The Indicator: November 2006

Message from our Minister

Dear Friends,

I admit it — I am scared of the current debate about the veil. This is not because I am scared of Islam, on the contrary, I am an active supporter of the three faiths forum and, as a Methodist look with envy at the real devotion to holiness that I witness in many of my Muslim friends. But the veil is another matter. I don't see the veil as a symbol of Islam, the Qu'ran makes no mention of it and neither do the teachings of the prophet Mohamed (peace be upon him). I see the veil as a symbol of power and abuse, not of holiness and devotion. It represents the patriarchal power of men over religion and thereby over women and children. I think it is abusive because it colludes in the sexual control of the powerless by the powerful. The veil, it is said, is supposed to protect women from unwanted sexual advances by protecting the man from having lustful thoughts. This essentially makes a woman responsible for a man's lack of control. It gives the man the right to say “its all your fault”, or in the words of an earlier age, when rape was generally considered to be the woman's fault “you were asking for it”!

I therefore think that the veil is an insult to men and to women. It insults men who are classified as animals who can’t control themselves, and women who are treated as sexual objects first, human beings second. This is, I grant, a personal view, but I make it because I know it is also the opinion of my Muslim friends, and in fact, the opinion of most Muslim men and women around the world. This needs to be known in order to address what scares me most about the whole debate — the fact that it feels like a deliberate attempt to marshal and manipulate of our worst fears and prejudices — just to make news!

In spite of the impression that you might have from the media, Islam is NOT just about controlling the male sexual urge, or getting hung up about what clothes to wear. Islam, like Christianity, is first and foremost a religion of peace, of devotion to God and of growth in grace. The repeated portrayal of Islam in our media as fundamentalist and un-British is a lie. Most practicing Muslims in the UK were born here. The fact is that in the UK more Muslims attend Mosque every Friday than Christians attend Church on a Sunday! Surely Britain can only be described as a Christian country when more Christians believe in God enough to attend worship — not just tick a box that says CofE when they go into hospital or when the Census is taken.

I confess I have a vested interest in the whole debate. I can't help wondering when it will be our turn. How would we feel I wonder, if the media began to portray all Christians as fundamentalists who burn Harry Potter books, threaten to kill nurses who work at abortion clinics and who dress and behave like the men and women in the Amish communities? The media already delights in presenting the church as being backward, bigoted and brainless, the last refuge of the hopeless and helpless.

So for me, the most frightening part about this whole debate is that we are having it at all, and that most people really do think that it is a debate about Islam, and not about the way in which the media now controls our understanding about our neighbour.

The words of Christ must win through — love your neighbour as yourself — all of them — even the Muslim — in spite of what the media would have you believe about them.

I pray that God grants us the grace to do so.

Revd Angie

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FEEDING THE 5000

A tribute to Maureen Young

There are those who doubt the truth of the feeding of the five thousand — but you won't find them here today — for all of us have experienced this particular miracle, time after time after time at Maureen's hand, for Maureen was one of God's miracle workers.

Like most of the disciples, Maureen wasn't always aware of her abilities, but she did know that she herself was something of a miracle. She was born in North London as the miracle child of rather unusual pregnancy. Maureen's mother had been completely unaware that she had been carrying twins until Maureen's sibling was lost through a miscarriage, Maureen survived the trauma, so her reputation for doing the miraculous must really be said to have begun before she was born.

It won't surprise you to learn therefore that Maureen spent almost as much time in God's house, throughout her life, as she did in her own. This started early as Maureen was a member of the youth club at Stroud Green Baptist Church in North London. It was here that she met and made some of her staunchest friends, and learned what it was to trust her faith in the future to God's careful provision. It was here too that she developed the gift of prophetic insight-no really — ask —Joe-and he will tell you with all seriousness that Maureen knew, by the time she was only eight years of age, that Joe would have a good pension! Well....maybe he exaggerates slightly — but Maureen certainly did have enough insight and foresight to know from a very early age that she and Joe were destined to be together. They lived either side of the Baptist Church, and under the watchful eye of Bill Butler, their love grew steadily. They couldn't quite remember when exactly their relationship moved from friendship to romance, but it was probably when Joe was in College and Maureen was working as a secretary for a firm of accountants in Trafalgar Square.

Joe would travel up from Chelsea to meet Maureen, and stop off to buy some anemones-which is why the flower has always been so special to them both. They were married in 1957 after what they would call a respectable courtship-and set up their first home together in a beautiful country lodge in Tunbridge Wells.

It wasn't too long before their marriage was blessed with the arrival of their two children, first Catherine and then Nick. As Joe's carreer developed, the family moved to Taunton and then back to London, to the Old Kent Road, where Joe took up the headship of a very needy school in Peckham.

