The Invisible Man

Reflection on this Sunday's gospel:

Dives and Lazarus
Luke 16:19-31




A voice from the other side

What I like most about this place
is that it’s always
just the right temperature.

That other place was so hot at times;
the sun would bake the earth to dust,
and the wind would lift it
and lash it into our faces
like it were punishing us.
Punishing us for being poor;
or maybe, just for being.
But there’s none of that here. It’s perfect.

And the light.
How can I describe the light to you?

It’s like that golden hour after dawn, or before dusk
when shadows are long
and the sun spreads its glow
across everything it touches, like spilt honey.

It reminds me of those evenings
when work was finally done
and we’d gather in that warm light;
sitting by the fire and sharing the little we had together.
Laughing, despite ourselves.
We had to laugh.
Sometimes it was all that kept away the tears.



It’s funny how some things stay with you.
Stronger than memories,
but less powerful somehow,
because here they can’t hurt you any more.

The hours of scraping a living off the land,
days of planting, picking and gathering –
well they’ve disappeared,
along with the sore back
and the calloused fingers that went with them.
I know that they happened,
but I can’t seem to recall much about them now.

But I remember my wife’s smile,
and the way she looked away from me shyly
when I first picked up the courage to talk to her.

I remember when we first made love
the evening we were married by the tribal elder;
sloping off to our tent like naughty children
with the laughing eyes of the villagers upon us.

And I remember our firstborn;
the wonder of seeing her thrust into the world;
a precious gift from God.
We passed her between us as if she were the first of her kind;
shockingly new.
And we loved her with everything we had within us.

But I remember too
the day the men came.
Men with strange speech
and odd clothes.
Smiling,
but never with their eyes,

I remember their shiny jewellery,
their expensive shoes,
and the way their eyes looked around them
even as they spoke to us.
Sizing up our people
scoping out the settlement.

I remember when the first of the trees fell,
and their machines started ripping up the landscape
we naïvely thought was ours.

“Making space for cattle” they said.
How many cattle do these rich people need?
How big are their bellies to need so much food?
Why should their hunger matter more than ours?
Why are their desires more important than our livelihood?

It’s easy now to see that I should have acted differently,
but an anger burned within me
that I couldn’t contain.
A rage for my people.
And for justice.

Without thinking I ran in front of one of the great machines
to make them stop this madness,

I heard you scream.

I felt you slip away.

And here I am.


There was no trial;
no media interest, of course.
We are the poor.
And our lives don’t count in that world.

All that happened was a sharp word from his boss
because this kind of thing isn’t good
for public relations.

The driver’s excuse?
He didn’t see me.

But he sees me now.
And I see him.

There he is,
Down there, across the chasm,
Along with all the others who in different ways at various times
Didn’t see.

Didn’t see the persecuted
Or the poor, or the lonely.

Didn’t see the beatings, or the bullying, or the exploitation.

Didn’t see what was blindingly obvious right under their noses;
or the plain wrong in what they were prepared to do

Didn’t see the process of cause and effect
which means that someone halfway across the world
can make one decision
and turn the lives of the poor upside-down.

And the irony is,
although they see us now,
the invisible ones they managed to ignore all their lives,
they still don’t see!

They ask for mercy, still blind to the fact that they showed none.
They seek help for their loved ones,
forgetting that their choices destroyed the lives of others.
They ask for someone to come back from the dead
so their family might believe,
when of course, someone already has come back from the dead,
and they didn’t pay a blind bit of notice to him.


It would be easy for me to be angry,
but somehow that emotion can’t exist here,
like fire can’t burn without oxygen.

Or maybe I could speak –
Send over a few words of comfort.
Because seeing them as they are now,
I bear them no malice.

But instead, I think I’ll keep silence and pray for mercy.
Because I already have
the only thing I ever wanted from these people.

To be seen.

A wonder-full weekend

Mission accomplished. We're safely back in St Hackett's after a bonzer weekend with our young people.

As I said earlier, this was a new departure for us, and we were more than a little nervous that everything would come together and the kids would enjoy it. As the one delegated to do the 'spiritual' bits, I felt a bit out of my zone because I've plenty of experience with primary children, but little with teenagers. But I needn't have worried.

