Pen and Ink Reflections - Pen and Ink Reflections

the things that ignore us save us

9/16/2020

The contemporary mystic Andrew Harvey once wrote that ‘the things that ignore us save us in the end. Their presence awakens silence in us.’ I have been pondering this week whether this is what all wild places have in common, whether they be the Australian outback, other deserts, mountain places or wilderness forest. Regardless of the particularity of their wildness, wild places ignore us – in a healthy and health-giving way. In a wild place we cease, as human creations, to be at the centre of our own worldview and become aware of all that is beyond us. As the American Presbyterian theologian Belden C. Lane expresses it in his great work “The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: exploring desert and mountain spirituality”: 'There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokenness we find within.' When we find ourselves bereft of human company and resources, then we find ourselves in a place to let go of the demands of ego, the trivialities of our everyday lives, and to receive something of the incalculable and transforming presence of God...

seeking the forgiveness of the land - blowing' in the wind?

9/12/2020

When I was young, parts of the country in which I grew up literally blew away. Living in Lincolnshire, one of England’s greatest agricultural counties, I could see this whenever I traveled. For I grew up as a child at the time of the greatest destruction of England’s hedgerows, many of them very ancient. Indeed, hedgerows are, as the Campaign to Protect Rural England has put it, ‘the most widespread semi-natural habitat in England’, and, more poetically, ‘the vital stitching point in the patchwork quilt of the English countryside’.1 They not only provide character, but essential life to all kinds of creatures, and help protect the soil itself without which there can be no sustainable farming yields. As a child however, I would see such features regularly ripped away, and a vast desert of landscape created, with vital topsoil whirling up in dust storms and carried away. Such soil frequently blinded us, reflecting the blinkered industrialised agricultural thinking which had produced it. It was an early lesson to me of how if we mistreat the land out of which we come and are fed, we also destroy ourselves. How then are we to live, without seeking the forgiveness of the land itself, and renewing creation together?...

Hearing this Sunday's Gospel reading of the parable of the unforgiving slave, and thinking today about land on this Land Sunday, the phrase that springs up for me is that of ‘an unforgiving landscape’. I wonder what those words conjure for you? What kinds of landscapes have you found to be unforgiving? A quick Google search yields pictures of high mountainous regions where little grows and it is hard to find footing as a human, and of deserts, with pictures of bleached bones, where cattle have been unable to find fodder. Hard, rocky ground and unrelenting sand seem to be our mental pictures. These are lands that do not yield to human need.

Yet I wonder if the wider problem is that, as modern humans, we ask too much of the land, and do not live with it, and learn from it, as our forbears did so much better. Modern farming methods leave little opportunity for the land to regenerate. We expect higher and higher yields, while giving back too little. At the same time. we have become increasingly detached from the land and lack a sound appreciation of all that it constantly gives to us. The writer Annie Dillard, for example, tells us that “In the top inch of forest soil, biologists found an average of 1,356 living creatures . . . including 865 mites, 265 springtails, 22 millipedes, 29 adult beetles and various numbers of 12 other forms . . . . Had an estimate also been made of the microscopic population, it might have ranged up to two billion bacteria and many millions of fungi, protozoa, and algae—in a mere teaspoonful of soil.” Isn’t that amazing? How would it be if we, seriously, stopped for a moment, to consider such things? What difference would it make? Could we find forgiveness with the land, and stop being unforgiving servants?

During the major Covid-19 lockdowns earlier this year, there was a real sense that the lands of the Earth, on which we all depend, were able to breathe more freely. Anecdotally, many of us shared in this as we saw aspects of wider nature return: more butterflies flying in our gardens for example, fuller and brighter birdsong. Yet recent reports suggest this was indeed but a breather, a brief moment of release for our wider Creation. Current calculations show, for instance, that the rate of human induced climate change will not slow in this otherwise extraordinary virus impacted year. The Covid-19 virus itself cannot bring a fresh direction – that is repentance – from humanity. All it can do is to challenge us to face up to realities, and, as with the short breather for our planet earlier this year, show us what the fruits might be for another way forward.

