28 August 2026 'Staying With'
- quietspacesplymout
- 12 hours ago
- 12 min read
Welcome
Opening Prayer
Creator God, we thank you for your presence with us as we gather here today.
We thank you for all the gifts of creation so many of them necessary to our daily lives,
and bringing us so many joys especially at a time when our world is suffering and in pain.
Guide us as we ponder the gifts we have, and perhaps those we feel we need, to help us stay with. As we reflect, help us to discover things in our lives which perhaps, until now, we have not seen. We give thanks for our own journeys, and for the opportunities we have to stay with one another. And we thank you for the guidance of your Holy Spirit.
Be with us in this time together, we pray, in the name of Jesus our Lord. Amen.
Reflections
A little while after I became a Nazareth Companion, early in the pandemic, I began to think more deeply about what it meant to be a community together - particularly an online community.
The Nazareth Companions were formed for people who wanted to follow the same Rule of Life as the Nazareth Community, based at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London.And, from those early days of the pandemic, this online community has gradually grown to around 155 people - people coming together from all over the world, many of us not knowing one another at first, and yet finding ourselves together in one community. At the heart of the Nazareth Community is being with God - and also being with one another.
Part of the Rule of Life points us to seven “pillars” - seven ‘S’s:
Silence, Service, Scripture, Sacrament, Sharing, Sabbath and Staying With.
It is that last one - Staying With - which has inspired this reflection.
As I have reflected, I have realised that staying with has actually been one of the threads running through my own life - and perhaps through the lives of many of us - although I don't think I have ever really recognised it as a virtue in itself.
We use the word staying in lots of different ways.
It can mean remaining, waiting, continuing, being around, residing, inhabiting.
But what might it mean to stay with?
For us as Christians, I don't think staying with means hiding within our faith, or within our faith communities. Rather, perhaps it invites us to open ourselves to all that God has created - to people of different backgrounds, cultures and faiths, and to the natural world around us.
And, of course, staying with is not something we find only in our spiritual lives.
We see it everywhere - in sport, in politics, in relationships, in all sorts of situations where people keep going, keep showing up, keep working at something.
So perhaps there is something rather ordinary - and yet rather profound - about staying with.
And there is something about staying with that seems to me to be closely connected with
the hospitality of God.
Perhaps for us this means being attentive to another person, noticing their needs, and sometimes being willing to walk alongside them for a while on their journey. And that isn't always easy.
Sometimes we may want to move on, to fix something, to make things better - or simply to turn away.
But sometimes, just staying with someone can be a profound gift - to them, and perhaps also to us.
It may mean being alongside someone simply through prayer and presence. Sometimes just being there, without necessarily doing anything.
It may mean staying with a group of people - supporting, encouraging and enabling others,
perhaps as we work towards something together or make decisions together.
It may mean keeping in touch with old friendships, even when we hardly ever meet. Friendships from school, former neighbours, pen pals, or those who, in one way or another, remain part of our lives.
And perhaps one of the hardest forms of staying with is staying with suffering - the suffering of another person, our own suffering, or suffering we see in the wider world.
We often want to do something, to make things better, to find an answer.
And sometimes, of course, we can and should act. But there are also times when there is no easy answer - when all we can do is remain present, listen, pray, and stay with.
Perhaps staying with our own suffering can be about allowing ourselves to acknowledge what is difficult, rather than immediately turning away from it. This does not mean that we should remain in suffering when there is help, healing or change available. But sometimes we need to stay with a process for a while, allowing it to unfold in its own time.
This connects for me with the idea of patience.
Staying with something often requires patience - seeing a particular situation, or a series of issues, through rather than giving up when it becomes difficult or takes longer than we expected.
Looking back, I realise that I wasn't particularly patient as a child or young person!
And yet I have become very grateful for the patience that has gradually grown in me through different experiences and situations over the years. I was particularly aware of this during my time in hospital and in recovery. I realised how much patience I had needed - and how grateful I was that, over the years, patience had somehow become a gift that I could draw on.
Looking back, I think that was also a form of staying with - staying with my own vulnerability, with uncertainty, and with a process of recovery which I couldn't hurry.