"Where are your young people at?", you ask. Or at least, I make you ask, for the purposes of this discussion!

By and large they're delightful kids. Few, if any, would call themselves Christians, though almost all have been brought up in the church. Some are still accepting of that, others are beginning to feel the magnetic pull away to other things that seems to kick in at around the age of 13/14. They're media savvy (though we banned phones for the weekend, much to their horror!) and the girls, typically, are very image conscious. There's also a wide range of maturities as I found out when we did a session on the question of God's existence and discovered that two of the younger secondary kids still believed in Santa Claus. We are sheltered here, in St Hackett's.....!

So how do you hold all of that together?

Well on Friday night, as an epilogue after a late tea and some fun and games, I told them the story of Punchinello, by Max Lucado (http://members.aol.com/Crucible2/Punchinello.html) I've used that story in many different contexts from schools to Eventide Homes and it's always well received because issues of self-image and acceptance affect us all. Despite all the excitement, they listened really well.

Then on Saturday morning we did the session on God's existence. We split into three groups and each was given something/someone whose existence they had to deny and another thing/person whose existence they had to defend. Discovery - it can be just as hard to defend Nicole Kidman's existence as that of Santa Claus! Then we did the same about God, looking at evidence for and against. I got them to fill in (anonymously) a wee card saying what God was to them at that precise moment and that exercise was interesting enough to warrant another entry of its own.

After that we looked at the question of 'what is God like?' with video clips from Prince of Egypt, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Dogma, It's a Wonderful Life and Ice-Age 2. Using these clips we identified the attributes we thought God must surely have. I especially like Alanis Morrisette's turn as God in Dogma - a God who's (a) gorgeous (b) has a sense of humour and (c) can't do a handstand to save her life.

By the end of this session we began to touch on 'wonder' as one way in which God connects with us, and we explored that later in the afternoon after a visit to the Leisure Pool in Inverness. We thought about what wonder was, and when we'd experienced it our lives. And then I made the point that it can be very ordinary things that bring us wonder, using clips from Amelie (where she returns the box of childhood treasures to Bredoteau) and the inevitable plastic bag scene from American Beauty.

All of this set the scene for worship on Sunday. I knew they were a bit worried about it all ('there won't be any singing, will there?!) and so I deliberately made things a little more circumspect. As I've said in the last two posts, sometimes you see things more clearly when you don't look straight at them.

I started by telling them a story by Frederick Buechner called "Message in the Stars" (The Magnificent Defeat, Harper Collins). Basically, God shows his power unmistakeably by making the stars spell out messages in the sky. At first people are amazed and change their behaviour, but after months of this they get disaffected/bored. The point? That wonder itself isn't enough. We need to make a connection with God.

So we tried to make a connection - a Lectio Divina on Psalm 139, which again, they were remarkably still for. Next I showed them a range of a dozen thought-provoking images I'd gleaned from the net and printed onto postacrds, and invited them to choose one and think about it for a few moments to some meditative music. Then I led them in a reflection which helped them think about why they'd chosen that particular picture, and what God might be saying to them through that.

The next part of the service was the bit I was most unsure about. I'd given each of them a smooth black stone on their way in, and now I asked them to let that represent something that was holding them back from connecting with God. I asked them to come up, place it in the middle of the wee table in the centre, with candle and cross, and take away a square of chocolate to savour and 'taste and see the goodness of God'. Again, we filled the space with some ambient music and to my delight most of the young people made a response. I kept my eyes closed at this point so as not to make them feel at all pressured by me, but there was a big heap of stones and very little chocolate by the end, and I'm pretty sure they took it seriously. One of the most popular kids followed me up after I went first and that was a real answer to prayer. He kind of broke the ice for the others and gave them permission to act.

And finally (!) I'd prepared a card with each person's name on it and placed them around the room. While music was playing, we were to go and write something unconditionally positive about each person we'd shared the weekend with. Mine's presently pinned to my noticeboard for when I need reminding that at least some people in St Hackett's like/appreciate me!

So that was it. No huge decisions for Christ, but - I believe - lots of little ones. And these little things count. Fun was had, relationships strengthened and suppositions challenged. And we all enjoyed it so much - leaders included - that we'll definitely do it again.

