[Dialogue] 18/8, Spong: A Walk Down Memory Lane in England with My Wife
Janice Ulangca
aulangca at stny.rr.com
Fri Dec 9 20:13:54 EST 2011
Ellie,
There is such sweetness in this account. I waited until tonight when there was time to read it - and glad I could savor.
Thanks also for your Christmas epistle which came today. Always good to hear news from you and Carleton and your family. And get some of your favorite quotes! I spent most of the day in phone conversations and e-mails having to do with a Colquitt, GA (Swamp Gravy home) Conference on Building Creative Communities coming up in Feb. - a description will be on the ICA-USA web site as one of the 50 anniversary events. Also talked to Sandra Rafos in Toronto about things that a group of ICA colleagues is doing there. Sandy is a trained Awakening the Dreamer Symposium facilitator (not a huge leap for a good ICA facilitator!) and is helping with one at the U. of Toronto in Feb. and setting up another for 2 churches. She's also with a group working with Elise Packard on a Learning Basket program for a First Nation group. That program, just yesterday! - got major funding from Save the Children. We're getting events on the ICA-USA web site as fast as we can. There's now a good talk by Terry there about the developing vision for ICA's role in the 77 neighborhoods in Chicago. From the home page, click on 50 years at the right of the top bar, then Event Reports. www.ICA-USA.org
Did you ever get to the Awakening the Dreamer - Changing the Dream Symposium in Illinois? What did you think? I can imagine that the experience could be quite different depending on the skill of the facilitation team. Also - it's hard to convince people to come for long enough to get the full range of experiences - if it's too short, many of the exercises have to be cut. But sponsors for the program have to do their best to fit with what they think people in their community will go for and still come. Just got word from one of our facilition team who is also a trainer of facilitators that in Jan. they are having a "grand rollout" of a revision of the Symposium with more on racism and social justice. There will be a rollout event in NYC - she is going from Ithaca - I just might consider going. (She says it's open even to people who haven't had their training - which I havent.)
I sent your Advent readings to my pastor Sue Davis. She loved them! And is putting some in Sunday's service. So thanks again, from both of us.
Love to you and Carleton,
Janice
----- Original Message -----
From: Ellie Stock
To: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net ; OE at wedgeblade.net
Sent: Thursday, December 08, 2011 10:29 AM
Subject: [Dialogue] 18/8,Spong: A Walk Down Memory Lane in England with My Wife
Homepage My Profile Essay Archive Message Boards Calendar
A Walk Down Memory Lane in England with My Wife
It was a nostalgic trip down memory lane for my wife Christine. It turned out to be a moment of insight into life itself. For that reason alone I share this experience with my readers.
On a recent trip to Switzerland and Italy, we added a couple of days in England, the land of Christine’s birth. The reasons were twofold. First, she has four elderly aunts, who range in age from 82 to 95, and to whom we are both quite close. As we begin to cut down our travel schedule, the opportunities we will have to see them will not be as frequent as in the past. We, therefore, did not want to come that close to England and miss the opportunity for a visit. The second reason was more personal in that Christine wanted to visit in a final kind of way some of the places of her childhood around which memories have always lingered. It was to be her farewell to places we will probably not visit again. We filled those two final days with many memorable stops. The aunts were all in good spirits. Three of these aunts are unmarried sisters who live together in the tiny village of North Boarhunt. The other, the eldest of the four, is a widow who lives in Bognor Regis. As usual, we caught up on family news and village gossip. With those bases touched, we began the journey to relive my wife’s childhood.
Christine was born in 1939, six months before the outbreak of World War II, in the town of Worthing, Sussex on the English Channel, about ten miles west of Brighton. Worthing’s beaches were in her early years not only mined, but were also loaded with barbed wire and concrete blocks to impede what they expected to be a German invasion.
Adjacent to Worthing is the village of Sompting, the home of St. Mary’s Church in which Christine’s early life was nurtured. This church was about a half-mile from her childhood home in the midst of the coastal hills called “The South Downs,” a protected green belt where building is prohibited so farming and hiking trails abound.
St. Mary’s Church was established around 906 CE, which makes it 1205 years old. It has a Saxon tower with a Rhenish helm, to which the body of the church was added by the Normans after the invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066. That kind of longevity was an important factor in Christine’s upbringing. Only things of great value endure through the ages like this church. So she developed a deep respect for Christianity and for Christian history. The crises of a particular generation did not invalidate the message of the centuries.
The second indelible impression that St. Mary’s left on her childhood memory came during the Battle of Britain. German bombers, accompanied by Messerschmitt fighters, were regularly bombing London and other English industrial centers and ports. On these sorties, they were intercepted by fighters of the RAF and the skies over England were alive with dogfights. If the bombers did not drop all their bombs on their major targets, they would offload them on the English coast on their way back to Germany, which made Worthing a secondary target.