Speaking fruitfully, one of the most wonderful jobs I’ve ever had was that of Rural and Environment Adviser for the Diocese of Durham, part of a then network of church rural officers across England. It was a great joy, as it involved me traveling across the rugged yet beautiful lands of my birth, working with extraordinary farmers, conservationists, and people of faith, who truly connected with the ground which gave us life. We worked together for a better land, in an area exploited for many generations, not least through unjust mining developments. In that task, I and others were drawn back to core biblical understandings of the land, which are inextricably bound up together in relationship with God and God’s people. For, in the Hebrew scriptures especially, it makes no sense to speak of loving human relationship to God without loving relationship to land. God-people-land form one covenant, in which each part is crucial. As the book of Deuteronomy above all attests, if we betray any one element – whether God, other human beings, or the land itself – we betray the other elements too. We are then called to seeking forgiveness so that renewed healing with justice – biblical shalom – may ensue.

How do we nurture forgiveness from the land in this land? Surely this can only result from listening afresh to the land itself and to those closest to it: to the best of our environmental scientists and farming community, and, above all, to the First Nations peoples of Australia. For there is a radical difference, isn’t there, between being in true, deep, covenantal relationship with the land, and simply living on or with it. White western people typically view land as something which belongs to them/us. Indigenous peoples across the world affirm, like biblical wisdom, that is the other way around. We belong to the land, for, at best it is only loaned to us by God, the Spirit of all Creation. Only when we start understanding that fully, and act upon it, will we be on the right track. For forgiveness, and fresh possibilities of new life, always involve repentance, changing our orientation. This applies just as much in ecological issues, as it does to community, or personal life.

In my country of birth, there has been some progress in ecological repentance in restoring the land. The Hedgerows Regulations passed in 1997, for example, give greater protection to the soil, and those who depend upon it. Yet such achievements are limited and fragile. We need to go deeper. To truly repent and become faithful stewards of the land, we need a profounder sense of our intimate relationship to the land. To receive the forgiveness of the land and of God, we need to know ourselves as bound together in a covenant of loving creation. For this reason, Indigenous people typically call the land our Mother. In recent times, Christian theologians have also explored how we might understand our planet Earth itself as the Body of God. When we see our land that way, we begin to understand more fully the truths attributed to Chief Seattle, that ‘what we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves.’2
In the name of Jesus, who lived humbly on the Earth and taught us to love its life and beauty from which we are born. Amen.

by Josephine Inkpin, for Land Sunday in the Season of Creation, @MiltonAnglicans, Sunday 13 September 2020

1 in English hedgerows – don’t cut them out!, CPRE report 2010
2. full speech here

The Cross comes when you try to change things

8/24/2020

“Jesus said, “if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, and take up their cross and follow me.”
We want to follow Jesus – why else would we be here this morning? So, it sounds like we had best take up our cross and get on with it. But what does that actually mean?...

but what do YOU say?

8/18/2020

Some questions require more of us than others. So it is with the central question Jesus asks in today’s Gospel: ‘but who do you say I am?’ It is typical Jesus, isn’t it? Rather than dictate or demand, he invites. Leaders, not least spiritual leaders, take note. Jesus is not giving, or expecting, a set answer. Rather they are challenging us to make our own response. As such, they are calling us into deeper relationship, by drawing us into the most profound experiences of our bodies, hearts and minds. Nor is this a once and for all answer to be made. For, as we meet again today, Jesus is asking us once more, as individuals and as a community, ‘but who do you say that I am?’. What answers have we to give?...

Mary – Mother, Mortal and Magnifier

8/15/2020

Let’s meditate a little on Mary from these four words. For we live in very unsettled times. Times when everything we have known is being overthrown. And in such times. we need Mary – not just as an archetype of womanhood, but as a living, breathing example of the approach we need to life and faith....

we can't walk on water - can we?

8/5/2020

Human beings can’t walk on water. This is fairly easily observable. However I was once told by no less a person than a church warden, that if I could build a labyrinth for meditative walking in the religiously conservative city of Toowoomba then I could walk on water. She was trying to tell me it was impossible. But the Toowoomba City Labyrinth was built and continues as a great tool for prayer. And – I can’t walk on water! Nor, I venture to suggest could Jesus.

