Author: dianewoodrow

I married Ian in 2007. I have two grown up children, who I home schooled until they were 16. My son has just joined the army, my daughter has just moved to Cardiff.
I have a degree in History and Creative writing and a PGDip in using Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes.
Until Feb 2016 I lived in a beautiful part of England and now I live in a beautiful part of North Wales where my time is filled with welcoming Airbnb rental guests, running writing workshops, writing, serving in my local Welsh Anglican Church, going for long walks with my little dog, Renly, and drinking coffee and chatting with friends

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Holy Week Monday

Holy Monday

A wild sea has pulled a bouy from wherever it was attached. For me this is what Jesus does on “Holy Monday”. He causes a storm and pulls things that people were using for protection loose.

My two favourite stories happen on “Holy” Monday. One that no one can get their heads round where Jesus curses the fig tree and then when Jesus really lets loose in the temple and kicks arse.

The cursing of the fig tree is told in one go in Matthew 21:18-22 but in Mark it is split into two halves with the trashing of the temple put between the curse and the explanation, which I think is great story telling. {Mark 11:12-26]

Picture Mark’s storytelling. Get him sat with you in a room. You are gathered round waiting to hear all this. You also know that this is the week leading up to Jesus’ death.

So Mark tells of the glorious peaceful procession into Jerusalem. Then it is like Jesus has one of those blips like we all do when something wonderful has happened. We get grouchy at the deflation of things. How many times have you done something amazing, celebrated your success then felt like you could fight the world the following day? Or is that just me???

But remember Jesus knows that is going to happen in a couple of days time. Or maybe he doesn’t know it is this Passover but knows that his death has to come one a Passover soon and it could be this one.

This past week I’ve had a cough, been shivery and also felt just yuck, but I remembered it was the anniversary of both my sister and my friend’s deaths. Both of which were unexpected and traumatic. My body was reacting and going into fight/flight/freeze mode because it was remembering what was going to happen.

Jesus knew what was going to happen. And I suspect he knew it was going to be this Passover because it is said that this one was a long one [Might explain more in a later post]. The signs were right. I think, if Jesus was truly human then he was scared too.

Anyway he is going into Jerusalem on those days of preparation for this long Passover and sees a tree looking good but with nothing to feed anyone from. Then he turns up at the Temple and it is a mess of capitalism and corruption. Looking good but not feeding anyone. The temple laws are being obeyed – people having to have the right things for the right sacrifices – but it was not being obeyed with the loving heart of God.

Jesus needs things right before he dies. This is not how people should be called into worship and connect with God. They need to be free of rules and be able to come as they are. Jesus was preparing the temple for his death and resurrection. Like giving it a spring clean.

Slight detour but …. before I go on holiday I like to give my house a super clean, tidy, change the bed, having everything tidied, clean and in order. So that when I come back from holiday I come home to a lovely looking house. It is a reason why I don’t have house sitters. They might keep it clean but things won’t be as I’d like them. I do wonder if this is what Jesus wanted with the temple – for it to be spring cleaned and as it should be so that when he rose again the following week things were “in place”.

But also I wonder if he was setting things up so the leaders were angry enough to want to get rid of him. Was this another of those God-plots where God makes sure everything is in place for what they want to do?

I do love how Mark bookends the temple episode with the fig tree. It gets cursed on the way in and then on the way out Jesus use the dead tree as a metaphor to talk about having faith. It finishes with Jesus saying

Whenever you stand up to pray, you must forgive others for what they have done to you. Then your Father in heaven will forgive your sins.

Everything you ask for in prayer will be yours if you only have faith

Mark 11:25-26 and 24

It is great storytelling. Clear out the greed and need for order and to “get things right”. Stop looking good but not being nourishing to others. Then forgive those who’ve done you wrong [people and God] whether they are sorry or not. And then you can ask for anything in prayer with faith. And God will answer you as God knows best. Trusting in your heavenly Father and not in what you think is a good idea.

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Holy Week Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday

I planning, at least at this end of the week, to do a blog post for every day of what the Western Christian Church calls Holy Week. So we start with Palm Sunday.

