Today is pretty varies and yet much of a piece.

As is the way this week, I am running late with everything - not my 'style' and not very energising it has to be said.  Still, overall things are good and enjoyable.

After yesterday's fun game of sending dead chairs to the tip and, with the help of two friends, getting a new table into my (overcrowded with oddments of furniture) kitchen, today should be calmer!

A sermon to write, lunchtime reflection in which to participate, then a train ride to Edinburgh for charity carol service.

Once Christmas is past I really, really, really must get rid of some of the extraneous stuff that clutters my home!

The Seecond Coming

by W B Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Ozymandias

by P B Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

I have just cleaned the cat fur from my four dining chairs for the last time - this time tomorrow the chairs will be history, having gone to the great kitchen in the... well to the tip, actually.  I have only cleaned the cat fur off of them because this evening, in a fitting 'last supper', they will be sat on by visitors who have come round to help with making props for the Christmas Eve service.

I came by these chairs, along with a table that lasted around seven days, when I bought my first house in Derby.  The vendors' dog had chewed the legs of all the chairs and epsecially the table and they weren't going to take it to their brand new home, oh no.  I think I may have paid for the chairs, I can't recall; they certainly sold me other bits and pieces that turned out to be impossible to move when I sold the place two years later - ah well.

More than 27 years on, and 4/5 (depending how you count) house moves later, these chairs have served me incredibly well.  They have been climbed on by cats and children, had paint, food, drinks, glitter, glue and goodness knows what spilled onto them.  They have witnessed laughter and tears, been the place where essays were written, sermons planned and earnest conversations held.

They are, it has to be said well and trully worn out, should probably have been replaced at least two decades ago but somehow there was always something better to do with the moeny I had at the time.

So tomorrow they take their final journey and will end their days dismantled and disseminated between various skips at the recycling centre, well hopefully, it is entriely feasible they'll end up in landfiill.

Well done good and faithful chairs, you have served me well.  May you rot in peace!!

Another well researched, intelligently written and thought provoking read, this issue of BMS Mission Catalyst covers aspects of the current debates and legislative considerations around end of life issues.  Probably not that often that Baptists and Muslims get lumped together as the agreeing odd ones out on a topic!

Some very personal and deeply moving writing, honest and challenging.  One quote that really struck me was this from Tony Nicklinson, a man who has shut in syndrome following a major stroke:

"To end on a personal note I decided in 2007, some two years after my stroke, that I didn't want to go into old age like this.  I engaged a lawyer to draw up a living will and stopped taking all drugs that were meant to prolong my life. I also wished for a life-threatening condition like cancer so that my life may end sooner rather than later because the law is not helpful to me.  I also considered starvation but concluded that I didn't have the courage to put my family and friends through that amount of distress.

So, we a law which: condems me and others like me to a life of misery; makes my wife (or anybody else) a murderer for simply carrying out my wishes; puts people in jail for up to 14 years for helping someone to commit suicide; makes we wish for a fatal condition; makes me consider starvation as way out and sends society's cripples abroad to die.  Tell me, just what is compasisonate about that?  Who will defend sich a law?  What sort of person might he be?  Who can defend the indefensbile?  Perhaps your [Lord Falconer's] Commision will tell us."

From BMS Mission Catalyst, Issue 1 2014, p7, emphasis mine

That cut me to the core - that someone would wish for cancer as a way out of suffering.  That someone would feel their life was so unbearable that they'd choose the path that I, and countless others, are propelled down unwillingly every day.  That someone would want to die so much that they would want to be in the shoes of those friends of mine whose cancer ravaged their bodies and stole their earthly futures leaving their families heartbroken...  My heart aches for him, I cannot imagine being in such a place; I cannot imagine not wanting to go on living because my quality of life was so awful.  I'm not angry at what he said, or at him for saying it.  Indeed, like a lot of people who have/have had cancer, I feel that it (cancer) is almost certainly preferable to some other conditions and diseases, but I would not wish it on my worst enemy (if I had one, which I don't).

But it also jarred because on Friday evening I, with a friend from church, was visiting someone roughly my own age who has advanced and advancing MND, who has already defied her prognosis, and who is a truly remarkable woman.  Free from self-pity, she choose life, she chooses to find moments of joy in each day.  She uses an iris (eye) controlled keyboard emulator to communicate, and had written a lengthy message for us to read on arrival.  We chatted, properly chatted, via this medium, for an hour.  We laughed.  She shared stories of her student days in London.  We talked about church stuff.  And we prayed together.

The valley of the shadow: I've been there myself (even if I did get the escape route up its steep sides), I've been privileged to walk it with others, but it need not be a place of despair.  I thank Tony Nicklinson for his honesty, and I am grieved that he feels so helpless and hopeless, but it is only one view.  The woman I visited has no possibility of old age, yet, for so long as she has breath in her body she chooses life - and I find her attitude humbling and inspiring.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me...