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both to our own emotions and to the emotions of others empathy sympathy and compassion are integral and vital in all human relationships and all human communities i was speaking with some people about medical education recently and one of the points that came up was that while we might want to encourage doctors to have empathy and to train them to be sympathetic and compassionate there are limits to these as to all other virtues personally i want a doctor to be full of sympathy and empathy when he or she is talking with me about my problems but when it comes to the technical side of the work i don t want empathy i want precision efficiency and an excellent result in cases like surgery this should be quite simple as far as i am concerned the empathy can stop the moment the anesthetic kicks in but what about more complex areas like physiotherapy the subtleties of emotional life are indeed complex when children are very young it s no good if their parents try to organize things so that the child will never be upset on the contrary the parent must determine when the child is upset part of the role of the parent is to be in charge of the boundaries that make the child s life safe and manageable and healthy part of the role of the child is to test and to seek to transgress those boundaries fast forward seventy or eighty years and things may well be reversed power of attorney is arranged and the children might now have to upset their parents by making decisions about care and wellbeing and even such basic things as whether someone can live at home any longer these will be times of strong and difficult emotion and rightly so emotion is a proper and important part of life emotions rise when choices are faced and the starker the choice and the closer the deadline the greater the emotion a referendum is therefore bound to raise more emotions than a general election and the aftermath is bound to be more emotional just as a knockout competition is more exciting than a league and why penalty shoot outs are knife edge affairs especially when they get to the stage of sudden death if well attuned and proportional our emotions can make us wise but if they are excessive they can easily make us foolish very often when emotion pushes us to make a mistake we go on flooded with the further emotions of guilt or embarrassment to make more and more mistakes so that the whole thing spirals out of control until something or someone or maybe many things or many people get very badly hurt and we decide far too late to stop it and so it is that we look back at the wars of the twentieth century with a tear in our eye and look at the current state of our politics and feel at least a little bit anxious about where it is all heading for a long time the most motivating words in politics and economics have been growth or change looking at things today many of us might find words like stability and indeed sustainability more attractive however there are times in our lives when change is not an option change is the point at which we have arrived we have recently seen graduation ceremonies here and today we come to the end of the chapel s academic year and so we are saying goodbye to our year 8 choristers and our recently graduated choral scholars one of the nice things about institutions is that they generate and evolve traditional rites of passage these help us manage the inevitable emotions and make good transitions sometimes such traditions involve food a dinner perhaps with speeches the choral scholars have a dinner tonight and i gave the choristers a dinner a few weeks ago it is worth noticing in this context that the talking and eating the conviviality and shared emotion of such occasions mirror that of the eucharist with its focus on the meal of bread and wine and the sharing of the word of god through readings and sermon if we use these occasions to be emotionally generous and intellectually truthful then they can be more than good ways to manage the emotions of transition they can become gateways to the transcendent windows that open us up to the guiding supporting and sustaining love of god who is grace and truth and it is to that eternal love that i would want to commend our leavers and all those who are at this time experiencing complex and deep emotions all those who have been taken by forces both outside and inside themselves to a place of disequilibrium and stress and all those who have in recent days been on the receiving end of hurtful remarks or violent actions sparked by the unfortunate emotionality of our recent political process the love of god is more than a match for all this trouble and strife god s future is far more positive than the naive mix of anxiety and optimism that dominates our current politics and bangs on about change and growth as if they were ultimate values time and again jesus and his followers have said that it is the heart that matters most certainly it is our hearts that can become dangerous when inflamed with raw emotion but it is our hearts that are the seat of our deepest values and the place of our spiritual struggles the message of this final sermon of this year is simple put your heart into the hands of the god of love truth peace forgiveness hope and joy these are the things that matter most deeply for they are the qualities of both of god and of human beings at their best and it is when we pursue these that we find our selves our lives and our world transfigured and transformed and discover that we are easing our way towards a positive future in the sustaining company of the god of grace and truth read full post breathing space posted in poetry spirituality tagged god grace peace prayer religion and spirituality on january 13 2013 1 comment this is the name of a wonderful project at witton gilbert chruch just outside durham read more here http wittongilbert durhamnorthteam org breathingspace this poem of mine was read at a special serivce there this evening to commission the project officer mrs pamela barmey breath of god breath of god be my life this day be my compassion breath of god flow where you are not expected flow where there is hurt and hatred breath of god flow where life is coming to an end flow into the place of death breath of god flow into me through me from me breath of god be grace be spirit be life be love breath of god breath of god breath of god breathe on me breathe with me breathe me read full post 25 years a priest the lessons posted in christian ministry tagged church durham cathedral god ordination religion and spirituality on june 30 2012 5 comments twenty five years ago i was ordained a priest that means this is silver jubilee time and i even have a card to prove it i remember the ordination in manchester cathedral eight of us were ordained at the same time to my left a man who died about five years later in a fishing accident he took it up as a hobby but should first have learnt how to swim a terrible tragedy to my right an extremely large man who could only get to his feet from kneeling by putting his hand on my shoulder and pushing hard i recall that much more vividly than any bishop s hands on my head that man s ministerial career came to an untimely end too he was arrested and imprisoned for possessing a firearm and ammunition it was hot very hot my wife was eight months pregnant six weeks later i remember conducting a pre wedding interview with our new baby on the floor sleeping fitfully on a fleece a few hours later