In my work within a prison chaplaincy in the high security estate I became increasingly aware of the real deprivations that are involved by incarceration. Prison is, of course, by it’s very nature, considered to be first and foremost a penalty meted out to redress and punish some wrong doing and personal deprivation is part of that punishment. Choices are stripped away and the relentless monotony of day to day prison life hits home and little by little strips back any humanity that may be present in the inmate.
It became evident to me that making the most ordinary journeys- from bed to bathroom, to kitchen – From home to work, school, church. These simple movements were no longer available to these men and I experienced a moment of deep sadness for them because I understood, perhaps for the first time, how very significant these journeys are to each life. It is through them, in part, that we come to understand ourselves. One day we choose to take a particular route because we love the tree lined avenue that is changing with the seasons or another route because we can pick up a delicious frothy latte from the little coffee shop with the nice barista or there is a hedgerow filled with tiny birds singing, an apple orchard, a friend’s house, a long fast road to drive down….. these tiny almost unconsidered choices shape and inform our thinking, our day, who we are and yet we are barely conscious of them.
I facilitated a Bible Study group that was well attended by a faithful group of men, mostly Christian but open to anyone and undertaken freely and as a choice. It usually meant that they had to sacrifice a gym session to participate (a big thing for a man in prison confined to a small cell for many hours of the day), the gym is an outlet for their constrained physicality and much needed to expend pent up aggression. So choosing Bible Study was a great commitment to God on their part.
It seemed very important to provide a journey for my group, something to restore humanity and at the same time deepen faith. A journey to be shared at the deepest level. I decided to organise a ‘pilgrimage’ to the Holy Land over the weeks of Lent. An invitation ‘Road to Jerusalem – A Modern Pilgrimage’ was placed on the seats at the Sunday services so that they could sign up for the trip by choice.
I prepared for each of them a personal passport for our travels through the various parts of Christ’s own country. It would be stamped each week and special documents enclosed as a record of their visit to Nazareth, Judea, Galilee, Bethlehem the Garden of Gethsemane etc. The picture in the passport was a drawing of Christ that one man had beautifully executed as a gift for his prison visitor and gave permission for me to use. The idea behind this ‘is Christ in us’, that when we looked at our ‘photograph’ we searched for the image of God knowing He is there, that this is our picture. I invited other members of the Christian chaplaincy team to join me and be our guide in the different places we visited each week. We had a map of the countryside we would travel through, with our route marked out on it.
This picture drawn by one of the prisoners and the one I used in the ‘passports’ for each of us. It was a black biro drawing and one of the most beautiful depictions of Christ I have ever seen. It moves me still to look at it. (Ana Lisa De Jong)
The team leading consisted of a Catholic, Anglican, Quaker, Free Church and Methodist so each week took on a beautiful shape of it’s own informed by the individual and their way of relating to Jesus. We journeyed through Christ’s life from birth to death visiting the places mentioned in scripture, experiencing sights (through pictures and photographs), the smells through herbs and spices brought up from the prison kitchen and a fragrant oil, the sounds through music, prayer and silence, the colour and feel of the place through fabric rough and smooth. Our senses were drenched in the experience. A rarity in the prison where one’s senses are emphatically dumbed down to ensure the men are manageable and kept under control. We explored through our senses, the nature of Christ and His ministry, labyrinths, travelling together and alone, fasting and feasting.
The final part of our journey took place in Holy Week and involved me chalking out a labyrinth on the carpet tiles in the large chapel with a large wooden freestanding cross at it’s centre. We walked the labyrinth together and alone, in our own time but considering another’s pace, arriving at the centre to stand before the cross. Many of the men fell to their knees silently weeping and worshiping the living God. We were provided with a sublime moment of faith on that day and our pilgrimage was complete. We moved into the Easter Triduum with a deeper sense of ourselves and so of Christ, with God at our centre and without circumference.
