What has the European Directive on the export of duck eggs to do with St Ursula's? Or the statistic that the average ten-year-old laughs over 400 times a day, while the average adult laughs only fifteen times in the same period? If you had been at the seminar here on January 13th, you'd have known.
Over forty people, from here and from other churches in Switzerland, came to learn from Canon Robert Warren and the Revd Alison White about Spirituality in the Church. Well, really it was about Mission, but as Alison said, if you advertise a meeting on mission or evangelism, it just turns people off. Not that spirituality scores much better - it's a taboo subject, and most people will talk more readily about their sex life or their bank balance than their prayer life. Yet spirituality - making sense of our lives - is common to all human beings.
For us Christians, though, it is Spirituality with a big `S', knowing God for God's sake, and not just an ego trip. It needs inspiration - openness to God. It needs engagement (`letting the rubber hit the road', said Alison). In needs expression - getting on and putting it into practice. And it needs discipline - persistence, system, routine.
Robert and Alison are part of the Springboard Team, a group set up by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1992 for the Decade of Evangelism with the aim of Church renewal (Robert felt the title Decade Evangelist was a bit misleading!). So the workshop focussed not just on our own spirituality, but on the needs of the churches we came from. The heart of the day was a study of the Beatitudes ("values for a society which is searching for values", or "turning the world the right way up").
I wish I could summarize this study without losing any of the gems that emerged. The eight beatitudes fit together in a pattern. Blessedness must be seen in the light of the example of Jesus. For example, "blessed are those who mourn" is not addressed to those who are bereaved - it is addressed to those who truly feel a loss, who share in the suffering, just as Jesus wept for Jerusalem. Or, to take a striking example, those who actually care when they hear that 1.8 million people have died in conflict in Zaire over the past year.
And being comforted doesn't mean being given a cup of tea and being told "there, there, it'll be all right in the morning" - that's not what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane when "angels came and comforted Jesus"! It means being strengthened - in the way Chad Varah, for example, was inspired and strengthened to found the Samaritans.
This led on to thoughts about "Minding the Gap" - the gap between what is and what ought to be. And to thoughts about intercessions in church - in the words of Theresa of Avila, to whom are we speaking? Who are we? For what are we asking? Or in practice, who voices our intercessions in church? (It was once the job of a deacon to "gather up" the prayers of the congregation.) What format do we use? What words? What use of silence? Of symbols? And who do we pray for - why do we tend to pray for teachers and nurses, and not for refuse collectors and estate agents?
This moved us on to the thought that the church was for everyone. And we got together in congregations for a bit of role play - those of us whose surnames began with D, who had straight hair, blue eyes and Velcro-fastened shoes had to imagine ourselves as a young person, without many friends, in a car-owning family, whose main interest was watching television, suddenly feeling an urge to see what church was about. How would we find out where to go and when? What would it feel like, before, during and afterwards?
Food for thought indeed. Here at St Ursula's, the dozen of us who attended agreed to meet again and discuss what we had learned, and to find ways of putting it into practice.
And the duck eggs? Well, the Beatitudes run to fewer than a hundred words. I'll leave you to guess how many thousand the EU directive has - start at 20 and work upward! Which is the more effective rule of life?
HD