Author: mrgsponderings

God walks among the pots and pans

God walks among the Pots and Pans – a reflection on St Teresa’s day October 15th

Teresa of Avila believed that God could be found in everyday and rather ordinary activities as well as in the silence of prayer in church or some special place.
Though she herself had experienced deep mystical experiences she was down-to-earth and practical.
When it was reported to her that a sister was having an extreme religious experience which threatened to overwhelm her, Teresa advised that she should eat marmalade. (she knew the importance of sugar balance!) Another sister in a similar state was told, quite sharply, that she was there to do the dishes!
Though she was granted a particularly great spiritual experience of God, known as the Ecstasy of St. Teresa, which she described as a “complete transformation of the soul in God,” she firmly believed that God was to be found and experienced in everyday ways.

Most of the time, our journey of faith is really quite ordinary. Yet it is in the midst of ordinariness that God opens Himself to us and warms our hearts. I’ve always liked what St. Teresa of Avila said—God walks among the pots and pans. He’s can be found in the ordinary things that we do and the tasks we perform, like cooking and cleaning the dishes. Whilst experiencing Jesus in church worship and in the sacramental life, God is always near us. If our hearts are tuned to him we shall recognize him in the mundane, the unexciting, the ordinariness where Jesus is constantly waiting to meet us.

Teresa was born in the 16th century and her feast day is on Tuesday. At an early age she was fired up by the lives of the saints and she was particularly taken by the martyrs and their complete self-offering to God.
When she was about 12 she decided that she would leave home and travel to where there were enemies of Christ who would, she confidently believed, behead her! Then she would immediately enter heaven. She took her younger brother Rodrigo with her but fortunately for them, they were apprehended by an uncle before they had reached the outskirts of the town. He noted that the ever-practical Teresa had remembered to pack sandwiches.

Though she failed to receive the martyrs crown she responded to the call from God which was to be total and life-long. Entering a Carmelite convent at the age of 21, she was to be dogged by ill health for many years, even to the point of death. It was when she experienced a mystical visitation from God which left her heart trembling that she was “left completely afire with a great love for God.” She knew then that her soul would “never be content with anything less than God.”

At this time in Spain, the convent life was one of luxury. Nuns even had their own personal maids! Teresa received a call from God to restore a sense of sacrifice and simplicity to the Carmelite order. With thirteen other nuns, she left the security of her convent and for the rest of her life she founded a different sort of convent. Throughout Spain she introduced reforms, some of which she had to argue for in front of prelates and even a Pope but she was not afraid of anything that she saw as standing in the way of God. Simple convents for a simple God-centered way of life. The nuns went barefoot as they trod gently but purposefully towards God and His Kingdom.

Teresa rushed all over Spain founding such convents, and earning the nickname as ‘God’s Gadabout’. But in the midst of all this activity was a soul stilled into prayer. She remained close to God in the silence of true prayer. She never ceased to find him in the ordinariness of her daily life.

Sometimes she met Jesus in ways she would have preferred not to! On a particularly rainy day, the ox-cart in which she was travelling got stuck in the mud. Seeking to help in some way, she jumped from the cart into mud almost up to her knees, whereupon she shook her fist towards heaven and is supposed to have said, It is no wonder that your Majesty has such few friends, the way you treat us!’
She was to write many fine words about prayer but surely none would come straight from her heart as that did!

Her spiritual guides insisted that she wrote down her thoughts about prayer and they are, to this day, among the great spiritual classics. They reflect her holiness, wisdom and sense of humour. Through them she has become a favourite teacher of prayer to many, many people.
Her teaching was recognized by the Church, when shortly after her death she was made a saint who was truly a ‘teacher of the faith’

Her words, her teaching, her example, have given us a rich treasury from which to discover how to both accept and give the love of God; a love through which we grow faithfully and in the knowledge that God is always close to us. In everyday ways and everyday words Teresa helps us to open our hearts more fully in peace and trust to the one she always called Your Majesty, and lived close to in deep friendship and love. So might we.

