Easter Day intercessions

[Sparked by God waking me at 4am to rewrite them, and prayed as part of Easter Sunday Eucharist at Huddersfield Parish Church]

Let us pray for the church and the world, for ourselves, and for one another, as we come together this Easter morning, having walked Holy Week together, having walked the way of the Cross with Jesus, knowing the joy of the Resurrection.

• On Thursday Christ the servant washes the feet of his friends. He kneels in front of them, despite their protests, and he serves them. He tells them to do likewise, to seek to serve each other, to support each other. He calls them to eat together, to break bread and to take wine, to live in community with each other. He commands them to love one another following in his example. 

Lord of love, help us to follow your example too. Thank you for our fellowship together, both here in this place and with our siblings in faith around the world who meet to proclaim your resurrection and share in the joy of our salvation.

As we seek to witness to you, we pray for our ministry here. Help us always to strive to be open, warm, welcoming, and outward looking, to be a community working together to recognise the common humanity we share in Christ, the love that binds us to one another. Help us to be willing to serve, to wash the feet of others, to invite others to the table to be fed and nourished by you in your great love for all your creation.

• On Friday Christ the condemned is taken from his family, from his friends. Taken to be tried, mocked and humiliated. Met with violence and pain. He is wounded, he is abandoned, he is frightened. Yet he goes willingly, knowing that it will end in new life. But there is darkness, and there is sorrow, and there is the brutal reality of death, the awaiting empty tomb.

God of peace, our hearts are heavy at the violence and war tearing through communities around the world. Be with all those who are scared for their communities, those who have been forced to flee, those who have lost loved ones because of war and conflict. We pray that they will know you in the midst of their suffering, because you know only too well their pain. We pray for all who seek to advocate for peace and reconciliation between peoples and nations, those who offer hope in the darkest of places. We pray for our world, that is so greatly in need of your justice, your peace, and your healing.

• On Saturday, the friends and family of Christ are broken. Broken in spirit, broken by loss, broken by the guilt of abandonment and denial. There is the overwhelming, sudden absence of the one they had loved and been so loved by. The tomb that was empty now holds his body, and hope is hard to find in the bewilderment of grief

Compassionate God, sometimes we find ourselves so caught up in the darkness and the pain and the cruel parts of life that we cannot find any way to hope or to move forwards. We pray today for all living in those dark and hard parts. For those who are struggling with their mental health. For those who have recently lost loved ones, whether through long illness or sudden bereavement. You are a God of light, a God who walks alongside us in our grief and in our desolation. We pray that all those who are struggling today will know your comfort and presence with them, as we look towards the dawn.

• Today the tomb is empty. Christ is Risen, and there is life. Life in all its fullness and abundance. 

God of resurrection, as we go from here, draw us from death to life, knowing that we are Known and loved beyond our ability to understand. Draw us closer to love of neighbour, to love of the stranger, the refugee, to love of the lost and the wandering, to love of the sick and the scared. Breathe new life into us, making and shaping us to be an Easter people, proclaiming your victory over the grave, and your grace and care for all that you have made, sharing the joy of the victory of Christ our Risen Lord. Amen

It is meet and right

I’ve been reflecting lately on a parallel that feels, on the surface, a very strange one to draw. But bear with it. At least for now. When I first came out as trans I vividly remember posting in a Facebook support group for trans masculine people, asking if it ever got old being called ‘sir’ – it was so new for me to pass, so new to be so affirmed, that I wondered if it would ever become tiresome. A few guys said that they were teachers and so yep, being called sir 9000 times a day by students meant they were largely immune to it. But eight years later, it still hasn’t ever become old to me. And I don’t think it ever will. To be seen and read as myself. Every time someone calls me sir or uses my pronouns, it is like part of my soul is being acknowledged, seen, and known by others. And it feels so very right.

In a very similar way I found myself this week reflecting with a friend on how it feels to share sacrament with others. Part of me wonders if those moments of encounter with one another and with God – of the shivers that I have as I offer the chalice to someone, as I pray with other people, as I seek to serve – whether that will ever get old.

