Year: 2019 (Page 2 of 4)

I’m recently returned from a stimulating visit to Finland, where I met up with some old friends and made some new ones. Looking back on my days there I am aware of a number of moments that touched me deeply. I visited an art exhibition ‘Silent Beauty’ which I liked very much, and there was one painting in particular that stopped me in my tracks when I first saw it. I’ve learnt that when that happens I need to pay attention. So I stayed looking at the picture for some time, and then came back to it later. There were no postcards of it for sale, so, with permission, I took a photograph of it, and have been looking at it a lot since. My experience is that when something touches me in this way, God has something to say to me through it, and so its been with this picture. There were other moments in Finland that had a similar effect, they all happened unexpectedly, as is usually the case. I attended a St Thomas Mass on the Sunday, a Mass for Doubters, and was so moved on several occasions that I was close to tears. Since returning home I’ve been mulling on why that happened and what God might be saying to me. Experience has taught me that the obvious answer is not always the deepest one, and I keep mulling.

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I recently met up with some friends. It was a good meeting and I’m very glad that I went. But as I reflected on it afterwards I realised that the most significant thing about it for me was a chance remark that led to a brief conversation about something only loosely connected with the declared purpose of the meeting. I think that this is an example of what Gert Dumbar defines as ‘serendipity’: “find[ing] something that you haven’t been looking for but which changes everything that went before and comes after. The English word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole, who used it for the first time in 1754 in a letter. Walpole described the adventures of the Three Persian princes of Serendip. ‘By chance and shrewdness they discovered things which they were not looking for. They looked for one thing and found another. They were very surprised about this themselves.’ ” Dumbar links serendipity with creativity, and I agree.

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I think of spiritual direction as one person helping another to recognise where God is speaking to them, and walking with them as they seek to respond. There’s often a degree of mutuality about it.

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I was praying for the dead one Sunday morning, and in particular I was holding my Dad in love before God. I don’t know why I was praying for him rather than anyone else, but I’d felt led to do so, and then I sensed him suggesting that I visit the local Quaker meeting one Sunday for worship. I knew that this was good advice, I trusted it and duly went a couple of weeks later. It proved to be very good advice indeed. [see ‘More Feral Priesthood’]

Subsequently I have been mulling on that experience. How did I happen upon that insight? Objectively, I obviously don’t know, but what are the possible subjective explanations? My heart and soul were focused simply on Dad and maybe that was enough? Dad had been a regular attender at Quaker meeting all of my life, and I’d been occasionally, but never with him, so maybe it came out of that somehow? But he wasn’t someone to suggest that I do something, to do so would have been out of character for the man I knew. Maybe my soul knew that it was good advice and delivered it to my conscious mind in language it would recognise? Or might there be an alternative explanation?

I’ve learnt not to believe in coincidences, but to assume that when they seem to happen I am often being alerted to something. A week or two prior to the Sunday morning I’m writing about, my friend Paul came to talk and was enthusing about Boswell’s ‘Life of Samuel Johnson’ that he had been reading, and in particular he read me a prayer of Johnson’s that had impressed him and deeply moved me. It had been written in the early hours of April 26th 1752, immediately after the death of Johnson’s beloved wife:

‘O Lord! Governour of heaven and earth,
in whose hands are embodied and departed Spirits,
if thou hast ordained the Souls of the Dead to minister to the Living,
and appointed my departed Wife to have care of me,
grant that I may enjoy the good effects of her attention and ministration,
whether exercised by appearance, impulses, dreams
or in any other manner agreeable to thy Government.
Forgive my presumption,
enlighten my ignorance,
and however meaner agents are employed,
grant me the blessed influences of thy holy Spirit,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The thought that the dead whom I hold in love before God in my prayers, would likely be doing the same for me is not new to me, and indeed I’ve come to trust that it is so. And the idea they might sometimes intervene in my life to my assistance, because they continue to “have care of me”, is not new either, for I’ve had several experiences when I’ve known that someone who is dead was communicating with me, out of a gracious concern. In two of those experiences it was someone whom I knew personally & recognised, and they acted a bit differently from how I had known them to act when alive: rather like my experience with Dad. But in both I had ‘seen’ the person concerned, while in this recent experience I saw nothing, heard nothing but simply intuitively knew something and from whom the ‘knowing’ came.

