Singing New Songs

There are moments in life when the old and new come together; where what was and what is hold the same space for just a moment. I have been helping a little bit with my Grandma who, at the grand old age of nearly 92, has had to have an operation on her eye. She can’t be left alone at night and needs copious drops during the day, so we have shared out the night and day shifts, to make sure that she has the care and support she needs. When I was a non-sleeping baby, over 40 years ago, Grandma would come over once a week and walk the floors with me all night, to give my parents some sleep.   It's a special privilege to be able to return the favour on a smaller scale (at 92 she sleeps better than I did at 1, I’m pleased to say!). As I sit, tapping away on my laptop now, listening to her old clock ticking loudly as it has done for as long as I can remember in every house I remember her being in, there is a real sense of the old and new colliding. The more hazy Grandma’s sh...

I've had a week or so to think about my first Holy Week and Easter in my new church. With essay deadlines just beforehand and a busy schedule, it all felt quite intense. But the intensity I felt didn't come from the busyness. I seemed to feel every conversation, every talk, every hymn and song much more keenly than I would do normally. The sense of walking through the week from Palm Sunday to Easter Day was very real - following the steps of Jesus as he went, inescapably, to his crucifixion and then the joy as he rose again on Easter Day. I have felt like layers of meaning and understanding have been peeled back slowly and deliberately this year more than ever before. On Maundy Thursday evening, there was a communion service with washing of hands (rather than feet), followed by stripping of the altar and the rest of the church and then a silent Watch.  My wonderful and thoughtful supervisor, knowing that much of this was quite new to me, invited me to help throughout the se...

Very recently I went on a silent retreat..... (I'll wait while those who know me finish laughing.....) Better? OK. I wasn't planning on going on a silent retreat but my college allocates you a retreat every year and, whilst you can express a preference, you generally have to just go with what you're given and trust that it's where God wants you to be. Well, I had put this retreat high-ish on my list, mainly because it avoided me being away at half term, but had missed the fact it was a silent retreat. That came as a bit of a shock when I received the confirmation email but I decided that it's good to try anything once, and went along, equipped with books and a general sense of curiosity of what it would actually be like to keep silence for 40+ hours.   I'm pretty sure that it was no coincidence that the wifi went down as we all arrived. The retreat centre is set in beautiful but pretty remote (and therefore almost signal-less) countryside so I c...

I have never been diving but, at the moment, I feel like a deep-sea diver, who has spent a reasonable amount of time under pressure in the deep - I am slowly resurfacing, taking time to get used to normality again and thinking of the wonders that I have just experienced. I knew that Advent and Christmas time would be busy in this new life of mine but nothing had completely prepared me for the extent of the stretch and the sense of eyeball-bulging tiredness that would be the result. I left for a week-long college residential just as Advent was starting and, thanks to the shortest-possible Advent (what with Christmas Eve actually being the 4th Sunday in Advent), came back to full-swing preparations for Christmas services and events. Since then it has been a rollercoaster ride of services, school assemblies and carol services, community and churches-together events, whilst trying to organise family things and plan ahead for next term! By the time I got to lunchtime on Christmas D...

I have to be honest, I’ve never been particularly comfortable with the idea of Black Friday. Please don’t misunderstand me – I love a bargain more than most people and have no issue with saving money by buying something you need on a day when it’s cheaper than it would normally be.  But I’m just not sure about the consequences of having a day set aside for it. Fights in the shops over the last TV in the pile were hard to watch on the news a couple of years ago. And I find myself having to delete the emails that keep pinging into my inbox this week, so I don’t get distracted by that brilliant deal on the juice extractor, or grooming set, or rowing machine or <insert any number of other items that I neither want nor would ever use here>. It’s not the bagging a bargain that I object to (I’m a student again, don’t forget! To misquote Matt Smith’s Dr Who – "Bargains are cool…") but I don’t think I’m the only one shifting uncomfortably in my seat at the way we see...

St Abbs Harbour This is my church today. The waves breathe in and out over the rocks and breathe into the harbour.  The wind breathes over the scene, lifting seabirds higher and then bringing them down gently. As for me, I am breathing in the clean, salty air and breathing out the cares of the last half term.  Breathing in the quiet and calm and breathing out the busyness of the new routine, the essay deadline, the reading, the meetings and rehearsals, the busy life that my whole family lead. I am taking the time that I have today - this precious, rare moment of not having to be anywhere or do anything - to breathe in all that has been good about this term so far: the new friends made, the things I have learnt, the kindness and hospitality of my new church. I am taking time to breathe in the sense of being God’s beloved daughter. I know that it’s always there but it does me good to consciously look for it and feel it, listening to him, knowing he deli...

This week saw my first New Testament Greek lesson. There were about 50 of us intrepid early risers gathered in Lecture Room 2 at 8.30 on Monday morning, the rest of our cohort having decided (possibly wisely) to take the extra hour in bed, rather than get up to do a purely optional course. And, by the way, my journey felt even more of an adventure on Monday morning, thanks to a fabulously eccentric (award for understatement of the century) man on the Victoria Line Tube train.  He was wearing what was clearly a home-made cone hat made of foil and coke cans and brandishing a stick wrapped in the same kind of thing. I was only on the train for 4 stops or so but in that time he had managed to hold forth, in a high-pitched, slightly odd voice, about what "space" was and how the doors aren't just closing on the train but they are closing to heaven and we're all too late. As I got off at Victoria, he was just starting on a monologue about what peoples' eyes were do...