Tonnau Duw ('God's waves') Fr Tim Ardouin

It is fear, anxiety, cares of the world

That put the shackles on the doors of your heart

But within the doors there is an upper room

A space into which the Breath of Life may come

And say to you, Shalom, Peace

Do not be afraid

All you need to do is create a place in your own breathing

In the sensations of your mind and your body

Notice the Risen One, and the wounds and the ever-reaching, everlasting arms

Being and been

There

All the time

Pay attention to the Universal One,

Feel God’s breath in you

Let God show you God’s wounds:

your fear, your anger, your shame, your grief

Let God be there. No locked doors will keep God out, if you are just prepared

to be

in the room

Listen,

There is a message for you:

There is enough love

I have come

to set you free

If you forgive anything, it is forgiven

If you retain it, it is retained

You can let it go

Or you can hold it too tight

You decide

I love you anyway

But if you let it go

I will breathe life into you

And you will pass through those doors

in peace

and you will go outside

and heal

in my name.

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 The body does not consist of one member but of many.
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.”

Creation, beautiful symphony
harmonic, acoustic, each note counts,

Each note has meaning, no note is superfluous
All creatures are of the music. The plants and elements too. Each has a gift. Each gift plays its part in God’s mysterious plan…
you might be a bold motif shouted out by trumpet or bassoon
or maybe the harmony of third violins,
subtle but changing everything,

shape-shifting, raw soundscape,
or the oboe gently offering a countermelody.
Each one of us is part of the song. Building the song.

God is all about healing, not wounding,
about creating, not destroying.
Life for the body is its members joined,
not severed, not judged bad and good.
The healing of the world
is the mending of its tissues,
the weaving together of its peoples,
all of us. Community. Symphony.

The energy of the Spirit is harmony,
communion of different members.
The energy of judging and dividing
is the energy of evil.
The Spirit’s loving energy is more powerful
than fear and separation.
All the gifts you have been given
are for the sake of the healing of the world.
Even the smallest gifts are mighty when they are discerned and embraced and put to use for God’s use.

Everything belongs.
Your prayers, your conversations,
your walking on the marsh or your driving through town,
all are part of the symphony.
Religion is like that.
The observance of Torah,
the path to enlightenment,
keeping kosher, the hajj, the rosary, fasting,
the praise song, lectio meditation, bare feet in the earth, sweat lodge, hermitage or Druid’s grove
each is a gift, different
but no less a part of the body…

Christian Unity is about humility. It is non judging. Christian Unity is Epiphany. Enlightenment. Good News. Gospel. Jesus didn’t come to impose right religion. He came not to condemn the world but to set the people free…

A witch once told me that dark is needed too because without the dark you can’t notice the light. ‘Jesus is the Light’, said I. ‘Yes’, she replied, ‘Jeshua. It’s All about him’.

“Oh sister am I not a brother to you

And one deserving of affection?

And is not our purpose the same on the earth

To love and follow his direction?”

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

In Jeshua ha Meshiach, Jesus the Christ, the symphony is fulfilled.

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Though we came to pray for St Madoc Centre, and though we certainly did that, it was not long before we, trustees drawn from denominations and free churches across Gower and Swansea, found ourselves being led deeper and deeper into a prayer for Gower and to God’s aching call to just be his people, without recourse to tribe or sect, and answer his call together, with simplicity, with integrity, with faith.

And Jesus said, ‘Bring them here to me.’ Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled…     (Matt 14)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRd_id2ewQ

Click on picture to see video

At the end of the day, Jesus withdraws to a thin place. He will do so again after the great feeding on the mountain. Later, he will walk free in faith on the wild sea. Because he can. The rock/church will try to walk out to him, and before the thinking kicks in, (s)he will indeed walk! But when comes the thinking, so too comes the fear. This is where the monsters are. This is not the land and it’s not my fishing boat!…Oh Peter. Don’t you know who I AM? Oh you of little faith!

But we are with the loaves now, as we pray, in this thin place, prayeful chapel on St Madoc cliff, prayerful, hopeful trustees of a place where crowds do come with aching need for Word, for Bread, for Fish. We pray for those who are here tonight and for those who will be here soon. We pray for signs. We pray that uncountably more may come and be abundantly blessed. We pray that God will take away the burden of financial debt, so restricting the work of this place, that the mountain of it may fall into the sea and so the staff and provision here may be released and increased, that God’s peace might flow on and from this cliff like rivers of life. We offer small amounts of what we think we have and ask for a miracle. Oh God, your will be done, your will be done…

And I can see the hands of the Lord. They are breaking the bread and the fishes. And there is noise and adrenalin pumping as baskets are taken and the sharing is made. But the breaking just goes on and on. And I see the sandaled feet of the sharers. They are running to give. And the arms of the hungry are stretched out and there is no end to them that I can see. Hands opened above desparate faces, aching to receive. They are here on the cliffs and they stretch out from the sea. And the Lord just keeps on breaking. And the baskets keep flowing…

Now I look into heaven and I have to ask, though to hear it scares me still even after all the breaking, am I broken enough yet? Can  I walk yet on the sea? Is my faith stronger than my mind, yet? Lord?

