I am struck by my friend Ann's analysis that where we are now is what matters. She has a saying where she argues that the centre of the egg timer where the sand slips through the hourglass is the real present where everything is lived. The future and the past may have formed us and may drive us, but being here now is what I must embrace and all that this entails and means for me and those I love. In fact in some way indescribable the present holds the past and the future together. So this means letting go of living in the past bringing what is good from the past into the present. The all that we regret is part of the future we choose. By doing this we are allowing the future to be what it is and being hopeful that God will be in it. Knowing this is central for Ann to living in Christ. I find it really hard.

There is a poem which has the line 'the meaning is in the waiting'. Sabina said that she had read that real life is what happens to us while we wait and plan and think we are in control. It is the unplanned, unmanagable, unforseen, sometimes unwanted or unwelcome happenings that come our way and shape us as human beings.

I am persuaded by these arguments, but unmoved by the argument that 'things happen for a reason'. I prefer the thought that things happen for sometimes for no reason at all. I think that God is able to create meaning from those experiences. God can do something creative with any situation. Where there is engagement with God there is learning. We are engaged with God and God is engaged with us and so we are learning. This is not the same as saying that something 'had to happen' in order for us to learn. What it means, for me, is that we learned something specifically because something random or unjust or even lucky happened specifically to us. Our unique experience is naturally unique in what it teaches us to learn. We are uniquely created by our unique experience and so, in one way, for any particular thing to be learned we must have a particular experience. By this argument that particular incident 'had to happen' if we learn a particular lesson or skill, because only that experience would have taught us this particular thing. These things are not the same as God inflicting horrid injustices on us so that we 'learn a lesson'.

This brings me to my next point. I face the ordination of Rebecca and the licensing of Jayne to work in a paid and public ministry with all the things they will be allowed to do that I will not. As I face conversations like the one this morning with Deb's mentor from her placement regarding Deb's brilliant aptitude for ministry and cheering her on to start her training in September. I am as unconvinced by 'things happen for a reason' and more and more persuaded by the thought that this now is where God is at work. God will re-create me and God will use this mess, no doubt unexpectedly. God will find something to say because of the mistakes that have been made and will change us and fill us with yet more hope as an insurmountable and unneccesary injustice is re-designed. It is like sculpture. I am like sculpture. Vocation and Calling and Priesthood and Christian life is like sculpture.

The potter and the clay image, overused as it is, serves us. I do feel like a lump of clay being mucked about with and currently feel that I have been placed in a firing kiln to bake. The Fire and the Clay book about Vocation had warned me about this. I was a cynic then, but as I am being cooked I take it all back. What the pot looks like at the end can't be anything as important as the creative process where material and artist work together and take on a third life.

What happened to me was and remains an injustice. It was not meant to be. What God wants to happen is healing and wholeness and company and laughter and love. This is what God pursues in any given moment in the present and I am resolved to do the same.

Why do people feel the need to make statments and decisions about what other people can cope with? Specifically here I am referring to learning. I have been told that it is percieved wisdom that 'average people in average churches', the first question emerges, would be 'unable to understand Rowan Williams', and the second question emerges. As I continue to think about this another question arises and another and another. What is an average person? and what is an average Church? how do we know these average people cannot manage Rowan William's work? In particular how can we know this if these average people are not given an opportunity to read his work? How are we ever to cease to be average unless we try challenging material and make it accesible to those who struggle to see it as writing for all of us, and not simply for the academic elite?

The most important question of all is 'why would the fact of something being deemed 'heavy' be something we should avoid? Even more frustrating for me is that anyone should consider it their place to decide that someone average is unable to cope with something and should be helped to avoid it. The largest question therefore is my first, 'why do people feel the need to make decsions about what is bearable for others?

Here I am judged an average person in an average church by someone average who has never visited this Church or found out about me in all my averageness. As it happens I am an avid reader of Archbishop Rowan Williams, however 'heavy' some people judge him to be. He is not a 'heavy' writer. He is challenging, but to call him 'heavy' does him an injustice. He is poetic, uses difficult ideas which are not easily broken into neat black and white piles of ready answers. Perhaps this goes some way to answering the question of the motives of those unwilling to engage their 'flock' in his work.

If we average flocks start to think in hazy ways, in grey areas, start to live with ambiguity, look for meaning to emerge, start to read between the lines and to engage critically with Political scenarios we stop being average or a statistic or a person in a particular box and start to be persons in our own right finding our own meanings. Surely this is why it matters so much that we read his work and works like his. Here is a national treasure a widely recognised international scholar with creative flair and ingenious crafted arguments. Perhaps the it is those who accuse the average of being unable to cope with Rowan Williams who really cannot cope with the challenge he poses to their own positions.
Rowan Williams for those of us lucky enough to have read him is pure poetry to those who love him. To hear senior clergy argue against using his material for Lenten study because he is incomprehensible to us mere mortals is something only someone who had never properly engaged with his work would say.

In the brilliant Tokens of Trust Williams writes 'There was nothing bland and obvious about Jesus in his own day' (p 61). Likewise ther is nothing bland or obvious about William's work or God's people in each place and time. Until people who are making decisions about those they have never met and the educational needs they assume we need stop putting us into bland and obvious categories they will impoverish us.

And that...dear reader...is why I am so angry