These intuitive knowings are quite common. I was praying this morning and a train of thought popped into my mind, that was certainly not consciously bidden. I ‘knew’ there was something in it, without knowing whence it came. Recognising both its authority & its authenticity, I trusted it, and followed to where it took me. Not all such thoughts that pop into my mind are deep and meaningful, but some certainly are, and usually I can recognise the wheat from the chaff. But where do they come from?

In one sense knowing where they come from is less important than learning to recognise and trust them. But in another sense perhaps not. Perhaps I can assume that some of them, [maybe all of them?] are of the order of what Samuel Johnson refers to with respect to the continuing care of his late wife, as:
“the good effects of her attention and ministration,
whether exercised by appearance, impulses, dreams
or in any other manner agreeable to thy Government.”

If so, then I am connected into a network of the dead, who seek, from time to time, to be actively involved in this earthly world in a positive and creative way. And it would be foolish of me not be open to their wisdom and advice. Sometimes I may have a clear sense of from whom the suggestion is coming, but often I don’t, and maybe it doesn’t matter?

Whenever I have tentatively aired these ideas I have been surprised by the number of people who not only take what I’m saying seriously, rather than ringing for an ambulance, but who go on to share personal stories of the known presence of some dead loved one giving them advice that they recognised as being loving and practical. Other faith traditions take all this more seriously than we do, although we in Western Europe probably did, before the Reformation..

There is another matter that intrigues me. The early Christians believed that Jesus of Nazareth was now their Risen Lord and that for a time he appeared and spoke to them, and certainly could be relied upon to respond to their prayers, leading and guiding them with advice beyond anything he had said while walking the land of Palestine. Over the centuries the Church has continued to believe and trust in this, and has changed its mind on a wide range of matters because of it. I believe that the Risen Lord continues to act in this way: the problem isn’t that He no longer does, but rather that we don’t expect Him to and therefore don’t recognise Him when He does.

What is the difference between experiences of what I might take to be the Risen Lord, and say, the experience I had of being addressed by Dad? The obvious answer is that they are identified as coming from different people, one of whom has a greater authority. But is it as clear as that? I am able at least in theory, and sometimes in practice, to distinguish between the known felt subjective experience, apart from and before I began to put it into words and identify its source. Could it be that all of these experiences come from a single greater authority beyond myself, and that the culture in which I stand determines whom I identify as its source?

The Gospels have two versions of the Lords Prayer, one in Luke and the other in Matthew. It is interesting to see them together, when it becomes clear that Luke’s version is shorter than Matthew’s.

Luke 11:2-4

Father
Hallowed be your name
Your kingdom come
Give us each day our daily bread
And forgive us our sins
As we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us
And do not bring us to the time of trial

Matthew 6:9-13

Our Father in heaven
Hallowed be your name
Your Kingdom come
Your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our debts
As we also have forgiven our debtors
And do not bring us to the time of trial
But rescue us from the evil one.

I reflect on several things:

[1] The editors of the New Testament were happy to include two versions of the Lords Prayer: they didn’t feel it necessary to choose one over the other. In this they are following an established Biblical principle whereby differing accounts of something are allowed to stand side by side.

[2] I think it more likely that Matthew’s version is an expansion of Luke’s, than that Luke’s is an abbreviation of Matthew’s. I find it more likely that Jesus’s words were expanded upon, perhaps under the guidance of the Risen Lord, than that the early followers of Jesus would have edited out some of what Jesus taught them.

[3] That would suggest that Luke’s version is more likely to be the original, perhaps even, that it was the one that Jesus himself used, before sharing it with his followers. The use of ‘Father’ rather than ‘Our Father’ would seem to point that way. It would certainly shed light on his spirituality if this were so, with its focus on God as Father, the announcing of the Kingdom of God, living one day at a time, the centrality of forgiveness, and its wish to avoid the time of trial. Luke’s version provides the richest summary of Jesus of Nazareth’s proclamation that we possess. In praying it we place ourselves foursquare behind him and express our commitment to his core Gospel message. It both inspires and challenges us when we pray it.

[4] But the early Christians felt themselves free to edit and expand it. It wasn’t seen as unalterable. The words of Jesus of Nazareth were not set in stone, but were adaptable, as needs arose, under the direction of their Risen Lord.

[5] That being the case there is no reason why we cant do the same, albeit with the same discernment.

Right now I’m experimenting with the following, while wondering what the Risen Lord may lead me to try as additions or amendments. Any thoughts welcome.

