I have just been putting together the order of service for next Sunday, that's how it works in my little world, get organised early and it's easier to cope with the uncertainties that emerge later.

Next week's service will be 'completely different,' and yet it won't!  Instead of Mothering Sunday/Mothers' Day we will be celebrating what it means to be a Gospel People, a Community of Faith.  With no less than 6 Bible readings, 7 songs and lots of interaction, we will be holding our first ever cafe style service.  Utterly traditional, yet pushing the boundaries a bit for these dieheard traditionalists.  The real challenge will getting them to share commnuion in small groups around little tables... but I'm praying.

As part of this service, each group/organisation has chosen one of the hymns (apart from the communion hymn) and on the whole I am secretly chuffed with their choices.  One group has yet to let me know their choice - 'Oh Catriona, it's far too early to decide,' they claim.  The groups were asked to discuss and choose hymns/songs that said something about how they saw themselves, and this is what they opted for...

All things bright and beautiful

(... I did say, 'on the whole...!')

 

Will you come and follow me

Take my life and let it be

Brother, sister, let me serve you

Lord, for the years your love has kept and guided

My guess is the missing song will be a children's action song, as it is the children's workers who have yet to choose.

If we really are understanding ourselves as a community of servant-disciples, then I guess we're doing something right.

I'll it you know how it goes...

Every now and then I peruse the 'best sellers' at real bookshops, rather than the virtual one named after a race of she-warriors, from which I buy most of my stuff.  Sometimes I even buy - especially when there is a 3 for 2 offer on.  What strikes me more and more, is how much autobiography there is written by unknown writers using pseudonymns to protect both guilty and innocent, and relating, often quite graphically, horrendous tales of abuse and suffering.  Yestersay I purchased and read two such offerings. One was by a British-Asian woman who wrote with incredible honesty about her experience of forced marriage and honour codes, and how she now works to provide specialist support for Asian women.  The other was by a foster carer telling the story of a child who had been systematically physically and sexually abused by a whole network of people and is now permanently injured.

What is almost as scary as the stories themselves is (a) the quantity of them out there - despite our facade of being a civilised nation so many people suffer horrendously, often in silence (b) the fact that these stories become almost reduced to entertainment - something we read in our spare time.  There were moments when I felt 'I shouldn't be reading this, it is too voyeuristic' - can I justify reading about someone else's pain?  Is it even right that such stories are published and sold?  Yet what if they aren't?  What if the trauma of 15 year old girls packed off to Asia during school holidays to be married is never heard?  What if people never hear the voice of 'Jodie' whose personality has disintegrated  following her life of molestation?  What about the unheard voices of other characters in the story?  The Asian parents who honestly believe they are doing their best or the incompetent social worker who perhaps has a whole raft of her own issues that she cannot share?

I find myself with loads of questions and no answers.  I realise just what a collossal social history is being generated by these authors, what a complex 'web of significance' is being generated for future generations to try to unravel when they try to understand anything about 'us.'  One of the serious books I read recently said something like 'it is less important that what people recall is accurate than why they recall it, what it says about their understanding of what has happened.'  The next step on from that though, is what then happens by the hearer/reader as he/she tries to make something of it.

Just maybe the plethora of writing on such topics as have been described will break the taboos and enable cycles of violence to be broken.  Just maybe someone caught up in webs of destruction will be set free.  Just maybe in a hundred years' time someone will be able to look back and say 'these stories were awful and people who read them were forced to examine their own motives for so doing, but now, look how much good has been achieved because people both wrote and read them.'  I certainly hope they might. 

Sons and (in my hamfisted attempt at a transliterated Hebrew feminine; you have to forgive me I never even tried to learn Hebrew) Daughters of Encouragement, who leave comments and who email or phone or are simply there offering quiet support, I thank you.  You know who who you are, and I am blessed by your words, thoughts and prayers.

Dibley is never dull, and I am learning and, I hope, growing (apart from rounder) all the time.  Discipleship is a tough path, but God never calls us to it alone; one of my greatest gifts is the companionship of fellow disciples who also have bloody knees when they stumble and bruised hearts when they love. 

Over the years I have come to value a mental image of Christ's hands, scarred by nails (even if it was really his wrists) which reach out to pick us up when we fall, to embrace us when we feel broken inside.  If I was an artist, I'd paint it, as I cannot find such a picture anywhere, but I'm not, so it remains in my mind.  Nonetheless, it is into those safe, battered hands that I commend you, encouragers in The Way. 

Found this great 12 step programme for doctoral students here.  It is nice to reassured by others who once felt as hopeless and helpless as I do now.

After last night's unjolly meeting, a not very good night's sleep, and a bit of space to reflect, I am feeling cheated!

Cheated because one of our decisions was not to have any services of our own over Easter but instead to join in with other people.  Not that I mind joining with other people, I just enjoy preparing worship for Easter and this year won't get to at all.

On Maundy Thursday we will join with D+1 and D+2 at D+1 - I don't mind this at all but a have great longing to do a 'Christian Passover Seder' which never gets any nearer to happening.  To be honest watery soup and trite poems, with no mention of an upper room or foot washing is, to me, a travesty, but there I go.

On Good Friday we will join in our traditional ecumencial thingy, which is great, except it leaps to Sunday before we end the service, and denies us the real entry into Good Friday feelings.  Let's all be jolly and munch half a hot cross bun while Jesus (symbolically) is still in agony at Calvary.  Maybe I'll need to sneak into an Anglican or Catholic vigil service.

On Easter Sunday we will join with the Methodists for their early communion and breakfast and then, in the words of one of my deacons, for goodness sake, 'have a day off.'  It means I can get to the GB Easter parade service, but I am deeply saddened that my folk don't want to celebrate the resurrection together, and with the colour and exuberance I'd long for.  This greatest festival, at the heart of our faith, the event that drew us out of Judaism and we want the day off?!  For this our forebears died?  I despair!

So I'm feeling cheated, and saddened, that this central Christian festival is being sidelined just because it is more convenient so to do.

Sorry Jesus, I did try...