he was in hospital in the middle of the night we had to decide whether to summon the chaplain to baptise him i was caught between wanting to do it myself and toughing it out we toughed it out so did he but it was touch and go i baptised him three months later attending an ordination service earlier today i was trying to recall what i was thinking twenty five years ago apart from will i buckle under the strain of this giant heaving himself to his feet i was wondering how much of the reality of ministry i had been able to imagine at that stage very little i think certainly in terms of detail but also in terms of themes so what did i underestimate three things spring to mind buildings money and people i had expected terribly wrongly that ministry would be something that happened wherever and whenever the church building seemed to me to be a kind of convenience certainly not intrinsic or central i discovered that i was wrong in my curacy i wrote in article in theology that people connect their mental image of the church building with the person of the local priest since my curacy i have only had three jobs but in each one the building had a massive significance when i say that one was king s college chapel cambridge and another durham cathedral then it does make sense though i had never seen such splendid edifices in my crystal ball but the two churches of holy trinity and all saints in loughborough were really important too while i was rector we closed one and restored and developed the other both were major major projects demanding not only time and effort but also a hat full of skills that i did not possess the church architect said to me you would be better off with an ond in building studies than a cambridge degree in theology he was right but i also needed degrees in fundraising capacity building project management and keeping the peace in the congregation english all saints church loughborough taken by kev747 photo credit wikipedia money this was not an issue when i was a cambridge chaplain but when i got to the parish it was the issue we could not afford to do what needed to be done so i had to learn very quickly to pay attention to matters financial this was not what i had in mind when i first felt called to ordained ministry i expected to live and move on a higher plane perhaps the main change in my attitude and expectation over the years is that now i believe that ministry takes you not to the heights but to the lower levels and that spirituality is not about exaltation but about plumbing the depths it s a journey down to the level of reality it s humility stupid should be the theme of every ordination sermon i now know that money is a primary consideration and that it is a ministerial duty to get stuck into the issues the issues however are not quite what they seem yes there are the accounting issues the cash flow problems the systems to ensure bills are paid and the task of craftily increasing streams of income and at the same time encouraging high levels of straightforward financial giving but the big questions about money are around values and priorities and involve keeping money in its place there is a major role for the church in talking about what money cannot buy and limiting the influence of financial matters in decision making and the wealthy in calling the shots i have always thought something like this the difference now is that i realise that lofty aspirations are not an alibi for careful financial management and planning but neither should the seemingly endless everyday tasks let the clergy off the hook of speaking out prophetically rather they can be used to offer a way of gaining credibility and learning how to speak the language that people will listen to the third theme is people ordained ministry exposes you to a huge variety of people and accelerates the speed with which you get to know them it also exposes you to a huge range of people from royalty to rectory callers looking for money clothes or food care in the community indeed it can also exaggerate the significance of the issues on which you differ i have always been interested in people as my university choice of psychology attests but people are far more complex subtle vulnerable and unpredictable than we appreciate they are also much deeper more spiritual and generally more robust and resourceful than we give them credit for this applies to children too and the elderly one thing to surprise me in parish life was my lack of capacity to read novels or enjoy soap operas i think it was because my head was already full of personalities stories characters and complicated plot lines one of the delights of the role of vicar is speaking at funerals when you feed back to a family some of the things they have told you not in order to add an undeserved halo to someone s memory but to help them see the significance perhaps the holiness in the life of their loved one i could of course find more themes to expand upon after all twenty five years is a long time and if pressed i would nominate my surprise at feeling the importance of spirituality more and more pressingly over the years i would also mention coming to see the christian contribution much less in terms of announcing the right way ahead and much more in learning how to be there in the muddle and in the aftermath of it all going wrong once upon a time i believed that the church would be in the vanguard to progressive and liberationist movements in some places it is we even have something called inclusive church but generally speaking it is not i am sad about that as i believe that society has moved quicker than the church and that much truth is spoken more clearly beyond its walls and yet i have come to the view that the important thing is not the pace of change but the quality of the journey and in particular the quality of relationship sustained forgiveness given and reconciliation both hoped for and accomplished what i think i am clearer about now is that the mess of the world like the mess of people s lives and minds is far more intractable than i had thought we are not going to sort it out and there are lots of things we are never going to get right the role of the priest is not to be angry at the failings of others or excruciatingly shamed by their own or steamed up with indignation at the church s faults rather it is to be alert to the reality of pain and the possibility of healing to be alert to the reality of failure and the reality of forgiveness and to be willing to work within the mess in such a way that the window which allows the grace or spirit of god into the situation is open even if only slightly this might seem to be a poor aspiration it is not getting and keeping that window open is the ultimate practical and spiritual challenge it is only possible for those who keep the window of their own soul unlocked and open that s the thing ordination is not about being high minded or having clean hands knowing lots of theology or about being right talented good or skillful it is about being a means of grace addressing my younger self i d have to say it s humility stupid not that i would have listened then i hope i can now read full post exemplary forgiveness and the maryland story posted in forgiveness uncategorized tagged brenda brewington episcopal diocese of maryland forgiveness god rev mary marguerite kohn on may 10 2012 1 comment in 2006 five little girls were killed and another five wounded by a local man who the...
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