Father
Holy is Your name
Your Kingdom come
Give us today what we need for today
Forgive us as we forgive others
And uphold us in our times of trial.
Amen

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I’m attempting here to join the dots and link a number of things I’ve written about.

When we talk about Jesus we need to know which ‘face’ of Jesus we are talking about. Is it Jesus the man from Nazareth? Is it the Risen Lord? Or is it the Cosmic Christ? In a sense they are one and the same. But in another they not. If we asked a question, we might get slightly different answers from each of them. [See ‘Which Jesus?’, ‘Which Jesus: a further thought,’ ‘The Cosmic Christ’.]

While we can in theory distinguish between them, in practice they overlap. So the earliest followers of the man from Nazareth, knew that he had been killed, but they also knew that he had overcome death because he was still present with them, appearing to them, teaching and guiding them. They knew that the man from Nazareth and their now Risen Lord were one and the same and so in the Gospels where they later wrote down Jesus’ words and actions, its not always clear whether it’s the man from Nazareth or the Risen Lord that they are speaking about. That would not have been a distinction that would have made any sense to them: to them they were one and the same.

Once those who actually knew the man from Nazareth began to die out, it became important to record his words and actions not least because otherwise those who continued to experience the presence of the Risen Lord would not be able to make the connection between the two and thus name it. Hence the Gospels were written down, where previously memory had sufficed, and they have served as a crucial reference point ever since.

Today we are faced with a similar problem. The majority of people claim to have had an experience of ‘something greater to and beyond themselves’, although most are cautious about talking about it. Many would not use religious language in describing it, but the accounts that people give sound much the same whatever language they use. My personal experience has led me to assume, using the Gospels as my reference point, that at least some of these experiences that I have had are actually encounters with the Risen Christ, and my assumption is that that must be true for others too. But it took me a long time to make that connection, and I doubt if many people do, not least because we do not expect there to be one. I believe that the Risen Christ is alive and well and appearing to people of all faiths and creeds on a regular basis, while remaining mostly unrecognised. Roy Gregory and I edited ‘The God you already know’ partly out of this conviction.

This year alongside my Bible reading I have also been using ‘The World Religions Bible’ edited by Robert van de Weyer. It contains readings from a dozen faith traditions, one for each month. I’m only half way through but already it is obvious that there is a great deal of common ground in their wisdom and teaching. We should not be surprised. The Prologue to St John’s Gospel tells of the Word of God [the Cosmic Christ] that “through him all things came to be, without him no created thing came into being. In him was life, and that life was the light of mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never mastered it………He was in the world, but the world, though it owed its being to him, did not recognise him.” So the Cosmic Christ is the light of every human being: the divine spark within everybody. It is not then surprising to find this common ground. The man from Nazareth, the Risen Lord, ascended back into heaven whence he came, to sit at God’s right hand as the Cosmic Christ, where He is the indwelling light of every human being. Again, the faces overlap, are one and the same, but are known across the earth by a variety of different names.

But there is more. John’s Prologue makes it clear that the Cosmic Christ is involved in the creation of everything. Every thing in the universe has the Cosmic Christ’s fingerprints all over it. So it is that the Celts argued that there are in fact two Bibles. The Good Book and Nature. The Cosmic Christ meets people of any and no religious belief system, through the natural world, again, without necessarily being recognised.

To me this is a source of wonder and awe. But everything has its downside. One of the downsides of the overlapping, is the loss of the full humanity of Jesus of Nazareth. We project the Risen Lord and the Cosmic Christ, back onto Jesus of Nazareth, and lose something of his humanity. It gives us the glories of John’s prologue and the Birth stories of Matthew and Luke, but we forget that he was a human being exactly like us: born like us, he grew up just like us, he faced all the problems and opportunities that we face, he faced suffering and doubt as we do, and had a faith journey just like ours.

There seems to be a human tendency to do this with any figure whom we deem to have done great things: we tend to read that greatness back into their story, as being present from their birth and childhood: and we see echoes of the greatness to come, that were almost certainly not obvious to people who knew them at the time. We put them on a pedestal, and in doing so make them different from the rest of us, when in reality they’re not. In doing so we encourage ourselves to forget that we too can do great things.

