Tag: contemplation

pilgrimage, Prayer

Still walking with Werburgh….and the Risen Christ

Dr. Jennifer Fox Eades

This post is written a week after my last walk….a long walk to Marple and back. And perhaps it was too long? It certainly left me with bruised toes and a need to work out how to better protect my feet on a 20 mile hike. And perhaps it left me with a bruised ego too…..hence the time lag between walking and reflection. Somehow I thought I could do this without struggle, without pain.

But the day AFTER my overly long walk, I was planning ANOTHER pilgrimage, this time with Year 6 at St John’s Primary School, Bollington. The children want to walk a Bollington pilgrimage as part of saying goodbye and marking the end of their time at primary school. And a wise and articulate 11 year old girl said, ‘It can be hard work. Pilgrimages ought to be hard’.

And of course, she is right. Pilgrimages ARE meant to be a struggle, are meant to tax us, physically, mentally, spiritually. Because it’s when we are challenged that we grow.

And my walking is being done in the season of Easter. As I explained to children at St John’s and Bollington Cross this week, Easter is a LONG festival, it lasts 7 Sundays, ending on the feast of Pentecost on 24th May this year. And I have been walking it with Werburgh and, a little unexpectedly for me, with a new sense of the presence of the Risen Christ.

Ian Mobsby, in his reflection for the Sixth Sunday of Easter speaks of letting go as a contemplative practice….letting go of certainty, letting go of needing to have clear answers, letting go even of our images of God. https://postsecularcontemplative.substack.com/p/easter-week-6-10-16th-may-reflection?r=50siwv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

I agree. That has been my experience. About 20 years ago, after being profoundly wounded by people in the church, I felt called to let go of everything I believed about God. And it hurt. And I felt a sense of loss, of bereavement. I mourned the faith I had let go of.

More recently I found myself unexpectedly back in church and even on the path to ordination. Yet I also found myself letting go of Jesus. It was not that I stopped believing in the Trinity, the kind divine community at the heart of Christianity but the White Jesus, the Colonial Jesus, the dominating, powerful macho Jesus proclaimed in a riot at the Whitehouse and used to wound and hurt my black and disabled and LGBTQI+ friends….I felt called to let go of him. Not really knowing if another Jesus would turn up…..

And again, I felt lonely. Again, it hurt. Again I mourned the relationship I had let go. But I just wasn’t sure who Jesus was anymore. It was hard, listening to friends in chapel singing about this Jesus I didn’t think I recognized anymore. Intellectually I knew Jesus hadn’t gone anywhere but he felt …..absent.

And then, again unexpectedly, this Easter, the Risen Christ has been with me once more, walking the canal paths, sitting with me in Ian’s beautiful meditations, somehow there once more. And I feel a profound comfort and a sense of being healed, of being held.

The spiritual life IS a pilgrimage. And I know I, at least, need to let go of the idea that this pilgrimage is, or ought to be easy. Ought not to hurt. Because sometimes we get bruised toes. But always, always…..felt or not…….the Risen Christ is with us. Amen.

Book Reviews, Prayer, Spirituality, Well-being in education

Book Review: Appreciating Church

Dr. Jennifer Fox Eades

Tim Slack and Fiona Thomas

Appreciating Church: A practical appreciative inquiry resource for church communities

ISBN: 978-0-9955594-1-7

Publisher: Fiona Shaw www.appreciating.church

Appreciating Church is a handbook style resource book based on an ecumenical project of the same name. The aim of the project is to create ‘communities of practice’ – groups that foster change in positive, hopeful, inclusive and encouraging ways. Behind the project, and behind the book, is the organizational practice of Appreciative Inquiry, a practice that is based on looking for the best in people and in organizations. Developed by David Cooperrider, appreciative inquiry and, by extension, Appreciating Church start NOT from the viewpoint that organizations are problems to be solved, but that they are miracles of human organizing and ingenuity – to be appreciated.

I heard Cooperrider speak once. He is both the son and the father of Christian ministers. His belief in the potential of human goodness to bring about positive change in the world was palpable and deeply inspiring. He was perhaps the most hope filled person I have ever met. Cooperrider’s key insight is that if you go looking for problems you will find them – and you are then likely to get bogged down in them. If you ask different questions – questions about when an organization is at its best, when its people are at their best, you don’t cover over the difficulties but you do help to generate the imagination, the creativity and the energy needed to move beyond them. In every system, every church, every person – something is working, something good is happening. Appreciative inquiry seeks to find that goodness and to grow it.

Appreciating Church is a practical resource for bringing some of that hope filled appreciation into churches and church projects. It does this by bringing together a bit of theory, a lot of stories and a lot of resources to help communities see themselves and the future a little bit differently. As a church leader, I particularly liked – and will be able to quickly and easily use – the practical suggestions for introducing an appreciative approach into meetings and also its use for the discipline of spiritual journaling.

Richard Rohr describes contemplation as a way of seeing that includes recognizing and appreciating. I have worked with appreciative inquiry in the past and recognize its overlap with the contemplative path. Appreciating Church seems to me to be one more way in which the essential spiritual path of contemplation is being reinvigorated for today’s church.