I know that while making this pilgrimage, the men were encouraged to regard each of the smaller journeys they were making within each day as something sacred, a private prayer. The walk from cell to the workshop, from healthcare to chapel, from corridor to corridor, contained opportunity to meet with Christ, be His feet, His hands and His mouth. To see through His eyes the officers on duty. To really live those small simple journeys in a different way, the Way, the only way. To make ‘doing their time’ different, better. It was a journey I will never forget and one that has proved to leave a lasting impression upon my own walk in faith.
Alice Hoefkens is married to Jerome. They have 4 children and live in the Cotswolds at the heart of the UK. She has worked in the chaplaincy of a maximum security prison providing pastoral care for prisoners and staff, introductory courses to Christianity, devising and facilitating new and imaginative ways to explore and deepen faith and in building unity of faith among her fellow chaplaincy team through creating shared projects. Prior to this she worked in a Psycho-Geriatric Home for the elderly as a carer and was made the POVA representative for the religious sisters who were her colleagues. It has always been important to her to use every and any available tool to reveal the person of Christ to others: music, art, poetry, nature, fabric, fragrance, whatever may present as itself at a given time as a symbol of the love of God.
As the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere approaches the coast of Mexico we offer up a special prayer:
Merciful God,
Compassionate Christ,
Transforming Spirit,
Have mercy on the people of Mexico.
May you calm the wind,
dissipate the storm and protect your children.
Be with those who are in harms way,
And those who seek to help.
Have mercy on all who are afraid.
Lord have mercy,
Christ have mercy,
Lord have mercy.
Protect the weak and the vulnerable,
Provide for the homeless and the destitute,
Comfort the grieving and the dying,
Have mercy on all who are helping.
God who loves
Christ who cares
Spirit who comforts
Grant mercy to the people of Mexico.
The prayer above is my favourite alternative rendition of the Lord’s prayer. It was written by Jim Cotter and has also been made into a meditation chanted by chanted by Ana Hernandez and Helena Marie, CHS.
Eternal Spirit — a video meditation from DioCal on Vimeo.
Many of us have rewritten this beautiful and most popular gospel prayer in language that suits our situation. It is a great exercise and one that I heartily recommend.
Here is a collection of some of my favourite interpretations.
This adaptation is published by the Society of the Sacred Heart but no longer available on their website.
I have also spent quite a bit of time reflecting on the Lord’s prayer and writing my own prayers adapted from it. Here is one that I wrote a couple of years ago:
Our Father,
Not mine alone but stretching beyond family, race, class, and religion,
Reaching to everyone everywhere.
Our Father,
The One who takes responsibility for us as family,
The One who cannot do anything but the loving thing,
Hallowed be your name.
May we reverence in thought and word and deed your name, your character,
May we see as holy the very nature of who you are.
Your kingdom come,
Your kingdom of peace, justice, wholeness and abundance.
May it come because we seek it above all else,
And put it in our prayers where Jesus did, first in consideration and allegiance.
Your will be done,
Your will for the only way that life is meant to work,
Your will for kingdom life to be revealed,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
Not bread for me alone but for everyone, your entire human family
Not bread for the rest of my life but for today,
For we know that when we seek first your kingdom,
all these things – food, clothing, all we need- shall be added,
As and when we need them.
And forgive us our sins,
Forgive us our desires for luxuries that make others do without necessities,
Forgive us our holding onto tomorrow’s bread that should be shared today.
Forgive us as we forgive others, not resenting what they have, who they are,
how you have gifted them,
Lead us not into temptation but away from evil,
Guide us, all of us, until evil is not longer a temptation for us.
For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory,
You still rule, now, in our world today,
You rule with kingdom power and kingdom glory.
Amen
Do you have other adaptations of the Lord’s prayer? Please share them in the comments below or on the Godspace Facebook page as a comment on this post.
Efrat, Jewish Settlement in the West Bank
Our Israeli Arab Christian bus driver slowly navigated the winding road up into the hill country of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Bruce, a late middle-aged American Jew who had immigrated to Israel narrated our journey over the bus’s sound system as our guide to the Jewish settlements of Tekoa (338 acres, and 1808 people, established in 1977) and Efrat (568 acres, 7454 settlers, established in 1980).
