Finding our Middle – 40 Days with Anna

Day 9 – Friday after 1st Sunday of Lent 

To Read:

Mum and Anna shared many likes and dislikes; perhaps the simplest and the most beautiful sharing was their attitude towards Mister God.  Most people I knew used God as an excuse for their failure.  ‘He should have done this’, or ‘Why has God done this to me?’, but with Mum and Anna difficulties and adversities were merely occasions for doing something.  Ugliness was the chance to make beautiful.  Sadness was the chance to make glad.  Mister God was always available to them.  A stranger would have been excused for believing that Mister God lived with us, but then Mum and Anna believed he did.  Very rarely did any conversation exclude Mister God in some way or other.

After the evening meal was finished and all the bits and pieces put away Anna and I would settle down to some activity, generally of her choosing. Fairy stories were dismissed as mere pretend stories; living was real and living was interesting and by and large fun.  Reading the Bible wasn’t a great success.  She tended to regard it as a primer, strictly for the infants.  The message of the Bible was simple and any half-wit could grasp it in thirty minutes flat!  Religion was for doing things, not for reading about doing things.  Once you had got the message there wasn’t much point in going over and over the same old ground. 

From the Scriptures:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world.  (James 1v27)

To Reflect:

Religion was for doing things, not for reading about doing things.

As we find out more about Anna we will learn that she does not bear fools gladly.  Especially ‘Holier than thou’ fools who enjoy looking down on her.   Churches were for dancing in and even, as happened in St Paul’s Cathedral once, for ‘pushing a prayer book around the black and white squares on the floor.’  Perhaps because she had learnt that religion was about loving;

 ‘Mister God and to love people and cats and dogs and spiders and flowers and trees’, and the catalogue went on, ‘- with all of me.’ 

not just about going to church she could, with Mum’s help probe the deep questions of life.

Whenever something bad came along that was the chance Mister God had given the two conspirators to start ‘doing things’ alongside Him.  Yes things went wrong but that didn’t mean you blamed Mister God, you used failure as an opportunity for growth.  Ugliness was there so that we could make it beautiful.  Sadness was a precursor to joy and gladness (Psalm 30v5).

Each year I write these reflections after spending the best part of a week in a meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England.  Those meetings can often be long and arduous and overfull of dissension and fractiousness instead of mercy and grace.  It is easy to despair as Church can too easily seem to be all about saying and not at all much about doing.  These past weeks I have wondered what Anna would think about our pettiness and devilish point scoring….

In the early 1980s in Johannesburg I met John Wimber (one of the founders of the Vineyard Churches).  Describing the beginnings of his faith and a growing ministry he recounted how he questioned his then Quaker pastor about the gifts of the Holy Spirit and active work for the Gospel by asking, ‘When do we get to do “the Stuff”’.  His pastor explained that that the church wasn’t about ‘doing’ but about ‘learning’.  I think Anna and John would have got on very well indeed.

Religion [is] for doing things, not for reading about doing things.

Please Note:  These reflections are also published on my blog: suffolkvicarhomes.com on Bluesky as @suffolkvicar.bsky.social, and on my public Facebook page  Suffolk Vicar – Rev Andrew Dotchin.  If you would like them as a daily email please send a request to revdotchin@gmail.com

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