The ancient god Jehovah speaks to his people through the prophet Ezekial:
“Get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit.
A new heart will I give you, a new spirit put within you.
I will take the heart of stone from your flesh,
And give you a heart that feels.”
For the whole of my adult life I have refused point blank to live in London. Smelly, noisy, dirty, too many people, I always said.
Most of my friends from university moved here. I went to Spain instead. When I came back from my travels, I refused to even consider jobs here, instead I went to Brighton – the sea, you don’t feel shut in, you see.
Mind you, I had always enjoyed being a tourist here – art galleries , theatres, all that. I grew up just down the road in Reading after all. Not particularly well known for its grace and beauty either, it has to be said.
And then finally in October of last year I caved in. I took up my first ministry post at Bethnal Green in the East End of London. And went into terminal shock. The first time I saw a tube train during rush hour, I just stood there.
“But there’s no room for any more people on there…” It left the tube station without me, despite the fact that fifty more people had somehow managed to shoehorn themselves aboard.
Please bear in mind that I had spent the previous two year in Oxford doing ministerial training which made the whole contrast much more striking.
The homeless guys on the streets of central Oxford look healthy, the ones on the streets near me in Bethnal Green don’t look well at all.
And because I felt so stripped of everything that had protected me until that point, I saw people. Every face seemed to tell me a story, I was aware of every little encounter that I witnessed or took part in, on the streets, in the shops, on the tube…
This is one of the great London poems written by a man who took the sufferings of its people very much to heart, called of course, ‘London’:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’s Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear:

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackening Church appals,
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

That was taken from William Blake’s Songs of Experience, a bitter and disillusioned collection of poems that accompany his Songs of Innocence which are sung through the eyes of children.
He saw the loss of innocence as inevitable, as part of growing up but the cynical view of life he also saw as a point of view we could leave behind us.
We can choose radical innocence, choose to keep our hearts open to the world and only that way can we truly change it.
The first time I went to the Buddhist Centre in Bethnal Green I ended up pouring out all my raw experience to some poor unsuspecting Glaswegian who had been a long way from home for quite a while I think.
He smiled at me tolerantly and said, “Yes, of course, but you will soon start to live in a bubble like the rest of us.”
And of course he is right. Nearly six months later, I have grown a shell to protect myself. But even at the time when he said it, I knew I didn’t entirely want to live in a bubble. Oh believe me, it has certain attractions. The most obvious of which is the capacity to cut off from other people’s pain and thence my own.
But during my raw months I also saw great beauty and kindness in this city and that time permitted me to learn to love this city in ways that I do not believe I could have done unless I had walked through the fire.
Blake calls it radical innocence – the Buddhists call it Buddha nature. I remember Sarah’s service here back in the autumn, so soon after she had arrived, at the same time like me. The need to justify the time we have spent in study. Among other things, I wrote a dissertation on the Buddhist teachings of the open heart.
Perhaps the greatest modern teacher of this is Pema Chodron, a Western Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition who now teaches at a monastery in Nova Scotia. This little story is probably the most-loved and most-quoted of all her work:
When I was about six years old I received the essential Buddha nature teaching from an old woman sitting in the sun. I was walking by her house one day feeling lonely, unloved and mad, kicking anything I could find. Laughing, she said to me, “Little girl, don’t you go letting life harden your heart.”
In my wilderness years, and perhaps we have all had a few, I remember describing to a friend that it felt that a frost had settled like a crust upon my heart. That I couldn’t really feel anything anymore. I couldn’t make connection with people anymore. That is what life can do to us. It can make us go away inside, live in a bubble, develop armour, however you want to call it.
But it need not be so. We have the capacity to always remain here, present in the world, with all its beauty and sorrow.
We own as our birth-right, the openness and spontaneity, that we were born with. This is Buddha-nature, our own enlightened self, always and forever there underneath the frost that has gathered on the top.
William Ellery Channing, the great American Unitarian expressed it thus:
Is it only in dreams that beauty and loveliness have beamed on me from the human countenance, that I have heard tones of kindness, which have thrilled through my heart, that I have found sympathy in suffering and a sacred joy in friendship?
I do not dream when I speak of the divine capacity of human nature. The germs of sublime virtue are scattered liberally on our Earth.
Let us hold fast to a faith in the greatness of the human soul, that faith which discerns in the depths of the soul a divine principle, a ray of the Infinite Light, which may yet break forth and shine as the sun.
This ideal will not be realised automatically however. Before we can achieve the great ideals of the world religions, to love our neighbour as ourselves, universal compassion, we have to learn a very simple and very difficult lesson.
Not to run away.
When I began ministry training, a friend who runs a meditation centre in South London gave me this Buddhist symbol that I now wear. At the time I thought “Oh, that’s pretty”, put it to one side and thought no more about it.”
It symbolises the strength to hold together all the warring impulses that pull us in different directions, the strength to hold the centre which at times can look like doing nothing. But that very doing nothing can take all the wisdom and patience we have.
And wearing it has been useful to me, it reminds me when I am in grave danger of forgetting, the need to hold the centre in our movement at large.
But how to stay still? How to stay present with the tensions and conflicts both within us and within our churches and our movement?
Just stop and stay, first and foremost, with our own discomfort… to see what is happening around us… and to take a moment to clock our own reaction to it.
Because react we will… usually so fast that we don’t even realise that our response is old and tired, based on old habits, old attachments, old fears.
Only by slowing down and seeing our reactions for what they are can we dismantle them and open our hearts to each other again.
To live in this world with an open heart…Personally speaking, that has been the challenge of my life.
We need to regain our spontaneity, the curiosity of children, to see every situation afresh.
And then our very vision of the world changes. I will end today with Wordsworth’s vision of London, the same London as William Blake’s. This from a man who detested cities and lived most of his life in the Lake District.

Written about his experience on an early September morning in 1802 on Westminster Bridge:

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will;
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Rev.Jane Baraclough
Bethnal Green, London