“The media, with their agenda of spin, calls these ‘settlements,’” Bruce opined over the bus’s sound system, “but what they are is neighborhoods, just like any you’d see in the states, and they don’t call THOSE settlements – they’re neighborhoods. They’re suburbs! If this is like the Wild West, we aren’t the cowboys. We’re the Indians. This is our land!”
When our bus arrived at the check point entrance of what Bruce referred to as his “gated community,” armed Israeli guards greeted Bruce, who was carrying a holstered gun of his own. As an Israeli citizen qualified as a security guard, Bruce was a settler whom Palestinian workers would call from the security gate to ask for armed escort into the area to work, in compliance with an Israeli Defense Forces regulation.
Our Pilgrim Group, January 2015 – At Dominus Flavit
Our tour bus quickly moved beyond the check point and into the settlement. As Bruce spoke, my focus turned to the landscape of the hill country outside my bus window.
Semi-nomadic Bedouins had once roamed the area freely, finding pasture for herds of goats and sheep, but (we learned from an earlier presentation) they were now relegated to a category of land that the Israeli army uses as firing ranges. Palestinian families, for whom the area had been home to ancestral olive groves, grape arbors and grain crops have experience their trees chopped down and their crops burned.
I was reflecting on these things when the next words of Bruce’s ongoing narrative arced into my consciousness like an arrow to a hind, “We only build where there isn’t anything; it’s just wilderness here.”
With crystal clarity, I heard the righteous judgement of 18th century European sentiments expressed in numerous journals and legal documents of those who colonized North America. “It’s just wilderness here – no one lives here. There was no civilization here before we came. It is God’s will that we occupy this land. These people will behave in a civilized fashion (i.e. ‘live as we determine’) or they will die.”
I realized that what I was hearing from Bruce was exactly the same ideological narrative that my great-grandparents encountered in the European invasion of interior British Columbia – when their people, the Shackan, had their land and resources stripped from them because all that he settlers saw was “wilderness.” Native peoples were a part of that wilderness, just another resource to exploit or to destroy. In my blood and bones, I know how the story of Palestine ends.
As I struggled to reign in my overwhelming grief, the bus came to a stop in front of the house we had come to visit. Our pilgrim group began to disembark to enter the home of our Jewish hosts. We had come to hear more about the Israeli settler perspective.
I quickly found myself standing alone in the bus aisle, my hands holding on in white-knuckle grips to seats on either side of the aisle. I didn’t want to get off the bus. Indigenous peoples always know when they are the prey, when they are fixed within the gaze of a predator. I was caught within an historical déjà vu, and I felt endangered.
My anxiety rose quickly to the level of panic, and I asked one of the members of our group, to please go get my bishop, The Rt. Rev. Greg Rickel, who had already disembarked. I don’t know what I wanted of him other than to grab onto someone that I trusted and wail in sorrow or terror.
Hanan Ashwari & Bishop Greg Rickel
However, I began to feel foolish in my fear, so I determinedly pulled myself together and stepped off the bus. Once across the street, I met Bishop Greg coming out of the house towards me. I turned away from the house as he put an assuring arm around my shoulders, and my hastily gathered reserve gave way with equal haste.
“I’m not sure I can do this,” I confessed, “This is so horrible. It’s exactly the same. It’s exactly the same…” That’s all I could get out.
“You don’t have to do this, you know. I can…or maybe I can’t imagine…what you must be going through. You can get back on the bus, if you need to. It’s okay,” He assured me.
I looked up hopefully, only to see the bus drive away.
With escape no longer an option, I set my face to stoic and entered the house with the bishop. After crossing the threshold, I stood unmoving – like a wooden Indian – just inside the front door.
Our hostess, a gun holstered at her side, talked about emigrating from California to live in a settlement on the West Bank. Like Bruce had before her, she spoke of the land that her new house was built upon as her ancestral home, the place that both God and the European community (in 1948 and 1967) had promised would be the Jewish homeland.
