very good Bowman we need our "wellies" today its chucking it down of rain lol..

Angela

Thankyou Bowman , Your protest is heard and acknowledged, though as usual i cannot promise to have a total grasp of the theoretical meaning to you.

However what you indicate is what in councelling terms  is known as the empathic response, if a person is too often distracted from caring for the innerself then often communication difficulties ensue, accross the board..

I define the church as "further than the stars" and "wider than we can measure" Whenever two are gathered comes to mind. This site demonstrates very well and very clearly the distance between communicators and although not everyone is the same denomination, or not everyone even believes, we are a group that communicates where we stand on the spectrum of church. Again we could look at a councilling term and say its like the spiral curricullum, some are at the top of the spiral and in the church 24/7 and others with varying degrees are further away from the concept of church. In parishes it will be like this some will be believers but not attenders of the local church ,yet they will be part of that church through other links like schools and colleges, they may well contribute to the maintainance of buildings through donations, but not attend. Some will be on the outer ring of church in the community, not really that impressed, but at the same time not objecting. But i would say they are part of the church through their service to the community, some of which may attend the church. That is why in some ways it is immeasurable. Caring and sharing brings together the inner and outer self. 

It is the sharing bit or the "anetdotes" that gives hope in the church and in adversity and inspiration to the lost.. I have been inspired by so many people that i would not have been had they not had the courage to share, Christ ,themselves, and their talents.  But as you also wisely indicate it is a whole package of theory and practicality and spirituality. All anetdotes with no practical assistance or direction is not very helpful to any of us.

Peace

Angela

Blessings Angela-- Thank you again for your recommendation. Giving Amazon another chance, they came up with a series of MacDonald books on the organisation, rebuilding, and maintenance of inner worlds. Clicking into them, they are just as you describe them. Insightful, though more replete with anecdotes than is usually to my taste. I will download the best one.

MacDonald confesses our preoccupation with an outer self to the neglect of the inner one. Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison. Amen.

May I, however, register a protest that this preoccupation-- this distraction from the self in the pursuit of a degree of goodness that others will recognise-- is just what many take to be the whole point of "church?" What is to be done about this?

The scriptures do little to encourage this preoccupation, and sensitive students of them object to it, of course. As doctrine, it's just plain wrong. But saying so makes little difference. People vary widely in their ability to recognise their own inner emotions and thoughts, and those who are the least aware (or most avoidant) of what is inside themselves can make their own astonishingly shallow sense of what they experience as church. To see church as a place in which those who care have their goodness validated by others must make immediate sense to those who cannot make any more interior sense of it. It's not that the colors aren't there/ it's just imagination they lack/ In my little town...

I thought of this when comments on That Topic returned to gay and lesbian experiences of ordinary parish life. Perhaps bigotry really was the problem being described, but even if so, my suspicion is that it was the prior obliviousness of sleepwalkers to all interior crises whatever that made them precisely insensitive enough to be bigoted. If, as Job seems to have discovered, the conscious experience of one's own inner depths is all that enables one to respect struggles in the depths of others, then may not the converse also be true? How can those who do not know their own depths show authentic compassion?

I have seen sleepwalking ministers in complicity with just the sort of distraction that sets people up for the disasters that MacDonald writes about. Now, a few of these reverend sleepwalkers have been awakened to themselves by some wonderful occasion outside the church, which is good news, of course. Yet, strangely, I have seen such blessings turn them against the tradition inside the church-- and especially against those who thrive in it-- like a resentful kid mad at his teacher's favourite student. The ancient springs of Life were there for all, but the sleepwalkers could not kneel to drink from them, and it wounds their pride that there are those who could and did. (Was there not an angel who was jealous of man?) Every jealousy thrives where an outer activism struggles for a recognition that substitutes for an inner solace.

When Phil defines the Church as the elect, or Carl is sceptical of the signs pointing to to a church building, or DavidW wants to draw lines in the sand, I am entirely sympathetic. Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. But I am also sad that some who have an ocean within are afraid to sail out of the sight of land and never navigate by the stars. This stunted inner life seems something different from rebellion against God himself, even if it takes some nasty forms.

Whether the self is numb or evasive or both, the psalms in course of the Daily Office are said to have some healing effect on it. Still-- is there an intercession for those who do not know themselves?

Bowman

I looked for the book for you Amazon have it..

