Encountering Jesus May 2021

a very warm welcome from saint paul's cathedral to the next of our online conversations today i will be talking to rachel troik the bishop of gloucester and exploring themes of encountering jesus from her recently published book we talk about all sorts of different issues from encountering jesus in our own lives to encountering jesus in others we even dip into the theme of pantomimes and what they might have to do with our encounters with jesus as well as thinking about silence and stillness and its importance in our lives if you would like to see some of our previous conversations then please do go to our some paul's cathedral youtube channel where you will find conversations with the bishop of london sarah mulally with timothy radcliffe with john swinton and with rowan williams please do also feel free to join us next month for a conversation about race and gender with rosemary mallett ginny macdonald and lucy winkett but for today i hope you enjoy this conversation as much as i enjoyed having it with bishop rachel rachel it's wonderful to have us with you here today uh thank you so much for joining us to talk about your book um and your book is absolutely fascinating because it's all about encountering jesus i really really enjoyed it um can you tell me a little bit about why you wanted to write it in the first place um well really good to be with you uh paula the truth is that i didn't set out to write a book it was during my sabbatical in 2019 when i had 10 wonderful weeks away and i spent some time of that in israel in tiberias and during that time i spent time focusing on the gospels reflecting on encounters i've had with different people and places during my life and began just writing things that came into my mind as i engage with jesus encounter people in the gospels and then it just began to emerge which is why the book i think feels a little bit random in places i know yeah exactly they kind of sometimes books just kind of grow on their own don't they then and um somebody says why did you decide to do that well i didn't really it just kind of went off that way absolutely um can you um tell me so kind of what's lovely about the book is strung together with the encounters with jesus are your own encounters with jesus could you tell me maybe one of those encounters that is really important to you that has made the biggest difference maybe in your life hmm oh that's quite a hard question it really is and i suppose the one that just comes to mind immediately again perhaps in a rather random way this is the encounter i talk about when i felt a strong calling to ordination although at that time women could not be ordained as priests and it was a very um quite a visceral uh sense really that i i think i say that i've been a pantomime and um i came back that night to the flat that i lived in at the time in london and was lying in bed and had this really really strong sense of christ at my side calling me to put myself forward for ordination and it was not something i wanted and it reminded me a lot of that old testament scene of jacob wrestling with god and i had a real wrestle i can still remember lying in bed and crying and struggling and saying to christ i do not want to do this i can serve you much better as a speech and language therapist um as a family therapist and all the time having that sense that um i was being pursued really and then i began to hear a song playing in my head and it was a song of those days called you laid aside your majesty gave up everything for me and i really sent christ saying i gave up everything for you and i want you to give up the journey you're on at the moment to go on a different route and it will not be sacrificed if you say yes and at that point i said yes to christ i felt this amazing sense of peace that i can only describe as mysterious so i suppose that's one that comes strongly to mine that i write about at the beginning of the book and it's probably a mean follow-up question to that one has the sacrifice been worth worth it or has it not felt like sacrifice in that sense of that encounter yes i mean it hasn't really felt like sacrifice in terms of um feeling that i continue to become the person i've been created to be and that's something i am passionate about for all people that's not to say it's been a bed of roses it's not to say that i don't really miss my work as a speech and language therapist and the work i was doing training to be a family therapist but i can see how god has woven all those things into this present chapter um so i don't want to pretend it's been easy of course there are times when we all feel we sacrifice things uh in our lives and yet knowing that actually um becoming the person god's calling me to be is the right path and i think in my life apart from my ambition to become a speech and language therapist i've never had any other ambitions i've just known each step of the way what it is that i'm being called to next thank you um one of the things that really comes to mind is that um your encounters are vivid um and they bring to mind a couple of the encounters that i've had in my line that life that are equally vivid but there are some people either who never have that quality of encounter or who have maybe one or two in the entirety of their life um what would you say to them because it's often easy isn't it in christianity you feel as though you're a slightly second-class citizen because you haven't had the best experience and someone's had a much better experience than you have yes and i think it's really important that we don't always focus on those sort of highs if you like um what i would say is that it's not all about feeling i'm someone who feels very deeply in fact i have to have had to learn over the years for my my heart to dialogue with my head and it's very important for me to hold on to what i know and from my reading of scripture and going deeper in prayer i know that