There is a fire alarm. We must go out into the cold-night wilderness as the sun goes down, just over there. Here on a tennis court, children are counted and cared about. They are safe here. There is such peace for them on this cliff.

Now, back into the chapel, drama subsided, a head teacher gives such thanks for this thin place and for untold blessings poured into the lives of children who cannot pay to be here, who know three streets and a corner shop and who might eat or sleep between school and school, or might not…

And the hands of the Lord keep on breaking, bread and fish, fish and bread, and baskets fill, and sandals run, and arms stretch from the sea, and we pray…and we pray…ABBA! YOUR WILL BE DONE!

Tangnefedd

Fr Tim

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as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy.

There are moments in all our lives when something kicks inside us and just seems to say, “Pay attention here, this is the truth.” We might pay attention or we might rationalize and/or ignore it. We have free choice, that most gracious gift from the One who Is.

Mahatma Gandhi spoke about the inner voice, a sacred place within each human being – some Christians call it conscience – but an inner sanctuary in which God calls to and speaks to each human being –  every human being. Free will is to hear this voice and to follow its call. We can sense it when something is right, a call into the light, a call to work for peace in the world, in our lives, in the lives of others.

But we live in a world that values competition, material wealth, displays of power and strength. It respects and rewards the arrogant, the self – promoting, the successful. The inner voice is not promoted and it can easily be drowned out and forgotten. This begins early in people’s lives. Depending on where and when we are born, the social programming begins, unconsciously, consciously, nurses, doctors, parents, nursery school, school and so it continues through work, the media, the company we keep. People forget the voice, the call, the peace at the centre of human being. Spiritual stirrings are set aside and rational, material perception more readily trusted. The inner voice is drowned in the noise of the world and people get fat and tired and depressed. It’s like you try and do what everyone seems to tell you have to do. You follow the programme. You succeed or you fail or both. But just nothing makes sense and nothing seems to make you happy. The more you get, the less you feel. And it pulls you down till you just don’t even want to get out of bed anymore. So you might take drugs or drink or find some other way to blot out the pain. Some turn to violence and lash out in a desperate attempt to change things. For terrorists, for example, there is an instinctive realization that things are not fair and the world is off course but they think they can force change by destroying the structures of oppression through the bombing of its lifestyle. This is not the inner voice. It is desperation and madness. It is dualistic thinking. Wrong thinking. Similarly, the social programming is dualistic thinking and wrong.

But the gospel news, good news, is that the inner voice is in every single human being. And it is the voice of salvation. It is the voice of God. The voice offers life inside each human being. Each human being is made in God’s image and is of the deepest value. Jean Vanier told me a few weeks ago, even just days after the Paris bombings, “People are beautiful.” We each have the capacity, because we are made in the image of God, to live in communion with God – the Father in me, I in you, you in the Father at – one with the creator, one with the created. The inner voice tells us this is true. The inner voice leads us to work for peace. Free will allows us to listen. Free will allows us to respond. But it needs work and nurturing. Our free will is easily seduced by the noise of politics, education, social programming, advertising, consumerism, competition…

Gandhi again: “The inner voice is something which cannot be described in words. But sometimes we have a positive feeling that something in us prompts us to do a certain thing. The time when I learnt to recognise this voice was, I may say, the time when I started praying regularly.”

Surely, part of our calling in this time, in this place, is to nurture our own listening to the inner voice, to give witness to it and so enable others to perceive the voice within them. This morning we said together Mary’s song recorded by Luke, Magnificat. Why not use it in your own prayer rhythm this Christmas and on into the New Year. Recite it when you wake up, giving thanks for your waking, and again before sleep, giving thanks for the day gone and asking blessing through the night ahead. Let the words descend into your heart and then observe them as they flow from your heart and out through your lips. Be conscious of the prayer of a young girl in the heat and the dust who heard the voice of an angel 2000 years ago and said, “Yes, your will be done.” 2000 years on, her “Yes” remains and it has the power to heal and to give us hope. Pray the words. Be conscious as Mary’s prayer becomes your prayer and then listen, as the voice within you whispers your name.