We have done that to Jesus of Nazareth. Believing him to be the Risen Lord and the Cosmic Christ its inevitable and to some extent right that we do that. But it comes at a price. He ceases to be a fully human being just like us. He becomes somebody who has done something for us, rather than somebody who shows us the way. Following Jesus is about living a life modelled on his. He has shown us that this is both possible and what God calls us to.

I have been mulling for some time about Jesus spiritual life. I do so as someone who tries to take my own spiritual life seriously, and who often finds himself in conversation with others about theirs. My assumption is that Jesus’ spiritual life must have been much like ours.

Thus I assume that Jesus of Nazareth must have had the equivalent of a spiritual director: someone who encouraged and nurtured his faith in God, and from whom he learnt much about the Jewish scriptures and traditions. It seems likely that this would have taken place as a member of a group of young men who met regularly together as part of their training as young Jews. I assume that at least some of the first disciples whom he called in Galilee were probably part of that group, and who had already seen him as their leader. Hence the ease with which they left everything to follow him when he called them to do so. [See ‘Did Jesus have a spiritual director?’]

I notice that Jesus rarely began his teaching of his disciples or the crowds who gathered to hear him, by quoting Scripture. He did so the few times he preached in the synagogue, but hardly ever otherwise. Instead he told stories and gave spiritual teaching. Now where did he get those stories and that wisdom from? Some of the stories have scriptural echoes, others seem to have been drawn from his observations of everyday life. But I think that good spiritual teachers, ones who speak with authority as Jesus clearly did, speak primarily not from what they’ve read, or learnt from somebody else, but from their own experience. They speak from an inner knowing that only comes from their own experience of God. Much of Jesus wisdom and insight would have come from his own experience. [See ‘The Spirituality of Jesus’.]

I remember, many years ago, reading a novel about Jesus life before he embarked on his public ministry. The writer suggested that the story of the Good Samaritan began its life as something that happened to Jesus himself. He was beaten up & robbed on the road to Jerusalem, and was rescued by a foreigner, someone he’d been taught to view as an enemy, rather than by those he’d thought would be his friends. This experience affected him deeply, and changed his view of who were his friends, who indeed were God’s friends. Subsequently he found that non-Jews were often more receptive to his teaching than fellow Jews were, and he went out of his way to be alongside people whom his community saw as outsiders. This new way of seeing the world had its origins not primarily in traditional teaching but in his own personal experience of life.

We will never know if this is historically accurate, but it seems likely to me. The story of the Good Samaritan has a lot of incidental detail that’s not essential to its meaning, and that suggests to me that it may well derive from personal experience. There is a second story that Jesus told that sounds similar. It’s the story of the Prodigal Son. I suspect that this too may come from Jesus’ personal experience. I have a hunch that maybe he ran away from home as a young man, not only to escape from his family, but also maybe from God? Why else would he also talk about the story of Jonah, who fled from God’s call to preach to Nineveh? Did Jesus feel a call to preach to the Jews and wanted to avoid it? It might explain why Jesus went to John for a baptism of repentance? Why else did Jesus feel the need to repent, of what? Interestingly the words spoken to the Jesus at his baptism could well have been the words that the father said to his prodigal son.

I wonder if Jesus fled from both his earthly and heavenly Father, and was overwhelmed when he found himself loved and accepted by both in such similar fashion. Maybe that’s in part why he addresses God as Father, and taught his followers to do likewise? And if Jesus saw the story of Jonah as a model, it might explain why he expected the people of Jerusalem to repent at his preaching as the people of Nineveh did at Jonah’s preaching, and why he felt that God had abandoned him when they didn’t.

I’ve been thinking about the Beatitudes recently. Luke’s version sounds simpler and thus more original. ‘Blessed are the poor, the hungry and those who weep’. After his baptism we are told that Jesus was led into the wilderness for a time. He must have been poor: there’s no indication in the Gospels that he ever earned his living and he’d squandered his inheritance. So he knew what poverty was, and he must have wondered as he pondered the call he heard at his baptism, ‘how is this going to be funded?’ He must also have known hunger in the wilderness: there was no food to be found there. Its not difficult to imagine that he spent time weeping there too: both tears of repentance at his attempts to avoid God, and tears of joy at knowing himself forgiven. The temptations that we are told that he faced there speak to these words too. The temptation to rule the world and become rich, to turn stones into bread to release his hunger, and to call on God to perform a miracle as outward proof of his forgiven and accepted status. So Jesus knew all about the realities of poverty, hunger and sadness. He also knew, from experience, that they were the source of blessing for him. So he was able to speak the Beatitudes from deep personal experience. I suspect much of his teaching came from the same source.

