Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea.

It’s followed immediately by the parable of the sower, a story much beloved by Vincent Van Gogh, but the parable is often the starting point for a round of analysis as to what the Church should be doing. I may be guilty here of subverting the bible, but it seems to me that in a form like the gospels where there isn’t really much “spare”, no sentence appears without reason. And all over the gospels we get told that Jesus went out to pray – Mark says that Jesus got up early, while it was still dark, to go to a solitary place and pray (Mk 1:35); Luke says he withdrew to lonely places and prayed (Lk 5:16). But here he didn’t go to the beach to pray, he just “sat beside the sea”.

What does it feel like to sit on the beach? – perhaps on a hot summer’s day with waves lapping and children’s laughter and sails flashing in the distance, or maybe on a brisk winter’s morning, wrapped up well against the elements and walking through a stiff wind to sit in the shelter of a large sand dune and watch the crashing waves. Jesus went down to the beach, not to pray, just to sit.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine came to stay in my house while carrying out a research project. One evening I was cooking dinner when the phone rang. While I was answering it I also nipped upstairs to see if my son was out of the bath yet, and then the doorbell rang, and after I’d dealt with that the phone rang again. I got back to the kitchen to rescue the dinner, to find that my friend had taken over. He put a glass of wine in my hand, pointed to the chair in the corner of the kitchen, and said with a smile, “Sit down! Now! Honestly, don’t you ever just sit and do nothing?”

I used to be better at sitting still, I think, before I began the juggling act of bringing up a child and holding down a job. But it’s not only single mothers who get drawn into a frenetic pace – it happens to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.

Our culture likes speed: we like things to go faster and smoother and more efficiently. And in some areas of life speed is excellent. Clearing bureaucratic hurdles at speed is good, your computer running quickly and efficiently is good, the post arriving on time is good. But there are other ways in which speed is not so good for us. Fast food, ready meals, eating on the run, driving too fast, never having the time to pause and take stock, or look into someone’s eyes and really listen to what they are saying. Author Carl Honoré, in his book In Praise of Slow (Orion 2004), called this the cult of speed; not just speeding up things that need to go faster, but winding up of the whole of life until it’s like a centrifuge that pins us to its revolutions.

Even our spirituality can be subject to this tendency towards speed and drivenness. Jesus went to sit by the sea and get the space he needed, but soon found himself besieged by the crowds, who wanted more of him. So from his moment of stillness he pitched out in a boat and began to tell them his stories.

He told them about a farmer who walked about throwing seeds onto his land. The seeds went everywhere, and no doubt he knew that some of them would come to nothing, because if you’re going to grow things, some seeds are always wasted. And there were seeds that were eaten up by the birds in no time, and others that started well but grew too fast, and couldn’t mature for lack of depth.

The ones that did grow, though, were the ones that vanished for a while – went a bit deeper into good soil. They didn’t sprout so quickly, but this was good because they were putting down roots first. And when they eventually came up, they didn’t grow quickly at all. They grew at the proper speed, developing strong stems and good fat seed heads.

Spirituality that bears fruit is not a fast food business. You can try to make the Kingdom of Heaven more efficient if you want to; you can try and maximize effort and produce more fruit per hour of work. But in the end, like growing wheat, real spiritual growth has an optimum speed, and accelerating the growth and maximizing the harvest will be about as much good for the soul as fast food is for the body. Some things just take time.

The parable of the sower, then. Not so much a call to do more things, achieve more evangelistic goals, hunt for more spiritual scalps, get more bums on seats. More of a call to recognise that spirituality that lasts involves letting quite a lot of stuff go to waste, and having the patience to ignore the fast growing weeds and wait for the good stuff to grow. In the meantime, there is plenty of time to go and sit on the beach.

I remember listening to a sermon once by a man called Jack Hayford. He was a pastor in some USA denomination, and I happened across him by accident. Much of what he said was in the kind of religious language that leaves me wondering about someone’s connection to the real world, and when he said he “heard God speak to him audibly” I wondered a little more.  But apparently God said to him, as he was driving around town, “If you don’t slow down, you’re going to crash.” He spent some time considering what kind of spiritual application this had – were his church programmes being developed too quickly? Was this some wisdom about regulating Church growth? Eventually, Mr Hayford realised that the words in his head had to do with his speedometer, not his church.

Steve Taylor once wrote about a challenge to the culture of speed in Church:

“I believed in a fast God. I was part of a system that gave altar calls for instant salvation, prayed for healing, and expected instant church growth, if not this week, then at least this month. Did I follow a fast God? And what would it mean for me to follow a slow God; the God who took 80 years to prepare Moses for leadership; who took 40 years to get a people across a dessert; who took 30 years to prepare a Messiah ministry; who gave Paul 3 years for integration? Where is the slow God in my spiritual formation?”

Here are some of my Lent slow-down pledges:

1. Walking instead of driving where possible.

2. Say no.

3. Go to bed earlier.

This year I came across Ian Stackhouse's book, The Day Is Yours, which is about "Slow Spirituality in a Fast-Moving World". It's a powerful book about discovering a rhythm of life that takes control of what matters while still living in the "real" world.

If you like ideas such as "Urban Monasticism" you'll probably like this too.

I read this today in Eugene H Peterson's The Contemplative Pastor. It's an excellent book. If you are too busy and run off your feet, buy it right now, take the afternoon off and read it. The busier you are, the more you need to read it.

In the park where I take my son to play there are enough different trees to keep a photographer as well as a tree-climbing boy very happy indeed.   

We went over to Burghley the other day, back when the sun was shining, where there is a sculpture garden and the new Garden of Surprises, both of which have astonishing art installations set among trees, making you see the landscape in a completely different way.