[Mr G]

Getting it right

Refugees by Brian Bilston

Brian Bilston will be known to many who frequent Instagram and Twitter.
Each day he present a poem or sometimes just a verse, often entertaining and witty. Sometimes pithy. Always with something to say about the human condition.
As well as poems online, he has also published a number of books ; collections of his social media offerings and others.
His first poetry book was entitled, You took the last bus home.

you took
the last bus home

i still don’t know
how you got it through the door

but you’re always doing amazing stuff

like the time
when you caught that train

Since then he has written a novel Diary of a Somebody (Picador, 2019) was shortlisted for the Costa first novel award. He has also published a collection of football poetry, 50 Ways to Score a Goal (Macmillan, 2021), and his acclaimed poem Refugees (Palazzo, 2019) has been made into an illustrated book for children. A new collection, Days Like These, which features a poem for every day of the year, will be published later this month.

He is described by some as the unofficial Poet Laureat of Twitter. With over 350,000 followers that is a worthy title. He is also a bit reclusive. He is clouded in the pipe smoke of mystery though unless he has several disguises, he is currently open to discovery as he tours bookshops and venues reading his poetry. He is said to have a thing about tank tops, loves Vimto, and isn’t all that keen on Jeremy Clarkson.

(* Vimto is a strange and popular drink which is bottled in the Manchester area. Hard to describe its taste but for North Easterners and Scots folk, it is nothing like Irn Bru)

My point about introducing his poem to you is partly because without his zany poetry I’m sure your life may be a touch diminished but mainly, because he has a message we need to hear.

His Poem Refugees is, to my mind, something profound and powerful on the subject and I print it below with just a thought: So often we can get things the wrong way round and our judgements are flawed as a result.

REFUGEES

They have no need of our help
So do not tell me
These haggard faces could belong to you or me
Should life have dealt a different hand
We need to see them for who they really are
Chancers and scroungers
Layabouts and loungers
With bombs up their sleeves
Cut-throats and thieves
They are not
Welcome here
We should make them
Go back to where they came from
They cannot
Share our food
Share our homes
Share our countries
Instead let us
Build a wall to keep them out
It is not okay to say
These are people just like us
A place should only belong to those who are born there
Do not be so stupid to think that
The world can be looked at another way

Now read it from top to bottom

poem is (c) copyright, Brian Bilston.

Red Glory

Red Glory – Autumn notes from the Lake District.
Photo of Bramble by my Friend, Gill Henwood.

“Brambles here are stunning this year, after a bumper blackberry harvest in the fells
along hedgerows and dry stone wall verges.
More brambles will be seeded everywhere by the birds
… our Labrador has become expert at softly picking the low berries,
without a mouthful of prickles.
No doubt wildlife do the same (or wait till the berries drop). ” [Gill]

Late summer swelling on bramble vine
feeds jam-makers and pie-bakers
and early winged treat-finders.
Then October rain comes
sliding over reddening leaves,
dripping from purpling boughs
onto dank grass preparing for sleep.
Thorns creep slowly into winter mist
waiting to enfold in silence
until new growth comes.

The work is done.
Or is it!

[Mr G]

“Enlighten the darkness of my heart”

*Latton foxes gather around St Francis. Photo by The Revd Lynn Hurry*

When St Francis gave up his life as a kind of lad-about in Assisi – when he turned away from drinking, fighting, leading a pack of rebels, it was because he had been brought up sharp by Jesus.
Not for the first time or the last, God had visited the soul of one whose life was going in entirely the wrong direction. Francis’s soul was sick and needed healing.
So God drew him away to a derelict church of St. Damiano on the edge of Assisi. There he knelt in prayer and looked at the faded crucifix still hanging over the altar. Francis insists that the voice of Christ came to him from that crucifix, at that moment. The words he heard were: Francis, rebuild my church, which you see is falling down.
The derelict Church certainly needed repairing, just as Francis’s soul needed rebuilding. Francis was about to begin his ministry and service for God.

