Thinkabout shared at St Johns Pevensey Road on Sunday May 5th 2024

(Readings were: 1 John 5:1-6 and  John 15:9-17)

We’re immersed in the letters and gospel of John, and this week — as last week — we’re up to our eyes in love. In this church, our great preacher on love is Father David, and I think he made a good case for it last Sunday.

Now, I am not very big on love; in all honesty I think love is so very complex that I’m not more than about 30% sure what it is. Love has never been my thing, to be truthful; but I am very good at problem-solving, so that’s the track I’m heading down today.

Back in 2011, Alan Titchmarsh interviewed Prince Philip in a programme called Prince Philip at Ninety. I watched that in a Travelodge on the Ouse Bridge in York, and Prince Philip said something in that interview that I have never forgotten.

Alan Titchmarsh pressed him to talk about his relationship with Prince Charles — now our King, of course — specifically, he wanted to explore the rumours that it was not an easy relationship.

And Prince Philip said that there are basically two kinds of people — pragmatists and romantics — and he said that he was essentially a pragmatist, where Prince Charles was essentially a romantic; so they saw the world very differently from each other.

I can easily imagine that to be true, but what caught my attention was that it made me realise that I, too, am essentially a pragmatist. Problem-solving and finding work-arounds has been the story of my life. I am not a dreamer.

So when I am confronted by texts like our readings today, dizzying stuff about love and laying down your life and bearing fruit that will last and conquering the world, I don’t think “Yes!” or “Hallelujah!” 

I think, “How the heck are we going to do that, then?”

If you are essentially a romantic, you are probably already okay with John the Evangelist, who paints his canvas on a cosmic scale, whose spirituality flies high — that’s why the evangelical creature that represents him is the eagle — and whose vision of life and love and glory is pretty much off the charts. He’ll speak to your soul.

But if you are, like me, essentially a pragmatist, I wonder how you responded to this from our epistle:

“And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.”

Or this, from our gospel:

“I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.”

Right. Gosh.

Pragmatists are, of course, very disappointing to romantics; horribly down-to-earth and not very charming. A sharp eye for the budget, be that of money, time or energy. It was Gandhi who said, in his book Experiments in Truth, “Without properly kept accounts it is impossible to maintain truth in its pristine purity,” and that’s how you know Gandhi, in contrast to his friend Rabindranath Tagore, was essentially a pragmatist. He was interested in the detail, and in figuring out how to put stuff into practice.

So St John is telling us that we’re going to be conquering the world, bearing fruit that will last, and furthermore that the Father will give us whatever we ask in the Name of Jesus.

Really? 

Well, let me say that I am a Bible kind of Christian. I do believe what’s in this book.

The Bible speaks into our lives with great power. When a Bible is presented to the monarch at their coronation, the archbishop says this:

“receive this book,

the most valuable thing that this world affords.

Here is wisdom;

This is the royal law;

These are the lively oracles of God.”

And I absolutely believe that. So when it says we’re going to be conquering the world, bearing fruit that will last, and that the Father will give us whatever we ask in the Name of Jesus, I assume that to be true. We just have to figure out how to do it.

I want to suggest an approach that may help. Five things.

Let’s start with “his commandments are not burdensome.” Seriously? What like, “be born again”, “take up your cross” and “unless someone gives up everything they have, they cannot be my disciple”? “Take my yoke upon you; my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”

Well maybe these are not burdensome, maybe his burden is light, if he’s carrying the burden. So my first suggestion, as a pragmatist, is — Phone a friend. Get help. The first indispensable essential for actually living this stuff is to get in touch with Jesus and keep in touch with him. Turn to him. Talk to him. Listen to him. Invite him in to your heart and life. I mean that simply and literally, not figuratively. Take some time out to sit down quietly in your room, by yourself with him, and talk to him; ask him in; give your life to him — I mean, you might as well; it’s too hard to do it by yourself. So, thing one is: Phone a friend. Get help.

Thing two, is start with something small. What is small? You are. When the epistle says “whatever is born of God conquers the world” (off you trot, do it then) — I put it to you that the world is not entirely external. It is also within you, as indeed so is the kingdom. Start by conquering the world that is in you while you’re gearing up to changing society and overthrowing the government. Begin at home. What do you think needs changing? Are you sick of corruption and lack of integrity? Get to work on your own pretensions and minor dishonesty. Cultivate authenticity in your own life. Are you sick of cruelty and violence? Start with your own minor meanness, the little unkind things you say and do. Start small. Begin with yourself. Work on what’s familiar.