god is with me um i don't always feel that often it's because i'm not being attentive to that but there is that sense um i think psalm 23 comes very strongly to mind for me you know though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death you are with me and sometimes it's simply holding on to the fact that god knows us by name and god is with us and will not let us go and i don't think we should always be going on on our experiences on our on our feelings um because we're created differently some people are much more head people some people are more heart some are more gut um and how we we celebrate that and recognize that that's inevitably all going to be part of the way we live our faith and experience god in different ways i don't know if that makes sense but there is a sense for me of of holding fast to mystery and this and and holding fast to what i know through scripture and through prayer yeah no absolutely i entirely agree and um i think for me one of the really striking things is is becoming better at telling those stories um because i i know that i've it's only through conversation with wise friends that suddenly i've realized that a thing that i thought was just a thing was in fact an encounter because you begin to kind of tease out the words and the language and you begin then to understand something about yourself how do you reckon we encourage people to get better at telling their stories because it seems to me that at the heart of your book what you're doing is is beautifully telling the story of the gospels and the story of your own encounters um and it's those it's that kind of meeting together makes it so powerful um if somebody were wanting to explore that part of their own spirituality how would what advice would you give them where i would start is telling the everyday stories of our of our lives we all love story i think we're created to be storytellers and often when we think of telling stories we try and think of that that dramatic moment or that thing that we think will be significant to someone else but actually just telling the story even of our day when we recount what's happened in the day and reflecting on that i think reflection is really important to be telling us and reflecting on it and perhaps daring to look at it a new way saying well i wonder what was going on there is why silence is so important to me why noticing is so important to me so so one of the things that i've really tried to learn in my life is as i go through each day it's trying to notice to look perhaps to look beyond the surface to listen more deeply even list of just everyday conversations we have with people um the everyday things we see just to tell those stories to articulate it and begin to ask where might god be in all of that where was god in all of that and often it's as we as you says we tell those stories to one another of our day other people might begin to gently point out well i see god in there or i see christ in that i hear god in that i hear christ in that i see the holy spirit being at work so i would just encourage us to begin telling stories i think people who who long to encounter christ and haven't yet encountered christ um i particularly in parish ministry used to always encourage people to just just tell me the story of what's been in your day and that's not all about the things that have been wonderful what the painful and sad things be and let's just reflect together on on where you might actually be encountering god in all of that and as you're talking um brought to mind one of my favorite stories from the gospels of mary and joseph taking the baby jesus into the temple and i st it still blows my mind that those two people were able to see a young couple with a tiny baby and say there is christ in our midst i mean how they managed to is incredible but i think there's something and the bit i the detail i love in it is you know with anna who's fasting and praying in the temple day and night she's become a real expert god noticer you know she notices god when god appears so then when god turns up in the form of a tiny baby she can still recognize and there seems to be something in that doesn't there that is important for us as christians yeah i so agree with that i'm so glad you said that because whenever i read that story in the gospels and particularly um around the feast of candlemas when we you know celebrate that time and i was just amazed that in come this young couple with a baby and somehow simeon and anna behold this baby as the long-awaited messiah i think the same actually when i reflect on um the shepherds uh you know running to bethlehem um having had the amazing experience of angels and then arriving in a very ordinary place and seeing this young couple um and and this baby and yet that sense of worshiping we get the same with the magi because in some ways i think it must have been incredibly disappointing and yet there is that recognition and that worshiping and as as you say i think that is that noticing that that being attentive to seeing beyond the surface and i think in our very busy lives often we go through the day without giving that space to noticing deeply and listening deeply and and being expectant i think that's the other thing each day i pray that i will be expectant to encounter christ in my day yes one of the lovely phrases in your book in the introduction is the sacred space of your imagination i absolutely loved it can you tell us what you mean by that um as a child i had a really really vivid imagination in fact as i say in my book i wanted to be an author when i grew up well how things change and i loved using my imagination and it occurred to me as i grew into being an adult that we're not really encouraged i don't think very often as adults to use our imagination and it was an immense discovery for me through ignatian spirituality to be encouraged to use my imagination and to see it as something really god-given and i would