In one air battle over Worthing, the RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires brought down a German bomber. It plunged nose first into the hills of the South Downs. The German crew of four were all killed. The people of St. Mary’s went out and retrieved the bodies of these airmen and provided them with a Christian burial, placing all four bodies into a cordoned off section of their churchyard. Everyone knew that in this section lay “the Germans.”
That was a defining lesson for Christine. There was something about this thing called Christianity that meant you treat even your enemies with respect and that this religion transcended tribal mentalities even when the tribes were locked in a desperate conflict for survival. In 1963 the remains of these Germans were disinterred and moved to a permanent burial spot in Dusseldorf. So the Church of St. Mary’s was a place we visited on our farewell tour. We wandered in the churchyard and occasionally Christine would recognize a name on a tombstone and tell me of her association. A woman vicar now serves this still small village church. Inside it looked clean, bright and well used. We have worshipped there in the past and the churchyard is still holy ground, a memorial bench is now where the Germans once laid. .
As a child Christine and her neighborhood friends, who ranged in age from five to fourteen, played on the South Downs, using their imaginations to supply whatever was lacking. Their favorite game was “Robin Hood.” The girls, like Christine, were cast as Marian or one of her maids. So on this trip, we climbed the South Downs and reminisced about childhood games, ate wild blackberries and listened to the echoes of the past. These Downs are so special to Christine that her will states that at death she is to be cremated and her ashes scattered on the South Downs. As we talked with each other about that we began to contemplate life’s meaning.
Next we drove to the house in which she grew up. To get there we passed her first school and the place where she became a brownie and then a brownie drop out. Her house was a modest two-family home, built around a common green space, which became known as “the patch,” for during the war it was divided into allotments where people could grow the food necessary to survive the wartime shortages. Christine’s father was always known as a “green thumb gardener” and she still asserts that there is nothing quite like new potatoes raised with no chemical fertilizers. Shock greeted her when we turned the corner on Bramber Road and her old house came into view. It had been painted pink! Nostalgia retreated for a moment as reality set in. Not all progress is progress. We rode twice around that house. The sight did not improve.
Then we did a quick trip through the little shops that once formed the business section. A giant Sainsbury’s grocery store across the street has altered business practices dramatically. The Post Office was gone. A fish and chips shop, the English equivalent of McDonalds, was there, but it also offered Indian and Chinese food, revealing the changing nature of the neighborhood.
We drove a few miles further down the road until we came to a sign marked “Parking for Cissbury Ring.” This was another childhood playground and adult hiking trail in the South Downs. Originally, this ring was a hill fortress erected by England’s earliest inhabitants about 1000 BCE. On top of a hill and easily defendable, these people, digging by hand, had erected giant mounds of dirt in a large circle, behind which they kept their livestock safe from rustlers and found themselves also protected from their enemies. It was a cool, blustery day as we climbed the hill, reaching the top in about an hour. Then we walked around the Ring, surveying the villages below from all sides and even gazing on the blue waters of the English Channel. Christine related memories connected with each sight. The Ring was very large, taking some forty-five minutes to navigate. It was, however, precious time.
When the walk around the top of the Ring returned us to the place where we had begun, we were on the highest point. Christine paused, surveyed all that was around her and beneath her and then turning slowly from one side to the other she began to say her goodbyes.
“Goodbye, Steyning,” she began, speaking to a village on the northern side of the Downs. “Goodbye, Sompting,” she continued, coming closer to where we were. “Goodbye, St. Mary’s Church. Goodbye, Worthing. Goodbye, Bramber Road. Goodbye South Downs.” It seemed so final, even sad. When her goodbyes were ended, I broke her silence and called her back into the present by saying, “Hello, Christine.” She looked at me for a moment and smiled. “I love you,” she said, and then in that stiff breeze on that impressive hilltop I embraced her as fervently as an 80 year-old man can embrace his 72 year-old wife. I love you too, I responded, and I do.
It was at that moment that I experienced what I believe is the deepest meaning found in human life. Life is finally not about a place, no matter how sweet its memories. We move from place to place in life, even from continent to continent and we do it with great rapidity and regularity. Places enrich us, but they do not define us. Only relationships can finally do that. It is in living deeply, loving wastefully and being all that each of us can be that we break the boundaries on our humanity and transcend the limits those boundaries impose on us. We cannot achieve these things alone. There is a radical loneliness in our humanity. We are alone in birth – alone in death and this loneliness can only be overcome in relationships. Christine and I are so deeply a part of each other that I do not know any longer how to draw lines of separation. Yet the uniqueness we each possess is not compromised by the depth and meaning of our relationship. It is, therefore, that relationship, which enables us to walk into the future unafraid. We leave the past without forgetting it, but no longer are we bound to it.
