One Church
We like to walk together on the first Saturday of each month. Find details of the next walk below.
This Saturday at 10.30am, we’ll meet at Lower Lodges Car Park in Stanmer Park for a gentle stroll up through the woods and back – a couple of miles, or more if people are up for it! Bring some water, a snack and some shoes you don’t mind getting a bit muddy.
The car park is a short walk from Falmer train station, or you can get the 25 bus to Stanmer Park.
At last, we have come to the end of the journey that is ‘Sanctuary’.
This final poem is a response to questions we may all have asked ourselves at some point in our lives: where is the presence of God?
And the answer may be closer than you think.
Here are some words from The Poet on this poem:
“In this final poem, I found myself remembering an important fact about finding sanctuary in God: it is not a one-sided desire.
“Just as much as we seek the rest, hope, unconditional love, and encouragement that comes with dwelling in God’s presence, God also seeks to share all of this and more with us all the time.
“Understanding this allows the misconstrued idea of God’s characteristics and Their relationship to us to be deconstructed. Instead of God being an unimaginably enormous, impersonal authoritarian figure that watches us from Heaven with contempt, God reveals Themselves to be on our level, at our side, ready and willing and eager to embrace, teach and guide us.
“And thus, to the question of where can we find God to find sanctuary, I say: it is right here. As close as the earth under our nails.
“Just as Jesus walked and dwelt with his disciples as a loving friend and patient teacher who guided them as they grew in strength and wisdom each day, so too does God walk with and dwell with us right now.
“God is essence of hope and love that, every day, is ready to embrace us in times of loss and sorrow, to lift the burdens of life from our shoulders, renew our souls with peace when the world becomes incomprehensible, and help us begin again. Sanctuary in God is living every day with the awareness of God’s intimate proximity to us as we walk with Them, lean on Them, and trust in Their everlasting love for who we are, as we are.
“Yet hope returns when I remember this one thing: The Lord’s unfailing love and mercy still continue, fresh as the morning, as sure as the sunrise.” Lamentations 3:21-23 (Good News Translation)
“This and all the poems in ‘Sanctuary’ were a direct result of the time I spent talking with, volunteering with, and learning from many wise and inspired members of One Church Brighton, inside and outside Sunday service. That empathetic communion with each other is a manifestation of God’s love for every human on this planet. I aimed to capture that spirit, as well as a more personal communal perspective of God, in this whole collection, and I hope I have been able to do so.
“Thank you for reading.”
Sanctuary can be made as well as found, and it doesn’t and shouldn’t stop at words. It should be demonstrated in action.
In the penultimate poem of this collection, ‘5001’, The Poet brings us into the environment of the Community Meal. Held within the Florence Road church, volunteers from the congregation gather every third Sunday of the month to cook and serve hot meals to vulnerable people in Brighton’s local community, ensuring that they too can experience some sanctuary from life’s hardships.
Here are some words from The Poet on ‘5001’:
“While I shouldn’t have favourites, ‘5001’ definitely has a special place in my heart. I have volunteered at the Community Meal four times now, and honestly, it has been one of the most transformative experiences I’ve had the honour of partaking in. It is a place where the action of God’s love is truly demonstrated and for the vulnerable people who come, the space is a sanctuary for them.
“The people who we share coffee or tea, a hot meal and delicious dessert with at the Community Meal are no different to any of us. At any time in our lives, we could all face the hardship of the people who come for a hot meal every month, and because of that, the extension of care and compassion to those people is just as important. Not because it gives anything in return, but because that is the unconditional compassion of God towards us also.
“I wrote this poem as if it were told by God Themselves, spoken as if to the regular attendants of the community meal, but also towards all of us, offering the promise of care, of healing, and of safety in whatever experience of lack and loss we may face. There is no cap on this compassion, there is no limit to how much we can ask for, for God is the essence of unconditional love that is found when we give to those less fortunate and accept help ourselves when we need it most. Knowing you need help is the first step, but allowing yourself to receive it is where healing starts.”
Matthew 25:40 – “I tell you this: whenever you saw a brother or sister hungry or cold, whatever you did to the least of these, so you did to Me.” (The Voice Bible)
Can you remember a time when you received help that seemed to come out of nowhere? What did receiving that kindness feel like? Where can you show that compassion to someone else this week?
Fittingly, the poem for the middle of this week is titled ‘Mid-Week Service’, and here, The Poet encourages us to realise that sanctuary can be found in places we may often overlook as mundane. Sometimes, you can find it in a café.
Throughout the week, One Church on Florence Road becomes Skylark Coffee café. In such an environment where people from different life paths come together and work or read or relax around one another, a new perspective of what sanctuary can mean is discovered.
Here are some words from The Poet on this poem:
“The idea of sanctuary, even the word itself, conjures up imaginations of cathedrals or great and transformative acts of God or at the very least, the fellowship reserved for Sunday services. But if we are to find and live in it, we must also understand that not only do we carry that with us, but also that God’s welcoming rest can be found in every aspect of our lives.
“In this instance, it is a café.