go so far as to say it it's part of what it means for us to be created in in god's image to have the imagination it's something i see lacking a lot of time in the church that we're not encouraged to really use our imaginations and and i think it has been very god-given and over the years i've been learning more and more to to value my imagination to almost let my imagination go wild i'm also someone who dreams very vividly um i'm someone who remembers my dreams and again been learning to to listen to my dreams and so i i do believe our imagination is sacred the god-given gift and i long for us to use our imagination more deeply not least when we read scripture and and particularly the gospels i feel the need to point out that your um great ambition to become an author is in fact true now because we're now talking about your book which is rather lovely um i i too like you i absolutely love the imagination and for me there is something that we miss profoundly in reading scripture when we don't use our imagination but when i talk to people about imagination they're often just a little bit anxious because christianity surely is about truth and then our imagination is about um well what is that in relation to the truth i've got lots of theories but i'd be interested to know what you what you would say if somebody said to you yes but it's not true is it what would you say well actually uh paula i can give a very good example that when i went to theological college at a time when i was very excited about my imagination and my discovery of ignatian spirituality um i think it's pretty true to say that most people around me were very nervous about us using our imagination as we approach scripture and and i well i think i i held out very strongly the imagination and actually as i look at christ in the gospels christ was always appealing to people's imaginations christ was always telling stories and walking along with his disciples and saying you know look at the flowers of the field look at the birds of the air stretching their imaginations to think more more widely now of course as you say there will be people who say that's very dangerous because we need to be reliant on on what we know on our knowledge and perhaps that sounds contradictory from what i was saying earlier although i would say my experience of faith is it's full of paradoxes um but i would just want to say dare to use your imagination dare to bring your imagination to prayer i say that to people who who are very represent about faith they say well dare to talk to god and and use your imagination and and see what happens and if if god is truth and if god is god why are we so scared and i absolutely agree and i think the other thing that i would add in is part of the problem of us not talking about using imagination is that we do but then we pretend that we don't so therefore we mix what is kind of christian traditions imagination on top of actually what the gospels do actually say and for me one of the really interesting things is once you become more explicit about this bit i've imagined then you have to go back and read the text more carefully and say well actually is it in the text or is it imagination and you can begin then to recognize what is there and what are the layers of imagination you know the best example of it is um da vinci's imagination of what the la support looked like it's very hard to imagine the last supper without a long table and people all sitting on one side of it um looking outwards with no women present at all um but that is one person's imagination that has so loaded onto our thinking that it's really hard to get past it and i think there is something quite interesting about saying if we think imagination is really important actually it helps us to understand which bits are there and which way it's our imagination and i think that's such an important point of saying actually everyone is using their imagination even if they think they are not so um when people say to me and i know have said to you um you know well i'm a bible-believing christian as if somehow i'm not um actually even people's interpretation of scripture and they say well scripture says this or scripture says that has still been shaped by what people have been taught and um what they've been brought up to believe or or how they've encountered faith and that wolf involved their imagination you know i think back to um even pictures in in bibles or pictures in children's bible stories they have shaped how we imagine god to be you know that that man in the sky with a white beard and very old um so actually it's about being honest about our imagination sometimes so we can undo some of that and imagine in a fresh way but to acknowledge that all of us are coming to this with our imagination and i'm just reminded then as you would you were speaking of um you know paul's uh famous words in corinthians about you know now i see in a glass darkly actually we're we're all seeing in different ways at the moment recognizing that actually one day we will see fully but for now let's use our imagination and let's be honest about about that and not be scared of that because we are all um we're all incomplete and a bit broken as well as being a bit beautiful um you know at the moment and so let's just dare to use our imagination and be honest about that and um one thing that i know that you will probably have thought about as well is one of the things that really struck me a few years ago when i was imagining i was going to do my imagining of the gospel stories and when i imagined them there were no women and somehow kind of managed to imagine all of these stories with only men in them and i kind of pulled myself up short and when how fascinating that even though i've done a lot of work on women in the new testament and consider that place to be really important somehow my imagination was populated in a different kind of way yes and that's something's become