That was my learning on top of Cissbury Ring in the South Downs of England with my wonderful wife. I love the past, but I leave it. I live in the present and appreciate it. I anticipate the future and still have great expectations. More importantly, in the transformative power of human relationships in general and in my unique life in particular, I find I transcend my limits and experience that which I believe is eternal. My self-consciousness expands until I enter a universal consciousness. Perhaps that is what the author of I John had in mind when he wrote that “God is love and those who abide in love abide in God” or what the author of John’s Gospel meant when he had Jesus define his purpose as that of giving life, abundant life, to all.
That is what Christine has given me – expanded, abundant life, new being and a sense of ultimate worth. I hope that is what I have given her. That is where we find life’s treasure, encounter the Holy and share in eternity. All of this while taking a nostalgic journey with my wife down memory lane.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
------------------------------------------------------
New Book Now Available!
RE-CLAIMING THE BIBLE FOR A NON-RELIGIOUS WORLD
John Shelby Spong presents Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, a book designed to take readers into the contemporary academic debate about the Bible.
A definitive voice for progressive Christianity, Spong frees readers from a literal view of the Bible. He demonstrates that it is possible to be both a deeply committed Christian and an informed twenty-first-century citizen.
Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.
Order your copy now on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com!
------------------------------------------------------
Question & Answer
Russell, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
What do we mean by the word “faith?” People, who would dismiss us as anti-intellectual, ridicule faith with the presumption that it means believing in things that are hard to believe in or believing in things that are contrary to known facts. I know this is not what we Christians mean by that word (outside the evangelical fringe), but I don’t have good words to explain it. Can you help?
Answer:
Dear Russ,
I can try. Faith in its original biblical meaning had more to do with trust than it does with believing. This trust was not in the conviction that all would be well, but that whatever tomorrow brings, God would be present in it. That is why the author of the epistle to the Hebrews could write that it was “by faith that Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees” to form a new nation in a new place. It was “by faith” that Moses left the known of Egypt for the unknown of the wilderness.
Later in Christian history “faith” was connected with believing certain propositional statements. That was when the creeds began to be called expressions of “the Faith.” Actually, this was little more that idolatry. Creeds represent the human and ecclesiastical assertion that the mystery and wonder of God can actually be captured in something that human beings have created. That is in creeds, doctrines or dogmas. This practice is also the source of the development of religious imperialism, which ultimately gave birth to the Inquisition, to religious persecution, to religious wars and many other evils.
Creeds are at best pointers to the mystery of God. They are not and should never have been allowed to become strait jackets that we were required to put on in order to pretend that we have captured the truth of God.
The first creed of the church was only three words. It was an affirmation that “Jesus is Messiah” rather than a set of beliefs. To call Jesus “messiah” was to claim that in the life of Jesus the transcendent power of the divine has been met and engaged. I think this is still the best creed the church has ever formulated.
In a word (or two), I define faith as “having the courage to be.”
~John Shelby Spong
------------------------------------------------------
New Book Now Available!
RE-CLAIMING THE BIBLE FOR A NON-RELIGIOUS WORLD
John Shelby Spong presents Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, a book designed to take readers into the contemporary academic debate about the Bible.
A definitive voice for progressive Christianity, Spong frees readers from a literal view of the Bible. He demonstrates that it is possible to be both a deeply committed Christian and an informed twenty-first-century citizen.
Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.
Order your copy now on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com!
------------------------------------------------------
Announcements
Read what Bishop Spong has to say about A Joyful Path Progressive Christian Spiritual Curriculum for Young Hearts and Minds: "The great need in the Christian church is for a Sunday school curriculum for children that does not equate faith with having a pre-modern mind. The Center for Progressive Christianity has produced just that. Teachers can now teach children in Sunday school without crossing their fingers. I endorse it wholeheartedly."
Subcribers, please remember that your subscription is automatically renewed. You can unsubscribe at any time. You just need to login to access your profile page and cancel your account. Also, please note that the name on the bill will now be listed as "SPONGNEWS" or "SPONGNEWSLETTER" rather than "water front media" or "wfm" as The Center for Progressive Christianity (aka ProgressiveChristianity.org) is now the publisher and manager of this newsletter. We hope you enjoy the new website and newsletter layout!
Login to be able to comment directly on the website. Join in the discussion!
Interested in staying informed of the latest updates to ProgressiveChristianity.org? Click here to sign up for our free monthly e-Bulletin, which has articles, reviews, books, events, and more.
Look for us on Facebook.
You can also follow Bishop Spong on Twitter.
Thank you for taking this journey with us!
Any questions or concerns, please contact us at support at johnshelbyspong.com or 253-303-0354.
forward to a friend
Copyright © 2011 The Center for Progressive Christianity, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you have a membership at our website.
Our mailing address is:
The Center for Progressive Christianity
4916 Pt Fosdick Dr, NW
#148
Gig Harbor, WA 98335
Add us to your address book
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Dialogue mailing list
Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20111209/d2fb51c8/attachment-0001.html>
More information about the Dialogue
mailing list