The past

I was thinking recently about my mother who passed away summer 2013. Not unusual you might say, and I suppose that is true.

Vera was like most of us, a mixture of the remarkable and the very ordinary. Her very ordinariness touched so many lives. My brother in law Will and sister Barbara helped out running an international Bible School, mum used to sit around and talk to people - anyone who would listen really. After she passed away messages of sincere condolence came in from literally all over the world. I doubt whether I shall make the same international impact.

But this blog is about a subsequent event. To mark the anniversary of her death, my sister Barbara and I spent a day nostalgically re-living our roots, in particular the area where I spent 5 years to the age of 10.  I still have a small mental scar which marks the place as small child of being torn away from my school friends when we moved away, but I have absolutely no doubt that it was the best thing to do, and if we had stayed then I would not be the person that I have become. My father took the decision to move his family to an area of greater opportunity, and I am thankful that he did.

Memories are dangerous things. I have for example a very clear recollection of walking to school down a certain road. The moment when I relived that journey only to find that the journey I remembered so clearly was not only not possible, but had never been so, was for me a troubled moment of self-realisation, that our past is a slippery and dangerous place.

So, when Barbara and I went to see the house that I lived in from the age of 5, all kinds of feelings came flooding back. For example the front wall which my father built is still there. The car access to the house is at the rear and as we walked down the rough track there was an elderly gentleman unloading groceries outside. I did not wish to frighten him so I approached and explained that Barbara and I were remembering the death of our mother and had travelled back to the house we left 47 years before. The mas stopped, looked at us and said "Oh you must be The Pooltons, my wife and I were talking about you the other day".

Here was the garage my Dad built, incredibly I suspect that the kitchen was the one he put in and in many ways I became that small child again. But I was a small child who moved away and as I relived so many of the memories (the local library, the Co-op with those wonderful vacuum suction cash tubes which sucked your money away), I realised the truth, that the past is gone. We cannot access it again and the world we knew may look similar to this one, but it is not. The idea of revisiting (even re-inventing?) our past is beguiling, but fundamentally untruthful. Whenever (and this is true of church) try to live in yesterday, we become dislocated from the present. It is a message and lesson we all need to learn.

Take Care

Alan

The tale of the plumbob

I recently had to drill a wall to put a large (and heavy!) mirror into position. It was only after opening the packaging that I realised that the mirror had two side positioning points rather than a single central one. The significance is simple, with a central fixing, positioning it to be level is easy – you just hang a wire and move it around until it looks level. Easy peasy. Two fixings are an entirely different matter; you have to drill two exactly level horizontal holes. The slightest measurement out and the mirror is never level and every time you look it in you notice the imperfection.

Those of you, who know me, understand that I am not the best DIY-ER in the world, but nevertheless I took extraordinary care in measuring and drilling. The result – according to my spirit level and plumbob was a complete success – until I put the unit back underneath it. You see, the mirror was straight, the wall was straight, but the dressing table underneath was not. To make it level, I had to put folded bits of cardboard underneath the legs to raise one side!.

So much for perfection.

It made me think of the way we look at the world. There are those people I know, and have known over the years who are real perfectionists. They see the world as something to control (some even use the phrase – a “control freak”) and become agitated when others around them fail to see things their way.

I wonder how God sees our world – especially at Christmas time? The narrative of God being born into poverty and the humiliation of a birth outside of marriage seems to many as frankly, rather vulgar. After all, if God is the “prime motivator” (the phrase used many hundreds of years ago to define God) of all things, surely he has only himself to blame if things do not work out as he ordered them?

When  I look at God working in today’s world – trying to sort out the mess we all make both on the everyday level and on an international level, I see the hand of someone “folding bits of cardboard” trying to bring back into true, to match the spirit level and plumbob.

The God whom I have come to know as a friend of many years is one who loves to take the mess of the ordinary and beyond hope, beyond expectation, make something remarkable from it.

Take Care and have a good Christmas

Alan