But not for a while, ok.....?!

Shell shocked

Most of my week's gone on getting things together for our FIRST EVER St Hackett's Youth Group weekend. Remember that episode of Father Ted with Graham Norton as Father Noel Furlong? Arran jumpers and singing 'The Whole Of The Moon' at 3am in the dingiest caravan in Ireland? Well that's not going to happen.....!

Anyway - little time to blog this week, but a supplementary to my last entry. If you're joining us at this point, the question was "why is it that some things are better seen when we don't look straight at them?"

I still haven't processed that, but let me submit the following as supporting evidence:

Yes indeed - a shell. Drawn by me several years ago. Nothing exceptional about it except that I really can't draw for toffee and this is probably the best piece of art I've ever produced. It is unmistakeably shell-like.

My spiritual director at the time had given me a little task to do. She asked me to draw something, anything I liked, but to approach the task in an unusual way. She asked me not to focus on the edges and contours of whatever it was I'd chosen to study, but to look at the space around it. At first I thought she was bonkers (and told her so) but by the end of the session I knew exactly what she meant.

It was difficult at first, trying not to focus on what was so obviously in front of me, but looking at the space rather than the shell, softened the whole process and led to results I never thought I was capable of.

And I know now why she gave me that exercise. At the time there were a lot of things looming large in my mind, and she'd often tell me 'not to hold them so tightly'. Drawing my shell was an object lesson in how much better (and easier) things can be when we approach them with a little latitude. Makes sense?

TODAY'S SHIMMERING INSIGHT OF GLORY: You found God? Great!! If nobody claims him, he's yours in thirty days.

Starry, starry night

I'm writing at 1am in the morning, having just spent an hour reading the sky and smoking cigars. It's about as balmy as it gets in northern Scotland in September, certainly comfortable enough to be outdoors at midnight without risking your extremities to hypothermia. And tonight the stars were brilliant. St Hackett's parish is far enough out in the sticks to miss the worst of the city's sleepless glow, and for once the veil of grey clouds had parted long enough to reveal the night sky in all its glory.

I remembered other nights like this. Lying on my back at the fringes of a student beach party somewhere in the South of England, years ago. A special memory because we lay there for hours watching shooting stars, dozens of them, tear their way across the sky. Every now and again we'd spot something consistent and slower moving: a satellite traversing the heavens with purposeful precision. To my shame, at the age of 21, it was the first time I'd ever seen those things, or at least noticed them.

I remembered too walking back home with Rosie late one night while on holiday in the Hebrides; breathing in the pure sea air and avoiding the ditches at the roadside by the most phenomenal starlight I've ever seen. We wished that the low, wispy clouds would blow away so we could see things more clearly, and then we realised that these clouds were actually pinprick galaxies filling the darkness between the constellations with their gentle light

But tonight's experience was of a different kind. The background wonder was there as always, but allied to it was a determination that for once I wouldn't just experience, but learn. I nipped indoors, printed off a webpage that showed what I should expect to see in the night sky in our part of the world, and returned, torch in hand, cigar in mouth, to do my homework.

Mercifully, the plough/big dipper/Ursa Major was obvious. Low on the horizon by midnight. From there I traced Draco's tail swishing just above, fainter but still visible; her triangular head standing proud and poised to strike. Ursa Minor was harder, but once I found Polaris she showed herself, while up above her, Cepheus cut a precise rhombic form. It took a while, but once I'd spotted Cassiopeia's sideways 'w', Perseus and Auriga fell into place just below, and off to the east were the Pleiades whose name I only knew from the book of Job.


And it's there that I want to rest for a moment, because that cluster of stars, more than any other I think, illustrates the principle that some things are better seen when not looked at directly. When I set my focus just to the side of the Pleiades I saw the individual stars resolve out of the corner of my eye, and they seemed to shine brightly. When I looked straight at them, they faded and several seemed to disappear altogether.

And there's something in that, isn't there? But rather than post some half-assed idea to round off this little episode of "The Sky At Night" I'm going to think about what that 'something' might be and get back to you. Twinkle twinkle for now.