“During the week, One Church at Florence Road turns into the Skylark Coffee café, where hot and cold drinks, and sweet and savoury pastries are served to the tune of relaxing and quietly upbeat music playing through the speakers. Working on this poem brought me to Skylark Coffee, and what I found was just as much kindness and calm, and openness as I did on Sundays at church.
“Just like church where we are encouraged to let down our troubles and burdens of life to the feet of Jesus, in coming to the café, I found myself putting that encouraging guidance into action.
“I took a seat at an empty table in the café, rest my legs from the arduous climb up the hill, and catch my breath. I listened to the gentle ceramic tinkling of cups on saucers, the murmur of chatter of groups of people at their own tables as they worked or just chatted, the crunch of crumbling croissants and the gargle of the coffee maker brewing a new drink. I felt made to belong as the servers chatted with me as they took my order and served it to my table once ready. To me, that was as holy as church on Sunday because the reverence for each other was maintained.
“So, I encourage you all to look deeper into the places you spend your life throughout the week beyond Sunday. Let yourself settle in those spaces, experience them consciously, and perhaps find unexpected relief in them too.”
What are some seemingly ordinary places you visit often that give you a sense of relief? What can you learn about God’s rest and offer of retreat from those environments?
We are half way through the ‘Sanctuary’ poetry collection now, and we hope you have been enjoying the poems shared so far.
‘The First Lesser Heaven’ brings a reprieve to the emotional weight of the previous poem, and a checkpoint for the whole collection. It invites us to slow down, take a moment to bask in the present moment and find sanctuary for ourselves right where we are.
Here are some words from The Poet on this poem:
“If this collection can be seen as both an invitation to experience the spacious welcoming of One Church as well as an offer to find sanctuary in God through our personal journey of faith, ‘The First Lesser Heaven’ acts as a peak of a hill that is our ever-undulating walk with God.
“It was directly inspired by the Easter Sunday morning where some of One Church’s members met at the beach early and over hot crossed buns and coffee, we were given the opportunity to be still and present in the moment with our thoughts, our minds and with our sights on God. After reading the poem “Easter Dawn” by Malcolm Guite together, everyone was encouraged to take 5-10 minutes to walk along the beach on their own and consider the poem, the meaning, the morning air, the arrival of Easter Sunday, and to be completely present in the moment.
“It was quite cold that morning, breeze and the sky a light grey. I walked towards the sea with, admittedly, a heavy heart. It was as if I was carrying the weight of the previous poem into that morning. But as I stood there, breathed deeply, and listened to the ocean gently crashing, I slowly felt the weight in my chest and the burden I had brought to the beach slip away. That was a sanctuary for me. A 5-minute piece of Heaven’s gentle quiet on Earth brought forth on the waves, an experience we rarely seem to have time to find with how busy our lives are becoming.
“So, with ‘The First Lesser Heaven’, I invite you to feel the same. In being still, being present, in taking a moment to breathe, in allowing yourself just 5 minutes to let all the worries be washes away with the tide of your breath, I hope you too can find a moment to be in God’s presence and feel God’s cradling, comforting peace, wherever you are.”
Do you have a special place where you always feel able to forget about all of the burdens and worries of life, and simply be?
The third poem of ‘Sanctuary’ is an acknowledgement of the challenge of finding peace in God while unfathomable pain rears its head in and around our lives. However, it also offers a seed of hope that can give us strength as we find ourselves in these confusing and challenging times.
Here are some thoughts from the Poet on ‘The Epicurean Trilemma’:
“The Epicurean Trilemma presents a threefold question presented by the Greek philosopher Epicurus as an opposition to the idea of an all-powerful and all-loving God’s existence in the face of evil in the world:
“It is a dilemma I myself have struggled with in the past few years, as circumstances in my personal life, with work, my own identity and global issues have shaken my faith deeply. It was even so much that, for a time, I rejected the idea of God entirely. I was reminded again of this seemingly impossible question during one of Dave’s Easter sermons on Jesus’s final words on the cross, particularly when he cried out “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?”
“The loneliness of these dark times is what I aimed to capture in this poem, and because of that, it was one of the more difficult poems for me to write. With how often it feels like we are screaming into the void when we need God to show up most, many challenging experiences I have been through came back to me, and facing the weight of them again in this piece was heavy to bear. But in my contemplation over writing this poem, and an ending that echoes with finding ‘Sanctuary’ within this, I was reminded of God’s promise and the hope that promise brings us through these moments.
“God’s promise is: “I will never leave you, nor forsake you.”
“Even though we can’t understand why such evil happens, God is still with us. The hope that remains when all else is constantly stripped away by the world and some uncompassionate people in it, comes from God’s direct understanding of our pain, God’s empathy as we express and process and hopefully heal from these weighty emotions in our own time, and God’s love that will remain to hold the pieces of ourselves that seems to be all that is left.
“It may not answer all our questions immediately, it may not make the pain go away immediately either, but knowing we are not and never were alone in that pain can be a form of peace in itself.”
Have you faced an overwhelmingly challenging struggle that left you wondering how this could happen at all? What helped you feel grounded again?