‘For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them’

As we continue our series of blogs from our leavers, here we have Hannah, a Masters Student in English Literature.

When you start postgraduate study, everybody warns you about how isolating it can be. Of course, on my induction day back in October, I don’t think anyone could have predicted how isolated I would become; I can’t even work in my garden because our Wi-Fi doesn’t get that far. As a post-grad student, you’re encouraged to make sure you have a support network and if I didn’t have Chaplaincy House to sit around in all day, every day, then I would have been incredibly lonely. Chaplaincy has provided me with a strong group of cheerleaders, confidantes, sounding boards and pun generators, who have kept me endlessly supplied in tea, sympathy, and legs (Ed. These legs are chocolate and come from the Isle of Man. See picture) Only having four contact hours a week does free up time though. I had several new experiences this year as part of Chapel Community: we organised a whole Nativity procession, complete with costumes, props and Christingles; we went to Gladstone’s Library, and that bus to Warrington is an experience all on its own.

Obviously, the biggest thing that happened this year was the Nativity procession. I am so incredibly grateful for Patsy for organising the whole thing – her tenacity and verve is inspiring and really pushed us all forward into making it happen. It was so fun to be creative and to bring the Gospel to life; we had a chance to throw ourselves into this service, and we did, from Heather transforming her chariot into a camel to Rob’s sack. I still watch the film that Ruth made when I’m feeling a bit blue and remind myself of how wonderful our community here is.

I also really enjoyed going to Gladstone’s Library together in January. Heather poured her heart and every scrap of energy she had into organising it for us, and I am incredibly grateful – she even made us a quiz, which I took back with me when I went with my friend in March. Chaplaincy has given me opportunities to go to places that I would be too anxious to visit otherwise, and these experiences and memories are ones I will cherish for years to come.

 

The second biggest thing this year was that we welcomed a new chaplain! Last year I said that one of the best things about Chapel was the way that although people come and go, the core of who we are as a community never changes. Last year we said goodbye to Chaplaincy stalwarts like Joseph, Matthew, and Fr. Robert but this year we welcomed Gill, who slotted right into our loving and friendly, if slightly eccentric, community. I’m very glad I was able to go to her installation service in Warrington; it was lovely to help officially welcome Gill into our community and to meet Bishop Keith, who comes from a tiny South London village called Carshalton. It also meant that after so many years hearing stories about this mysterious other campus, I finally experienced it for myself. It is as eerily quiet as the legends say: Alison took me, Debbie, and Patsy on a mini tour around the campus, and we hardly saw anyone!

In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ says ‘where two or three are gathered in My name, I am there among them’ (Matthew 18.20). I wholeheartedly believe that in Chaplaincy, this does not apply just to our worship; instead, Christ is present in everything that we do. So many wonderful things happened this year which have strengthened us as a community, to the point that, even now as we are separated by hundreds of miles (and in some cases, a whole lot of water), we are still connected and we still feel like members of Chapel Community. After all, nothing brings a community together like an accidental Brexit party and nearly killing the chaplain with a non-alcoholic jelly shot. Thank you for being my support network this year and every other year. May we strive to keep Christ at the centre of our lives and our community here, letting his love shine through us in everything that we do, everything that we say, and everything that we are.  Amen. 

Lent to Easter Via the Coronavirus

I wrote a magazine article before we were in lockdown, about how we may respond to the coronavirus. We have made a lot of changes about how we do things. The spread of infection has come to the forefront of our mind. I don’t know how you felt, but it hit me hard when I heard Boris Jonson say that ‘many more will lose loved ones.’ Some may have panicked, some will have made new plans, some will have rolled their eyes, some will have vowed to change nothing and decry those who are panicking. What a strange lot we are as human beings.

Mark, my husband, and I both work in environments with people from lots of different countries. We have discovered that people have a tendency to trust the advice of the country from which they are from. We have heard: “Post soldiers outside people’s houses and shoot them if they come out;” “Make everyone stay indoors and deliver state food packages.” It may be hard for them to hear the measures in the UK: “Stay at home. We’re trusting that you will do that.  The police will enforce it, but really, we haven’t got enough police to ensure people are following the rules, so we are trusting you.”

“Ridiculous!” I am told. “It will never work!” Imagine, we have the audacity to dare to get through a pandemic by initially relying on people’s altruism.  We’ve all seen apocalyptic films, where Zombies, or revolutions, weather events or pandemics have taken over and left the characters in a strange, dystopian futures where chaos and selfishness reigns.

How surprising, that now it has happened, instead of that, we have unprecedented levels of volunteering, supporting neighbours, new community groups, huge donations to charity despite being in the most difficult financial situation many of us have ever faced.

God gave us the tools to deal with pandemics, but they have another name: the fruit of the Spirit. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (Galations 5.22-23)  Firstly, Self-Control. That we have enough self-control to realise that we may not need 36 rolls of toilet paper and that we follow the rules when we are bored of them.  Patience to wait for an unfolding epidemic, patience to wait for medicine, patience to remember to put others before ourselves who may have underlying health conditions. Patience to stand in a supermarket queue or sit with our children, all day, every day, whilst working. Also, we need the patience to stay away from infection when we are bored of staying in. When we have lost the will to protect ourselves, we must protect ourselves for others.
We need kindness and goodness, where we are ready to help our neighbours when they have no one else. We need to be brave and we need to trust others, that they will leave enough for us. We need generosity with our time and our patience. We need gentleness not judgement when we see others behaving badly; when we see others being selfish. We need to search for peace in a time of worry and and fear. We need to remember to love those around us, with our thoughts and actions. We need to behave lovingly.

That leaves faithfulness and joy. Joy may be hard at the moment, but we remember at this time of year the joy of Easter. The ‘fear and joy’ of the women running from the tomb with the words, ‘He is risen’. Throughout our life we will experience fear and joy like the women at the tomb.  And it is through our faithfulness, that we start to glimpse the world through God’s eyes. That we see the rhythm of life and death, fear and joy.
Let us approach the pandemic with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Laura Rhodes – Chaplain

Memories of a Brilliant Teacher

While we are in the midst of All This, pieces of Other News are still coming to our notice. Yesterday I heard of the death of one of the lecturers who taught me when I was a student. You will never have heard of Dr Stuart Warren, but he was the most gifted teacher at whose feet I ever had the privilege to sit. One of my contemporaries described him as “possibly the best HE Chemistry teacher there has ever been.”

Stuart had an uncanny knack of knowing exactly what one needed in order to further one’s own individual learning. On one occasion he asked us to write an account (calling it an ‘essay’ would have been going too far for us chemists!) on “How do we know abc?” (‘abc’ in this case is a highly specific technical matter of chemistry which I will, of course, be very pleased to explain to any non-chemist who has half a day to spare.) The only feedback he gave me on that homework was one comment of three words; he wrote at the end of my effort, “I remain unconvinced” and left it at that. Those three words were a stroke of genius! I spent the next few days thinking, “Actually, I wasn’t convinced either”, went back to the question and sussed it out eventually. Years on, I related that to a member of staff in Chester who said, “We can’t get away with doing things like that anymore!” But Stuart was not ‘getting away with’ anything. What he did was exactly what I needed in order to have confidence in my own ability to work things out, to stretch myself and to carry on learning how to learn. His knack of knowing exactly what students needed was beyond our comprehension, because on other occasions we would ask a question and he would give us the answer straight away; he knew when we undergraduates were not going to get there on our own. His was a remarkable gift.

Stuart had a head start when it came to impressing many of us whom he taught; he was an excellent spin bowler and played minor counties cricket for Cambridgeshire. Very occasionally we persuaded him to turn out for the Chemistry Department team in the University league. This was far below his natural standard but he always took every match very seriously and, without saying anything, raised the performance of the rest of us merely by his being on the team. He was once asked in an interview what he would like to have been had he not become a chemist; his answer: “a professional cricketer, but I wasn’t good enough, [or] I suppose an actor, a novelist or an Anglican minister.” He was an inspiration in the lab and lecture theatre and on the cricket field; if his calling had been otherwise he would have been an inspiration on the stage, behind the page or in the pulpit too. He had many talents and was a lovely person.

I have always tried to live by one piece of advice Stuart gave to some of us whom he had taught as undergraduates. When we became research students and began University teaching ourselves, Stuart told us, “By far the most important thing is to be encouraging. If you can’t think of anything else to say, tell them you like the way they draw their diagrams!”

So I conclude remembering Stuart with a word of encouragement. Staff, realise that students never forget the positive impact you have on them, on their learning and on much else. Students, realise that, just occasionally, your teachers might need a word of encouragement too; so tell them that their lecture was interesting, that they have just bowled a fantastic over or, just possibly, that you like the way they draw their diagrams.

Thanks, Stuart, for your encouragement. Rest in peace and rise in glory.

Peter Jenner, Senior Chaplain

 

What does a Chaplain do?

I have to write an explanation of what I do as a chaplain.  So here goes:

When asked what we do in chaplaincy, my natural tendency is to laugh. My job is varied and always likely to take an unexpected turn. The major aspect is listening to staff and students and the difficulties they are going through. This can vary from home sickness, the ill health or death of family members, struggles with friends or colleagues, work, or anxiety. Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a chaplain because you can meet them first, have a few cups of tea and decide if this is the person you want to trust with your difficulties, your secrets.

Sometimes people are in great distress. The current waiting time for help with domestic abuse is four weeks, for sexual abuse it is four months. We listen to people, give them a safe place to talk or cry or sit while they wait. We hear stories from staff and students, but we also have a place on university committees, so we are able to feed back some of the struggles that we have seen and heard to help improve people’s experience.

In Chester we have a wonderful chapel community of staff and students. We meet each week for breakfast after prayer on a Monday, for lunch after prayer on a Tuesday and dinner on Tuesdays and after chapel on Wednedays. We pray for the university and the world and we have a service once a week. Our main Wednesday service is varied. We had a transremembrance service, where we read out the names of the 291 trans people around the world who have been murdered this year. The week before we heard an inspiring talk about fasting in Islam. The next week we had a traditional Advent communion service. The following week we had students and staff dressed up in dressing gowns and cable-tie halos for a nativity procession around Parkgate Road campus and a Christingle service (like when you were seven).

I run a weekly baking session, whilst kneading and making breadcrumbs, whole life stories come tumbling out. Many languages are spoken and we learn through bread and cakes about cultures from all over the world; all from the tiny kitchen in Chaplaincy House.

I say yes to every manner of strange project. I work with different departments talking about wellbeing, reflective practice, end of life care, religious literacy, modern slavery or anything else I am asked to do. We support students with disabilities and talk about vocations. We work with the wider community, with Green Chester and get involved in local projects. And there is a LOT of washing up – we are working with students after all.

Laura Rhodes

Love, Actually

Last week we had our farewell service in chapel and some of the leavers spoke about their experience of university and chapel community.  Here are the reflections of our very own Hannah, a fourth year English Literature and Spanish student.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says that ‘all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another’. If I had to summarise my experiences of chaplaincy while at university in one word, it would be love. In my first week of university, I got overwhelmed by the size of the campus and ducked into Chaplaincy House to seek refuge and it has acted as a safe harbour ever since. Even if it’s empty, the love stored in those walls makes me feel calmer and less frantic and less argh. At the core of all the memories I want to share is a sense of community, friendship and fellowship. 

I was the only first year to regularly attend chapel in my first year and when I think back, I feel like I was kinda the baby of chaplaincy? That’s not to say that I was babied, but I think chapel community has a way of letting that sense of fellowship and love wrap around the youngest ones? You’ll probably have to ask the current first years how they feel. I was particularly looked after by someone called Hannah, who was studying a PGCE, and a third year Geography student called Christa, but really, everyone in chapel community cares because, as Christians, we love each other.

Of course, the biggest demonstration of the community showing me their love was that time I got baptised. That was pretty cool. The nicest thing, obviously aside from actually being baptised, was the number of cards that had someone’s name followed by the words “chapel community” in brackets. I think the fact that multiple people thought “you probably don’t remember who I am exactly, but I am thinking of you and wishing you well on this day” demonstrates the love inside this community.

I also really liked the Chaplaincy trip to Liverpool that happened in my first year. Three Hannahs and two Sophies went on the chaplaincy trip to Liverpool in 2016, because that was the year of Hannahs and Sophies. If you didn’t know someone’s name, guess one of those and you were probably right. It was a lot smaller than the trip to the zoo we just had but the sense of fun and feeling of community were exactly the same.

Second year was bookended by pretty massive displays of friendship and love: the first service of the academic year had us announcing our engagement. Joseph told me he vaguely remembers that happening in the first ever chapel service he went to, so we do envelope everyone from the beginning. The other big Moment of friendship was definitely that time these two first met.

Peter and Vicky had guests over that day, guests who never got a word in at the dinner table because the history nerds got into a discussion about the Byzantine Empire. And why we shouldn’t call it the Byzantine Empire. For about four hours.

And then that weekend, we went away and it was sad! But then we came back! And there were new people, and suddenly I was the grown up in my fourth year of study taking freshers under my wing. And I was one of those final year students hanging around Chaplaincy House discussing my dissertation. And there were new things I’d never done before, like mobile ashing and baking. I started going to Faith & Food. There were more Chaplaincy trips. That sense of community grew stronger, like I’d never been gone. Sure, some people are gone and some people are new, but the love remains. Only faces ever change, the core of who we are as a community remains the same.

May we all strive to follow these principles of worship, learning, mission and friendship throughout our lives, but the greatest of these is friendship. The greatest of these is love. A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another as I have loved you. Amen.

By Hannah Buchanan

LGBT History Month: Sara Miles

For LGBT History Month https://lgbthistorymonth.org.uk we are writing a weekly blog on an LGBT+ Christian.  We begin with the conversion experience of Sara Miles, the spiritual writer as her book: City of God has inspired our own practice here in chaplaincy.  In City of God she describes her experience of ‘ashing’  the people of the Mission in San Francisco, where she lives on Ash Wednesday.  Inspired by her story, we too set up a ‘mobile ashing’ on Ash Wednesday at the university.

One of the most interesting aspects of Sara Miles is her sudden conversion experience.  Sara Miles was a war journalist, and writer, working in Central America and the US. She was an atheist, raised by parents who deliberately did not expose their children to institutional religion. They felt their own parents, who had been missionaries, had given them too much religion, and they vowed not to do this to their children. As Sara grew up, she was commitment to social and humanitarian action and this became her religion.

In her book, Take this bread, she writes about the cloudy Sunday morning, aged forty-six, when she drifted into St. Gregory of Nyssa’s church in San Francisco, went up to the altar and took communion. Until that moment, she had been an atheist.  At best she was indifferent to religion. She was horrified by the acts of war she had seen in the name of God and by the treatment of LGBT people by the church.

Unbaptised, unprepared, she took her first communion and everything changed.

 ‘Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations, to a faith I’d scorned, and work I’d never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer after all, but actual food – indeed the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized, what I’d been doing with my life all along, was what I was meant to do: feed people. And so I did. I took communion, I passed the bread to others, and then I kept going, compelled to find new ways to share what I’d experienced.’

She found her conversion to be unexpected and terribly unlikely.  She described herself as a ‘blue-state, secular intellectual; a lesbian, a left-wing journalist with a habit of scepticism.’ Yet is finding God, she found an inclusive religion, rooted in the most ordinary, yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the poor, the despised and the outcasts are honoured. And so she became a Christian, to the horror of her friends.

Her theology focuses on communion, she sees this as the act that locates us within a group, and from communion, comes community.   Sara was propelled into extending the communion she received in the extended communion of setting up a food pantry for those in need in 2000.

Starting the food pantry, she gave away literally tons of food around the same altar where she’d first received the body of Christ. This was her understanding of companionship – she took bread, shared it with Jesus and then shared it with all who needed it. Her book, Take this Bread, inspired many churches to set up foodbanks.

She encountered many struggles: her family, her doubting friends, the prejudices and traditions of her newfound church. She met all sorts of people in her work, which had now extended all over the city of San Fransisco and beyond: thieves, homeless, millionaires, politicians, bishops.

At first, Sara saw a church community that was open, diverse, welcoming. It did not divide or judge people based on income gender, age, politics, or sexual identity.   However, in church culture, she encountered an obsession with rules and procedure. And when she tried to extend the food pantry from weekdays to Sunday, she hit a new wall of opposition. She tried to argue that the Sunday pantry would bring in new people and some of them might join the church and change it in exciting ways. But she found that the food pantry feeding people on more than a weekday – on a Sunday, really pushed the comfort zone of many in the church.

‘Why do we need to grow?’ a longtime member challenged her. ‘We’re just fine as we are.’ ‘Sunday is too much’, an older woman shouted at her. ‘I’ve been coming here for more than fifteen years, and Sunday is my day of rest.’Now it seemed as if the dream of open communion and community – an invitation of Jesus – who welcomed sinners and ate with them, as was inscribed on the altar, was being put aside because of inconvenience, messiness and prejudice.

Most if them made a point of praising the food pantry, but their message was clear: Feeding the hungry belonged in its place, and ‘real church’ belonged on Sundays. Sara was shocked. She believed the food pantry represented the best of St. Gregory’s practices and values: its openness, its inclusion, its invitation to take part in creating something together. A former Jesuit, who sang in the choir, took Sara aside, pointing out that she was not the first person to get excited about doing Jesus’ work and then get disappointed in his church. ‘Get over yourself’, he said, not unkindly. ‘Welcome to Christianity’.

Later, Sara had what can be called a second epiphany and conversion. She says, ‘You can’t be a Christian by yourself. You can’t be special or more holy.’ ‘I was going to have to work with people I liked at St. Gregory’s, and the ones who really irritated me.’ Quoting Rowan Williams, she said, ‘Community is a Gospel imperative that we find hard.’

Eventually, the grace of God enabled her to come to terms with her fellow but doubting members, just as they came to terms with her fervour. The strain of living the Gospel, commitment to prayer, the Eucharist, community, and care for those in need seemed to transcend the very human disagreements and frustrations she experienced.

When asked in an interview, What’s the most important thing about Christianity to you? She replied:

The gritty reality of incarnation: that God lives in bodies. And the truth that Jesus doesn’t pick and choose his dinner companions. He eats with everyone: not just with ‘good’ people, or the right kind of Christians, or the people I happen to like. Eating the body and blood of Christ, for me, implies a radical inclusivity that demands action. If you take it seriously, communion challenges everything —including most religion.                                             (Article in the San Francisco Gate, 26 February, 2007)

Connecting through sport

How do you feel about the relationship between sport and faith? Personally, I’ve always been sports mad whether it’s playing it or watching it. For others, they hold the opinion that sport is full of overpaid prima donnas who are paid for by hooligans. Throughout history, the relationship between faith and sport has been an interesting one, to say the least. In the nineteenth century a movement known as muscular Christianity played a fundamental role in making sport popular initially by creating recreational time in public schools to improve the discipline of the students. Later sport was used by churches working in poor industrial areas to get young people doing something productive rather drinking or causing problems; in essence to have activities that were more acceptable. The movement believed that the positive influence of sport could be transferred to other areas of life. Interestingly it was the liberal wing of the church that grasped this rather than the Conservatives. However, by 1930 Christian attitudes changed as sport became more commercialised. Gambling and professionalism meant that ‘stars’ emerged and the innocence of sport was changed.

So should Christians involve themselves in something that is so focused on results and where the winner takes it all? Christ’s example was to go to all people, including those involved in sport especially those at the grassroots as well as the elite.

Community called sport

According to Sports Chaplaincy UK, the community called sport is around 25 million people –  just below half of the population. In Higher Education, Sport England (2016/17) reports that 55% of University students participate in sport at least once a week, which would indicate a million students participate in at least 30 minutes of sporting activity each week of the 2.32 million students studying in 2016/17. At the beginning of this new year, what an opportunity for all Christians involved in universities to have some involvement to support, to care for and connect with this community and my own story below shows how it can be done.

My Chaplaincy Story

When I started working in University Chaplaincy I was given a brief to connect with students to help build community. After two years of trying to connect by doing different events in the Chaplaincy with limited engagement with students, I started having conversations with key people, namely the Students Union. I realised that the majority of students engaged with sport regularly. After much thought, I decided to start providing oranges and water to the sports teams on Wednesday afternoons. The relationship took time to develop and has meant that Chaplaincy is building community and being pastorally and spiritually with those who probably would not have had any connection with Christianity otherwise. The feedback that we’ve received from those sports students is that they were pleasantly surprised that the chaplaincy would serve in this way, this has made chaplaincy more accessible, and shown it is not just for religious people. As we are called to be Christ’s hands and feet in the world, sport is a great way to connect with the University community and you don’t have to be good at sport, you just have the heart to serve people.

James Wallace