If Jesus did walk on water, then we rid ourselves of one problem – the questioning of the historical accuracy of the Biblical account. But we create another - a Christ who only pretended to be human. Because humans can’t walk on water. We can of course protest that Jesus is the Son of God and can do anything, but the moment we do that we open up a whole other set of problems around why Jesus does not do a whole heap of other things that might be felt more useful, like ending wars or saving children’s lives. If we do not want to turn the human Jesus into a capricious divine figure masquerading as a human being, we might have to accept that he did not in fact walk on water.

So, what about this story then? How are we to read it? Well some scholars resolve the problem quite neatly by declaring it to be a misplaced resurrection story. This makes a lot of sense. This is why the disciples for examples are afraid and think they are seeing a ghost. However, I do not think that is the whole answer...

wrestlings, wounds and blessings

7/29/2020

As each of us comes to worship today, how are we going in our lives and faith? Are we ourselves wrestling with challenging things in our lives, and with God? Are we bearing wounds? Are we seeking blessing, or feeling blessed? In what ways are we perhaps ‘God’s Wrestlers’, ‘God’s Wounded’, ‘God’s Blessed’? These are but three different ways of approaching the great Hebrew story we encounter today in our lectionary (Genesis 32.22-31) - the story we may call Jacob’s Wrestling with the Angel, or alternatively, Jacob’s Wounding, or Jacob’s Blessing...

understanding as a treasure to be given away

7/25/2020

Jesus asks his disciples ‘Have you understood all this?’ and they answer 'Yes.” And I find myself saying, ‘really?!’ I rather think that in fact the disciples had the somewhat glazed expression that I had this week, when the NBN technician was trying to help me factory re-set my modem password! My 'yes’ really meant, actually I haven’t the faintest idea what you are talking about, but I trust you to work it out anyway”...

parables of patience

7/18/2020

‘He told them another parable’. I love parables, don’t you? And one of the things I love about them is that there is never, ever a ‘right answer’; a single correct interpretation. Of course, that can be rather trying to those of us who like clear answers. But Jesus didn’t give any clear answers, and where he appears to do so, we can be pretty sure that the gospel writer is putting words in his mouth.

This morning we heard a little cluster of three parables – and a dodgy interpretation of one of them – did you spot them all? The wheat and the weeds, the mustard seed and the woman with the yeast. Sometimes they are known as parables of growth, especially as they follow on in Matthew’s version from the parable of the sower. But it seemed to me this week that we could call them ‘parables of patience’ – and as such very apt for our current situation, where the spread of COVID seems to be asking again and again for patience...

Clara and the Sower - brown beans no more

7/7/2020

As a small child, one of the most wonderful things I remember my school asked me to do, was to grow a plant. Now it didn't appear to us children to start well. For we were each given a very unassuming brown bean and an empty jam jar. We were instructed on how to fill the jar with soil (whoopee!) and put the bean into it so we could see still see it, and we were told to keep watering and looking after it. To begin with of course, nothing happened, or seemed to happen. It was seemingly just a boring glass jar with dirt inside it, together with a seemingly even more boring brown bean. TV, and football, seemed much more enjoyable. Watering and caring for the bean seemed pointless. But I did persist. Then, amazingly, one morning, I woke to see a shoot beginning to break out of the bean, and then another, and another. These beautiful white strands of life then began to break through the surface of the soil into the light, sprouting even more gorgeous green leaves. For the small child I was, it was spectacular. TV was one thing, and football - well, maybe even football - was another. This however was a wonder, and a wonder I had myself helped to nurture.

Do we lose that sense of wonder as we grow older, do you think? Do we stop learning that new life is always possible - that it will break out extraordinarily by God's good grace, and a little human care? Do we fail to realise that we too are not destined to be boring brown beans in boring jam jars, imprisoned in dirt? The good news - our Gospel message - is indeed that we too are called to sprout, reach out and flourish in the light. Moreover, this morning, what a better way do we have to express that than in our prayers and blessing for Clara, as she sprouts into the authentic light of who she is, in God's grace, as a transgender person?...