increasingly important to me over the years and thank you for your writings on that look at them certainly encouraged me um a long time ago when i i did some creative writing which never became a book i imagined um living the gospel stories as the women with jesus who so often they are there that some of them are named but they do stay hidden in the shadows and one of the things that i find frustrating in the way that the gospel stories are told is that so often the women aren't named um i talk in my book particularly about that wonderful encounter of the woman with the hemorrhage of jairus's daughter and interestingly jairus's name the disciples are named but we don't always get the women named and i think that is something to do with the gospel writers being men and the culture of the time and again i don't want to be scared in saying that that doesn't mean that the truth isn't there but actually the writers of the gospels haven't focused on the women in that way rachel in our conversation so far and actually in the book as well you talk about how important silence is for you can you tell us why silence is so important we live in a very noisy world i'm sure even now as we're speaking there's noise around us and perhaps most crucially noise within us i'm very aware of my emotions within me of the thoughts in my head and that creates quite a lot of noise and how we pause to pay attention to that is something that's become very important to me it's how i learn more about myself it's how i learn more about myself with god and going back to what i said earlier about noticing i find i need that silence to reflect to be aware of that noise to ask or what might that be about often it's in the silence when i look back on something um something comes more into focus perhaps something i wasn't aware of at the time um one of my favorite hymn verses from that hymn the lord and father of mankind is that verse dropped by still jews of quietness till all our strivings cease and for me it's often that place of quiet that my heart and my mind still and i become much more deeply aware of who i am who i'm becoming i become much more aware of the places where i've fallen and the places where which perhaps have been good that i haven't noticed um and often that becomes a place of prayer for me um so yes silence is very important one of the i always want to say the most significant thing i did in my life i have to quickly add apart from my wedding or my husband gets upset is my 30-day ignatian silent retreat which was 30 days of silence in prayer with the scriptures and in those 30 days i only had half an hour every day where i spoke with a spiritual director and it was the most profound time because outwardly things were silent and completely stress-free i you know wasn't aware of anything in that time i had no task to have to achieve but inwardly so much noise within me and i just couldn't escape god and i spent a lot of time reflecting um being with the scriptures imagining myself in the scriptures as ignatius encourages us to do and that was the most profound time in my life what would you say to people who struggle with silence because i know that there's for some people who are just so in my um marriage my husband's a very strong introvert totally loves silence there's nothing more he enjoys that a whole day by himself all nice and quiet um it may come as a great surprise that i'm the other way and my great favorite thing is to be with friends there'd be lots of noise and the chatter and one of the things i've often struggled with over the years is the way in which we talk about silence often feels as though what is really being said is you ought to be an introvert and if you're not an introvert you're just not good enough i now know after many years of wrestling with this that's not actually what is being said and i've heard it in a different way but it it can come across in the wrong kind of way can't it have you got any thoughts on that yes and really important to say that goes back to something we were saying earlier which is about learning who we are and who we're becoming and actually learning that we are all different too often we put stresses and pressures on one another because we think people should be like us and actually in the same way that i um might want to encourage people to learn more about silence i also need to learn about noticing from people like you paula who are able to notice more profoundly when you are surrounded by people and with noise so so actually for me i think that's the deep thing the important thing is about the noticing about the listening and whether we're doing that in silence or whether we're doing it around other people um how do we learn from one another one of the big things i'm trying to draw out in my book is actually a real sense of thankfulness for all the different people i have encountered in my life who have shaped me and taught me so much and some of those will be introverts those will be extroverts so actually how do we celebrate our differences and learn from one another because actually if we believe and i do believe we're all creating the image of god then we are diminished if we don't see god in one another and learn from one another and um i absolutely agree and one of the things i'm discovering as an extrovert is that silence isn't just about not speaking it's about stillness um my favorite um translation of that bit you know the lord and father of mankind that you quoted um in the hebrew um a literal translation is the sound of sheer silence and i think there's something kind of beautiful in that that actually um silence is about an experience it's about a quality of being rather than whether you're talking or not um and i think in a way that's what you're talking about here isn't it yeah i so agree because actually we can be not talking but have all sorts of noise going on within us which is deeply unhelpful um and actually equally we can be