Being free and connected

  Sometimes when I need to find some perspective on life, I climb a hill. Looking down, the characters in my mind’s stories fade and become weightless, lightening my load. The human world is subsumed into the whole of nature, its true nesting place. They, we, are not everything. Humans may have made a mark on the surface, but the hills and valleys have a longer view. Two moments of recalibration and reorientation found me in high places. These intense memories were made vivid and virtually indelible by their emotional significance, standing clear like mountain summits above the mist in the valleys of quotidian existence. A Maltese apartment, high above the bustle and buzz of a double-sainted religious festival. A deep and challenging three-day conversation, courageous revelations and radical listening, and we agreed new paths forward. But then we hit an unexpected roadblock of misunderstanding, of not understanding, of seemingly irreconcilable differences of perspective. A litt...

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind Rom 12:12 We love transformation stories: Before and After, happily ever after. The hero goes on a quest or faces a challenge, in the process of which they discover their true selves, become a better version of themselves, break free of life-limiting constraints and sometimes save the world too. My heroes were Frodo, Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennett. And my favourite book was 'A Wrinkle in Time' by Madeleine l'Engle, with Meg Murry as the super-intelligent nerdy misfit girl hero (easy to see why I associated with her) who gets caught up in the cosmic battle of light, good, freedom and love against dark, evil and control.  Meg Murry in the film version of 'A Wrinkle in Time' In the 80's I devoured stories of transformation based within the framework of the Christian story: 'The Cross and the Switchblade' (Mau Mau gang members in New York finding Jesus), 'Chasing the Dragon' (Triad gang members and heroin add...

Pray continually  (1 Thess 5:17) T his is an instruction from St Paul to the early churches and passed on in copious books, sermons and lectures. It is one of the 'impossible to succeed' instructions, along with 'Be perfect '. The function of this is twofold, in my view:      1. to encourage believers to aim high     2. to keep believers failing so they have to depend on God's forgiveness I did try to remember to pray frequently, at least, for many years, but continual conscious prayer is clearly unachievable by anyone living a normal life, working, interacting with other people. So I always fell short of the ideal, and attributed many frustrations in my life to this deficiency. I was brought up in a Christian family, but prayer was simple and formulaic. I was taught to pray a 'God bless mummy and daddy...' type prayer at bedtime, and we always gave thanks before meals, often with a little song we sang together as a family:     Thank you for the...

It's miraculous! ... Is it? Literally?  At my Oxford college in 1985 there was a young man who was almost convinced about Christianity, but he said he'd only become a Christian if we could convince him that the stuff that Jesus did in the Bible, the healings and miracles, were still happening. We really believed that they were, at least we'd read stories about them happening in California, and we fully expected them to start happening around us too. It was just a matter of time, praying enough, maybe fasting too. It felt like an exciting time to be a Christian, in the 80s, with prophecies of revival and a buzz of anticipation around 'signs and wonders', supernatural interventions that we believed and fully expected to see.  A weirdly blonde Jewish girl being healed by an Aryan Jesus Hope starts to fade and the energy dissipates when promises aren't fulfilled. But every few years there was a fresh wave of excitement about some new teaching or stories of outbreaks...

When I was 13, I went to Ely cathedral to get the Holy Spirit inserted into me by the bishop.  This, I was told, was what would happen at my confirmation. I might experience something. This sounded reasonable, as God coming to live in me, one might expect, could cause a bit of a tremor at least. But, disappointingly, I felt nothing apart from mild pleasure about being the centre of attention in my family, and being given a box set of 'The Messiah' on LPs. Apparently this was OK too, and I could trust that God had fulfilled the contract set up by the Church of England. Forward to my late teens, and I was a good Christian girl, going to church and youth group regularly, trying to read the Bible and pray, and definitely planning to 'keep myself pure' until I married. My uncle had given me a postcard with this instruction captioning a white rose, which I had pinned on my mirror to remind me.  But I was still missing any fuzzy frisson of feelings, a tangible sense of God wit...