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All information is copyright of

Derek Dunne -

Shepperton-Info © 1999/2001.

Shepperton News

January is the month of dieting and credit card bills. In February the light returns. In the cycle of wealth and poverty that makes up our lives taking the latter to cover not just MasterCard, but all the experiences of finding ourselves spare and diminished what useful part does poverty have to play? To judge by the thesaurus on the computer, it doesn’t: the alternatives to “poor” are shown as “miserable”, “wretched”, “dingy”, “seedy” and “sleazy”. Jesus said that the poor were “blessed” but Bill Gates isn’t convinced 

He has a point. Elected poverty may have its virtues but poverty which is grinding and unavoidable is a killer of body and spirit. The Jubilee 2000 campaign against unpayable debt, which has featured in these pages often thanks to the dedicated work of Fran Chandler, has been about challenging the poverty that denies people their place in life. The poverty that closes hospitals and puts an end to schooling, and robs the world of the talents of so many of its people. The work to right this is not over with the start of a new millennium; it is too great an evil to be ignored. It is dreadful to romanticise this kind of poverty, at home or abroad.

Yet the poor are sometimes referred to as the “favourites” of God; the poor in spirit are “blessed”. This talk is not just about material poverty of the kind that calls out the concern of the campaigners. It is a way of recognising that God’s love is always seeking to give itself to us, far more so than even the most ardent believer can desire it.

The only poor people in this scheme of things are those who cannot sense the gap, the divine space, into which the gift can be given - the self-sufficient and well-defended who have no need of being surprised by the unexpected.

It is the situation of the rich at any time and any place, of those who will find it hard to enter the kingdom of heaven because the road has not opened up for them and they can’t really see the point of the journey anyway. In our society this wealth is the condition to which we are taught to aspire -politicians promote it and insurance companies sell it to us - so that we may not to be vulnerable to life’s circumstances.

As the Church became accepted, respectable and somewhat more invulnerable in the early fourth century there were those like Anthony of Egypt, on whose day this letter is being written, who found it all too dull and predictable; too fulfilled with what was patently the product of human self-satisfaction. Groaning at this, Anthony asked God how to escape the deadening of the human spirit, and the answer came to him - “humility”. Not the dreary self-abasement which is just the shadow-side of pride, itself another way of expressing our self-absorption, but a letting go of all the props that keep our egos intact and remote - all the self-protecting myths and stories as well as dependence on material property for our status.

It took him twenty years of solitude to make a beginning, nut finally he came to the point at which he discovered that open space in himself responsive to the love of God which was the way to endless delight. “All things come to an end”, says the psalm; but “Humility is endless”, a poet replies, it opens us up to the reality of God. If you’ve paid off your credit card by the time you read this, good luck to you; but don’t lose your poverty - it’s the only thing that makes us rich.

Yours ever

Chris Swift

January 2001

Writing this letter is a dislocating experience where times and seasons are concerned Christmas happens shortly after Bonfire Night, the risen life of Easter is celebrated during the austerity of the Lenten fast and the New Year is marked in Advent before the Christmas party season gets into full swing. In some ways this is a good thing, because feasts and fasts are not separate events, sealed off from each other. There is a rich sense in which they often form a new whole and being taken together become something greater than their parts.

 “Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine”

So William Blake wrote. You can perhaps begin to see his meaning by imagining what a smug, limited, drab lot we should be if we always got our way in life. The compassion that makes us attractive and helpful to one another (to say nothing of bearable) is often the result of our recognition of woes and failures. Waiting can teach us to appreciate our desires and to savour our accomplishments.

But there is another side to this. Holding together light and darkness in a rich, symphonic wholeness is one thing; constantly being tyrannised by the next thing in the diary is very much another. Sometimes when I pray I sit in church and try to be in this particular moment, with the company of these people, the flame of this candle, the meaning of this word. It isn’t easy. I get flashes of contemplation but frequently much of the time is taken up by the mind rushing ahead to the next thing.

If the love of God is not only about the end of things but also always about the now of them, then to be so dominated by the next event is to miss the point of life.

This is a real danger for those of us caught up in institutional religion, which - along with a good many other institutions, it must be allowed - worries furiously about its future. This type of concern can be so dominating that it distracts us from the work of the present, and so from the places of potential renewal. Maybe the Church will have to die to anything like its present life in order to be able to live in the future; if so then this dying is the work we have to get on with now, and without delay.

A few years ago I came across a sentence by a writer called Fernando Pessoa. I know nothing about him, but I’ve written the words in the front of my diary each year ever since. A priest’s diary, like that of many other busy people, contains a world of gammon and spinach - i.e. a real mixed bag. There are engagements which fill the heart with concern and even dread.

There are the mornings of administration and the evenings of committees that are not always antici­pated eagerly. Then there are the human encounters and the opportunities for worship (for enjoying the worth of goodness) which are keenly looked - for. I may be asking too much of myself to love Synods, but Pessoa’s question and the answer he gives are worth serious consideration: “Was it worth it?”, he asks. :Everything is worth it”, he answers himself, “if the soul is not small”. To find the goodness and the worth of God in the present moment, however dull or awful that moment might be; now that would be a gift for the New Year.

Yours ever 

Chris Swift

December 2000
Letting God be God

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