Thing three, is begin with what is near. There are reasons Jesus told us to love our neighbour. For one thing, if we all do that then the social revolution happens overnight and the kingdom of heaven is made manifest on earth. Or, to look at it the other way round, the whole thing grinds to a halt before it gets off the ground if we don’t do that. Start with what is nearest to you. Love your neighbour. And that isn’t necessarily easy is, it? Some of us can’t stand our neighbours, and not only that but have you met our families? But then, as the fairly awful James Dobson once said, “If your Christianity doesn’t work at home, it doesn’t work: don’t export it.” So begin with what is near.

Thing four is, pace yourself. A master builder once said to me that men need tea breaks. If you don’t let them have tea breaks they burn out. Or, as my grandma used to express it, there was a man who had a donkey; he discovered he could make it do more work for longer if he gave it less food. Then he discovered he could make it work even longer with even less food. He’d just got it to the place where he could make it work all day with no food at all, when the donkey died!

Be kind to yourself. Take tea breaks. You can’t change the world all at once, this is a lifetime commitment, you’re going to have to factor in a snack and have some fun, or it will all go badly wrong and you’ll be unbearable. Pace yourself. You have to, because this is for real.

And then thing five, my last one, is get correctly aligned. What Jesus said, “the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name,” he did absolutely mean. But the “in my name” part is important: it’s not “anything you ask full stop”.

To know what you can ask in his name, you have to get to know him, notice what he’s like, how he lived — how he died — who he was. To make the miracle happen, you have to be correctly aligned. You have to be plugged in to the mains to let the power flow through. But if you are, it will. I can assure you.

So that is my pragmatist’s starter for ten on how to conquer the world:

Phone a friend — sit down with him and ask for his help.

Start with something small — like yourself.

Start with what’s near — like your neighbour.

Pace yourself — take tea-breaks.

And get yourself correctly aligned. Walk in his way.

And then, you know — all the stuff about love — if that leaves you as bamboozled as it leaves me, it’s worth remembering this: to all practical purposes, love and kindness are almost indistinguishable. While you’re waiting for love to take off in your heart, you can practice a bit by being kind. It’s pretty much the same thing.

I hope that helps. It’s a big project, but he thinks we can do it.

Jesus walked. And he stopped. What is the speed of love?

We’ll get there.

 

The Hawk and the Dove new edition, Volume One

 So friends — The Hawk and the Dove (as in the book, the first volume in the series) is now available on Amazon, both as a paperback and a Kindle book. If you have Kindle Unlimited, it's free to read there.

This is the cover for the new edition.

Some news about The Hawk & the Dove series

 The Hawk and the Dove (the first series rather than just the first book) was published in the traditional way, with regular publishers, over the course of about thirty years.

I wrote the first book in the series — The Hawk and the Dove — in 1989, and Kingsway published it in the UK in 1990. In the US, it was published by Good News, back in Al Fisher's time. 

At that time, Tony Collins (whom I married about 20 years later) was just starting his Monarch imprint at Kingsway. He passionately believed in fiction as a carrier of ideas, and Monarch became the Kingsway fiction list. In the two years that followed, Kingsway published further books of mine under the Monarch imprint, including the next two Hawk & Dove books — The Wounds of God and The Long Fall.

My prayer partner Margery (who died in 2004) was a stained glass artist and banner-maker, and she did the cover picture for the Kingsway (Monarch) edition of The Long Fall. That became very special to me, because it was the last piece of art work she ever did. She was already growing old at that point, and her eyesight failed. It was while she was working on the cover for The Long Fall that the first signs of macular degeneration manifested; it developed very quickly, and her eyesight was functionally gone in a brutally short space of time. I felt so grateful and so proud that we were able to work together in that way before it was too late. Only rarely is a writer allowed to choose their own cover art, and it was because I had the blessing of working with Tony Collins at Kingsway that this opportunity came about. Meanwhile, I also wrote Thereby Hangs a Tale (short stories) for Kingsway, and a non-fiction book, Spiritual Care of Dying and Bereaved People out of the work I did for some years as part of a hospice chaplaincy team, published by SPCK. 

After those books (and a couple of others) I became immersed in working as a Methodist minister, and I was fully occupied with pastoring church congregations and wrote no more books for some years.