But I think, and somewhere within me I Know, that it will not. Because at the heart of such encounters is the ridiculous nature of encountering Jesus, sharing so deeply the love and hope that we have been given. And that is something I cannot ever get tired of. And it is well with my soul.

The joy of being truly and fully our own created selves, wherever we are on our journeys, is a joy that I trust will never grow old. As my favourite preface says ‘it is meet, right, and our bounden duty that we should at all times and in all places give thanks unto thee O Lord’ – wherever we are, whoever we are, wherever we find our joys and trials, our sadness and our sacrament, I hope we know that where we are, God is also, and that it is right

Childlike, Christlike

“If your little ones need to wander, please wander with them”

In a practical sense, this request in the welcome section at the front of our order of service at my parish church is simply to try and keep smaller children as safe as we can in a church building with hard stone floors, lots of heavy furniture, and a fair amount of stairs – we want to try to ensure that the toddlers who discover the satisfying noise of pounding up and down a carpeted pew, and the six year olds who play hide and seek with energy the rest of us can only envy alike don’t come to harm, and are looked after.

But also it somehow recognises that we are all little ones in the eyes of God. As the Psalmist says in wonder ‘what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them?’ We are all called and created, despite and perhaps because we are mere mortals to be known and loved.

But how ridiculous and remarkable is it that God who created the universe also created us? How can we even begin to accept such love and knowing?

So often we are caught up in our own heads and our own lives, concerns, duties and responsibilities that this fact – that all of our own innermost, childlike and childish parts are known and fashioned by God – is often forgotten and sometimes actively discarded. And so we too wander.

And there is a deep joy in the discoveries made whilst wandering. By our very human nature we are curious about the world around us. And God, much like the anxious first time parent calls and asks us to wander with them. But wandering can be painful, hard, scary.

So in Jesus God comes to our humanity. God made flesh, God incarnate. A God who in Jesus experiences the joys, the violence, the compassion, and the pain of what living and moving and having our being rooted in God, trusting and anchoring in safe ports, truly means.

May your own wanderings be fruitful. May they be ways to encounter God and one another. May you know what it is to love and to be loved – fully and completely yourself.

How did I find this voice?

1 week on T, one month on T, one year on T. Audio files – immortalised in the Cloud.

The inflections. The cracks reminiscent of a teenage boyhood I never got to experience.

The higher, habitual, hated, pitch of my customer service voice.

The days of winter where I am full of cold and the glories of a sore throat, the hoarse and deeper and huskier voice. The way my Northern-ness has crept back, after years of trying to soften it.

The radio interview I did, 6 months on hormones. Cringing to hear it back, despite the pride that I was brave enough to speak my truth out loud.

Re-listening to YouTube livestreams where I have read or preached.

Hypervigilant.

Now? I sing, and I read, and I am heard.

And oh how I am heard – Northern. Nervous. Nicholas. All of it both Created and Creating.

I am learning to love and live with this new voice. This new tone and new privilege.

How can I keep from singing? For I am living and speaking, giving voice to those truths which I know, and to those I don’t, but some day might.

On falling and flying

How can I bear this love?

How can I possibly help to carry the knowledge of your Presence to my fellow fragile, overwrought, exhausted community?

How can you call out, time and again, come. Come, and be fed. Come and hear. Come and do not be alone. Come because you do not know where else to go.

There is always more than enough.

Where can we run, where can we hide, from a Love that feels so alien, so huge, so daunting. Things go wrong and we fall, have always been falling. But somehow, by grace and Love we are caught. Upheld.

And perhaps one day we find, being upheld, being Known, that we can bear the painfully bright burden and privilege of carrying that Love for one another. Even if only for a little while.

And in those moments we are not falling, but soaring. Flying in our full and ridiculous and messy and glorious humanity, daring to share in divinity.

