John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Family misfortunes - the difficulties of desire

Galatians 5, Luke 9: Family misfortunes - the difficulties of desire: my offering for today.

 

Mission in Japan

From the room directly above my study, via the world wide web, this came to me: a flyer from Gary my stepson outlining his plans to start missionary work in Japan from September. He writes:

I love Japan. The history, language and culture fascinates me greatly. Not only is it home to some of the most advanced technology, it is also a beautiful country full of God’s creation. The Japanese people themselves love nature and take great pride in their mountains, flowers, trees and rice fields. The people are so kind and polite and you will always hear many “sorry”s and “thank-you”s during everyday conversation. I have had this interest and love for Japan for many years. 

Over those years Gary has developed a real heart to share his faith with people there. He spent time on a mission trip in north-east Japan last year and has just been accepted by the Youth With a Mission (YWAM) Tokyo team to join them for a minimum of four years, working with students and helping to build the church there - a great challenge in a majority Shinto / Buddhist country. As Gary puts it, in Japan 'less than 1% of over 127 million people know Jesus!'

The bottom line for Gary is that his strong sense of calling to this work needs financial backing. He's doing mission in a country with one of the world's highest costs of living and YWAM recommend that he raises pledges of around £700 per month to cover all his expenses. On top of that he needs air fares too. So he's asking for support from anyone who knows him - or who could begin to get to know him by reading the flyer and finding out more. Would you?

Your gift - it's good for the body!

Romans 12: Your gift - it's good for the body! - my contribution to Fathers' Day at Christ Church Norris Green.

More Mis-Guidance

Following yesterday's blog, this came in: Mis-Guides Phil Smith and Simon Persigetti are inviting people on 'A tour of Sardine Street', in Exter, next month. They write:

Since late 2007 we have been regularly walking, researching, exploring and performing on one street: Queen Street in Exeter. Now, after a number of ‘test runs’ with other walkers, we have prepared a ‘mis-guided tour’ of the street and would like to invite you to join us for one of these.
 
The tours all begin at the Dinosaur Café at the northern end of Queen Street (at its junction with the New North Road), next to the Miles Clock Tower.
 
These tours will last between 90 minutes to 2 hours, but walkers are requested to be free for 3 hours (occasionally we have been spontaneously invited to visit certain closed areas of the street, for example the cellars of the Rougemont Hotel, and we would like to be free to respond to any similar invitations).
 
The tours will be as follows:
 
9th  July  (Friday)  10am – 1pm
9th  July  (Friday)  2pm – 5pm
10th  July  (Saturday) 10am – 1pm
10th  July  (Saturday) 2pm – 5pm
15th   July  (Thursday)  10am – 1pm
15th   July  (Thursday)  2pm – 5pm
16th July (Friday) 10am – 1pm
16th July (Friday) 2pm – 5pm
 
Numbers are very limited (a maximum of seven people for each walk) so you will need to book your place (by responding to this email –perform.smith[at]ukgateway.net - or ringing Phil on 01392 410575).

Mis-guided liturgy?

Having spent a good time around Stuart's kitchen table eating Welsh Cakes freshly baked on the Aga last week, we left him with a copy of The Mis-Guide to Anywhere, in the hope of helping him on the path to walking his patch with his parishioners. 

And then there was the Canning walk (see below), only an hour long (not enough) but a stimulating little stroll ending with something I've always wanted to do: read The Prophet's Speech (which I call Liverpool Hope) at a high point in the city, looking down towards the river with the Liver Buildings in view... made it all the more moving.

And now comes a commission from the good offices of Wild Goose Publications. To come up with a 'walking liturgy'... your ideas on that welcome, reader. It's a challenge to do anything remotely as good as Simon Bailey's wonderful Stations - Places for Pilgrims to Pray, but I shall try to do it, my way. I suspect that whatever I end up with there will be some mis-guidance involved.

Just Walking in Canning

Notes from a walk I led in Liverpool's so-called Georgian Quarter last night: here

 

Luke 7 - The passion of a woman forgiven first

Luke 7 - The passion of a woman forgiven first - today's talk.

 

Jim's books

My small share of Jim's books, as mentioned below, now on my bookshelf. There could have been many more, but for the need to reduce my library having just moved to a smaller study. This is a rucksack full, and there were some large photo-books on the Miner's Strike and Salgado's The Children, and some old housing / town planning documentation too. I have given myself two Jim-related jobs to do, both massive tasks: one, read these books, and two: get cracking on getting some of his own writings into publishable form. A labour of love which will take a while - watch this space.

The Unofficial Countryside

On the fringes, where town and country meet, the scrublands, populated by semi-industrial works or forgotten agricultural sheds, unexpected beauty often emerges. In his 1973 book The Unofficial Countryside, soon to be republished, Richard Mabey 'explains how 13,000 tons of canary grass seed, fodder for caged birds, comes into Britain every year, and is recycled into landfill sites, to leach into the water table, to drift down embankments and sewage-outfall tracks; bringing life and colour to the uniform greys of spurned and disregarded places.'

I am quoting Iain Sinclair, reviewing Mabey's masterpiece in The Guardian last week. Sinclair has written the foreword for the new edition and wonders - like me - how he ever 'miss[ed], first time around, [a] book that linked, at a single stroke, burgeoning bureaucracy and the threatened pastoral of whatever lay beyond the city's horizon? Richard Mabey identified so neatly the transitional quality of unwritten places where slightly bemused survivors of the 60s, pocketing their battered copies of Food for Free, found themselves labouring at the dawn of a harsher era.' Sinclair observes that

The Unofficial Countryside is a proper reckoning, the Doomsday Book of a topography too fascinating to be left alone. Gravel beds, abandoned by film studios, were blissfully repossessed by passerine birds and opportunist plants. Mabey logs the tough fecundity of the margin, where wild nature spurns the advertised reservation and obliterates the laminated notice-boards of sanctioned history. Human tragedies of our paranoid cultures, raids and terrorist outrages, as Mabey points out, are nature's opportunity. "The first summer after the blitz there were rosebays flowering on over three-quarters of the bombed sites in London, defiant sparks of life amongst the desolation."

I'm honoured by a mention in Sinclair's article: 'A Liverpool clergyman, John Davies, took a sabbatical to hike down the acoustic footprints of the M62, from Hull to Crosby beach.' Honoured by this association with John Clare, WG Sebald, Ronald Blythe, Roger Deakin, Will Self, Nick Papadimitriou. Each connected by a 'trajectory, soul-sickness, walking in nature, swimming, planting, observing ...  Sickness was not always the launching point, unless it was the sickness in nature, in our broken treaty with living things.'

On my birthday: the procession of death meets the procession of life

The procession of death meets the procession of life - my sermon on my 48th birthday....