Tangnefedd. The Christ Mass is near.

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Last week some of us stood together in Penclawdd and remembered. We remembered the fallen and their wars and we faced the reality that war will never lead to the end of war. This world has not yet learned its lesson: it has chosen to refuse to understand and has been unwilling to embrace the road to peace, the method of love, the better way. A week later, we mourn with France and with all humankind another series of atrocious attacks in Paris. President Francois Hollande has vowed a “merciless” response. However understandable, this is war talk. It cannot bring peace.

Peace can only come through listening. Deep listening.

        When we learn to listen deeply, our listening exposes the existence of wrong thinking in the other person and wrong thinking in us. The other person has wrong thinking about him or herself and about us. We have wrong thinking about ourselves and about the other person. Most of us have been taught to think dualistically. Something is either wrong or it is right, good or bad, black or white. This is not true. Dualistic thinking is always wrong thinking. It is the makings of aggression, conflict and war.

       Islamic State terrorists have wrong thinking. They believe that the West is trying to destroy them as a religion and as a civilization. So they want to destroy the West, kill the West before the West can kill them. The anti-terrorist might think much in the same way—that these people are nothing but terrorists and they are trying to get rid us, so we have to get rid of them first. Both sides are motivated by fear, anger and wrong thinking. But wrong thinking can’t be overcome by machine guns, guided drones or suicide bombs. They can only be overcome by compassionate listening and love. Sister you are hurting. Brother I can see you are. What can ease your pain, your hurting, your suffering?

Jesus told us to love our enemies. I don’t think he meant give into them or condone the methods they use to be heard. I think he meant listen to them. Tell them how you feel too.

This is the way of Christ.

A merciless response is not the way of Christ. A merciless response will lead to another merciless response. And the cycle will not stop until

the human being

wipes human being

from the face of this beautiful earth.

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You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life. (John 5.39)

Scripture is not God! It points the way, sheds light on the journey. It is not the destination. We will not rest until we rest in the living God, who is not the character in a book but Life itself! But let’s step back a moment on what the Church calls Bible Sunday and contemplate our Holy Bible.

An atheist might argue that the Ancient Hebrew understanding of science and geography, reflected in the Bible, is wrong and so the Bible is not true. Atheists often do argue along these lines. The Hebrews described the earth fixed on an axis, the land was floating in a giant bowl of water with monsters in the sea and people on the land. The sky is the roof of a dome and the stars are the light of heaven coming through holes in roof. God and the angels are up there somewhere on the dome literally looking down on us. Rationalists might argue that Jonah couldn’t have been swallowed by a whale and lived, a serpent couldn’t have goaded Eve to eat the forbidden apple, the apple couldn’t give her knowledge anyway…the arguments go on ad nauseam, you get the picture… On the other hand, ultra-conservative Christians might argue (and sadly they do!) that God wrote the Bible, God doesn’t make mistakes, so everything in the Bible is literally true. Then the Atheists and the Right Wing Christians battle out a “yes it is”, “no it’s not” style argument until one or other finally gives up the will to head-but the wall anymore! Well, not literally, you understand. Other argumentative types might corner themselves and have to start picking and choosing what to believe and what to ignore.

Surely to take the Bible literally is not to really take it seriously at all! Why would the Bible be so limited? Who would think of taking the Mabinogion or Aesop’s Fables, the Tao Te Zing or countless other works of profound literature literally? Surely anyone with a mind to read them would undrestand they are metaphorical in nature and the wisdom they convey could not be written in literal language. Metaphor takes us way deeper than any straight reporting could even begin to hint at. So why would Hebrew writers be limited to literal thought patterns? Well they were not!!

Frederick Buechner – “… in spite of all its extraordinary variety, the Bible is held together by having a single plot. It is one that can be simply stated: God creates the world, the world gets lost; God seeks to restore the world to the glory for which he created it. That means that the Bible is a book about you and me, whom he also made and lost and continually seeks, so you might say that what holds it together more than anything else is us. You might add to that, of course, that of all the books that humanity has produced, it is the one that more than any other – and in more senses than one – also holds us together.”

The Bible is not a God given tool for the righteous to bash their religion over the heads of the infidels. That would be no gift at all. No. That is an abuse of the Word of God, abuse of Holy Scripture. But the Bible is a gift. And if we accept it graciously it has the power to heal and help us grow into our true selves. When that happens, we have the power to bring healing and God’s peace into the world. The kingdom of heaven is within us and will flow from us into people’s lives.

The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure and gives wisdom to the innocent (Psalm 19).

