John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Prayer - what 'mothering' is about

Churches Weekly Newsletter, 27 March 2022

The letters page of The Guardian has been discussing prayer, writes Andrew Brown in this week's  Church Times.
"It started with a letter from the Revd Richard Bradshaw: “An elderly Christian lady I met recently said with some bitterness that she would not be responding to the various calls for prayers for Ukraine. Why? Despite years of conflict and thousands of deaths in her country, she has never heard British church leaders pray for peace there. She is a Nigerian refugee.”
"So back comes Ken Gambles, another Yorkshireman: “Rev Richard Bradshaw’s Nigerian parishioner might be right about church leaders not praying for peace in Nigeria, but I can assure both of them that at Holy Trinity Knaresborough, at various times in the past 20 years, we have prayed for peace in Nigeria, Angola, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar, Iraq and Sri Lanka.”
"And so, the next day, Jenny Haynes, from Lincolnshire wrote in: “Regarding praying for peace, did it work?”
"That magnificent squelch might have been the end of it, but there followed a letter from the Revd Kenneth Cross: “Prayer, for many of us, is not magic, not seeking the intervention of a lofty god whose reluctant arms need to be twisted. It is, rather, a participation in and a growing in compassion. It is we who are changed, through contemplation and stillness, centred on divine love. Painfully slowly (in my case at least), we then become better able to act compassionately and justly. We become the answer to our own prayer. That, truly, has the potential to change everything.”"
Becoming the answer to our own prayer - a painfully slow but steadily life changing process. This practice is at the centre of Lent; it maybe also describes something core to what mothering is about.

This is where I'm from

Churches Weekly Newsletter, 13 March 2022

"In September 1938, events were moving to a crisis. Fear and apprehension prevailed throughout the country. War seemed imminent. News and conversations became concentrated on the single topic of the conflict in Europe: the press and simple wireless sets gave us no respite, no peace of mind. ... There seemed no escape from the atmosphere of gloom and despondency, at home and at work and in the streets; things were getting worse day by day. But I was fortunate in having a fortnight’s holiday due, and I fled the familiar scene. I walked alone from Settle in Ribblesdale to the Roman Wall along the eastern flank of the Pennines, returning down the west side. In the solitude of the wild Pennine hills, I found peace."

So began Alfred Wainwright's introduction to A Pennine Journey, published in 1986. "The parallels with our anxious, crisis-ridden contemporary situation seem pronounced," writes Anita Sethi in I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain, published last year, in which she (loosely) follows Wainwright on her own Pennine journey, a walk out of the busy city motivated partly by her love of Northern England's hills and partly to try to process and recover from a terrifying racial attack she had suffered on a train journey from Liverpool to Newcastle.

The crime she had experienced was "a vicious attack on her right to exist in a place on account of her race", (say the book's sleeve notes). "After the event Anita experienced panic attacks and anxiety. A crushing sense of claustrophobia made her long for wide open spaces, to breathe deeply in the great outdoors. She was intent on not letting her experience stop her travelling freely and without fear." Anita Sethi's reflections on the relationship between landscape, society and healing are profound, and like Blackburn's Wainwright, Manchester-born Sethi also found peace in these hills - and a restored sense of belonging. Having been harangued by her attacker to "Go back to where you're from" she had a healing epiphany at Hull Pot, on the western side of Pen-y-ghent, when she found herself declaring, "This is where I'm from: I'm from the North. The glorious North."

Who belongs and who doesn't - these questions are at the heart of so much conflict the world over. As a clergy friend of mine said this week, "Everything belongs. Everything is sacred. I don’t want to have conversations discussing if people are ‘in or out’. I never did. The world has become far too scary for the church to be indulging that. That’s not the promise of salvation. It’s what the promise of salvation saves us from: exclusion and division."

In the Iona Abbey Worship Book the congregation ask Jesus to “Bring to our house all those who hurry or hobble behind you.” So... those urban walkers, cyclists, runners, caravaners and picnickers, all who breathe the air alongside us on these Pennine streets, hills and footpaths... do we see them as mere 'visitors' to 'our land', to be regarded suspiciously, or as fellow-travellers on life's bumpy road, with stories to tell, in need of succour we might share?