with a group of people i can think of plenty of times as you were speaking it reminded plenty of times when actually in a noise when i'm in a meeting and people are talking i i will try to go to that still place within me to be listening i might even be talking at the same time but there's a sense of trying to um use the sort of jargon of centering ourselves but that sense of actually trying to go to that still place within me so i can really hear what is going on in this meeting what is going on in this social gathering um so absolutely it's much more about that still center rather than simply not talking one of the really lovely themes that runs through the book that i really enjoyed um is pantomimes pantomimes feature all the way through um why are they so important to you do you think and what might we learn from it i mean i love a pantomime as well sorry that's why i resonated so strongly with it well again it was something that was just as i was writing i thought oh my word pantomimes keep picking up hearing these stories um i do love a good pantomime um one of the things i love in a pantomime is that sense of humor being with other people um a pantomime i don't think probably is very funny if you're not surrounded with other people in watching i don't want a pantomime would be just online if you're watching it yourself there's a sense of doing something together with other people and again in the same way i've talked about imagination being god-given i think our sense of humor is really god-given um i need to be able to laugh with people as well as cry with people the other thing i love about pantomimes is that there is a sense in which the light is always stronger than the darkness there's always the baddie in the pantomime isn't there and there's the goody and there's love at the heart of it and love always wins and the baddie always loses and i think that's deeply theological and i talk in my book about pantomimes featuring very strongly in the church where i did my curiosity into george's toughnell park and simon park who was my training incumbent was a great writer of pantomimes and i learned very quickly how illogical they were and um i often will quote pantomimes when i'm talking to those about to be ordained as well often the wizard of oz which i i i write about so um yes let's hear it for our pantomimes and let's celebrate those christians totally with you i think that's a lovely idea and one of the themes again that comes through the book is is that of as you've said being with people and that kind of deep encounter and i think one of the really striking things about the society in which we live and this was even before lockdown is what people are calling the epidemic of loneliness you know the number of people who speak of profound isolation and loneliness and that was before the lockdown and now it's much much worse what reflections do you have about that importance of encounter and what the encounter needs to have in it for it because again you can feel very lonely in a big crowd can't you it's not necessarily about there being people there but but what is it do you think that causes such great loneliness and what can counteract it and so true that you can feel as lonely in a crowd as when you're on your own and sometimes it makes that more poignant um for me at the heart of who god is is relationship more and more as i go on through life i recognize that being created in the image of god is about being able to live in relationship with god with one another with the whole of creation uh it's no surprise is it that that great commandment to love the lord our god with all our hearts all our soul with all our mind love our neighbor as ourself um and i would take um that love of all creation being part of that and so for me it's how we live honesty in those relationships and they're not perfect so for me i can feel lonely if i'm with other people and not feeling able to really express who i am or being able to express my pain as well as my joy being able to express my fears my vulnerabilities and during this time of pandemic in many ways although people have been more isolated away from one another there have also been opportunities for people to be able to talk about their their fears and their anxieties and yet for others not feeling able to do that not having the people around them to be able to do that um so there's something in all of this for me about how people feel included how people feel excluded so i want to really encourage openness in our relationships of course if you don't feel that you have someone with whom you can be open and vulnerable and to tell your story going back to that that whole issue of storytelling and i think that's very isolating and and very lonely um we often say to people don't we oh how are you and we expect that response oh i'm fine how do we ask one another the questions or again tell me something of your story um even when we meet someone's the first time just tell me something of your story which i think can open up a much deeper relationship rather than just how are you absolutely because there's some the trouble with the how are you is um either you never answer or you do answer and realize that they really didn't want to know you're halfway through you could slowly go oh no no you really didn't want to know um and so asking their kind of those more generative questions expansive questions are much more helpful i think aren't they because they signals that you do genuinely want to know and you're interested in now one of the things that is intriguing about your own story is that your work before you were ordained was as a speech from family therapist could you just tell us a little bit about it because it is so interesting and do you think that it's informed the way that you minister um and in what if so in what ways has it informs the ways that you minister yes so i um became a speech and language therapist i was training doing some