What a difference a year makes

Life has shifted. As life does. And I find myself living in a place of both great upheaval and of great constancy.

Next week will mark a year since my father had a severe ischaemic stroke on an otherwise unremarkable Saturday morning which has left him with life-changing disabilities. And as a family where my mother also has significant health issues I won’t pretend the last year hasn’t sometimes felt like being at the bottom of a very tall and daunting mountain and not being able to even find the first foothold.

But. I’ve glimpsed God over the last year so many times I have lost count. From those who reached out on Twitter when I asked for prayers in the back of an Uber from work on the way to A&E not knowing what I might see at the other end, to the familiar rhythms of the BCP I could bear to attend that first Sunday morning, to the nurses who made me a cup of tea and gave me space to cry when I visited one evening and the sheer enormity of how life would have to change crashed over me, to the friends who have visited both when he was in hospital and since he has come home.

I still can’t always see the light. But as my father continues to make progress in recovery helped by so many different services I am yet again humbled by a God who promises restoration, transformation, and above all Love.

Life now looks very different from how it did a year ago. But, as much as it has been challenging – sometimes beyond where I thought my limits were – it has pushed me towards new things, both in terms of my own vocation and my own education. And for those things I can only thank God, and the people God has put around me

Pentecost Moments

Based on a reflection I preached at our Rainbow Eucharist at Huddersfield Parish Church on the Feast of Pentecost

Today the church marks the feast of Pentecost, 50 days after we dusted off the
alleluia’s and celebrated together the wonderful Easter joy of the Resurrection.
It’s a great feast for those who love theatre and spectacle. There’s roaring
wind, there’s crackling tongues of fire, there are people speaking many
different languages yet understanding each other. The images conjured up by
the reading from Acts are big and bold and powerful – many paintings show
the disciples gathered together with flames hovering over their heads, or the
Holy Spirit descending as a dove upon them, as they begin to proclaim the
Resurrection to those around them, as they begin to work out what being a
church might look like.

God is perhaps easy to see in these events – here is a physical manifestation of
divine power which draws the attention of pretty much everyone in Jerusalem.
It’s God writ large. The sort of dramatic appearance of God which we see
elsewhere both in the Scriptures and also maybe sometimes in our own lives.
Think of God calling to Moses out of the burning bush or God appearing to Saul
in the blinding light on the Damascus road. These Pentecost moments are
transformative moments, they are moments where through the Holy Spirit
people are drawn closer to the God who creates and recreates. On these
moments a great deal can be built. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit in wind
and fire to those first disciples forms the foundation for what will become the
church, Saul becomes Paul and comes to be a great apostle and teacher,
Moses leads the people out of slavery in Egypt.

Eight years ago I sat in my bedroom in a shared house in London where I was
living with friends and opened the parcel that had been sat on my desk for a
couple of days. It was my first chest binder. I’d been running from that
moment for a while, because I had a feeling that putting that binder on would
be one of those Pentecost moments, and I wasn’t sure whether I was ready to
start walking down a path that I knew would be full of hard conversations,
hard decisions, and an uncertain future. But I also knew that I couldn’t
continue to live a life that was diminished. I couldn’t continue to live a life
where I was not bringing the whole of myself to bear upon the world. I cried
and prayed and asked God to make it all go away. In fact I asked God to go
away. Really really far away from me and not talk to me. But. God, being God,
did not go away.

Instead I opened the parcel, and I began to bind my chest, and occasionally,
just occasionally, I glimpsed the true self that I had for so long been trying to
hide from.

The years that followed my acceptance of myself as transgender have been full
of Pentecost moments – changing my name, starting hormones, getting
surgery. Living my full and authentic self before others and before God. One of
the most spirit filled services I’ve been privileged to be a part of was a service
in which my friends and colleagues gathered together one Sunday afternoon to
affirm my chosen name, and mark this new chapter of my life. As the vicar
anointed me and invited people to pray with and for me I understood what it
means to be filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit, what it means to be upheld
and sustained and encouraged by God.