Being brought up in an Anglican church every Palm Sunday we would get give Palm crosses. Little things of dried palm leaves woven into a cross.

As children we would then use them as swords and fight each other on the way home. The meaning totally missed!

But it got me thinking about the palms that were allegedly strewn as the feet of the donkey Jesus was on as he rode into Jerusalem. How big were they? Where did they come from? Who thought of it first?

Did you know that is it only in John’s gospel that it states palm leaves? In the other three gospels it says people lay their garments or cut rushes to lay in front of Jesus’ path. Always interesting how Church tradition picks on one thing and we all decide that was what it was.

I have just googled palm leaves and found out they are not as big as I thought. They would not have been that hard to gather and wave and strew.

They are a good size but not huge. I think this procession is a bit awesome. Though its a shame they aren’t stood at the side of the road so we could see how a donkey would have managed walking over them

But then this morning my husband went to church and this is what he came back with – being held by a small cuddly donkey I bought from the Isle of Wight Donkey sanctuary.

My first thought when I saw it was the Doug Horley song “Have we made our God too small?” Do click on the link and have a listen.

But in truth I do wonder if we have made our God too small. We give out small dry crosses when at the time the people grabbed whatever was nearest and acted out an honouring. In ancient Near Eastern cultures it was seen as customary to cover the path of someone seen worthy of honouring. So here were the local people maybe not quite realising who Jesus was but understanding he was something worth honouring, and so they honouring him with whatever they had at hand; whether their cloaks, palm leaves or reeds. That doesn’t matter. But they took what they had to hand to honour Jesus as he boldly but peaceably rode into the main capital city just a few days before the biggest Jewish festival of the year.

We do do this. Look at pictures of when our royalty die or are crown.

Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral parade. See the flowers being thrown.

But we almost keep the whole doing that for Jesus as something quiet. I do know some churches do parades on Palm Sunday. The ones I’ve been involved in have been small, almost embarrassed affairs where we all huddle together for safety and talk to each other hoping not to engage with anyone else!!!

I was going to say if we really got the enormity of the whole Palm Sunday thing what would we do, but we have to remember these people mention in the gospels – whether fully true or exaggerated by writerly poetic license – did not know what the significance of Jesus riding on a donkey into Jerusalem meant but they still turned up. They still made a bit of a fuss. They still gave of what they had.

I think, because it is mentioned in all four gospels, it did happen and it was a big enough event for many people to say they remembered it. It is alleged that Mark interview Peter for his gospel, and also we have to remember that both Matthew and John were there. So even if they remember it slightly differently once they knew the significance it still happened.

Oh and I’ve also realised that we see Sunday as a day off or a day to be at church but for those ancient Near Eastern peoples it was a working day. For the Jews it was the first day back at work after Shabbat. They took time out of their working day to watch this enigmatic person ride by on a symbol of peace when they were in a country oppressed by a strong military junta. Now that is even more amazing!!!

So again what would I do, what would you do, if we were there and if we knew Jesus was coming to our town? We don’t know this is his final Sunday but we do want to do something honouring. We are willing to take time off work for this.

What would we do? I don’t think we would just shyly wave and fiddle with these woven things we get given at church on Palm Sunday. I’d like to think I’d take off my new DryRobe and let his donkey trample over it and not feel either disgruntled or proud that I had done that. What would you give?

Categories
hope plans

What Plans?

Where are we going? says the little dog trusting that his owners will not let him down. Clwyddian Hills 17th March 2024 Photographed by myself

I will come to you and fulfil my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,’ declares the LORD, ‘and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places

Jeremiah 29: 10-14

This came up in a Bible reading the other day it and got me thinking. So often we hear sermons or have a poster with the highlighted bit – “I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future” – or a version of that. And we see it as God having some great plan for us that we need to seek out and only when we find this right plan will be prosper, have hope and a future.

I hate to say it but whatever we do we have a future. There is no choice is that one. Also having hope, I believe is a state of mind. You can be in the perfect place, with the perfect weather, with those people who are kind and supportive, with the best of the best around you, but you can still feel like you are missing something, that things are not hopeful. Just look at all the famous successful people who take their own lives to have evidence of that. But also look at those people on holiday who just look a bit sad. Hope comes from the inside.

