It’s a good sign if they don’t change the locks while you’re away.  I came back to Westminster on Tuesday, to begin life post-sabbatical.   I’ll preach this Sunday and spend most of the week picking up where I left off back in May.

The past few weeks have been eventful with Tricia’s accident.  Thanks to the many who have brought food by the house and been so supportive while our family adjusts to a different routine for some weeks to come.

I had hoped to get further on some writing projects during sabbatical than I did but that will come.  However I did get my feet wet thanks to the writer’s seminar I took at the University of Iowa.  Here’s a creative short piece I was prompted to write by our instructor.  It reflects a bit on our time spent in Ireland.

Ruins

They crumble now, smoothed by rain, taunted by the wind, the hands that built them one carved stone at a time nothing but dust. Still they stand, glassless windows framing skies hovering over roofless sanctuaries. So you have to close your eyes and listen for the grumbling abbots, burping monks, and Latin Psalms chanted at midnight echoing across rock decade after decade, holy sounds only enhanced by unyielding surfaces. 

This was a foundry, bending iron wills, hardening short lives, for journeys no sane tourist would ever take. These people were crazy hunched over their vellum, scratching out peacock colored texts that most could never read. God they were crazy standing in cold water to cancel sins that I list as accomplishments. They were nuts seeing divinity in barbarians who cut them down like hay before the blade. 

It is ghostly serene now, minus the white-hot heat that burned cell to cell. Still they stand, monuments to absurd lives, markers of the extreme, compass points for those who choose to get close to the edge.  So I run my hand over crumbling rock, and I listen.

Things change fast.  Just a little while after making my last post on July 13 at Emerald Isle, NC we received word that our daughter had been injured in serious auto  mobile accident near our home in Georgia.  We immediately returned home to care for her. She has some serious ankle injuries but with rehab and some time to heal we anticipate a good recovery.

Thanks for the many prayers and expressions of concern from our church, family, and friends. Your support means a great deal. Our daughter Tricia will be updating folks from time to time on the progress of her recovery.

Needless to say this had caused my sabbatical leave to take an unexpected turn .  While we are grateful for God’s mercy, we are also struggling how to make sense of it all.  May plan is to return to my congregation the week of August 5th and take up the reins once again.  Your prayers during this last week are greatly appreciated.

It’s a rainy day at the beach, and that’s a good thing.  I’ve been thinking some today of the past couple of months and the little pieces of insight, conviction, rest, and rejoicing that have come my way.  In particular I’ve been reading the book a number of you are reading with me, The Celtic Way of Evangelism, and letting it rub against the experiences I’ve been fortunate to have.

The picture in the post is a sundial (perhaps 6th century) on west coast of Ireland that stands on the grounds of what was once the Kilmalkedar monastery.  It divides the day into times of common prayer, every three hours.  Three times a day the monks would cease from their business and gather for prayer, times literally carved in stone.

Prayer was the constant for these ancient saints.  It structured their day, in was their common bond, and it was from a praying community that most would eventually be sent to extend the faith against incredible odds.  It didn’t matter whether they felt like praying.  They prayed, as if like breathing itself, there was no other option.

I’m wondering about that kind of humble constancy which forms the backbone of such a resilient life. What does that look like for me? How does prayer become more than the bookends to a day that is lived as if it is all up to me?

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning on Emerald Isle, North Carolina.  After a week of hosting family it’s amazingly quiet.  Nothing stirred this morning but Marcia, me, and the dog.

While I’m here, in addition to doing some writing I brought along a couple of books to read.  One is Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith by Kathleen Norris.  It’s a personal reflection, almost a memoir, about the words Christians toss around by a person who lost her faith and had to find it again.  Norris also wrote two bestsellers, The Cloister Walk and Dakota, some years ago.  If you’re looking for a book that touches on faith from an an unusual, even poetic, angle this is a good one.

The other book is And The Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini.  If you read and enjoyed his other novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, I suspect you’ll like this one as well.  I won’t give away the plot but the novel revolves around a family from Afghanistan and the challenges that come with growing up in that land.

Blessings to you on this Lord’s day.

London is a collision between the old and the new, the grand and the gritty.  It doesn’t get any older, or grander than St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.  You can’t take photographs in these churches so I can only say that the beauty is more than I can describe.  To walk through these places is to run across the burial sites of names we read about in text books – Issac Newton, Charles Darwin, William Wilberforce – and a host of kings and queens. One of the highlights for me was getting beyond the history and staying for “Evensong” at St. Pauls.  The reading of scripture, chanting of Psalms, and singing of Latin Anthems (done by a men’s choir) in a cathedral is an awesome experience.

It’s also humbling to realize that most Londoner’s never attend these cathedrals or any church.  This city, which has some of the grandest churches ever built, has some of the lowest church attendance in the world.  I’ll resist the urge to preach, but it was a reminder to me in stone that the missionary task is never done, and is hardest of all in places where faith once made sense for the many, but is now compelling only for the few.