family therapy training um uh before i became ordained in fact finished my certificate uh whilst i was a cure but then never went on to practice a family therapist and as i look back now and as i said that was my only ambition from about the age of 14 or 15 to become a speech and language therapist i realized how the characteristics that god had put in me were about those things about relating about relationship about connecting and and i look back now and realize those were so important in my desire to become a speech and language therapist and wanting people to be able to relate and communicate um now when i read those early words at the beginning of john's gospel in the beginning was the word and i i realized how important communication is at the heart of who god is so so in my work as a pediatric speech and language therapist was about enabling children to communicate whether through words or in other ways if they had disabilities being able to express themselves and then being able to to enable families and systems of people groups of people communities to be able to relate to one another which is why i developed this great interest in family therapy because i realized just working with individuals to help them communicate was not enough it was about what it means to live in relationship with others and when i had that wrestling experience with god when i was called to a donation and saying to to god you know i can serve you much better as a speech language therapist a family therapist and a very wise person saying to me you will discover those same things um as an ordained person i've discovered that to be true the way i look at the community of the church um is as a system of relationships as a as a family although i do struggle a little bit with the use of the word family with the church but perhaps it's another subject um but actually that sense of community what it means for us to relate to one another with those people we like and those people we find difficult and how do we learn to communicate better and how do we enable all people to have a voice that's very important for me that all people should have a voice um and so it has very much informed my ministry do you know that reminds me of them my youngest daughter had hearing problems for a while and so went first to a speech therapist and then also went to a listening therapist and i was absolutely fascinated by the listening therapy so it wasn't a hearing it wasn't an audiology appointment it was the recognition that she'd learned how not to listen because of her hearing problems and therefore the listening therapist helped her to listen and i sat there in the sessions going we need this in the church so much because it was very simple things about paying attention about when your attention wanders coming back and focusing on the people again um trying to listen to what people are not saying as well as what they are saying it was absolutely fascinating and um i um i often have these thoughts that um you know in another life i would train to be something else completely and i'm quite fancy being a listening therapist but we love you doing what you do yes well i think it's it's the same i would say with family therapy when i started doing family therapy training i thought gosh all of us should have this um because actually we're learning again to listen to one another to hear different perspectives um i talk a lot about different perspectives again it's about you know we can think we've got the monopoly on the truth but how do we stand in one another's shoes and listen deeply even if we disagree yeah absolutely um another strand again that runs through the book is um the way in which jesus encounters marginalized people again that's kind of a really important feature of your stories um what how how important why is that so important you think to jesus and where do we need to pay attention today to the marginalized people how does that kind of play out in the life of the church for me it begins with where we place importance um i think one of the things that jesus did when he was on earth was really challenge people's views and perspectives again on on who and what is important and again if we really truly believe that every person is creating the image of god then this is about every person being able again to become the person they've been created to be and being enabled to flourish and that can sound so trite and inevitably because of the brokenness of our world our own brokenness and not everyone is going to be able to be to flourish as i would want them to and yet what we see again and again in the gospels is jesus in a very provocative way going to the tax collectors the prostitutes those with leprosy um inviting them to sit and eat with him focusing on them and very in a very audacious way that provoked anger and frustration and and for me i often use that image of the table now who's invited to the table who is not at the table um and actually i have to challenge myself um who are those who are being excluded who are being um overlooked so today i'm sitting talking to you in the house of lords and there are many people in here who consider themselves important there are many many people in here today who are standing in every corridor um as security people there are people walking up and down the corridors cleaning um dusting and and i have to challenge myself to say actually i want to be talking to those people and asking them a bit about their story how their day is going because it's so easy not to notice people and actually during this pandemic hasn't it been interesting that um we've had black lives matter black lives do matter we've seen all the outpouring of emotion around the murder of sarah everard and actually violence against women and girls has become more into the form and many other things too and i think that's been challenging us about what sort of shape do we want our world to be um we should always