Zionism is a Jewish nationalist and political movement that supports the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as ‘the historic Land of Israel.’ Certain evangelical Christian groups see the return of Jews to Palestine as signaling the End Times and the return of the Messiah, so they encourage the occupation as well.
That’s what it really is, an unlawful occupation by an emerging nation – the State of Israel – engaging in the genocide of peoples, the destruction of homes and the appropriation of land and resources. In such instances, religion is just a useful justification of racist crimes against humanity, within a theological cosmology that judges who is among the elect and who is not. In short, it is colonialism.
As Hanan Ashwari (a member of the Palestinian National Council and an Anglican Christian) said in our meeting with her later in our pilgrimage, “The critique is not of a religion but of the actions of a state.”
For me, understanding the political landscape of Israel is like traveling a winding trail of tears through time and history. We see the impact on the land and people of the colonial powers of Britain, modern Europe and the United States, reenacting their own pilgrim history though the emergence of a new Israel.
Ashwari looks to the global community for restraint of Israel and support of Palestine. She gazes intently at the land of her people through the window of war. She still hopes that her colonizers will come to her aid, even as I called out for my bishop to support me. For, make no mistake, he represents the faith of a colonizing power. Yet, I think her hope – and mine – is not misplaced.
Ultimately, we are all on the bus. We are all seeking our Holy Land.
My greatest fear is that none of us will find it, unless we make the journey together.
Rachel at the Mount of Olives
The Rev. Rachel K. Taber-Hamilton is rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Everett, WA and is an ordained priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia (Western Washington). She was the first (known) indigenous person to be ordained in the diocese in 2003. Born and raised in the United States, Rachel’s heritage includes the First Nations Shackan Indian Band of the Nicola Tribal Association in British Columbia, Canada.
I am looking outside at a changing landscape. The leaves are turning red and gold, the grass is green from the autumn rains, and I keep looking towards the mountains hoping for the first glimpse of snow. Change is in the air and it’s time to get ready to celebrate.
Many years ago a friend suggested that the best way to get ready for change is to identify the stability points and affirm those things that will not change. It is some of the best advice I have ever received. Last weekend Tom and I celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving in Tsawwassen B.C and our MSA team are all looking forward to American Thanksgiving November 26th. All of us are getting ready for the seasons of Advent and Christmas and looking forward to the end of the year. These are anchors for our faith, our lives and our year. The ways we celebrate may change, but the need for celebration of these important stability points does not.
Celebrate the Change with our New Resources
In anticipation of our celebrations, the MSA team has produced new resources we believe will help anchor all our souls during this season of reflection and hospitality.
Brigit and the Hospitality of God – This beautiful MP3 includes litanies and songs inspired by ancient Celtic prayers and African American folk music. It also responds to the desire of many of us to enter more regularly into the Celtic style worship we experience at our annual retreats. Enjoy the hospitality of our generous God as you recite the responsive readings and imagine yourself worshipping amongst God’s wonderful creation or sitting with the Celtic saint, Brigit, at the banquet feast of God.
Rest in the Moment: Prayers Throughout the Day – an inspiring set of new prayer cards. Pausing to sit in the presence of God for a few minutes at regular intervals is good for our physical, emotional and spiritual health. As the Christmas season rushes towards us, it is essential. These cards are designed to assist you in establishing a daily rhythm of prayer and reflection. There are three morning, three evening, and four general prayers for the day. Each prayer is paired with a photo to help you focus and enter into that still place where you can hear God’s voice. On the back of each card is a short reflection/activity to deepen the impact of the prayer.
Celebrate by Leaning Towards the Light on Godspace
On Godspace we are gearing up for Advent and Christmas with a new focus – Leaning Towards the Light. In our celebration of Jesus’ birth we often forget that the light of Christ already shines in our world. We spend so much time and energy on preparing for Christmas that we do not allow the season to prepare us for the coming year.
