My Sister, our Death

A very long time ago, I saw a newspaper article and its associated photograph. I couldn’t breathe as I took in the anger, sorrow, injustice, rage and grief. I always am angry with myself for not finding the photographer. Carefully, I forgive myself that I followed copyright law in my use of their image (I only copied parts of it…). The parts of it spoke. Sometimes to blog with you, I simply open my files and wait for something to declare itself. Today, this is it. I called it My sister, Our Death.

I think of my birth country and all the sick racism. I see my last home country and its grinding racism. I see my new home coutry and read more and listen to its horrendous racism. I think of different countries with family members and friends raging at the injustice happening to them at the expense of someone else’s random power. Horribly, we can pick any year of existence somewhere on our planet and find such abuse of power and its ensuing rage and grief.

It must stop. What I did those years ago was read the article, stare at the image, get close to these people by drawing them in a new place on new paper in a home they never knew and dwell with them. The more we can truly see, get energy to engage with someone else’s truth and relay their truth as honestly as we can, the injustice will stop. It will. Eventually. Because more and more of us are speaking and doing. Over the last few years, we’ve seen hell on earth. We’ve also seen people who never in their lives would have risen up to react now by truth telling their rage - as they carry and care for their neighbours. I urge you to rage and love as hard as you can. Deep peace be with you and give you energy.

Two signatures!!

I blog on a Thursday today, not a Wednesday…. there were things to do! The summer has finally arrived in time for Autumn, and I’ve been out in the studio on my Thursdays creative day. As I used to carve out studio days of old, life has settled well enough now for me to carve out a Thursday, the day I always used for creative things during my pastoral ministry. The first few years of ministry, the Thursdays were chaplaincy at Oxford Brookes Uni. The second set of four years or so was the growth of Oxenford, my women’s clerical clothing company. The final set of years before I moved to wider ministry was the development of the Oxford Healthy Living Centre. Wider ministry and moving onto our dear boat meant no studio for a few years. Then, when we settled into a less travelled boat life, I found my Braunston studio, dedicated what time I could for art then moved my office there too. It helped me paint as and when for over ten years turning out commissions for painting and illustrations and the occasional new work. I loved it, but it was too easy for the desk work of ministry to reduce the art time. Now I have my one day a week absolutely dedicated to the creating and do the desk bit of it on other days. It’s fabulous.

Below are bits of two new paintings. Faith, the very colourful one I’m caught signing lays tribute to the three wisdom sources for our faith - the Cosmos, scriptures and our Soul. The single photo below Faith’s two is Symbiosis. It challenges the ideas that black is bad and light is good (do look up the dictionary definitions for both words). Here, dark, light and all colours containing both work together and are utterly necessary to each other. Symbiotically, they all need each other to be seen. I’ll write more for each and give a good photos when they get their web pages.

The cycle begins again...

What a week. Yesterday was the start of Ramadan, the Chinese New Year and Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras). Today is Ash Wednesday and so Lent begins.  Though the Christian preparation and festival annual cycle touches me most deeply of this list, I find that according to Chinese astrology, I was born in the year of this new cycle – the year of the Horse.  That makes me confident, agreeable, and responsible, although I also tend to dislike being reined in by others. Apparently I’m fit and intelligent, adoring physical and mental exertion; I’m decisive but also easily swayed and impatient. We’ll all have different opinions as to whether that is true for me. 😊 That we have these cycle points to remind us to review and renew is important. They’re a call to stop. Breathe. Pay Attention. Whatever spiritual tradition we find for our home, the cycle points call us to see others more dearly, to see ourselves more lovingly, to help our communities in whatever way makes sense. They’re a call to be part of something larger than ourselves and that, to me, is only a good thing. In this stopping cycle point of 2026, may you find energy to reflect and renew.

For these multiple views of the same moment, I’ve chosen the image below from Living Water, my Artist in Residence painting for the URC General Assembly 2012. In this section, after hearing report after report, I saw churches in all shapes and sizes, and in odd relationship to each other.  A comment in discussion gave the image of the Holy Spirit locked in a cage. 

 I saw images of churches firmly planted in the midst of the world, so buildings began to rise behind the churches.  As I painted the buildings I reflected that it is easy to see corporate buildings as images of evil; yet those buildings are inhabited by vulnerable human beings, some of them as enslaved as the Hebrews of old. So the buildings had to be green, indicating that there was rich ground for transformation.

The Mission Report told some hard stories of the world in which we do mission and the hard realities of so many people’s lives.  The bottom right corner of this land of churches in the world became dark with brown and purple boxes which I thought were other sorts of buildings, some visited by saints and spirit filled people.  Yet the buildings turned to water and I saw the murky waters in which people feel drowned.  As I turned those buildings into murky water, I realised that there needed to be water over the remaining panel, able to indicate that some people and churches can feel all ‘at sea’

I give it to you as an image of truth and hope.

In Chaos, Love is confrontation

You must be reading what I’m reading, more or less. Seeing what I’m seeing in various media from international newspapers, platforms like Substack and BlueSky, TV news if you can bear to see it. Years ago, there was a QAnon hoax that the Democrats were running an international paedophile cabal led by wealthy elites.  Now, almost ten years later than the start of that hoax, we know that whatever the right wing accuses Democrats of doing is a confession for the elite right wing leaders including many (and not all!) Republicans.  It seems too impossible to be true. But the truth is oozing out. The damage to so many women has been a lifetime of trauma. The damage to so many men who disabled their morality is a life sentence.  The damage to governance in country after country is incalculable.  Add to that the trauma for military and neighbours in torn country after torn country and we have to stop, breathe, and focus.