The Bible is about God and humankind and Creation, Jesus, death and resurrection…true…but the Bible is about you and me. When I read the Bible, any part of it, it teaches me much about all these things but its most challenging gift is that it shows me myself, with all my struggles, my hopes, my dreams. It shows me the light and the darkness within me and without. Now this is a wonderful gift but it comes with a lot of pain and it compels me to go through the pains and challenges of change and growth, of transformation from child of earth to child of God. Through the peeling away of the programmed skins and defences of ego, the true self emerges in my consciousness and it is only then I can truly come to Christ and receive life. In this way all Scripture leads us to the Christ who is closer to us than our own breath.

But the Bible can also shroud this realization. It is much easier to deflect the Bible than to let it work inside the self – treat it as historical, poetic, mythical literature, for example. It is all of these things but they are like doors through which wisdom may be encountered but they are not the wisdom itself. It is easier to read Revelation for example and see coded messages about the prophecies and signs of the end times for all humanity than it is to let it work on our own mind and heart and soul –

having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths…(2 Timothy 4)

It is tempting to hide while holding up the Bible like a mirror to the world and even supplying the interpretation.

In Port Eynon last week, Bishop John spoke to us very briefly but I think with deep wisdom about Scripture. I simply ask you to do what he asked of us. That is to take today’s readings home with you and read them again during the week, maybe 3 or 4 times. Do it slowly, prayerfully. Suspend what you think you might know about the words and let the words make their own way into your heart. Take time. Pray for God to reveal Godself to you. Pray for God to reveal yourself to you. Pray the Lord’s prayer to finish. Pray for God’s kingdom to come. Let the shift from “my will be done” to “your will be done” BE DONE. If you do this, you will know the peace, the absolute life, in Christ, that all Holy Scripture is leading you to.

Amen.

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GOWER is a place of Celtic saints – Peregrinari pro Christo, as the Romans described them – pilgrims for Christ (peregrē – “having a tendency to wander, cross borders”).

Christianity came to Wales through the sea trade routes in the first centuries AD and South Walean Celts were taught by travelling desert monks. From Wales, Illtyd, Teilo, Dewi, Cadog, Patric and the others travelled to other parts of these islands and beyond, teaching and evangelizing, long before the Romans brought their empire version and “converted” the Saxons.

Extraordinary people have stood where we worship this morning and gazed at the marsh and the trees and listened to the birds, sat under a yew tree, contemplated and given praise for the beauty, for the breath in their lives, and received holy communion with the saints of all time, all space. Extraordinary people have stood also in our lives, holding the Christ light for us to walk a little distance or stepping gently at our side.

Today the church remembers all the saints who have carried the faith through the ages, given their lives to the God who called them. May we not forget them.

Let us not forget the saints of our lives. Let us not forget too that each and every one of us is called to be extraordinary even if history does not remember us.  Saints do not expect such things and are certainly not motivated by them. Saints are all too aware of their own ineptitude but they give themselves anyway. Saints are people just like us. Please God, may the  peregrinari pro Christo find our way through the brambled paths of this time.

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“Jesus said, ‘Do not stop them (casting out demons or healing in my name); for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.”

There has been what seems to me a worrying trend in some of the world’s leading Christian denominations over recent years, toward a renewed and zealous ultra-conservatism with regard to non-Christian religions. Newly ordained priests in the Roman Catholic church in this country and in America have been a notable example but I have seen plenty of signs of it in the Church in Wales too, both among newly ordained clergy and the laity.

Elitist attitude toward the other is born of fear and ignorance. It does not come from Jesus and it is at best a complete misunderstanding of his teaching. At worst, it is contemptuous of it. Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. A religious constitution of any kind clearly is not.

There is much in common between our faith and the practices of the other major faiths. It is in honest dialogue with all God’s children, that we and they might grow in faith and in relationship with the Creator and with each other. Learning from the spiritual practices of others and sharing with them our own, is surely a natural response to the God we find in the face of all creation.

Someone asked the Dali Lama on a recent visit to UK, “How do I convert to Buddhism”. The wise one replied simply and quietly, “Go and become a better Christian”.

Let us walk in peace, secure in the notion that we are journeying in humility, empathy and respect into the heart of the universal Christ.

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On Good Friday, after 6 weeks or so of prayer, fasting and contemplation, the Church asks us to enter into the Christ event of the Cross – the historical moment itself and the cosmic ripples and echos of it, with all its ramifications and blessings for us and for all creation.