How do we lean into the light of Christ that will shine through us and out into God’s broken world over this coming year?
In the northern hemisphere, as we pass through the darkest season of the year and look towards the coming of the Christ light, we may be aware that darkness is the place in which new seeds germinate. In the southern hemisphere, where Advent and Christmas are marked by the long days of summer, leaning towards the light might engender images of growth and harvest.
Join the celebration. Read the daily reflections, add your comments, or contribute your own reflection to the series. We are still open for submissions.
Celebrate with Our Photo Challenge
We also invite you to celebrate the season of Advent by participating in our photo challenge – Reflections of Hope – prepared by Jean Andrianoff. This exciting spiritual practice invites us into another experience of photography, a contemplative practice which beckons us to slow down, take notice, savour what we see, and enter into a sacred encounter with our God. The free booklet with scriptures and prompts for each day will be available mid-November. Share your reflections and photos with us. Be inspired and inspire others with your thoughts and images.
Celebrate with a Retreat
One way that all of us can prepare for the season of Advent and Christmas is by going on retreat. As the season of Advent approaches, many of us are conflicted. There are so many calls to slow down, declutter our lives, and relax, yet we are easily caught up in the consumer frenzy and the fast paced life that races at us as we move towards Christmas and the end of the year. We feel stressed out, overwhelmed and guilty. How can we find that peaceful pace that God intends for us?
We encourage you to plan your own retreat, participate in the Reimagine How We Pray e-course, or join us at Union Church in Seattle, on November 21st 9:30 – 12:30 for Discerning Our Way through Advent. At this retreat we will explore the conflicting pressures of the season. Through a process of discussion, discernment, and reflection we will create together practices that can help us find God’s rhythm for our lives. Cost is $20.
For more information and to register,
Celebrate the Change
There are other exciting changes coming at Mustard Seed Associates too which we look forward to sharing with you in the coming months. We are changing, we are growing, we are evolving. It is an encouraging, fulfilling and challenging time.
We appreciate your prayers and continued support of all we do.
God bless,
Christine Sine
Executive Director
MSA
INCORPORATING the Word of God, and the Presence of the Holy Spirit, into the living of our lives: taking a word, a line, a sentence, a verse, or even a passage of text, and building it into our daily life.
That’s what this is about: drawing the eternal Word into the experience of our lives. …
And that experience is the Presence, being with us, us God-conscious, living real.
As we blend a sunrise or a sunset with God’s divine narrative, or consider a cooling breeze in the shade on a hot summer’s day with the grief imparted from loss, God speaks. God enters the truth with us, and we receive by listening. God is sensed real. Experience is ever pertinent.
By our experience of reality, with his Word listed on our hearts, we live existentially in the rawness of life, which commands the reformation of our character; grow or die.
Meditation is to be our existential mood. A prayerful kind of God-consciousness, meditation in the living, breathing, walking flow of life is the reflexive space within reflection that we all need. By reflexive space, I mean self-reflection as we observe ourselves as others or God might (through his Word), but not in a harmfully judgmental sort of way. We’re after unique insights that only God can elucidate. Our Lord never speaks in a condemning way; only for our learning.
Even in the busy swarm of life there are moments of surreal silence, where a loneliness is ever real, even where life is noisy and chaotic. This is why a living, breathing, walking form of meditation is the crucial stratagem for adding God into our emptier life spaces so otherwise fearful stimuli may be removed. When we have a moment’s respite it’s easier, actually, to enter into a heart space with God than wallow in our darkness. We all have a darkness that we’re tempted to go into.
The living, breathing, walking meditation considers how bizarre life is; it wrestles with the cogency of reality without fighting it. What is may be accepted. A Word of hope is introduced or conjured up from a previous reading. Or, there’s a Word carried in our heart. We learn early on, as we bring a cognisance of God with us into and through our daily moments, that we’re free to conjoin meditation with our moments.