Maureen then started working for Sedgehill School as a secretary. She was one of the pool; of secretaries looking after the ‘naughty children’. Later on she became the secretary to the headmaster. As with everything else in her life Maureen threww herself into her work. She would often go away with the school for weekends, and involve herself in extra-curricula activities. Maureen just loved to live her life to the full. She enjoyed being a wife and a mother and she enjoyed being a very capable administrator. She loved the busy-ness of it all, the cooking, baking, being and doing, the feeding of, well, if not the quite the five thousand, whoever was around at the time. Life was lived to the full and was almost always busy. Joe and Maureen took up sailing, and there were almost as meny memories of Maureen in her home-made wet-suit, sailing in the home-built dingy, as of Maureen in a home-made ‘pinny’ serving teas in the clubhouse whilst the men were out sailing.

You see, it wasn't that Maureen loved cooking (although she did), it was that Maureen liked being a disciple, looking for the ways in which the kingdom was made present here on earth — so she did what she felt she should do. And she loved to do whatever it was that that she felt God was calling her to do.

Maureen retired from her school work in 2000 after thirty years of loyal committed service — and then really got on with her life!

Like many people it was only when she stopped that she really got going. In other words Maureen never knew the meaning of the word retirement, and refused to have anyone try and educate her about it.

What, slow down? When there were grandchildren to be tickled, scout jumble sales to be organised, rotas to be drawn up, emails sent, the Kelsey Group to be organised, episodes of Eastenders to watch, meetings to attend, minutes to take, lunches to cook, the five thousand to be fed. There was certainly no time for housework or dusting — or sorting through fridges and freezers that Maureen kept filled up. They've found bread that predated Emily's birth and sausages older than Matthew.

Was Maureen just in a race through life? Was there anything that anyone could have done to persuade Maureen to slow down, spend more time on herself, on her family, on Catherine, Nick, Steve, Emily and Matthew, on her sister Chris and — of course — on her beloved Joe?

I doubt it.

Perhaps her strange entry into the world, or the loss of her father at only 11 years of age had given her an early taste of mortality. Perhaps it was seeing so much need in the children that Joe worked with, or the suffering of people that she loved so deeply. Perhaps it was her faith and her calling and her real belief in the need and promise of miracles — whatever it was ,she was unable to say “send the crowd away” that we might fend for ourselves. Maureen, unlike the disciples in our lesson, identified with the needs of the crowd — like Christ she had compassion on them, and rather than sending them away- she gave freely, expansively, and sacrificially of herself to feed them.

And how she fed us.

She fed us love unlimited, in hugs and smiles, in words of wisdom and in her self-effacing humour. She fed us the gospel, in word and example, as she shared in fellowship, read in church and practiced her faith as a pastoral visitor and church steward. She fed us cakes unlimited — even when she had a night off she seemed to always be baking for church parties, for cake stalls, for mission and outreach. She fed us hope and inspiration through her work at TC's and through her ministry of coffee and biscuits at guild, after Sunday Services and of course — in aid of National Children's Home.

And most of all she fed us bread.

The bread of Christ

Broken — for us.

Self-sacrificing and self-effacing — and broken.

I will not deny the last gift Maureen gave to us, even though it is far and away the hardest for us to swallow.

Maureen's last six weeks of life were every bit as full and as busy as the rest had been, and in spite of the pain and the anguish that they caused, they were very much a gift to all of us here. In those few weeks she fed us the bread of Christ — as she gave us hope of resurrection, the promise of eternal life, and the real meaning of love. She helped us realise how precious and how powerful prayer, and being part of the family of God, can be. She took us on a roller-coaster ride, and gave us time to come to terms with our loss, time to recognise our need for one another and the way we SHOULD be dependent on each other.

She called the multitude together as people from all over the world stopped what they were doing, to pray for her life, for her healing and for her family. And she did not send any of us away empty.

Through her pain, and the shock of her passing, we are back where we started — with the miracle of life — and the promise that even now we will not be sent away empty — there is more. To those who eat of this bread will never die, and those who break it and feed it to us, who bake it with their lives, and shar it with their last breath on earth will not send us away hungry.

She leaves us now with the twelve baskets of broken pieces to pick up, for there are others who need feeding, and still others who could be fed on the bread of hope and life that she has bequeathed to us. Maureen has left us a legacy of discipleship that each and every one of us could take up if we wanted to. It requires no great skills, or intelligence or even great funds — just the desire and committment to give God a meaningful share in the blessings we have received.

These are all chores that any one of us could take up and do. But above all of those there is her ministry of life — baskets full of optimism, grace, smiles and hugs, enough to keep us all over the difficult days and weeks ahead. So in praise and thanksgiving for the way in which Maureen worked her gospel miracles amongst us, let us resolve in the face of the immense difficulties that still confront our world to do as Maureen always did — to say

Oh Corks!

And then simply take up those baskets and share them with others, so that the bread that was broken might continue to feed those in need.

A S-J.

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