Tag: trinity

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.

pilgrimage

Walking with Werburgh 3

Dr. Jennifer Fox Eades

“Creator of all, have mercy on us

Jesus bearer of our sins, have mercy on us

Spirit of grace and truth, grant us peace”

The prayer above emerged in the course of a 12 mile walk this morning along the Macclesfield Canal as I prepare for my June pilgrimage along The Two Saints Way. 6 miles one way, 6 miles plus breakfast on the way back ( I left early, to catch the bird song!)

And what I realised I had done was to craft a trinitarian prayer. The Holy Spirit can seem the poor relation of the trinity – She is mentioned far more rarely in our Christian prayers and liturgies than the other two persons of the trinity, traditionally God the Father and God the Son. And I make no apologies for prefering to gently balance the overwhelmingly masculine language of protestant Christianity by naming the first person as Creator, whatever the theological arguments against it (and there are many! There always are!)

One of the books I have been reading this Lent is a beautiful new translation of a spiritual classic, the Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence (a 16th century friar). This translation is called Practice of the Presence and is by Carmen Acevedo Butcher

Butcher speaks of the ‘kind divine community of the Trinity’ that weaves throughout the friar’s teaching as a bedrock of Christianity, a ‘healthy threeness’ often somehow missing from theology and church language.

So I am choosing to prepare for my pilgrimage in conscious company with that kind, divine community, as well as with St Werburgh and St Chad and my Franciscan friends, St Clare and St Francis.

And as I prayed I began to wonder who, exactly I was praying for? And indeed who I was going on pilgrimage for in the first place?

And at the start of today’s 12 miles I found I was praying for people I know and love – my own family and friends and the people of St Oswald’s, Bollington whom I have been privileged to serve and to grow to love these past 3 years. And then my prayer widened ….and I realised I was praying, too, for the wider world, and asking Jesus to bear the structural sins of inequality and poverty, war and racism, sexism and homophobia.

And then my prayer widened still more. Last night I was attending a Lent Course with my sisters and brothers of the Third Order https://tssf.org.uk/ which you can find here https://www.spiritoffrancis.com/europe/,. And we were asked what the land, in this case of Europe, asks us to remember truthfully. And perhaps because of that I found myself, this morning, praying for the land I was walking upon and asking the Creator to have mercy upon Mother Earth and Christ to bear the sins that we inflict upon Her and the Spirit to bring peace between humanity and the rest of creation, as well as peace between people and nations and peace to the heart of every human.

And I pondered, too, on the purpose of my pilgrimage. At a simple level it’s a kind of retreat, time out to mark the end of my ‘training curacy’ and the beginning of…..whatever the future holds. But I began to see, as I walked and as my prayer widened, that I would be walking and praying and letting my walking BE prayer for many people; for my churches, St Oswald’s, Bollington https://stoswaldbollington.org.uk/ and St Peter’s, Windmill Street https://stpetersmacc.org/; for the schools and carehomes I have worked with, for the diocese of Chester in which I serve https://www.chesterdiocese.org/ ; for our nation and the nations of the world and, yes, for Mother Earth itself on whom I will be walking .

St Francis understood the relatedness of all people – and all things. He called all humanity Sister and Brother but he extended that relatedness and mutual dependence to all of creation.

I hope to quietly, prayerfully, do the same.

And did I mention that the porridge at Waterside Cafe https://www.facebook.com/cafewaterside is REALLY good?