The days where transition has been hard, the days when gender dysphoria has
been shouting loudly, the days where my own spirit is crushed and I lose hope,
I have found the only thing I can do is ask God for the comfort of the Holy
Spirit. Because of course, not every day is Pentecost. Some days we may not be
able to see God in any events at all. We live in a broken and fragile world, as
ordinary human beings, with all the joys and sorrows that that brings. And so
sometimes it is all we can do to hold on, and try to survive, before we can even
hope to begin to thrive and to build, before we can become the people God
knows that we are and calls us to be. And sometimes that working out of who
we are, of who we can be, and might be, and hope to be takes a long time!
As I continue to learn how to walk through life, the wonderful awesome parts
and the dark and hard parts alike, I continue to learn to appreciate these small
moments where God can be glimpsed. The working in and through us of the
Holy Spirit is sometimes immediately obvious, big and bold and momentous –
like the first time we come out or the first time we share our true selves with
anyone other than God. But more often it is the day to day bearing of fruit. I
wonder tonight what our own Pentecost moments might be?

We gather together, around this table, in this place, as the beloved children of
God, and God draws us together. The disciples who are sent out at Pentecost
are ordinary people, fishermen and tax collectors. They are not the powerful
ones, they are not the leaders. They are gathered together in Jerusalem
because God has called them to be there, to witness to the resurrection and to
go out and proclaim the love of God through Jesus Christ in the power of the
Holy Spirit. The Spirit which rests on the heads and in the hearts of every single
one of us, bringing comfort and renewal even when we find this world to be
too sharp and too hard. God tells us that God is with us always – even when
sometimes we might wish we could run and hide and not be the ones God is
calling. As we go out from this space let us take the spirit of God out with us
into the world, in the Pentecost moments and in the still small moments alike,
knowing that God loves, sustains, and comforts us always.

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful people, and kindle in them the
fire of your love. Amen

Coming Out [and Coming In]

When I was 20 years old I came out as transgender. I’d stumbled around the edge of acceptance of this part of my existence and identity for many years, but many factors stopped me from being able to fully put all the pieces together in the right order. I was incredibly lucky to be surrounded by people who gave me the necessary space to think through my identity, and I still vividly remember some stand out moments which helped me to understand myself and find the courage to then begin unveiling that self to the rest of the world. My housemates who read my note on our communal kitchen whiteboard about wanting to try new pronouns when I got back from Christmas break, and greeted me with them as soon as I walked back through the door; my university when I wanted to run for Academic Affairs Officer but campaign in my chosen name who changed my name on the ballot papers and campaign material without any great fanfare; the Associate Vicar at the church I was working at during the first few months of my transition who had many conversations on my behalf with some of our congregation who didn’t yet grasp what the changes to my gender presentation were about.

There’s a lot of the flotsam and jetsam of the early days of transition that I have forgotten (apart from early blog posts which will never see the light of day) and I’m largely glad of that. I’m glad I don’t vividly recall how much being misgendered ripped at my very being once I began to understand, and express myself, as male. I’m glad that I don’t remember how much greater the gender dysphoria around my chest became once top surgery became a real possibility. But there are also myriad shining moments of joy and euphoria too that I have to work hard to remember. The first time someone who had been trying really hard finally got my pronouns right consistently, the first time I spoke with my GP and got my referral to the Gender Identity Clinic, the first time I pulled that binder over my chest and looked in the mirror, the first time my parents used the right name for me. I think back to that time eight years ago and I see now how many things were constantly in flux and yet I knew that some day I would look in the mirror and see myself looking back, and day by day and step by step I became that person. Some days I never thought I’d get there, I’d be misgendered, or my binder wouldn’t make me look flat enough, or my menstrual cycle would betray me. But I clung to the inner certainty that in taking the next steps things would fall into place.