My first marriage ended when my husband left me for someone else. Among other initiatives, I wrote another novel — The Clear Light of Day — at that point; and again I asked Tony Collins to be my publisher. By that time Kingsway had closed down their fiction list, and Monarch had moved with Tony to Lion Hudson, who accordingly published The Clear Light of Day; David C. Cook took it for the United States.

I married again. My second husband died of an auto-immune condition a short while into that marriage. 

Another year went by and I learned that Tony's marriage was ending. While, of course, that is always sad news, it blossomed into a very happy thing because at that point our professional relationship became personal, and we married in 2006. His work as a publisher was based in Oxford, so I left my work as a minister in Hastings to move up-country and be with him.

Good News publishers still had the original Hawk & Dove trilogy, republished as a one-volume edition around the year 2000. I asked them how they'd feel about my writing a further novel in the series for 2009, since that would be 20 years in from when I wrote the first story, and they were keen to do that — so, now released from church pastoral duties, I wrote The Hardest Thing To Do, but that expanded into five further stories, bring the series up to nine volumes.  In the same time frame I wrote some non-fiction books for Lion Hudson. Because Tony and I were now husband and wife, he had to recuse himself from the publishing decision and process in respect of my work, so I had a different editor at Lion Hudson for a few years. 

Then Good News began to close down their fiction list, so Lion Hudson expressed interest in acquiring the whole series, and thus it came back to the UK. 

In 2009 Tony and I moved back to Hastings where the rest of my family is based — a very happy move. Here we live in a shared house with two of my daughters, Hebe and Alice Wilcock, both freelance artists.

Eventually Lion Hudson was bought out by SPCK, and almost all my work (about 20 books) therefore came under SPCK's auspices. For a short while, at that point, Tony also worked with SPCK, and I wrote two books for them — Equality is Biblical and Into the Heart of Advent. 

As the years have gone by, self-publishing has become more realistic and enjoyable than once it was, and in 2020 I wrote Relinquishment, extending the thinking of my book In Celebration of Simplicity, written around 2008. We published Relinquishment with the Amazon Kindle platform, under our own imprint Humilis Hastings. Jonathan Roberts, a very gifted covers man from Lion Hudson, designed the cover for me and helped with formatting. Tony Collins edited for me, and Louise Stenhouse copy-edited. Good team!

In 2022 I became ill, and have since joined the ranks of the chronically ill. My life became much more limited, more contracted, but I could still write. So during 2022 I spent the summer writing This Brother of Yours and Brother Cyril's Book — more stories from St Alcuins Abbey where The Hawk & the Dove series is set. To avoid confusion, since SPCK had the first nine volumes, we published these as Series 2, under our Humilis Hastings imprint. Alice and Hebe did the cover art, Jonathan Roberts designed the covers using their work, Tony edited and Louise Stenhouse copy-edited. 

We were also able to recover the rights of a rewritten and much expanded edition of Spiritual Care of Dying and Bereaved People that BRF (Bible Reading Foundation) published around 2008, and brought this out with cover art by Hebe Wilcock under our Humilis Hastings imprint.

It felt very exciting to be working from home together like this — it reminded me of the way William Morris and friends worked in the Arts and Crafts movement. It has the same integration of work and friendship, and I love it.

And now, the next step of the journey.

SPCK has kindly agreed to give me back the rights to all my work. There are some non-fiction books that for the moment we will leave to one side, though we may republish them with Humilis Hastings in due course — but (I feel so pleased about this) we will be re-publishing in the Humilis Hastings imprint the entire first series of The Hawk & the Dove — all nine books.

Just today, the first one is ready — The Hawk and the Dove. Alice and Hebe Wilcock will be the cover artists for the whole series, and Jonathan Roberts is the designer and formatter. Tony Collins has edited and Louise Stenhouse has copy-edited. We will work through all nine books and publish them under our own imprint one by one as soon as we can get them done.

The cover will look like this, and it should be out on Amazon as an e-book and a paperback in the next few days.

This feels very satisfying to me.

Another very joyous aspect of this is the decision to split all proceeds from my book sales with the Carthusian community in West Sussex (I live in East Sussex, so they are not far away). The Carthusians are the closest it is possible for anyone now living to get to a medieval monastic community, because the Carthusian Rule has remained unchanged since the 11th century. Their share of my book money is sent to them as it comes in to me, so I don't deduct my publishing costs (fees for work done on text and covers) from that money — those costs come out of my half of the proceeds. The Carthusians are not allowed to be a charity, because their work is prayer and the contemplative pathway; therefore the Charities Commission deems them to be doing nothing useful so they can't be a charity and can't expand their income by reclaiming tax. But you know and I know that there is no more valuable work in all the world than to go on steadily with the unbroken service of prayer and adoration, and I am so proud to be able, even in this small way, to help towards it. I hope that makes you as happy as it does me. It gives me a sense of real contentment. Every person who buys  a story of mine published under the Humilis Hastings imprint can know they are directly helping the Carthusian order continue in their path of contemplative prayer.