I like the book because it highlights how your inner world dictates how your outer world functions. I have long recognized that many people work very hard, in most of the caring professions it comes with the territory. Yet it never ceases to amaze me how dedicated people struggle to be organized outside of the (confines of their post). Highly motivated people are driven in nature, and that drive appears to detach them sometimes from (a) the humanity of the gospel and (b) they neglect there own spiritual needs, they are too busy to make time for God for themselves because they are trying to organize everyone else. It is very much how parents feel in organizing a family too. I know from experience that when you feel your spiritual world is in order, (and order is different things to different people) that it gives a resilience.

But most importantly it highlights how many people turn to God including the clergy in retrospect and ask the question "where has all my time gone" rather than organizing their time and using it wisely by being motivated to make space for God regularly enough, many clergy will say I serve God everyday but how many say i managed my social economic and family life alongside my church commitments and personal time with God every day?? its a question worth asking..

But the best answer to your question is when i read the book i identified myself in parts of it, and therefore made me take note..

Angela

organized in a disorganized kind of way lol

bowman just caught your post before it disappeared off page. Have you read "ordering your private world" by Gordon Mc Donald and forwarded by Selwyn Hughes.

You prompted me to pick it up for a re-read, I thought of it because it has always been the case that when you get busy because you are closer to God that the busyness itself becomes the divider and can distance you, this is the same for all areas of development whether technological academic building financial or relational, out of chaos can come positive change..I keep racking my brains and wondering whether it was David Runcorn who prompted me to read this book in the first place, it might have been. If you dont have it here is the  ISBN 0 946616191,

Angela

Never having seen the places described in the essay and comments below, I treated myself to as much of them as the internet affords. Then two thoughts came to me.

The persistence of any humane order through time makes it easier to imagine that we should often be trying to discern and describe the order of things from within that order, rather than supposing that we stand outside that order and can work our will on it to change it from without.

The persistence of the old amid the new is not the same as the joining of heaven and earth, but it is not a bad metaphor for it.

After reading this, I rummaged through the Fulcrum archives for something discussing tradition per se in an evangelical voice, and found this marvellous essay by David Runcorn.

This was a pleasure to read. I appreciate the vision of old and new being within walking distance of each other. It never ceases to amaze me how the older ways of life always appear more human. We still have the cows and sheep altering the traffic here, even an LNG tanker would have to stop for the sheep and cows;thats the bit that seems more human, and shows humanity and nature side by side; but alongside the slowness of where i live here is cutting edge technology with the largest energy plants and terminals as well as the shipping which is always dependent on the natural elements. They are all in the same direction within a 1/2 mile of each other. Even refinaries have a beauty about them at night when the light glistens accross the water, very inhuman yet it brings out the best in humanity with the shipping that goes alongside it.

Thanks for inspiring me to think about that.

Waterangel

This is the second time I've read this piece. It appeals to me in that it transcends the rather obvious dualism of ancient vs modern. I too have experienced this strange sense of the ancient paths. Walking through the Merry Hill Shopping Centre in Dudley four years ago, along a route that existed before it was built, gave me a profound sense of how ephemeral our built environment really is. There are corners where a sense of the ancient resides. For those who have the awareness, they are echoes of a time when it was we who found, and carved out, our place in the gaps between vast areas of forest. Among people of my generation I encounter a yearning to re-connect with the rest of the created order, an expression of a profound holism. It continues to astound me, however, that this instinct is manifest not in the Church but among people who shun our indoor practices and, with it, our lived theology.

David, thank you for that beautifully reflective piece, bringing together Macfarlane's evocation of the 'Holloway', the OT's call to tread the 'ancient paths' and the rich imagery of the season. 

You write, 'In such a world The Hollow speaks to me. It speaks also to a church urgently seeking newness and renewal. It tells us there is something we need just as urgently - a consecration of the ‘ordinary’ that we will experience, in God’s good grace,  as ‘a chastening without crushing’. We must make the pilgrimage within the routine and the local that will bring us to our bedrock.  For there is no newness that is cut off from history and it is hazardous to believe otherwise. Re-newal, the bible teaches, is always first of all an act of remembrance.'

I too enjoyed Macfarlane's book some time ago and remember being especially struck by his chapter on a Holloway in my beloved Dorset.  In the past I have walked one of the Holloways near Chideock and short stretches of the pilgrim paths to Whitchurch Canonicorum.  Thinking of these landscapes, I doubly appreciate your call 'to bring us to our bedrock', to experience life's 'chastening without crushing'.  These images will stay with me.