But Holy Cross Day is a bit different. It asks us to look at and to contemplate the symbolic nature of the Cross. So that’s what I am inviting you to do now and perhaps on into the next week. If I offer something from my own contemplations, what I offer is just that and you might well approach it differently. That’s well and good. Our thinking, feeling, contemplating, are ways of travelling towards the truth or God’s heart or the meaning of the Cross. But it will be necessary to let go of them all to actually arrive at such destination. In fact the mystics say that it is at that moment of letting go that we find that we have already arrived. John’s Gospel, for example,  is all about that I think.

One place I can begin my journey is with a negative image or with a negative but for me historically very powerful use of the image. The American writer Mark Twain said that, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” The Christ event of the Cross – the crucifixion, execution, murder of the innocent, God-filled Son of Peace – happened one time. History doesn’t repeat that but much of what I learned in school to be history and much of what I see in the world today certainly rhymes with it. Innocent people in and from Syria, Iraq, so many parts of Africa, South America, the Middle East and elsewhere, bombed out of their homes and forced to flee for their lives, echo and rhyme. The abuse of children, calls for so called voluntary euthanasia, shootings in schools, in the streets, on the beach, in the office, all of these rhyme with the executioners too.

But the negative image at the beginning for me this morning is that of a cross held out before the Roman, the French, the Spanish and the British Empire armies who went all over the world in the steps of “explorers” and wiped out indiginous lives and life-styles in the names of progress and freedom. So ironic! It would be laughable if it weren’t actually true. But it is true and the troubles around the world today are rooted right there in those empires’ abuse of this earth and its inhabitants. And it makes me weep that the cross was then used not only to somehow claim sanctity for such appauling treatment but to subsume the religious practices of people so in oneness with Creation and God already, and who were so able to receive Jesus’ teachings and love of God even through  the monsterous ways in which the Bible and the Cross were used as instruments of control by their European overlords.

So it is with the Native Americans, Australians, Africans and with out Celtic ancestors in mind that I look this morning at the Holy Cross.

Let’s look at this Celtic cross.

First my eyes fall on the centre, where the vertical and the horizontal intersect. The perpendicular. Here is Christ’s heart. God’s heart. The universal centre. The intersection between time (horizontal) and eternity (vertical). God pours love and healing and Holy Spirit into the world right here.

Then there’s the foot of the cross, rooted into the earth. The native peoples revere the mother earth. At the foot of Jesus’ cross, there were a few women and his beloved disciple. Among them was his earthly mother. The Cross reaches into the mother earth and rises to the heavens. Earthly life, beautiful, finite, painful, rising through the heart of God, poured out, broken for me, into new life, infinitely more beautiful, unbounded, eternal, free.

Free at last! And yet I am even now free. My life is already infite. As this Celtic circle reminds me, all is connected. Time and eternity kiss each other here at God’s heart and all within the extremities of nature and being touch each other. I am connected with my ancestors and with those not yet born. I am connected with whom I have been and whom I will be, with the earth and with heaven, with all directions north, south, east and west. I am connected with the sun’s rising and with its setting, with moon and stars, with the warm winds from the south and the west and the cold air from the north. My feet feel the warmth of the sand and the cool ocean bathes me. Rain refreshes my soul as sea meets sky and returns, pure and clean, upon my face, as I gaze from earth to heaven and know that the God who is there is here.

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Wisdom has sent out her servant-girls, she calls
from the highest places in the town, ‘You that are simple, turn in here!’… Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me…

After her “complete conversion” Thérèse of Lisieux, the late 18^th Century Carmelite mystic and “Little Flower of Jesus”, understood that she needed to stop striving to be good and instead accept her imperfections, trusting God to remove them in God’s time.  Thérèse came to see that imperfection is part of the human experience.

Striving for perfection only ever became identifiably Christian after the Church was “wedded” with empire in 313. Once aligned with the mind and will of empire and success, spirituality focuses on perfection, willpower achievement, performance and attainment. This “ladder theology” has undergirded much Western church doctrine since and only now are we beginning to shrug it off. It is not the way of Hebrew Bible Wisdom, nor is it coincidental with the teachings of Jesus and his early followers.

Shortly before she died, still aged only 24, Thérèse said, “I only love simplicity. I have a horror of pretence”. Her life’s quest: “I wanted to find an elevator that would raise me to Jesus”. This elevator, she wrote, would be the arms of Jesus lifting her in all her littleness.

Imperfection or littleness, in all the great spiritual traditions, is not an enemy to human/divine being. Neither is it just to be tolerated, made excuses for, or even need to be forgiven. It is in fact the very theatre in which God makes Godself known and where he calls all created into gracious communion. It is the moments of clarity, in which our disability is laid bare for us, when we realise we are not the makers of our own virtue and never can be, that allow us – sometimes force us – to “fall into the arms of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31) and so live.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (Born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin, January 2, 1873 – September 30, 1897)

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