First, though, he had to get to know the One who called him to this service and to know the love of God flowing into him and through him to others. Francis opened his heart to God in Holy conversation.
As he knelt in that place of meeting with Jesus, the first prayer he said was one that was to remain with him throughout the rest of his life.

The Prayer before the Crucifix

Most High, glorious God,
enlighten the darkness of my heart
and give me
true faith,
certain hope,
and perfect charity,
sense and knowledge,
Lord, that I may carry out
Your holy and true command

Another prayer is this which was to become food for his soul, in which he prays that the love of the Lord Jesus should enter his heart and absorb him with its fire and sweetness. It is known as the Absorbeat because God’s loving Spirit possesses him.

May the power of your love, Lord Christ,
fiery and sweet as honey,
so absorb our hearts
as to withdraw them from all that is under heaven.
Grant that we may be ready
to die for love of your love,
as you died for love of our love. Amen

Francis certainly used this prayer often , and it is characteristic of his spirituality.

A simple, yet deeply profound prayer was one that he is said to have dictated as he lay dying.
It was a prayer which he had used often and wasn’t original, but it was so important to him that it was his deathbed prayer. Many will know it in some form.

We adore you, most holy Lord Jesus Christ,
here, and in all your churches throughout all the world;
and we bless you,
because, by your holy cross,
you have redeemed the world.

Francis grew quickly and deeply in love with God and this spurred on his eagerness and zeal to serve others in God’s Name.

Richard Rohr, a much loved Franciscan brother who lives in America and teaches Franciscan spirituality wrote this week that the only way we can truly know how to love God is to love what God loves. Only then do we love with divine love and allow it to flow through us.

It is not always easy to do that because such love has to be stripped of anything that makes demands or is tinged with our desire for them to be what we want.
A Franciscan theologian, Duns Scotus, put it this way.

“we are to love things in and as themselves, to love things for what they are, not for what they do for us. That’s when we really begin to love our spouses, our children, our neighbours, and others. When we free them from our agendas, then we can truly love them without concern for what they do for us, or how they make us look, or what they can get us. We begin to love them in themselves and for themselves, as living images of God. Now that takes real work!”

Through Prayer and especially time alone with and for God, this spirituality of loving what God loves, simply because God does so, became central to St Francis’s own spirituality and way of life. It became the driving force for his work with the poor, the sick, the lepers, animals, birds and all of nature.
It was how he came to love and honour God.

So he came to Praise God above all else.
This he expressed in another Prayer poem

Praises of God.

You alone are holy,
you who work wonders!.
You are strong, you are great,
you are the Most High,
you are the almighty King,
you, holy Father, King of heaven and earth.

Lord God: you are Three and you are One,
you are goodness, all goodness,
you are the highest Good,
Lord God, living and true.

You are love and charity, you are wisdom,
you are humility, you are patience,
you are beauty, you are sweetness,
you are safety, you are rest, you are joy,
you are our hope
and our delight,
you are justice, you are moderation
you are all our wealth
and riches overflowing.

You are beauty, you are gentleness,
you are our shelter, our guard
and our defender,
you are strength, you are refreshment,
you are our hope.
you are our faith.
you are our love,
you are our complete consolation,
you are our life everlasting,
great and wonderful Lord,
all powerful God, merciful Saviour!

Amen.

Of course, we are probably all familiar with the poem/song Make me a channel of your peace. It is known as the Prayer of St. Francis but it was not written by him. Indeed in was probably written in the 1920’s but who could read, pray or sing it, without acknowledging that it is marinated in St. Francis’s own spirituality.

There is so much in his sayings, these prayers, and canticles I haven’t referred to, but if we are to understand the witness and service of St. Francis, these prayers above are a good place to start.

The San Damiano Cross from Fr. Michael Scanlan

[Mr G]