John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

The M62: a pilgrimage in everyday life

The Iona Community have made the Spring 2012 issue of Coracle available online, and in it (Page 19 if you're interested) my article, The M62: a pilgrimage in everyday life [download here]. An extract:

It is liberating, to purge oneself of prejudices about certain types of places and people, to remove from oneself any preconceptions about spirituality as sanctioned by purveyors of pilgrimage, and about the limited range of activities which will bring oneself closer to the divine. It is a joy to discover that your spirit can grow not just in so-called thin places, but in places thick with carbon smoke: motorway service stations, for instance, which are the arenas for thousands of meaningful human encounters each day, refuelling stops for people on significant journeys, places of work for many, leisure destinations for those who live locally to them. Roger Green spent two years immersing himself in the life of South Mimms Services on the M25; his Destination Nowhere is a fascinating read, which inspired me to make the Travelodges and Days Inns of the M62 my home for days on end whilst on my journey. The generously-lit space of Cafe Primo became my living room: people-watching from the perfect comfort of a well-proportioned leather armchair, ready for unexpected occasional conversations, and enrichment. 

Jesus' boat is a pirate boat

Many of our churchyards have gravestones which contain the image of a skull. Standing before one of these one day a schoolboy asked me, ‘Was that person a pirate?’ For the skull is implanted in our consciousness as a pirate image. I explained the difference between the Christian skull and the pirate skull. The skulls on Christian gravestones have wings - pirate skulls do not. Skulls with wings express the Christian faith in an afterlife, the dead rising to live in eternity with God. Skulls without wings, pirates skulls, simply say, ‘we are the dead, we are dead to this world and its ways, its death threats no longer trouble us because we have found a new way to be, which has liberated us’.

Pirate ships fly the Jolly Roger, the skull and crossbones, to announce that they have freed themselves from the shackles of death - the ways of a corrupt world - and though they expect to live only a short while longer, their Pirate’s Code ensures that they will live freely, equally and liberated. Today’s creaking world economic system is based on the exploitation of the poor for the benefit of the privileged and rich, and seeing this, feeling it deeply, many people’s ambivalence about pirates is becoming admiration, many people are yearning to remove themselves from the shackles of this terribly unjust system to find new ways of being human, and humane.

And so I return to the question with which I began this talk. What sort of boat did Jesus use to cross Lake Galilee? 

The answer, I suggest, is that the boat which Jesus sailed in was a pirate boat.

I suggest this because in Jesus’ boat death - and the fear of death - had no power, no force. In Jesus’ storm-tossed boat some cried, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ And he challenged them to embrace faith, faith which overcomes mortal fear, faith which eclipses death. The occupants of Jesus’ boat are to live as if death is not...

I suggest that Jesus’ boat was a pirate boat because his way opposes the ways of a corrupt world. In the extract from Mark’s gospel we heard today Jesus says to his disciples, ‘Let us go across to the other side’. Geography and movement are symbolically significant in Mark’s gospel. So, ‘Let us go across to the other side’: let us leave behind us the ways of the empire, its kings and corporations and priests, its exploitation of the poor for the benefit of the privileged and rich, let us direct ourselves to another way of living where we treat each other as equals, where we free each other to be fully ourselves, where we are encouraged in fellowship, sustained in community. 

The teachings of Jesus are pirate teachings. People are ambivalent about them because whilst they find them attractive they fear making the crossing. It’s a deep, deep, challenge, being an occupant of Jesus’ boat and learning how to live as if death is not...

... and yet more and more people are willing to face that challenge today.

From Jesus' boat is a pirate boat, my talk today which owes a great deal to Kester Brewin’s book, Mutiny! Why We Love Pirates, And How They Can Save Us. Also also nods in the direction of Jack Nelson-Pallmayer’s Jesus Against Christianity: Reclaiming the Missing Jesus, which is the book on my bedside table just now.

 

Father's Hands

My Father worked with his hands. I can picture them vividly now. 

He was a car mechanic and his hands were so important to his art and his trade. 

Strong hands - lifting heavy engines from their cases, bouncing rubber tyres across greasy garage floors. Hands used for hammering, ratcheting, body panel beating.

I remember his fingers - always stained with dirt, even after a weekend’s scrubbing; the black line behind the fingernails, an ever-present combination of engine oil and road gunge. Fingers which I watched perform the most detailed tasks: adjusting the gap in a spark plug, threading a screw, working a wire through the narrowest of gaps.

One of the thrills of my childhood was being asked by my father to help him in a task, and I would stand ready to pass into his hands the particular spanner he asked for, or to hold two pieces of metal in place while he carefully soldered them together, his hands held rock-steady, for the slightest slip would ruin his careful work.

These were the hands which held me as a baby, teaching me that I was loved; the hands which lifted me onto his shoulders as a toddler, showing me that I was enjoyed. These were the hands through which, occasionally, I learned that I had done wrong: a smack on the legs got the message across. These were the hands which shook mine when I’d achieved something, the hands which hugged me - still hug me today - in greeting and farewell, showing me, without words, that I’m appreciated and cared for.