Why do I think all this is so important?
I believe that ‘the God Whom we already know’ is the God whom Jesus of Nazareth knew.
I believe that what John’s Gospel says about Jesus, namely that he was with God from the beginning, that he laid that down to be born as a human being, and was then returned to God at his death, all that is also true of each of us too.
I believe that Jesus of Nazareth/the Risen Lord/the Cosmic Christ has shown us that this is true, and that this is the core of the Good News of the Gospel.
I believe that we are called to imitate Jesus of Nazareth, by heeding whatever God calls us to be and do, as he did, by trusting our own experience of God as he did, by trusting the Risen Lord to guide and uphold us, and by trusting that the Cosmic Christ is present in everyone and everything we meet .
What’s different about Jesus of Nazareth, is his calling, his vocation. Each of us has a distinctive vocation from God that no-one else has. Jesus had a distinctive vocation and fulfilled it. So do each of us, and our task is to fulfil it as well as we are able.

Sylvia, my wife, is assiduous in putting food out for the birds in our back garden. In the winter, when its cold and food is scarce, its like Heathrow outside our back door as our feathered friends fly in from all directions, to take on nourishment from a reliable source. Sitting in the warm, by the window we can be royally entertained for hours.

But in the spring it can be a different story. Adult birds bring their young to where food can be found and the exploration is not without its casualties. One fledgling tit flew by mistake into the glass of our back door and fell to the decking, stunned. Sylvia went out and gently picked it up in the palm of her hand and placed it safely on the bird table. It sat there for while before eventually flying off, seemingly unharmed by the experience.
A few days later, while praying in my shed, a fledgling tit, I hope not the same one, flew into one of the shed windows and fell stunned onto the path. I got up, alarmed at the noise, and saw it there. I was concerned that it could be injured, but I was reluctant to intervene unless absolutely necessary, lest I frighten it. So I held it in prayer and waited. After a time it too flew off.

I reflect that Sylvia and I had responded differently to a distressed young bird: she intervened straightaway, while I waited, but the result appeared to be the same: both birds flew away safely. I am reminded of three stories that Jesus told in Luke chapter 15. One is of a shepherd who actively seeks a sheep that is lost, and a second is of a woman who actively seeks a coin she has lost. The third story is of the Prodigal Son, and here the man who has lost his son doesn’t go searching for him, but rather waits for his son to return. The three stories are told in response to questioning about God’s response to those who are lost, and they offer different answers.The first two say that God will take the initiative in seeking them out, the third that God waits patiently for them to return. All three end happily with celebrations.

Neither Luke nor Jesus offers any explanation for the two different responses. I used to think that in the first two stories God treats us like children who need to be actively sought out when in trouble, while in the third God treats us like adults who have to take personal responsibility for the situations we find ourselves in. Now I’m not so sure. Even the most mature of adults sometimes need to be cared for as children, and the distinction between the two approaches is not as black and white as it might at first appear: you might argue that the Prodigal Son knew well enough when he came to his senses, how his loving father had cared for him as a child, and it was thus not necessary for the the father to further seek him out now.

The other thing that intrigues me is that the first two stories each only take a few verses to tell [ 4 and 3 verses respectively], while the third takes a great number [21 verses] and is full of detail in the way that the first two are not. The first two tell recognisably everyday events – sheep and coins do get lost – while the third tells of something much less common – of a son who takes his inheritance while his father is till alive, squanders it but is nevertheless welcomed home. Moreover, the notion that God seeks out Her people when they are lost is found in the Old Testament in a way that the idea that God waits patiently for those who have abandoned Him, to return to Him of their own accord, is not. This causes me to wonder if the novel notion of God in the third story derives from Jesus’ personal experience which was how he knew it to be true.

Perhaps there are three overarching simple truths here: that the Bible is happy to set varying views of a matter alongside one another without feeling it has to choose between them; that Jesus seems to have been willing to trust his own experience of God above the received wisdom of His tradition: and that however you choose to tell the story, the fact is that God knows when every sparrow falls, and that all in the end will be well.

We live quite near a river, and I can walk down a lane and across some fields to get to it in about 20 minutes. I often do so, for there is one particular spot that I recognise as a holy place, and I love to go there to sit, listen, look, and just be aware of what’s around me. I invariably come away feeling strangely blessed.