Here are some of the ways that I’ve been able to bring God-consciousness to bear in my living, breathing, walking moments:
➢ Out in nature, on transport, in a new environment, or when imagining other parts of the world, I ponder the wonder in the plainly observable. Pondering wondrous things elicits praise. Nothing of us is in the way.
➢ Downtime is key reflection time for me. I try to think creatively. Even times in the bathroom can be put to good use.
➢ When we’re able to disappear from life in the world for a short time we’re in prime location for a Spirit encounter (and may they be plural!).
➢ Times of exposure, where there’s the flicker of embarrassment, or when the emotions are piqued, I ask God mindfully to still my heart before responding. Reflective space, where God makes himself real in our experience, can be found even at times of great pressure.
➢ I try to see what I do not readily see. “Lord, show me what I’m missing.”
➢ When my responses are intuitively graceful I know they’ve not come from the unhealed hurt me that dwells in me. I’m reminded these responses are from the Source of grace, himself.
➢ Reading my Bible, I seek direction on where to look and what to look for, and I try not to be swayed too much by human logic.
Engaging momentarily in meditative reflection enhances our experience of the Presence of God. Meditating was made for the unclaimed moment.
Accept those moments. Create those moments.
Fill those moments with God.
Take a Word into your moments to make your moments worthwhile.
A Word is a caption of God-life for overwhelming perspective.
© 2015 Steve Wickham.
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The photo in the image above is a rock I picked up over the summer. I was originally drawn to it because of what looked to me like a cross in the centre with a pathway leading to it. The more I look however, the more my eyes are drawn to the blaze of glory behind it, a wonderful reminder that the kingdom not the cross is at the centre of our faith. It was the good news of the kingdom, not of the cross that Jesus came to proclaim. (Mark 1:14-16)
In their fascinating book Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire. Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker tell us: “It took Jesus a thousand years to die.” Brock and Parker travelled the Mediterranean looking for early Christian art that depicted the crucifixion, instead they found wonderful images of healing, restoration and resurrection in a garden of incredible beauty. If the cross was portrayed it was always with Jesus in front of it welcoming the repentant and reconciled.
The authors contend that images of Christ on the cross as the central focus of Christian faith grew out of the sanctioning of war and violence as a holy pursuit. The earliest images of Christ on the cross as the central focus that they found, appeared in the 10th century in northern Europe and proliferated throughout the Middle Ages. What brought about this change? Brock and Parker believe that it was Charlemagne who began the trend as he spread Christianity by war and violence, subduing the Saxons and forcing them to become Christians. In fact it was in these Saxon churches that the earliest images of crucifixion are found.
What is your response”
Sit for a few moments and think about your own view of Jesus and the good news he came to preach. Is it a vision of love or of militancy? Do you preach the good news of the kingdom through your words and actions or are you so focused on the Cross and its judgement that the good news does not shine through? Allow God to speak to you and draw you closer.
What did that good news look like? I love the way that The Voice translates it in Luke 4:18-21:
The Spirit of the Lord the Eternal One is on Me.
Why? Because the Eternal designated Me
to be His representative to the poor, to preach good news to them.He sent Me to tell those who are held captive that they can now be set free,
and to tell the blind that they can now see.
He sent Me to liberate those held down by oppression.
19 In short, the Spirit is upon Me to proclaim that now is the time;
this is the jubilee season of the Eternal One’s grace.
This is the jubilee season of the Eternal One’s grace, and the glory of God shines around Jesus to proclaim the good news of the kingdom to all who are poor, blind, and oppressed.
Tom and I have just been up in Canada celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving, in a few weeks we will also celebrate American Thanksgiving. For me the imagery of the kingdom conjures up a great homecoming feast a little like Thanksgiving only better. This is a feast that I never tire of talking about. It is a feast that we catch a glimpse of every time we sit down at dinner with friends and strangers. A feast that is foretold in the sharing of the bread and wine of communion.
What is your response?
Watch the video below and spend some time thinking about what the homecoming of God will look like. Who will be there that you usually ignore or despise? What can you do to change your attitudes?
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