Input for the April 2024 gathering of the Lantern Group

At our Lantern Group meeting this time, we thought about spiritual cleaning — cleansing and purifying, not housework!

We were looking at three areas:

• Cursing and blessing.
• Severance
• The Ho-oponopono prayer.

Now, this is about the removal from society, or one’s personal life, of toxic input — that might be abuse or bullying, whether directed at you or at someone else; or other toxic behaviours that are spoiling your life or the common life; perhaps people who are greedy or selfish or violent or sexually predatory; that sort of thing. Or it can be about removing any kind of block to progress and development.

Starting, then, with cursing and blessing. There are two key passages about this in the New Testament. Here’s what Jesus had to say about it in the beatitudes (Matthew 5)

⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵ that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

And here’s what St Paul had to say, in Romans 12:

v. 14: Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse.

¹⁷ Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. ¹⁸ If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. ¹⁹ Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. ²⁰ On the contrary:

“If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”

²¹ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

These passages make it clear that in our spiritual practice as Christians, we are not in the business of cursing. The key is that last phrase from the Romans 12 passage: “overcome evil with good.” That’s what we have to do.

This doesn’t set us at a disadvantage, because there is no power but God, creation proceeds from God, and God is love, God is good, God “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous”. 

We can infer from this, that goodness will always triumph in the end, because it is inherently more powerful than evil. In the rock-paper-scissors of the spirit realm, goodness will always trump evil, blessing will avert a curse. Love wins.

It’s important to grasp the power of what we say, when it comes to blessing.

You may have heard of Masaru Emoto — his experiments on water in Japan — and Veda Austin doing the same thing in Australia. They photographed the crystalline structure of water molecules captured at the point of freezing. If you look this up online you can find lots of information and photos about their work. 

Masaru Emoto would take words and tape them to the side of a bottle of water, with the word facing inward so the water could read it. He demonstrated that the words made a difference to the water’s molecular structure: so something like “peace” or “grace” or “I love you” or “thank you” would bring about beautiful, snowflake-shaped structures captured by freezing. By contrast, such words as “I hate you” or “you make me sick” would result in chaotic and disordered structure.

Our bodies are 60-75% water. What is spoken into us makes a material difference to our wellbeing on a molecular level. Words of blessing make us well.

We are made in the image of God who is I Am that I Am, so our words have power. In order to transform the world and establish the reach of Christ, the kingdom of heaven, it is important that we use words with care and respect, because we are speaking life conditions into being. We are to bless, not curse — we want to create Heaven, not Hell.

It’s also important to understand that we have power, authority and responsibility, through the Name of Jesus, to do this. So when we pray to transform a situation by blessing, we command or announce, rather than petitioning or requesting. Thus we would say “I bless you with the love of the Lord” rather than “Lord, please will you bless this person?” 

There are two particular ways of praying into a toxic situation that needs changing — for instance a cruel and oppressive political régime. The first way of praying is to not curse it, but to announce in the power of the Name of Jesus, and with his authority, that it will be transformed or removed, making way for leadership committed to social justice, international peace, the wellbeing of creation and the common good. This is a form of mountain-moving intercession, of clearing the way for the King of Glory to come in and the kingdom of peace to establish.

The second prayer, that I learned from Eileen Wheeler of The Servants With Jesus, is short and simple: “I bless you with the love of the Lord.”

She would use this prayer as a kind of spiritual solvent to dissolve and remove any blockages. For instance, at one time the Servants had a sitting tenant who would not vacate a house that they needed to sell. They didn’t argue or threaten, they just prayed repeatedly and daily, holding that tenant in mind, “I bless you with the love of the Lord.” The tenant left of their own accord.

Something else to bear in mind is that authenticity, honesty and truth are essential to effective prayer. Miracles can occur only in an atmosphere of authenticity and integrity. Because we are made in the image of I Am that I Am, the created order will organise according to our authority — it will believe us and respect what we say. But if there is a dissonance, it won’t know what to follow — we’ll be sending out mixed messages. So if we are tangled in hypocrisy or trying to maintain an image or approval-seeking, we block our own power to bring transformation. How will the universe know what to do if we say one thing but do another, or say what we don’t mean, or profess one thing and secretly think something quite different.