Can you picture your father’s hands, and consider what they’ve taught you?

My Father's Day talk today is inspired by to Paul Cookson and his wonderful poem Father's Hands.

 

Kester on Pirates

 

I'm looking forward to reading Kester's new book, Mutiny! Why We Love Pirates, And How They Can Save Us. He's always been great with taking offbeat metaphors and working them into stimulating, challenging, considerations of life and faith: especially his work on Christ and dirt-boundaries which sticks (like good mud) with me. I know he's been toying with the pirate theme for some time and so there will be a good deal to chew over in this reflection on the question of how and why this set of outlaws, mutineers and rebels have become iconic in our society - from Blackbeard and Luke Skywalker to Peter Pan and Odysseus. And I look forward to seeing how he relates the gospel to the activities of Somali fishermen, DVD hawkers and childrens party entertainers. In true pirate spirit he's self-published this one - on Lulu, where (I feel I ought to remind people) you can also buy my book Walking the M62, in paperback or ebook (pdf) format. 

 

The spirit of Dartmoor in Country Life

Nice of Country Life magazine to send me a gratis copy of their May 30 issue, in which I am quoted in Clive Aslet's article on Dartmoor, 'Where Man and Myth meet'. They quote me pondering the 'spirit of place': Lydford Gorge's tricksterish forest groves, a place where mischief might be had; the moorland spirituality bound up in the interrelation between the land, the animals and the people who work it. And they share my reflection on the memorial seat to Capt Nigel Hunter at Black Rock, 'a favourite spot'. 'Capt Hunter gazed over the waters of the River Lyd uphill to Widgery's hilltop granite cross and reflected that all the beauty before his eyes was 'not all' there was to life.... Dartmoor's heights suggest other universes to those who stand and gaze from them.'

Always interesting to reflect on what articles like this miss out. The part of my contribution which Country Life decided not to publish goes like this: 

[Dartmoor] is also a highly militarised area. The MoD's Dartmoor Training Area covers over  31500 acres of upland Dartmoor. It's quite common for walkers to find themselves having to re-route when the MoD's red warning flags are flying; not unusual for horses and sheep to be grazing passively on one side of a valley whilst on the other troops are massing around a sequestered farmhouse, with smoke billowing from it. Locals often have the sound of gunfire in their ears accompanying the birdsong.

Do you object to being a subject?

... The best monarchs are those who manage to save themselves from megalomania, who avoid becoming obsessed with building themselves up at the expense of their subjects. To do this they have to have a sense of something or someone to whom they themselves are subject. And this is why Elizabeth is such an example to us, for she is explicit about her understanding of her dependence on God. In a recent Christmas Day broadcast she said,

‘I know just how much I rely on my own faith to guide me through the good times and the bad. Each day is a new beginning. Like others of you who draw inspiration from your own faith, I draw strength from the message of hope in the Christian gospel.’

Our Queen is happy to be subject to one who cares for her. It’s perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from her, to be a willing subject of God, conscious of being formed in love, of living in hope, of drawing inspiration from a greater power who is for us, not against us, and who makes every day a new beginning. 

Accepting ourselves as subjects of God releases us from the web of subjectivity altogether, puts all our other influences in perspective, frees us from obligations which crush and dispirit us. If our allegiance is to God then we are no longer subject to the demands and desires of others on our lives, no longer tangled up in rivalries. Rather, we are released into a relationship of pure giving love, through which we live generously towards others. ...

From my talk at four special church services today.

God Save the Queen!

... In my rebellious youth I would refuse to sing ‘God Save the Queen’, believing it to wrongly appropriate the deity to serve the interests of the privileged and powerful over against those of the ordinary person and the suffering poor, and to be too often an expression of aggressive nationalism, racial bigotry. I still hold to the principles behind those protests - firmly believing that the ethics of Jesus are rooted in a bias to the poor and an active concern for the well-being of the outsider. But my more mature view (and in the week of the Golden Jubilee I turn 50, keenly anticipating the arrival of my introductory letter from Saga Insurance) is to take ‘God Save the Queen’ literally - as a prayer which puts the deity and the monarch in their appropriate places, which regards the Queen as a mortal who, just like me, is liable to flaws and abuses of position, who is in constant need of God’s help and salvation.

These days I’ll heartily sing out ‘God Save the Queen’ knowing that Elizabeth II takes seriously the hymn’s prayerful perspective: aware that she often publicly describes these days the many ways in which God has saved and does save the Queen, in her daily life and the outworking of her duties.

In this, the Queen is countercultural. ...

I could never have imagined back then that I'd be writing like this today... but here we are..! A segment from my article in the Lydford village magazine and the West Devon churches' Northmoor News, God Save the Queen!