But also look at what Jeremiah says around those verses that so many know so well. It says that God will bring us back from a place where we have felt deserted, where we have allowed the worries of the world to overwhelm us. I do think “captivity” is being caught up in the worries of the world and not living in hope, not realising that no matter what’s happen the Creator of the Universe loves each one of us. That doesn’t mean outside circumstances will be great but inside of us we can call on the Lord and be heard. We can be freed from the captivity of our own making.

But here’s the catch – we need to seek God with all our hearts. Not just the bit that wants the Creator to make things right for us, but that is willing to say “here’s my heart. Even the grumpy bits. But even those bits are seeking you because I know you love the out-of-sorts parts of me as much as the parts I show to the rest of the world when I’m trying to show I’m doing ok.”

So are we willing to seek God with all our hearts so God can release us from our own captivity. [Remember at this point in the history of Israel they were in exile because they put things before God] and trust that whatever we do – whether that is chatting to someone in the park or sorting out climate change – that this is the plan God has for us and through that we have hope because hope in inside of us because we hang out with God?

I also think plans God has for us are also the things that make our hearts sing and so we don’t have angst and beat ourselves up but we need to slow down and listen to our own hearts. But of course that means we need some silence, some trust, and maybe that hope!

Categories
Clean Monday procrastinating

Clean Monday – 18th March 2024

This will also appear on Godspacelight at some point this week

Spring in my local park – March 2024. Photographed by myself

I did a piece last year for Clean Monday and only just remembered as the ideas fell into my head to write a piece this year

This year’s is taking a very different tack. I won’t go over what I wrote last time. You can read it if you want. This year I am much more focused on the cleaning angle.

Until March 2020 I rented the top two rooms out in my house with Airbnb. This meant that almost every day I was having to scrub down my house, check for dust, hidden dog toys, that we’d not left anything just lying about. It was a hard job but at that time I had the grace for it and almost enjoyed it. Then enter lockdown and Covid. My daughter lived with us for eleven of the main sixteen months. My husband was now working from home. There was no thought of anyone coming to stay over the 2020/21 period. So no real worry about keeping things too clean.

Lockdown ended. Daughter went back to her own town and back to work. Husband has continued working in the top small bedroom, venturing into his office occasionally but not regularly. All this gave me time to re-evaluate whether I wanted people staying in my house; to which the answer was No. The grace had gone and so it was time to move on with what I did with my time.

I’ve got more into my writing, into praying, into study, into coffee with friends. Life has changed. But so has my love of doing housework.

So with spring slowly appearing I have decided I need to give the house a real spring clean. I wrote the list. I planned out the rooms – what needed doing and how. I checked I had the required tools and products. I even checked the date to see what would be good one to start. What better date than today?

Or maybe tomorrow? Or when it’s warmer? Or just before we go on holiday? Or when we come back from holiday? Or just before certain friends come to stay? Or maybe I need to buy a steamer or a handheld hoover? Or perhaps I’ll do the car first? Or the garden? Or the dog?????

But then I realised how much I can be like this with my Christian life. I make the lists of what I want from this season, what books to read, the journal to write in, put an allotted time in my diary – and then …. Well there is always tomorrow. Next week. After the holidays. After friends come to stay. After I’ve bought a certain book. Perhaps the dog needs big hike in the woods and I could pray then/write poetry then/get closer to God then.

EXCUSES! Nothing more than excuses! A fear? Of what? Of the changes God might make?

Aren’t we good at finding plausible excuses?Yet the Bible has much to say about not putting off to tomorrow what you can do today. I thought there were only one or two but Open Bible has collected 46!!! Forty six bible verses that pertain to doing things when you say you’ll do them and not putting them off! Oh My Goodness!!!! That has certainly surprised me.

So perhaps I will get on and start on those spring cleaning chores. Though I think I’ll listen to Christine’s Liturgical Rebels podcasts as I do. Covering both the physical cleaning and a bit of spiritual cleaning too. And hopefully the biggest thing I’ll learn is not to put off till tomorrow what I am more than capable of doing today.