Jesus lived in complete alignment with God, and there is no power but God, so power came thundering through Jesus and made people well, and calmed storms, and raised the dead. He thought and spoke and lived in accordance with the flow of grace.

To re-cap so far — two prayers that are announcing not requesting:

• For a toxic situation or regime to be transformed or removed in the Name of Jesus
• The short blessing to remove blockages, “I bless you with the love of the Lord.”

Moving on now to severance as a method of spiritual cleaning.

To practice compassion with a pure heart, it is necessary to establish and maintain firm boundaries. 

If you don’t set and keep clear and firm boundaries, it is overwhelmingly likely you will become some combination of stressed, resentful, depressed, manipulative and ill.

If, in your life, there are individuals who routinely abuse you and treat you without respect, or who are enmeshed in narcissistic behavioural patterns, you would do well to sever yourself from them. Some people are habitually destructive and dangerous, and it is not practical to maintain companionship with them. They will ruin your life. Severance is advisable.

But in order to sever yourself from somebody, to separate yourself from them completely, to release them and let them go so that you are no longer entangled at a spiritual level, it is necessary to both love and forgive them. There is no other way to get rid of them. If you are angry or resentful towards them, if you bear them a grudge, that will bind them closer to you.

Forgiveness and love are not feelings. In this instance, forgiveness and love are the way you let them go. You disconnect by cancelling all the spiritual debt they owe you, leaving that in the hands of Jesus, and then blessing them on their way. You don’t have to say it to them, you don’t have to have anything to do with them at all — this is about the attitude you must bear toward them. Love in this instance is not an embrace but a refraining from blame or retaliation. They are God’s problem now. Live long and prosper. Off you go.

This, too, is a form of spiritual cleaning; removing toxic influence from your life.

Our last area of consideration is the traditional Hawaiian Ho’oponopono Prayer, popularised by Dr Hew Len (you can find him on YouTube if you do a search there). It is simple:

I love you

I’m sorry

Please forgive me

Thank you

Dr Hew Len offers the evaluation that we are responsible for whatever shows up in our lives. By that, he doesn’t mean that whatever happens to us is our fault or we caused it. He means that what comes to meet us gives us the authority to respond. It should keep off our path and out of our way if it doesn’t want what we are.

So whatever shows up in our life — perhaps a harassed parent with a child having a meltdown in the supermarket, or a couple having a row on on the bus — even if we don’t know those people or their situation, we have authority now to the extent that they have appeared in our life. This allows us to pray with power.

Dr Hew Len had a medical colleague vexed by a difficult problem in his psychiatric hospital. Patients were getting worse not better, and staff were leaving. The situation was getting unmanageable. He asked Dr Hew Len if he could help. So that made Dr Hew Len responsible — as in, entitled to respond, even though it was not his problem.

He asked for a room in the hospital and a list of the patients’ names. He didn’t need to meet with them, he just sat down in that room, in their hospital, and prayed the Ho’oponopono prayer into their names “I love you: I’m sorry: Please forgive me: Thank you”— a bit like Masaru Emoto speaking words of power and meaning into the bottles of water. Over and over, Hew Len spoke the Ho’oponopono prayer into the list of names given him. And the patients began to get better and were able to be discharged. The situation eased and resolved.

Wherever you are that a turbulent situation shows up and thereby entitles you to respond, you can, in the quietness of your mind, repeatedly speak the Ho’oponopono prayer into the situation, and you will see the situation be defused, calm down, start to settle. You will alter its molecular structure.

So, to recap:

• We are to bless not curse, and blessing will overcome curse; light is stronger than darkness. Into a toxic or oppressive regime we can command or announce with power that it be transformed or removed.
• We can apply blessing as a solvent to release stuck situations: “I bless you with the love of the Lord”, repeated several times when the situation comes to mind.
• In order to be effective in our spiritual path it is necessary to live with authenticity, integrity and honesty; if we practice with divided intention, with a public self and a different secret self, we muddy the waters and the universe won’t know which set of instructions to follow — what we pretend or what we are.
• In order to sever completely from destructive fellow-travellers, which is advisable, it is essential to love and forgive them.
• We can use the Ho’oponopono prayer to take spiritual responsibility and bring calm into a turbulent and unstable situation.

Our mantra for this time: