Advent 2015 – ‘At Home’

Happy Birthday River Dart Wild Church!

With the approach of Advent 2015, our Wild Church exploration reached its first Birthday and we celebrated with a collaborative communion in our home Church of St. Mary’s at Dartington. As I (Sam) write this, I wonder is St. Mary’s our ‘home Church’? More truthfully, I think both Beth and I are more at home in the Church of stream and sea, of forest and field, of moor and mountain than we are within traditional Church structures.

For me, one of my motivations in founding Wild Church was a healing one. To uphold for myself and others the possibility of ending any war between ‘established and emerging’, between ‘new and old paradigms’, between ‘innovation and tradition’. To move beyond binary thinking and inner splitting and practice a paradoxical marriage of seeming oppositions in the most practical ways possible. So Beth and I had spent some months working with the local Anglican clergy to co create an Advent communion service that could go some way towards finding the healing ‘space between’ us.

This had also involved me spending a year as a member of the parochial parish council and committing to the life of established Church at Dartington alongside the growing of River Dart Church. I chose this as a spiritual practice, not because I love traditional services and Parish structures and find them nourishing because to be frank, I rarely do. But I wanted to move beyond another layer of my own reactivity and resistance, my own tendencies to judge and dismiss and to take yet another step in becoming a little less ignorant about Christian traditions and through doing so to genuinely enable groups of people to come together who would usually be separated.

I meet many people in the Dartington & Totnes area who at least dismiss or ignore Christian or any other kind of spirituality, and at most are actively angry and condemning. The latter was how I felt about twenty or so years ago. I guess most of us rarely feel strongly about something that isn’t in someway connected to what really matters to us, as recent Open Space events offered by the Dartington Trust have revealed. Part of my own struggle with Christian tradition has been to do with how I experienced aspects of it meeting my teenage search for meaning with a mix of neglect and condemnation and a recurring experience of abuses of power (past & present) and failures to fully and constructively engage with issues that are deeply important to me such as women’s rights, issues around gender and human sexuality and the environment.

So I find myself an unlikely and almost a reluctant champion of the importance of engaging with tradition! But the great thing about grass roots work rather than theory, is that it always comes down to people in the end. It’s all about relationship. So Wild Church and established Church in Dartington engaged in a relational process in which we all had to stretch beyond our comfort zones and find Rumi’s ‘wide field’ of common ground:

 

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

 

So our Advent Service was in fact the tip of an iceberg of a much deeper and longer work involving many people. I found it my unenviable role to be often sitting at the centre of this web, lightly weaving together a lot of sometimes opposing and sometimes delightfully collaborative threads! Mostly though, I am left with a deep sense of gratitude to everyone who participated in co creating the ceremony (about ten of us) and to everyone who took the risk to come along and stay! In order to create a new kind of ‘one off’ communion service within the Sunday service time of an Anglican Church we also had to engage with Canon Law and we were met with great generosity by the Diocese in this and sincere thanks go to Rev’d Debbie Parsons, the Vicar of Totnes, for all her hard work with this, including crafting new words for communion.

Our morning began with music… and beautiful music (led by professional chorister, Rob Woodward, assisted by PCC Secretary Penny Dow) is much of what I remember now woven throughout the service, from Taize chants to Celtic hymns. I also savour in memory the collaborative nature of the whole service, how every element was led by at least two people standing up together (with Beth and I ‘stitching’ the whole event together) and the final blessing spoken line by line by all who are co-created the service. Our structure was our regular Wild Church communion form of gather, engage, share, bless with silence, song & prayers woven within.

So we gathered with opening words of welcome to the diverse inter-spiritual and all age community of about 75 souls. I have a beautiful memory, as I spoke about our theme of celebrating Darkness & Light, about Wild Church and invited everyone’s generosity in coming together in communion, of a young child who wandered up the main aisle and stood gazing at me across the altar. A moment of wordless meeting.

 

“I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places” Isaiah 45:3

“ To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark too, blooms and sings” Wendell Berry

Coming together continued through contemplative chanting & a unique confession inviting us to re-centre and lovingly created by Dartington curate, Rev’d Jane Frost. We then engaged with a brief Bible reading and a beautiful storytelling by local artist, teacher & storyteller, Helen Raphael Sands, of the community of St. Francis celebrating Advent with animals. Helen offered a brilliant and dynamic storytelling, complete with encouraging us to make animal sounds in Latin (!) and skilfully incorporating a small boy driving a red double decker toy bus very loudly up the victorian metal heating grids in the floor. Another funny moment! Rather than an address or sermon, we simply invited all present to turn to a neighbour and share moments of inspiration from the story and to write down any key words they wished on a paper star.