put down what I can’t change, I pick up the calls to justice I see everywhere.  If I stop giving power to my worry, I can re-energise my hope and my activity towards that for others.

Here’s a prayer I wrote for the pandemic, available on the United Reformed Church website:

Dear and glorious God, we cry to you.

At the moment, love seems both deeply hidden and alive like never before.

Selfishness is alarmingly exposed, numbing us to the fear which feeds it.

Selflessness is gloriously and exhaustingly alive, restoring our faith in you and in humanity.

In this Lenten time, stir in us, waking your love, enriching us with grace to be gracious.

Comfort us to know that our small steps made well are your active, powerful love.

Amen.

God is not HE. What’s the problem?

Except for an infinitesimally miniscule moment in the entirety of time, God is not human.  A minute moment in history, God was human in Jesus, a man.  That’s it.  A blink in the eye of eternity.  God is not human; not she, not he, not they.  God is most likely Spirit, but that’s a human way of describing how God is God.  No pronoun works. So?

When I was preparing for ministry in the 1980s, I had a deep long conversation with a man steeped in God-is-Male Christianity.  I was told that I couldn’t be ordained because I was a woman, though I am part of a church which has done so for over 100 years. After a very detailed chat in which I defended my right (why did I have to do this?), I was finally told, “Well, I can see that you are called to be a minister.  Maybe God wants you to have a sex change?” This was seriously said.  The male-ness was more important than faith, and significantly more important that justice.   

Yes, this is about me, but it is also a huge, huge deal for all of us. Huge. In Jesus’ time and in the few hundred years immediately after him, leadership of the followers and then the groups of early Christians had mixed leadership, in radical contrast to the culture in which Jesus-believers believed and in critical contrast to the religion in which Jesus grew.  When the Roman empire appropriated a handy ‘new’ religion with lots of followers, the women left the mix, painted out of many of the images of women in leadership on the walls of the Catacombs under the streets of Rome.  The church became a copy of the empire which used it.  That leaders were and always are men became the marrow of the bones inside the new religion named after the Jew the believers followed. 

This is a big deal.  Look at any society in 2021 which is modelled on leadership as male.  See injustice for many, not just for women. Look at any institution which is modelled on leadership as male.  See the injustice couched in ‘experience’, ‘tradition’, ‘scripture’.  We know that justice is not flowing on the ground in any country  or institution – but look to those countries, religions and sects where leadership is modelled on male power, and we see far more denial of human rights for far more people of all colour, many sexualities and people in poverty.  The male-ness of God is tied up in the male-ness of power itself and with it, inappropriate access to wealth and dangerous denial of basic human rights to swathes of people. Think education, health, the City, industry – many organisations taking their organisational models from religious practice.  See injustice, inappropriate share of wealth, leadership filtered into a few elite wealthy men. Generally white.  I could go on and on (and on and on).

To continue to push the God as He model is to feed the soil of human injustice.  To continue to push the God as He model shrinks God to a human notion of what power is.  Yet, in that one moment when God was associated with a pronoun, and from the testimony of people to this day whose lives were changed as a result, God is not power, but presence, courage and peace.  To continue to Make God Male is more than diminishing to God, more than dangerous to ourselves and significantly dangerous to the societies of which we are part.

I call on my colleagues and friends. Let’s be as radical as we often say we are. To change our language is powerful and it changes societies. If we all truly mean to be people of justice, we have to change what we say. It is time. The world needs us to chip at the structures of power

It's wet, dark and light

Like many in the UK right now, I’m cold and trying not to be wet. Thankfully, we have no flooding, thankfully we have no sudden loss of our home down a torrent. As ever, I can’t help but see the light. In this darkness, particularly in this wet darkness, I have the privilege to see reflections of light. Each one picks its place to land, touches a damp patch and multiplies the light around. I find it quite magical. If I take a millisecond of time, I leap into all sorts of connections between light and dark, the way we need the light to see the dark, the way we need the dark to know the light. Years ago, an art tutor said a technical truth which I take to be a fine metaphor - the lightest light is next to the darkest dark.

In these days when we are pushed to see darkness all around us, I reclaim my art tutor’s remark. I blend that with what I believe to be true of God and I find hope. In the significantly well defined variety of darkness around us, there is indeed the light of new governments, the light of new medication, the light of deeper relationships built across things and distance seemingly designed to divide us. The lightest light is next to the darkest dark.

Damp people from the painting Living Water, a residency piece from the United Reformed Church General Assembly in 2012

When we feel like we're not in control...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the sense of lack of control many of us are feeling, surrounded as we are by things which are not in our control. Ancient philosophers bequeathed to us the reality that we can put down what we can’t control because if we don’t, not only will our energy in trying to control be depleted, but we’ll be focussing on what can’t be done rather than focussing on what we can do.

I’ve had these conversations quite a few times in the past few weeks and finally, I had to visualise something. Because so much beyond us is beyond our control, many of us seem to be taking that feeling into our personal lives and imagining that we have little control in our home or work lives.  The map I’ve drawn is aimed at work related issues, but is just as easy to imagine for home related issues.  In the yellow circle at the bottom left, where I’ve written line manager/trusted supervisor, think mentor/trusted partner/trusted friend – whomever you know will know you authentically.

The hardest part, and I know this personally, is the Let Go.

How? To me, it has to be physical.  I pick up an object, perhaps whatever is in my hand when I’m thinking about it, name the issue I have to drop, then carefully place the object down and ask God to hold it for me.  If God isn’t for you, you can simply put it down and declare “I now let go of [issue]”.  Shockingly enough, trust me on this.  The tangibility of literally holding a thing then physically putting it down somehow seals the reality of the letting go.  I used to journal the letting go, but then found that I could re-read it in the journal.  Over the past year, I’ve let go with objects to such a degree that I can’t truly recall everything I let go.  Some objects are still around me and I look at them and say to myself – “Oh you!  I let you go.  You no longer weigh inside me.”

So here’s the map.  Have fun!