Categories
death grief trauma

The Trauma of Grief

Quarr Abbey grounds, Isle of Wight. Photographed by myself 9th March 2024

Back in 2012/2013 we had what can only be describe as a “series of unfortunate events” – feel free to read about them on – End of Year Round Up and this from the end of 2013. [Please don’t sign up for this blog as I don’t write on it any more!]

When I remember March/April 2012 and Sept 2013 I remember those times with a lot of pain and a lot of anger. As it came round to the anniversary of my friend Tessa’s death this January I did feel sad but not that angry painful sad. It was definitely a grief but not like the feels I have around memories of 2012/13. So this got me thinking.

It came to me after I posted Roadside Shrines the other day – what I was feeling from 2012/13 was the trauma of grief which then clouded the grief itself. I was not able to really mourn the loss of whose who had died in any real sense without seeing/feeling the trauma of it all.

By being able to recognise that what was going on was that I was dealing with the trauma of the respective deaths I have been able to let go of that. I have been able to be healed of the trauma of the events. I can let go of the how and why they died and grieve the loss rather than the “what could I/anyone have done to make things different/to stop it from happening?”

I am now free to miss each person and grieve for them as individuals.

I do wonder if these roadside shrines help one to deal with the trauma of the deaths and so move on to being able to deal with the loss of a person – friend/family member/colleague/someone of your community?

Who knows. But what I know is that being healed of the trauma has helped me see the human beings who I have lost. And, for me, that is a good thing.

Categories
self-care self-love

Putting Things Off

Sorry if the left-hand picture is a bit sqeamy. These are my son’s fingers on Saturday night

How often do we think we are too busy for self-care? How often are we too busy doing something to just spend time out to look after ourselves?

This on Saturday evening was a classic example. We were visiting my son and his wife, had just watched the rugby and son was cooking us beef nachos. I love my son’s cooking so was looking forward to it. Anyway whilst cooking his hand got splashed with hot fat. Instead of stopping cooking, running it under cold water for 10-20 mins and then taking stock of whether he needed to do anything he kept on cooking. It was only when we were all eating that he put his hand into a bowl of cold water. He carried on doing this on and off as we all ate and watched Crufts on TV. We then went back to our Airbnb. We’d just got in when my husband’s phone ran and it was daughter-in-law asking if husband could run son to A&E as he was in tears with his hand. The reason it was my husband who had to go was because he was the only one who had not had a couple of drinks whilst eating so was most definitely under the legal alcohol limit.

Turns out it was a pretty substantial burn and the fingers are still bandaged today!

But it got me thinking on how many times we feel like we need to keep going when we should stop. When there is that pain in chest or knee or headache or niggle and we just needed to stop, to breath, to rest a while but we keep going and have a fall, a heart attack, are rushed to hospital? Or we can feel something getting under our skins and know that if we stay in that environment much longer we will explode but we stay, have a huge row, say words we can’t unsay?

It would have been much better with my son, even if he had had to go to hospital anyway to have gone at 7pm rather than midnight. But I think we all do it. We all feel that we need to push through.

Why is it so hard to stop? Why is it so hard to put ourselves first? What are we afraid we’ll miss out on if we say Yes to the boss when we should say No? Or if self-employed keep ploughing on when time out to walk and ponder, to ask God/The Universe what needs to come next? Or if we do we have to justify it. We struggle to just rest, just to say “I’m ‘running my burn under the cold tap’“ [metaphor for so much there I think]

So I think I am going to challenge both myself and you, my reader, to have a look at what our ‘burn’ is, that thing that really hurts but we think we shouldn’t make a fuss about, and then what would our ‘cold tap’ be that would soothe so we don’t have to be rushed to A&E.

Categories
death Shrines

Roadside Shrines

A collage of Greek roadside shrines www.amusingplanet.com, an Irish roadside shrine https://catholicgadfly.blogspot.com/2012/06/catholic-marian-roadside-shrines.html, and a memorial on roadside in North Wales www.dailypost.co.uk

I could have added more – the Dunblane school shooting of 1996, the UKs only school shooting thankfully, or the floral tributes for Princess Diana back in 1997, and the many tributes that are now found in the UK on roadsides, beaches, and other public places.