be asking that question but perhaps we're particularly asking that question as we emerge into the next season and i think the challenge is who are we not noticing when i was in south africa in 1994 doing a placement there leading up to the first democratic elections uh the church where i was doing my placement um a church called since saviours were learning about voting and perhaps how life was going to look after the elections and i remember being told that then still in the church congregation on the whole the black people sat around the edges and the white privileged people sat in the center and those who referred to as colored um sort of sat in between and i remember being really angry and thinking how can't people see this and then immediately saying to myself what do i not see now that in many years time i will be horrified about and and i still ask myself that who is it that i'm not seeing who am i excluding now that in years to come i will look back with great shame and i think that's what jesus was always provoking people about yeah absolutely and i think the other thing i've noticed over the years is that it's one thing to invite people to the table it's another thing to shape the conversation in such ways they can genuinely join in because i've often seen kind of um and i've in fact been um not quite the victim but whatever the right languages i have received um the invitation they needed a lay woman so they went oh she'll do she can come but actually the conversation was so tightly bound by the established conversation you couldn't get a word in edgeways so i was at the table but i couldn't join the conversation and the question i'm often kind of bowling myself is well how do we need to change the conversation so that when people do are able to be at the table actually they can take a proper part of the conversation and how but how do people shape the conversation again one thing um i learned a lot in my family therapy at training was about how when people join a family it's particularly true when families adopt a child how does that child come into that family and shape that family because so often families want to create such a safe environment for particularly for a child who's been adopted but actually that child is allowed less creativity than they might have if they have been born into that family where naturally the family automatically changes often in the chaos of that child being born into the family and again it's something i ask myself about how does someone as soon as they say walk through the doors of a church building uh when we used to do those sorts of things and we are again now but how does someone immediately change that community because they should and if they're not we have questions to ask ourselves so often don't and we have those signs outside our churches which i confess i loathe which say um you are welcome to come and join us which implies that actually you come and then you be like the group that's already rather than a really creative bold dynamic you which i think is the one that jesus showed us on earth is come in be welcome as soon as you walk through that door you are us and you will change us um which i think is really important how do we not we often talk about giving people a voice or speaking up on behalf of the voiceless well actually it's not about how i speak on behalf of the voiceless it's about how do i live in a way that will enable someone to be able to speak for themselves yeah absolutely and speaking of change i'm going to bowl you a final mean question often when you're thinking about a book you ask somebody you know what what do they hope somebody else will get out of it but i'm going to ask you the kind of the harder version of that which is some what did you get out of it um because i find that when you write a book um you you learn all sorts of unexpected things that you never thought you were going to when you start um what kind of comes away from the writing of your book um that sticks with you today that's a lovely question well as i said at the beginning um it was all rather random in its writing so many ways i was quite surprised at what did come to mind as i entered into the gospel stories and i suspect if i wrote it again um there might be different stories so i think one of the surprises to me was the stories it did bring to mind from my own life one of the big things i got from it was recognizing more deeply all the people who have shaped my life and i say in the final chapter i didn't set out to pay tribute to all those who've shaped me in life i think one of the sadnesses was that there are many people i haven't mentioned um in my book and yet recognizing really that bruce sounds a bit trite but every encounter we have every day shapes us and and that was something that i really did get out of the book in in writing it i'm being so thankful for so many people in my life the ones who i haven't agreed with the ones i found quite challenging as well as the ones um who are deep close friends and family so um yes and of course it was very strange writing a book before pandemic and then it being delayed publishing being delayed and sort of then adding a little bit more to it to make sense i was writing about encounters rather strange and pandemic and and actually realizing how strongly i load that phrase social distancing which i refuse to use because actually in writing about encounters recognizing that we're being called to socially draw closer together in our differences and in our agreements physically distance yes but socially going towards one another rachel thank you so much it's been such a treat chatting with you um just now and thank you for joining us thank you

Channel: St Paul's Cathedral

Views: 1,661

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

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Id: ME0HHsauIls

Length: 46min 45sec (2805 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021