There are other times when staying with may mean staying with a question.
Discernment can be difficult. A particular event, an important choice, a crisis - or even a celebration - can challenge us to listen carefully and to resist the temptation to have an immediate answer.
We live in a world of increasing demands, distractions and fragmentation.
Perhaps staying with is also about learning to remain attentive - resisting the pressure to move quickly from one thing to another, and allowing ourselves the time and space to listen.
And then I began to wonder: how does nature ‘stay with’ us?
And how do we, as human beings, stay with the planet?
The trees are an obvious example - what they offer us, and what they offer to other trees and plants.
I remember the great storm of October 1987, and the devastation it caused. And then, when spring came in 1988, there were signs everywhere of regrowth and new life.Nature had, in a sense, stayed with us through the devastation - and reminded us that life continues.
Daylight and darkness give us a rhythm. An eclipse can also offer much food for thought, emphasising the rhythms of the natural world and reminding us how much those rhythms affect our daily lives.
The seasons come and go, bringing their different gifts - beauty, growth, rest and harvest.
They remind us that we don't have to be productive all the time.
There is a rhythm to creation which we are part of.
Perhaps this is another way in which we see God through nature.
Creation is there for us to notice, to receive, to dwell with.
Perhaps nature is also inviting us to stay with it.
And so I find myself returning to the question:
What might ‘staying with’ mean for me?
What might it mean for you?
Perhaps there are as many answers - perhaps more - as there are people reading this.
And perhaps there is no particular answer we need to find.
We can simply stay with the question.
Rev’d Judy Greenfield August 2026
Introduction to Silence
Blessing
From Staying With – The City is my Monastery
He is here at the bottom of the fall
A peace below the waves and currents
An easy stillness
A stillness where birds land
Where rain falls
And where the ground drinks
Listen, the wind is moving through the trees
A stillness within
Where we can move freely
Possessing nothing
And connected with all
Come Lord
Take us home to the center of the pattern
So that we may belong and yet be free
An easy love
To walk with no hands tied
But with you forever
Richard Carter – The City is my Monastery
An Irish Blessing as sung by Roma Downey
May the Blessing of Light be upon you
Light on the outside, light on the inside.
With God’s sunlight shining on you,
May your heart glow with warmth,
Like a turf fire that welcomes friends and strangers alike.
May the Light of the Lord shine from your eyes,
Like a candle in the window,
Welcoming the weary traveller.
May the blessing of Gods soft rain be on you,
Falling gently on your head
Refreshing your soul with the sweetness of little flowers newly blooming.
May the strength of the winds of heaven bless you
Carrying the rain to wash your spirit clean
Sparkling after in the sunlight.
May the blessing of Gods earth be on you
And as you walk the roads
May you always have a kind word for those you meet.
May you understand the strength and power of God in a
Thunderstorm and winter
And the quiet beauty of creation
And the calm of a summer sunset
And may you come to realize
That insignificant as you may seem
in this great universe
You ARE an important part of Gods plan.
May he watch over you
And keep you safe from harm.
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Phil Coulter
Thoughts to Ponder
Richard Carter – from The City is my Monastery – “Staying With”
We aim to live a way of life that is sustainable and life giving – it must be disciplined enough to give our lives a rhythm and a structure but flexible enough to be able to be integrated into the demands of our different lives, without just seeming like something else we have added that will make us busier than ever. In lifestyles that have increasingly demanded we do more things than ever – often at the same time and consequently feel ever more fragmented and distracted.
Our promise to stay with calls us to discover a rule of life that is not an added extra but the rhythm in which everything else finds its place.
Staying with is about creating a harmony within.
It is about establishing the internal patterns that bring balance and healing.
And discovering that prayer is as essential as breathing.
We often give up the very thing we need most because we fear not being able to do everything else.
Staying with helps us see that when we stay with God the things that we really need to do become more possible not less and our way of carrying out our daily duties is also transformed.
Richard Carter - The City is my Monastery
Hold Fast by letting go
The less longing, the more presence. The less we bang on the door, the more it opens for us.
The less we demand, the more we see the beauty of the gift.
