dean ayres' posterous

Time and Learning, by Dean Ayres

Taken in the Dean's Vestry, St. Paul's Cathedral

I led a Gracelet last night on the theme of the desert fathers and mothers, those christians from the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE who made their home in the desert to live lives of asceticism and prayer. Many sayings and stories about these remarkable men and women have come down to us. Of the ones I shared, this one was my favourite; (Abba just means 'Father' in Hebrew)

There was a brother at Scetis who had committed a fault. So they called a meeting and invited Abba Moses. He refused to go. The priest sent someone to say to him, “They’re all waiting for you.” So Moses got up and set off; he took a leaky jug and filled it with water and took it with him. The others came out to meet him and said, “What is this, Father?” The old man said to them, “My sins run out behind me and I cannot see them, yet here I am coming to sit in judgement on the mistakes of somebody else.” When they heard this, they called off the meeting.

It's smart, clever, and makes me want to stare at my shoes and figure out how to be less judgemental.

 

At Grace we celebrated Easter with an early morning communion service and breakfast, followed by a walk in Osterley Park for hardy souls willing to brave the snow. We created some liturgy in the service, which has become the last entry in the 2008 Grace Lent Blog. Do take a look at the Good Friday entry, And you held me, by Anna Poulson. This is the most beautiful reflection on the Passion I've read in a long while, and it's shaped my Easter.

I went to Cambridge yesterday for the annual Higher Education Chaplaincy Association conference and AGM. It was great to share news, thinking and ideas about chaplaincy with a spread of people from across the UK. And there was time to take a few photos during the gloriously sunny lunch break!

On July 20th last year, my parents were flooded out of their house in Berkshire. Last Sunday, 2nd March, they were finally able to move back in. They spent have spent a little over seven months living in hotels and temporary accommodation while negotiating with insurance companies, claims managers, plumbers, electricians and, most painfully, the awful builders appointed by the insurers. They have still got many months of work replacing and repairing things that were damaged, and their strength and fortitude through all this has been an inspiration.

Along their road, people are still living in caravans on their front gardens. The area is not known as a flood risk, and the local council and water company seem at a loss to explain why it happened, still less as to how it may be prevented in future.

 

Grace continues the series on Lenten journeys with an interactive exploration of Elijah in the desert. 8pm at St. Mary's South Ealing.

I penned my second contribution to the Grace Lent Blog on Saturday.

David tagged me in game to pick up the nearest book and quote from it. He said he thought I wouldn't play, probably the best way to get me to take part (even if it took me almost 3 weeks to notice!) The challenge is thus;

Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the next three sentences.
Tag five people.

My book is Alain de Botton's The architecture of happiness, and in these three sentences he's talking about a neolithic tomb in Pembrokeshire;

But what remains to these stones is their eloquent ability to deliver the message common to all funerary architecture, from marble tomb to rough wooden roadside shrine - namely, 'Remember'.  The poignancy of the roughly chiselled family of mossy orthostats, keeping their lonely watch over a landscape around which none save sheep and the occasional rain-proofed hiker now roam, is heightened only by the awareness that we recall nothing whatsoever about the one they memorialise - aside, that is, from this leader's evident desire, strong enough to inspire his clan to raise a forty-tonne capstone in his honour, that he not be forgotten.

The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure, like a paperweight to hold down our memories.

For an arbitrary quote produced by an algorithm, I rather like it.

I tag Mark W, Saju, Mark B, Andrew and Simon.