The artist who set these strange figures up on a branch must love trees too, I think.

I stick to 3 jobs as defined by the Ordinal. Preside, teach, visit. I got rid of all jobs outside of the parish, including at deanery level and never attend meetings or courses unless my people will definitely benefit from my attendance. I got rid of my need to be in charge, even if I thought I could do a better job. There is no reason why the local church leadership should not come from members of the laity. This even includes PCCs. Certainly people can be found to do most of the admin jobs and do it far better than someone trained mainly in the niceties of Biblical hermeneutics and church history. I stopped worrying about the Protestant work ethic. I don’t care if I’m not busy. Nobody acknowledges the fact when you work all hours anyway.

All this leaves me with plenty of time to do do my pastoral work properly. Visiting, arranging funerals as if each one is a major society wedding, walking round the parish, talking to people in the street. And you know what Sam, everything still gets done and people believe I am the only priest in the neighbourhood who does his job, even though I am the laziest sod in the priesthood.

I aspire to be lazy but haven’t achieved it yet. But like MadPriest I too have re-aligned a lot of what I do over the last year or so. Even in a Chaplaincy (where the popular myth is that we only work in term time) it’s entirely possible to take on more and more and more things, not only beyond the call of duty but beyond the limit of human capacity. I chopped out a large number of things that weren’t necessary, stopped doing other people’s jobs for them, and found that not only did I have enough time left over at work to do the important things, but was less tired when I got home, and managed to write a book in my spare time.

Wait – Books? Writing? – where does that come in the Ordinal? (unless you include it in teaching, I suppose…) But because of that, I also like Rev Sam’s response to MadPriest, which includes this:

"…in the end I did come to a resolution and a sense of peace: that a) I was called to parish ministry, but b) I had to work out for myself what it meant for ME to be a parish priest – not what being a parish priest was in general, but what sort of ministry is God specifically calling ME to – and that the model of ministry that I had been trained and formed for was not appropriate; that in fact, if I allowed that model to dominate who I was, that I would simply be repeatedly broken."

I like MadPriest’s comment because it takes you back to the starting blocks – why am I in this job? What am I supposed to be doing? And what did I just accidentally get talked into along the way? But I like RevSam’s development because it recognises there is more than one way to skin a cat.  MadPriest’s conversation with RevSam is serious food for thought for anyone in ministry whose work load has got out of control.

My sermon in Bury St Edmunds yesterday seemed to go down well. It was the beginning of the week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and I met some wonderful people there. I preached on Luke 18 – "Two men went up to the Temple to pray…".

Leaving Church is an account of Barbara Brown Taylor’s own journey into faith, ministry, and then Ordination; then her experience of life as a parish priest, first in a big city and later in a small rural town. Eventually, the story begins to track how and why she leaves the life  of a Parish priest, and what are the good and bad things about that experience. I trust (given the title) that that is not too much of a spoiler.

One of the reasons I love this book is because it traces the ambivalence that any Priest worth her (or his) salt is bound to live with – loving God, loving the Church and yet being painfully aware that commitment to Church brings as many constraints as it does freedoms, as many handicaps as priveleges.  Taylor puts her finger on the tension between living out what you believe you were called for, and living within the expectations that others have of a priest (almost invariably not the same thing!) To be a priest with any authenticity you have to be fully human, and yet very often it is the Church community that works against that necessity. Sometimes people will not accept ministry if you are not a priest, and yet they won’t accept your humanity if you are.  Taylor also relates beautifully and tenderly the tension of living with a sense of calling, and the way in which that can so easily spill over into sheer workaholism and the inability to say "no".

The title, "leaving" might just as easily be read as "finding" – it’s not a negative account at all, more an account of how, in order to continue a journey of faith and simply of human life, the season of ordained ministry had to be put to one side.  One of the reasons I like the book so much is that – unlike so much other rhetoric among Church leavers that is very simplistically anti-priest and anti-institution – she offers considered insight into the tensions of faith communities and their leaders, and shows how sometimes those communities disallow our calling first to be human, and only then to be ministers. She doesn’t claim to have left the Church because she didn’t believe in it any more, nor because she didin’t believe in what she had done thus far, and she doesn’t hold the Church in any kind of contempt. Rather, she relates the complex reasons why a clear shift in role and direction became desirable for her, and what she learned along the way. There are plenty of people who will give a bitter account of why they left, trashing where they have been before. It’s refreshing to read someone who gives an affectionate and grateful account, despite finding in necessary to leave all the same.

I think anyone interested in Church would benefit from reading this – priests and leaders and ministers of course, but perhaps also those who take different roles within Christian communities – if we could think together about our mutual ministries and what our various roles give to the community, perhaps it would be possible to break down in some places the undesirable divide between the "professional" and the "rest" and start living as communities of truly interdependent people? Either that or I imagine that I and many others will eventually follow the path that Barbara Brown Taylor has found essential.

Now don’t mistake me for a complete curmudgeon when it comes to shopping. Only last month a friend’s grown-up daughter pronounced me  "absolutely the BEST shopper" after I introduced her to the delights of Oxford Street and found her at least half a dozen items of clothing that she definitely couldn’t live without. I know sometimes it’s therapy, and that clothes and home stuff is good for you. But there’s also this worrying trend – the kind of shopping-mall disease – where you shop because you are bored, or your life isn’t full enough of other things.  There’s a version of shopping which is about filling a big emotional hole;  where shopping is no longer a trip to get things you need, or a few seasonal treats, but a "leisure activity". It’s a fine line, but one side of it is definitely a sad prospect. I think there are too many cushions and curtains on sale in Cambridge. We need to do more walking in the country and making our own jam.