The first time I saw a roadside shrine was when I visited the South of Ireland in 1980. There were not things like that in mainland Britain at that time. The next time was when I was in Greece in 1987. That was quite scary because I had hitched a lift in a truck carrying potatoes across the mountains of Pelaponese. The truck was speeding along and the driver was pointing these small shrines out and telling me in broken English that this is where people had died and of how their families would come to pray leave flowers, light candles, leave trinkets and pray for their souls. Well I must say it got me praying that I would not join them.

When I first got to really know God in 1992 the small charismatic Christian group I was part of said these shrines were Catholic or Greek Orthodox superstitions and that one did not pray to ones deceased family or friends once they had died. Dead was dead so to speak. At the time I hadn’t really lost anyone I was close to so I just accepted their word for it. So even though I found these shrines beautiful, moving and fascinating I allowed myself to dismiss them as superstitious nonsense like the good newbie Christian I was!

Then came the school shooting in 1996 where people from across the country, myself included, were sending flowers to be laid outside the gates of the school. I don’t know why other people did it but I did it because my son was of a similar age and at a school whose building looked similar. It was my way of expressing my grief and solidarity.

Princess Diana’s death followed close of the heels of the school shooting and the streets of not just London or the place she died but across the country were littered with flowers. I did not get involved with that, probably because it did not have the same effect on me as the school shooting.

Now it is not uncommon to see wilting flowers on the side of the road or on a park bench. Or like the above picture which shows the boy’s football shirt plus flowers, photographs, etc. Especially when grief is fresh this is what people need to do. They need to find a place where they can show their grief.

My pondering is – why have things changed so much? It is like that stiff upper-lipped Britishness of holding everything in is morphing into a more open Mediterranean show of emotion. Death is no longer something that is hidden behind somber church services and quiet tears. There is no longer the embarrassment of showing emotion.

I feel too as if we are moving away church involvement in death and so we need these places to focus our grief. Now. for whatever reason, a funeral can be up to a month after the death of someone. In the case of a roadside trauma it can be months or even over a year until the inquest can come to a conclusion as to what happened. Until there can be closure.

When theses roadside expressions of loss and grief started to appear on roadsides I found it odd and wanted to look away. Though in both Ireland and Greece I enjoyed looking. Perhaps for me it was that here, in a place I knew, someone was saying “look someone I loved died here” and that frightened me of my own mortality. I don’t know. But now I say a prayer as I go past for the person who has died and all the family and friends they leave behind.

Perhaps also as we go for more natural burials and more cremations and there are less and less gravestones we need a focus not just for our grief but for the grief of our fellow human beings?

Categories
Uncategorized

International Women’s Day – 8th March 2024

From a walk I did with my friend, Lisa, in Feb 2024

I was reading the post from Christine Sine’s about Standing With All The Women Of The World and was at first challenged by how all of us, men and women, have happily accepted King David, from the Bible, as a murderer but very rarely referred to him as a rapist, which is what he did with Bathsheba. The young woman did not stand a chance.

Christine ends by asking

Now prayerfully consider your own response, firstly to Mary Magdalene and Bathsheba, then to women in your life. Are there misconceptions in your views of them? Are there ways in which you discriminate against women by not treating them as equals?

I know I can be guilty of not so much discriminating but of not praising other women. I am amazed by so many. My first reason for writing was to honour Christine and all the work she does with Godspace and the challenges she does.

I then thought of other women who do things but felt that this is where we can go wrong – and a direction I am trying to let go of – and I want to honour the women who just are –

  • my QEC coach, who is cutting back more and more, who shows that you can trust that there will be enough by just doing what you are called to do.
  • my daughter who has been an independent lady from the age of 19 when she left home for university. She’s had her ups and downs but at no point has she come back to live at home.
  • my friend who felt called to leave her home here, nurse her parents until they passed away, and now is rebuilding her life up here, is supporting her son who is between jobs at the mo, but does it all without complaining, and is always there.
  • another friend who walked out of a toxic relationship and has slowly been rebuilding her life
  • my mum who had to put her husband into a care home because he has Parkinsons and she was big enough to say she couldn’t cope, and is now doing a major make-over on her house and being willing to pay people to do what she can’t do. She is an amazing example of knowing one’s limitations

I know there are many many more I could list who do great things, who say challenging and encouraging things, who write great/interesting/challenging/funny/all of the above on their blogs, who are just there, those who help me to be the best me I can be.