I’ll post more from London next time.

If I didn’t know I was in Iowa City, I would swear I had closed my eyes and woken up in Boulder, Colorado.  If you’ve never been to Colorado you won’t understand, but the motto for Boulder is “25 square miles surrounded by reality.”  Boulder is the Grateful Dead, Birkenstocks, beads, braids and granola frozen forever in time. 

Iowa City has that artsy flavor, particularly when you fill it with hundreds of aging wanna be writers. Add to that the local eccentrics and a thousand college freshman going through Hawkeye orientation, and the sidewalks in this small town are a parade of people trying to find themselves.  I’m feeling a bit square.

This is a week at the Summer Writing Festival of playing with metaphors, mastering synecdoches (look it up, I had to) and hearing the instructor say “show us don’t tell us” and “quit piling up the adverbs”.  It is a bit unnerving and a lot of fun.

I’m not here to write the next great American novel.  It’s about learning how to write what I really want to say, and getting a hearing when the average person has never been more distracted.

In the meantime there’s plenty more from Europe I’d like to share.  I might even post a “synecdoche” or two.

It’s a long way from Lindisfarne to London in more ways than one.  The four hour train ride from rolling country to Kings Cross Station in downtown London is like falling asleep in cornfield and waking up in New York City.  (Yes, all you Harry Potter fans, this is where the train  “Platform 9 3/4” from the movies is found.) 

There’s lots to say about London – Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, hundreds of naked bicycle riders crossing the Westminster bridge over the Thames River – for example! (I’d have never believed the bike ride had I not been standing right there.) What a collision of the old and the new, pop culture and high culture, the London of a historical Christian past and a wide-open anything goes present.  The picture of us is from the front of Buckingham Palace.

We saw a lot places, and because Marcia visits the people as much as the places, we met all kinds of folks.  We learned on the train of a place where the London locals congregate called “Gordon’s Wine Bar”.  It’s a restaurant underneath the street made from old hollowed out rock- sided storage caverns.  We met a young couple (Jenny from Ireland and her boyfriend from Italy) and got the insiders point of view of what it’s like to live in London.

As Marcia likes to say, ask a question and people will tell you a story.  Today I am waking up in Iowa (how’s that for contrast) at the Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa.  More later!

Take a forty-five minute train ride south from Edinburgh and you come to small north England town called Berwick-on-Tweed.  It is a walled city from the medieval time when the marauding Scots or invasive English (it depends on who you ask) where fighting each other for territory.  Directly across a small bay from the town is Lindisfarne island, better known as Holy Island.

Lindisfarne is a tidal island.  There is one road to it from the mainland which is covered by ocean when the tide is in.  Marcia and I timed our trip to get there while the tide was out so Steve, the good natured cab driver could drive us across for a night on the island.  It was worth the effort.

Holy Island represents the third expansion of the movement of Irish Christianity started by Patrick.  You might recall Columba was sent from Ireland to found the monastary at Iona that would eventually lead the way for the evangelization of the Picts, the barbarian tribe in Scotland.  In the 600’s Columba, at the request of the king of Northumbria, sent Aidan to found a monastary to be a base for the evangelization of the barbarian tribes that made up what is England today.  In time he was very successful.  Lindisfarne Priory, the name of the monastery, was instrumental in the spread of the gospel not only in England but back on the continent as well in the areas that would become France, Spain, and Italy.

So much for the history lesson.  Aidan was Christian of great character and deep compassion who like the monks before him found ways to adapt the gospel to the non-Irish he came to reach.  And long after he died the community he founded continued the work.  There is still a modern day group on the island, The Community of Aidan and Hilda, that continues in his tradition today. When Marcia and I went to the retreat center they run I was pleased to discover another Presbyterian pastor on sabbatical through the Lilly Endowment, doing some very similar things to what I was doing.  One of God’s little surprises along the way.

This is one place I’d like to return to in the future.  The natural beauty is stunning, the spiritual opportunity compelling, and the crabmeat is to die for.

Some things work well in Europe.  The trains are awesome!  The wifi is not.   It was a challenge trying to post with the flickering connections but we’ll catch up in the coming days.  Visiting Edinburgh brought me face to face with the Reformation.  The short walk from Edinburgh castle to St. Giles Church was the distance between Mary Queen of Scots and the protestant preacher John Knox, and a religious debate that changed history.  Who is the head of the church, the king or queen, or God alone?

It was an important question that at that time could have only one right answer.  A few hundred yards from those historic places was martyrs square where 18,000 folks we would call protestants lost their lives for refusing to acknowledge the divine right of kings.  We met a couple of Christian businessmen standing at the spot in the picture who explained to us the ongoing importance it held for them and other believers.  A sober reminder of costly faith.  

We’re stuck in Chicago with a sick airplane.  Hopefully the next post will come from Atlanta.

Murphy standing guard while I call the kids.