The Nearly Man

I saw him sitting there on the church steps as I drove past on my way home. A young man, I think, but all I saw clearly was the garish pink polo top he was wearing. Cresting the hill I swung the car left, passing his stationary Audi, and slowed to a halt in our driveway, just a hundred yards from where he was sitting, head bowed, outside my church. People only come to our churchyard for one thing during the day time; to lay flowers and remember the dead.

I cut the engine and sank back into the seat, realising I'd a choice to make. I sat there deep in thought for a good few moments, well aware that this would probably look weird to Rosie if she'd happened to look out the kitchen window.

Part of me - the efficient, jobsworth part - tried to play it down. It was none of my business... he probably wanted to be left alone to grieve... there was work I needed to be getting on with. Yadda yadda yadda. The coward inside me nodded and reminded me that I could be walking into a difficult situation here. Maybe he was on something; maybe it was my case he'd be on, because I was a minister and God - this God who's building he was sitting outside - had stolen someone precious from him. What if I ended up in the firing line?

But despite whatever reason those arguments contained, I knew, viscerally, what I had to do. I had to get out of the car and walk round to see that stranger. I don't wear the cheesy wristband, but I know that's exactly WJWD. So screwing up my courage I trudged round to the front of the church, without answers or anodyne; but by the time I'd got there the steps were empty and the car was gone.

Who the man in the pink polo shirt was I'll probably never know, and maybe the conversation we never had wouldn't have been life changing for either of us. But as I think about it, maybe the encounter was all about that choice I made in the car; the choice to risk vulnerability in the thin hope that somehow I could be an angel, a messenger of God to him.

Maybe next time I won't be so slow to spread my wings.

TODAY'S TRANSLUCENT PEARL OF WISDOM: Life consists in what you do, not what happens to you. Things happen to a stone.

Slow Work?

Ok - so why the title?

Well the phrase "slow work" comes from a poem by Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I came across it a few years ago and felt a deep resonance with what he's saying.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are, quite naturally,
impatient in everything to reach the end
without delay.
We should like to skip
the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being
on the way to something unknown,
something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability –
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually –
Let them grow,
let them shape themselves
without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today
what time and grace and circumstances
will make you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
And accept the anxiety of
feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

For someone like myself, in transit between old certainties readily received and new convictions hard won, these are good words to hang on to. These things take time. It's ok not to have all the answers. Take it one step at a time. Trust that God is there, leading you. There's something about this that has the absolute ring of truth for me.

I remember as a kid feeling my way into the sciences at school. In the first few years of secondary education they'd tell you about atoms and you'd assume they were hard little spheres, like mini marbles. Then, later on, they'd explain that they were more complicated; that inside the atom was this core with protons and neutrons, and orbiting around them in different 'shells' were the electrons - tiny planets spinning around a tiny nuclear sun. Then, just when you'd got that into your head, they confessed that it was even more complex! These electrons didn't actually move in shells, but existed in probability clouds around the nucleus. I remember these grey forms seriously illustrated in dense textbooks - some looking like smoothed-over Charles Atlas dumbells, others like the petals of some cosmic uber-flower. Better still, Heisenberg told us that we couldn't know an electron's position and speed at the same time anyway. And that's before we get into quarks and mesons and bosons......


And here's the point. You can't jump from A to Z in one effortless bound. There's a whole lot of learning you simply have to go through before you're ready for Z. There's slow work to be done. You have to take each model, flawed though it is, and get it into your head before you're ready for the next one.

Moving between models is painful (just ask Rod Stewart). Certainties have to be divested and unknowing has to be embraced, and that inevitably brings some instability. But in the long run, the work is worth it because a better model, a deeper understanding, emerges which allows you to do more and think better than ever before.

For years now I've felt that instability in my theology as I feel my way towards an understanding which can cope with all that I've had to leave behind. But at the same time, in my spirit, I have a growing sense that what lies ahead; indeed what already surrounds me, is far better than I've ever known. A God more embracing, more loving, more generous than I could ever have believed. At times I catch glimpses of that God, and on occasions rarer still, I might even reflect something of him to others. For the hope of knowing more about that kind of God, I can accept the anxiety of feeling myself in suspense and incomplete. Thanks, Teilhard.

TODAY'S WORDS OF PROFOUND WISDOM: There's always an easy solution to every human problem: neat, plausible and wrong