The less we expect, the more the joy of the surprise. The more selfless, the more self
Clamorous needs shut us off from the needed. ‘It is our clinging which is our death’
The less we cling, the more we embrace. The less we fear, the more we love
All joy reminds us, it is not a possession but leads us onwards
Our love is a taste of things to come
Go lightly. Go simply. Feel the beauty of balance.
A breathing out. A breathing in. A shared breath
A letting go so that we may be held forever
Richard Carter – The City is my Monastery
Staying with Truth
Go forth into the world with peace; be of good courage; hold fast that which is good;
render to no one evil for evil; strengthen the fainthearted; support the weak;
help the afflicted; honour everyone; love and serve the Lord,
rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit
Richard Carter – The City is my Monastery
Through
Through the rain
Through the autumn, the winter, the spring, the summer
The shadows, the clouds, the sunlight
beyond the weather, this being, this rising, this life.
Richard Carter – The City is my Monastery
Autumn
I have come back each week to the same place to see the change
Today the branches are almost bare of leaves
And the ground is thick with crackling browns, yellows, bronzes and golds
A squirrel comes so close - And sits back on it haunches - front legs open as though to embrace me
The lake seems stiller and deeper than ever - Its surface reflecting the deep colours of autumn
I catch the cold in the air - the smell of the coming winter that excited me as a child
with memories of bonfires and fireworks and coal fires and the nights closing in
These seasons are the miracle of God’s natural world in our vey midst
I could have missed all this
I just had not noticed all that was happening
I was too locked in to come out and see the gold.
Richard Carter – The City is my Monastery
Return
Return again and again.
For how quickly we can become disorientated and separated from the source of our being
Nothing can separate us from the love of God. But we do not see that if we turn away.
How quickly we demand our share of the inheritance and lose ourselves in a foreign land.
We too must come to our senses - All we are searching for, we have already been given
God is not beyond us in the never-never land - God is here and now Watching and waiting
His forgiveness come before our repentance and our return
Richard Carter – The City is my Monastery
Henri Nouwen
“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us,
we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures,
have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.
The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
Henri Nouwen
“The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert
by someone who has never been there.”
Henri J.M. Nouwen The Wounded Healer
“what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others.”
Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer
“Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in his own heart and even losing his precious peace of mind?
In short: “Who can take away suffering without entering it?”
Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer
John O’Donohue
"When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of inner landscape."
John O’Donohue - Anam Cara
St Matthew’s Gospel
Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’ He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.’ Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.
’Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping.
‘Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?’
Matthew 26:36-40 - New International Version - UK
The Guest House by Rumi
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
Rumi: Selected Poems, trans. Coleman Barks with John Moynce, A. J. Arberry, Reynold Nicholson (Penguin Books, 2004)
Hospitality
Hospitality is more than a gesture - it’s a quiet language of care.
It’s the warmth in a smile, the comfort in a shared space,
and the unspoken promise that someone belongs.
True hospitality doesn’t just open doors; it opens hearts,
creating moments where strangers feel like friends and friends feel like family.
Inspired by Chat Gpt
"Your pain is not mine to fix, but mine to share." - Author unknown
"I am with you in the storm." - Author unknown
"Hold somebody’s hand through the dark." - Joy Harjo
"We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business." - Gwendolyn Brooks
Jan Richardson
This Day We Say Grateful
A Sending Blessing
It is a strange thing to be so bound and so released - all in the same moment,
to feel the heart open wide and wider still - even as it turns to take its leave.
On this day, let us say this is simply the way love moves in its ceaseless spiralling,
turning us toward one another, then sending us into what waits for us
with arms open wide to us in welcome and in hope.
On this day, in this place where you have poured yourself out,
where you have been emptied - and filled and emptied again -
may you be aware more than ever of what your heart has opened to here,
what it has tended and welcomed here, where it has broken in love and in grief,
where it has given and received blessing in the unfathomable mystery that moves us,
undoes us, and remakes us finally for joy.
This day may you know this joy in full measure.
This day may you know this blessing that gathers you in - and sends you forth
but will not forget you.
O hear us as this day we say grace; this day we say grateful;
this day we say blessing; this day we release you in God’s keeping
and hold you
in gladness
and love.
Jan Richardson
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