What can we do?  Love. That’s all and that’s a lot. We can see it being acted out in march after protest after blogpost after podcast after Newspaper Opinion Editorials after late night talk show hosts after Grammy award winners.  As we watch love in action, it turns out to be far more radical than any sermon or poem could have said. Love in action has been what selfish leaders could never have guessed, assuming that if we were all frightened enough, we’d submit to terror. Oh, Love can face anything.  We have to love harder now than at anytime ever. It may be only to our near ones and dear ones and stops there. But they’re seeing what we’re seeing; we all can fly off the handle because of the stress. We have to Love near and far.

I did this image almost ten years ago now, around the time the QAnon-ers were confessing for the right wing. I was artist in residence for a rural Christianity conference. This section of a much larger piece shows a rising Jesus Love being the largest agent amidst community groups working for good and ill alike. Please take energy from this to revive your Love as much as your own body and soul can accept.

Martin Luther King Day – a few days after

I give you this picture, inspired as I was listening to stories of the abuse of power when I was Artist in Residence for a Free to Believe conference many years ago. It speaks to the Martin Luther King narrative, celebrated on January 19th in the USA. He was, at the simplest, pointing out that power was being abused and most often to suppress those without white male skin. See on the bottom right corner the brown people struggling under the weight of the ‘laws’ and laws which excluded them from full humanity. At this time in all of our lives, I can’t begin to write all I know, feel and think about the horrendous track record and present behavior of my birth country.  Right now, new atrocities are rising from the depth of what has always been seething through the pores of what kind of nation the USA has been struggling to be. Such oppression is a critical function for a society building its identity out of the massacres of indigenous peoples and the transportation of stolen African citizens who were converted to wealth for owners. To cover such crimes, myths of puritan patriotism are the mortar between the bricks of the wall against truth. People like Martin Luther King bloodied themselves to knock those walls down. And often succeeded.  People like Martin Luther King inspire us now to see that not all is gone; not all is evil. Justice is being fought for, legislated for, revived where it has been trod to dust. Hope isn’t the retreat of wimps. Hope is the scary radical stuff of keeping truth alive and shouting it to those who think they’re in power. May you have much outlandish tangible hope as you fly courageously into 2026.

Searching Knowing .... faith...

This last Sunday, I had the privilege and delight to lead worship at St Michael’s Uniting Church, Collins Street, Melbourne.  The set readings included the beginning of the Gospel of John, the narrative of Jesus being around since before time itself. I used the reading, seeped in Greek philosophy and including the germs of antisemitism (“his own did not accept him”) to affirm to us that the writers of John were simply searching for an origin story which made sense of the changes they could see in the Jesus followers they knew in their personal experience. Somehow, those who followed Jesus and gathered with each other to celebrate, also had the courage to face the Roman occupiers. They also had the mettle to help as they could, to share wealth, to share food and resource, to bring hope and healing to others. The changes for the good around them said to John’s writers that there had to be more to Jesus than the classic Nativity culled from the other Gospels.

The writers were searching; as are we. They had occasional knowing; as do we. A number of years ago, I did this painting, its own narrative here. It was a gift I didn’t expect to help me, and others I hope, understand that faith is no more complicated than a search, a knowing, that knowing leading to more search, then new knowing. It’s a flow of searching for only one criteria – that of Love.  The more we come to new knowing of new ways of Love, the more we know how powerful Love is. We search again, and find it fresh again. That’s all faith is.  I apologise for making it seem so simple. There we are.

Breathing in Christmas

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Christmas in this new home, well down under my birth land. Christmas is not the same Nordic/Germanic/Victorian routine and after a year here, I’ve come to be delighted to have such a chance to see it new.  Suddenly, the reality of incarnation has pounded me on the head. Christmas is God not just with us, but God inside us. At the birth, it didn’t make sense. As Jesus grew, it made some kind of sense if we could wrap our heads around Jesus being God and human at the same time. Lots of theologians are still not sure about that one. But when Jesus’ human life ended and Pentecost arrived, it made sense. Now, for the first time in my short life on earth, I can put together incarnation and this moment. Divine Mystery. Inside. Us. By the reality of Holy Spirit. 

Jesus was the human model for who we are called to be, not in behaviours, but a model for ways of seeing and challenging. We need to change from “what would Jesus do?” to “what would Jesus ask?” And instead of processing that question in our heads, we process that question in our hearts and our guts (where a good half of our neurons are anyway). We let Spirit inside of us, God with/inside, gives us the courage to challenge. Christmas is not just all the baby stories. Christmas is about connecting in real time. Eternity and humanity in the same place. No wonder that what we most want this time of year is to be together with people. (Duh). Connecting is what the whole thing is about. Connecting and connecting with purpose.

Before I knew how to describe any of this stuff, I was experiencing it.  I give you a pen & ink drawing I did when I was learning art at Uni back in the 1970s and then a poem I did when I’d had my spiritual awakening in the 1980s. I still feel the same.

Breathe with me.

See with me.

(through your other eyes)

(through those other lungs)

Feel the musty mystery cool

move

through,

untouchable

(having touched much).

Know with me the

mystery place deep,

eternity cooled,

calm,

now warm

(having been touched).