Transition is not a quick or an easy process, especially if you find yourself seeking medical transition on the NHS as I did. It requires meeting with a great many different professionals and you find yourself having to try and explain your own understanding of your gender identity. Finding the words to express and explain this very personal and internal thing to other people was, and remains incredibly difficult. How do you explain to someone outside of yourself how you perceive your own gender? You have to resort to metaphors, and examples, and hopes and dreams of what you imagine life would be like after transition. And so you string together the narrative, you spend a lot of time inside your own head thinking about what taking hormones or having major surgery would feel like, and come to the conclusion that, even when it is scary and uncertain, transitioning is the only way to bring your own sense of self into a coherent whole. Transition takes time, because it is exactly that. A transition. A change. And even though we change moment by moment, some changes are bigger than others. But once I knew, in the absolute core of my being that transition was the right path for me, I drew on that foundation for all the steps that were to come. I ‘came out’ to the world yes, but I also ‘came in’, in to my true self and in to an understanding of my identity that I might not have had if I hadn’t had to interrogate it throughout transition.

In the early days I was constantly having to come out, but I wasn’t able to come to a place where I could do that without doing the inner work of coming in. And that work also meant wrestling with the deepest questions of existence and identity. In and through that work and through reading and conversations with others I came to uncover a fledgling faith, to rediscover God, or perhaps more accurately, to discover God for the first time in a way that wasn’t just tied up with my upbringing and muscle memory of words and creeds long embedded in my psyche. God who through the Incarnation knows deeply and completely what it means to be part of this messy, fractured, human world. God who constantly calls and challenges us to live in the fullness of our created selves. God who transforms and who is transformed. God who is in the beginning and in the end, and in all the places in-between.

That God in Jesus shares fully in our humanity means that God knows suffering and trial and pain and sorrow. Not just as abstract, metaphysical concepts, but as concrete realities. Jesus weeps, he hungers, he cries out, he is marked and scarred. And Jesus questions, as he is questioned. As I began transition I questioned everything, and I was also subject to many questions. People asked me if I was sure about hormones, about surgery, people couldn’t or didn’t want to try to understand what it felt like to be so dysphoric about my own body. And Jesus tries to tell other people who he is, he tries time and again to explain to his disciples, and they cannot hear him. Not necessarily because they don’t want to, but because his frame of reference for his own self-understanding is so vastly different from theirs, even as he does the most human of things.

And now I find myself back in a Church community and starting to explore a vocation to the priesthood that I’ve long since felt called to, but much like my transition it is something I’ve also long struggled with, fought with, and run away from. And much like in the early days of coming out I simultaneously want to run towards the moment of ordination – of having the hands placed on my head as this sacrament is conferred upon me. And know that actually this is something which needs to be taken in parts. Slowly and not all at once. Transition included a lot of discernment. This calling does too.I pray that this coming out is also another coming in, of coming in to God and walking with God afresh.

Toast

When I was eight I asked the Head Server what the incense meant.

They told me it represented our prayers ascending to God.

I sit and watch the smoke dance in the sunbeams streaming through the high windows on Sunday morning.

Deepest thoughts, wants, needs. Rising. Fragrant. Rosa Mystica as bearer of our pleadings.

Prayers ascending, prayers unending, prayers fragile as wisps of air.

The morning after we have offered our own prayers and watched them rise

The space still holds the spectre of those hopes and confessions, suspended in lingering scent.

Now though the space holds the tang of burnt crust – inexpert wrangling with the mysteries of the church toaster.

Cheap white supermarket bread – there just in case,

Is broken, as she comes to us, asking us to help give her nourishment on a wet Spring morning.

Toast, with a cup of tea (two sugars) enough milk to make it as brown as the glass cup that holds it.

Take this bread. Take this cup.

And in this air now rises, and rests, both Her prayer and ours. Smoke dancing in the sunbeam of communion of being.

And She is through us and with us and in us. It is not us who do the blessing. For how could we?

How could we bear to? For now we can only open the doors and perhaps entertain angels unawares.