There isn’t usually much animal life to see, a swan or or two occasionally, some Canada geese flying by, and others who value the place as I do, say that they’ve seen a kingfisher but I haven’t been so lucky. Imagine my surprise then, when a month or two back I saw a small something moving on the opposite bank. Might it be a baby moorhen? Then it started out across the river in my direction at some speed and in a straight line. It reached the bank along from where I sat, but by that time I could see that it had a long dark body. Might it be an otter? My wild life recognition is of a low standard so I asked my wife when I got home and from my description she said that she thought that it was indeed an otter.

A week or two later, sat in the same spot, under an overhanging tree, I was gazing at the river when I saw not one otter but three. One playing in the water to my left, a second to my right who sat up and looked at me, and a third swimming across the river towards the others. I felt myself to be richly blessed. I’ve returned to the same spot regularly since, in hope, but without another sighting. Still, each time I say a prayer for the otters who in blessing seemed to be praying for me. A bond had been established between us.

Yesterday morning I went for my familiar silent walk down to the river. It was a beautiful day and I stopped to gaze at a solitary proud oak in a field, the light gleaming on distant fields, the varying shades of blue of the sky, all around me looked green and verdant. But when I arrived at my holy place by the river I was dismayed to find that the tree where I sat and saw the otters, had been cut down, the trunk and branches littered and left across the path and the area cleared. It felt like a senseless act of desecration and made me very angry. I wondered what had became of the otter family? I walked home feeling very depressed.

But then I slowly started to make connections. Two months ago when I was praying for the dead one Sunday morning I sensed that my Dad who was a Quaker, was suggesting that I attend a local Quaker meeting. The place had some previous for me as 30 years ago I’d visited and bought a subsequently much treasured Celtic drum from the then Warden of the place. Some weeks later I attended one Sunday morning, wondering why I was there, and left glad that I’d gone but none the wiser.

Walking back from the river feeling depressed I remembered that years ago, walking in the Surrey hills with my drum, I’d come across what felt like a vast tree graveyard, where the hurricane had laid waste a section of forest. Appalled by what I saw and felt, I was impelled to drum a funeral for these trees and did so, standing or sitting on each and every broken stump. It probably took some time, but felt quite out of time. Suddenly I knew what I now had to do.

Arriving home I got out my drum and cleaned and tended to it. This Sunday morning I woke soon after 5, got up, washed dressed, and drank a cup of tea. I collected my drum from my shed and set out for the river. I sensed that I was at one with the women setting out early on Easter morning to visit the tomb. It was cloudy with a light breeze, dawn colours were appearing over the horizon. It was quiet with no sight or sound of human activity. Horses in a field I passed looked at me, knowingly I thought. The walk there was beautiful. When I reached the scene I took my drum out of its bag, and walked slowly around the area drumming quietly. I sat on the fallen tree trunk and drummed there. Then I went & sat on the bank amidst the debris & drummed briefly before stopping and listening, and becoming aware. Nature seemed to be taking the devastation in its stride, as if to say, ‘well this is what happens, and we know how to deal with it.’ God was speaking in the wind through the trees, and the water moving gracefully down the river. All was calm. The early morning light wasn’t bright, there was no direct sunshine, it was more of a pastel shade. The birds were singing: I could hear a cuckoo across the river. Canada geese were honking in the background. There was no sign of the otters. I felt very relaxed & at peace sitting on the bank just above the water: something I could not have done before. I felt myself healed, and that the natural world was very capable of healing itself, and was already doing so. I stayed there for a while, before getting up & walking slowly home. There had been a dying and there was also a rising. I had done what I felt that I had needed to do, whatever that was: I didn’t need to know. The walk back was beautiful, the horses in the field all turned to look at me as I passed. There was rain in the air as I got home.

I made coffee that I took down to my shed, where I hung up my drum and reviewed what had happened. This is feral priesthood: it began with the otters, then Dad suggesting I go to the Quakers, with their link to my drum, then seeing the desecration and remembering my drumming a funeral for the trees years ago, then my decision to visit the grave early this morning, and my realisation that I was following in the footsteps of the women on Easter morning, with a not dissimilar result, I went to a place that I knew as a place of suffering and death, and found a place bursting with new life, and healing. Wonderful. Thank you.