I also want to make sure that from now on I let the women in my life know how great I see them and how I couldn’t be fully me without them.

Together we are stronger!

[An aside – I’ve always struggled with David and the whole thing of him being man after God’s own heart – or is that a male intervention and not a divine thing??? – a thought for another blog maybe?? And whilst I’m on the thought – how many women have been labelled as being a woman after God’s heart???]

Categories
2020 vision apocalyptic

Apocalyptic Times

Llyn Crafnant 3rd March 2024 photographed by myself

Yes apocalyptic can look as much like a sun-kissed Welsh llyn [lake] as it can those “end of the world” movies some of us love to watch.

Do you get it sometimes when you’re listening to something and someone says something and you want to jump up and down and tell the world? This is my space to tell the world – or at least you my dear subscribers. Some posts I really really hope get out there to loads of people and some I’m a bit embarrassed by and some, like this one, I am writing because I cannot contain what is going on in my head and cannot yet find a way of bringing it up when out dog walking 🙂

I was listening to Drew Jackson [yes I have been banging on about Drew and the podcast on Godspace but, for me, it has been amazing]. There is one point, in talking about his poetry that he calls it apocalyptic, and then says that we are living in apocalyptic times. He then explains that, for him, apocalyptic times mean “unveiling times” and not so much as we’ve come to think of them as “end of the world as we know it times” – though it is a bit like that too. But it is much more about things, structures, being unveiled.

I was so excited because I had written around this from 2020 onwards in various forms, and keep saying to my husband when another “unveiling” of something corrupt comes on the news that, I think, the whole of the 2020s – until the end of 2029 – will be a time of unveiling, a time of relooking at things and saying “that’s not right” – governments, health care, education, racism, sexism, gender issues, climate change, nature issues, homelessness, poverty, materialism, the whole Israel/Palestine, Russia/Ukraine, and more that are not coming to mind at the moment. And more that I’m sure you can name.

This is what the book of Revelation talks about, what Jesus talked about when he said about the end times. It may not mean the world is going to end and we will all go off to heaven, or wherever. It means, as Drew said, apocalyptic times are times of unveiling, times of revealing what’s wrong in our systems. A time to change.

At the event I was at last week one of the women speaking said about how things are changing with regard to clairvoyants and how the understanding of spirituality is changing. She said how she believed that the control of religious structures was lifting and people are starting to explore different ways of being. All the way through that day there was an understanding that people are starting to realise that we buzz with energy, and that we do affect others by our energy and other people’s energy affects us. A lot of QEC is about changing your energy as you are healed from your traumas.

Again these things are unveilings, are changes, are seeing things that were there all along but were hidden. As Christians we need to make sure we don’t stay in our safe boxes but that we get rebellious, get out there and explore what is being unveiled. Get out there and really live in these apocalyptic times without fear. I believe it is what God talks of in the Bible but there has been a fear about it. Instead we need to view it as exciting, as change, as seeing things differently.

Also the reason for the above photo is that the sun still shines, the lakes are still beautiful, families still go out and walk their dogs. Things being unveiled does not mean the end but the in-between space before we go into a new beginning.

But again for me personally the most exciting thing from all this was that Drew was saying what I had been thinking. So if he is and I am and things on Christine’s Liturgical Rebels podcasts are saying things then … let’s be awake and aware and responsive.

Categories
Feel the seasons March

1st Monday in March

Nothing overly deep or meaningful here. Just wanted to share the joy of March blooming in my local park. I find it exciting and delightful when the trees stop being a solid browny colour and start having these lovely green, pink and/or white tips to them. The sun is rising noticeably earlier and later in the day. Even if I’m not out in it to be able to open the curtains and have my living room flooded with light as I drink my morning cuppa before taking the dog out, or to have that same room still bathed in light as I start to feel ready for my supper is just such a joy. So I thought I would share that joy with you on this first Monday in March.