It is Advent and my thoughts are turning towards Christmas.
How silently, how silently,
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of his heaven.
No ear may hear his coming,
But in this world of sin
Where meek souls will receive him, still
The dear Christ enters in.
Just reading these words from the famous Christmas carol makes me feel quite excited that Christmas is coming. But this third verse from O Little Town of Bethlehem contains a secret that easily missed at Christmas:
Silently.
Silence is very much in vogue at the moment. It began, I think, with an endurance of a film called Into Great Silence. This three hour documentary with no commentary or incidental music observes the silent lives of Carthusian monks for six months. Then there was Sarah Maitland’s Book of Silence. Recently, on BBC 2, three programmes entitled The Big Silence followed five not particularly religious people through eight silent days in a Jesuit Retreat House. They discovered in that silence something that was life-changing. Also, this year the Royal British Legion released a silent single for Remembrance.
So what is it about silence that’s so important?. It has been said that silence is not the absence of sound but the beginning of listening. John O Donohue wrote that “Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits."
I do not think that silence leads us to anything supernatural. Rather, it leads us to the deeper natural, the parts of existence to which we pay little attention because we never stop to listen for long enough. I believe there is a deep human need for that deeper-natural that we find in silence. So where has this silence gone?
Between the years 1066 and 1800 England’s population grew from about 1 million to 8 million. In the two hundred years since, the population grew to just over 49 million. So for every person alive in 1801 there are now another 5 people. That’s a lot more chatter! The great growth in population coincided with industrialisation in this country. I want to argue here that for the greater part of human existence, the world has been a much quieter place, fewer people and no mechanical noise. The loudest thing most people heard before the industrial revolution was the odd clap of thunder.
Quietness, like trees and clean seas is just another part of our environment that we have lost through the process of industrialisation. We cannot turn the clocks back, and neither should we, for industrialisation has brought great benefits too. But just like other parts of our endangered habitat, silence should perhaps be sought out and conserved. Making time for this is difficult. I have suggested in the past buying an egg timer, turning it over and spending three minutes looking at the sands and just listening. That’s one way. Perhaps, also, we need to look for the natural silences, for instance, the tiny pause at the top of each breath. The silence that can be found in the midst of a busy supermarket, surrounded by people – yes, even this can be a place of inner silence in the midst of a busy Christmas. I think we urgently need to find silence as much as we need clean air and clean water.
How silently, how silently,
The wondrous gift is given!
There is a gift to be found in silence, but this gift is one of which we cannot speak, we can but listen, look and silently behold.
Monday, 29 November 2010
Friday, 12 November 2010
Hazlenuts and Farmers
I have in my hand a little hazelnut which I picked up on a walk between Almeley Parish Church and the Friends Meeting House. As I picked it up during the Harvest Festival Season it became the basis of my thoughts for Harvest, which we have now completed.
Human beings in their present form came into being some 200,000 years ago. If you were to compress the whole of this length of time into a 24 hour day, then the last Ice Age finished around an hour before midnight. In all the 23 hours prior to that point there was no agriculture. People lived by hunting animals and gathering berries, roots and nuts like the hazelnut I have in my hand. It is around that point we find the beginnings of Agriculture at the start of the New Stone Age.
This revolution did not reach these islands until some 6000 years before present. It was during this time that our ancestors were able to develop the skills and technology to build the Megalithic tombs such as West Kennet Long Barrow and Arthur’s Stone. It is Agriculture that made this possible. No-one who spends most of their time hunting and gathering will have the leisure to organise society in such a way that these things can begin to happen.
Of course, our technology has moved on. I am writing this on a computer; my third! Something I would not have dreamed of, even in my young adulthood. None of this, however, would be possible without the thing that made the first technology possible. Our very lives still depend on Agriculture; on farmers taking the risks with their resources, sowing their crops, not knowing what the weather will be doing during the Harvest season.
All our human activities are wonderful things. But the sustaining energy for them all is provided by agriculture. So the next time you are passing a farm, take a moment to give thanks for our farmers.
Human beings in their present form came into being some 200,000 years ago. If you were to compress the whole of this length of time into a 24 hour day, then the last Ice Age finished around an hour before midnight. In all the 23 hours prior to that point there was no agriculture. People lived by hunting animals and gathering berries, roots and nuts like the hazelnut I have in my hand. It is around that point we find the beginnings of Agriculture at the start of the New Stone Age.
This revolution did not reach these islands until some 6000 years before present. It was during this time that our ancestors were able to develop the skills and technology to build the Megalithic tombs such as West Kennet Long Barrow and Arthur’s Stone. It is Agriculture that made this possible. No-one who spends most of their time hunting and gathering will have the leisure to organise society in such a way that these things can begin to happen.
Of course, our technology has moved on. I am writing this on a computer; my third! Something I would not have dreamed of, even in my young adulthood. None of this, however, would be possible without the thing that made the first technology possible. Our very lives still depend on Agriculture; on farmers taking the risks with their resources, sowing their crops, not knowing what the weather will be doing during the Harvest season.
All our human activities are wonderful things. But the sustaining energy for them all is provided by agriculture. So the next time you are passing a farm, take a moment to give thanks for our farmers.
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
Is Accommodationism so bad?
Accommodation is the new dirty word. That is strange given what the word means. It means adapt myself to others with whom I share this planet especially those I oppose and who oppose me. I suppose I must ask myself the question 'How must, and to what extent should I adapt myself in order that I may live in peace with my opponent?' And whilst what I oppose may well be a thing, (i.e. religion, political ideology, builders of roads, whatever), my opponent will nearly always be another person or set of persons.
Of course there are things that I will not adapt to, but does that ever include people?
Shouldn't accommodationism be given the benefit of the doubt?
Of course there are things that I will not adapt to, but does that ever include people?
Shouldn't accommodationism be given the benefit of the doubt?
Monday, 20 September 2010
Changing People, Changing Earth
During the summer, whilst on a visit to my parents in Wiltshire, I visited West Kennet Long Barrow. It is a chambered tomb dating from round about 3600 B.C.E. At the eastern end there is a set of stone chambers which open out towards the east. At the spring and autumn equinoxes, during its time of use, the light of the rising sun would have shone directly into the back of the tomb. Elsewhere in the British Isles, such as Orkney, similar tombs face the rising sun at the beginning of February. It is possible that these were significant times of the year for our ancestors. Certainly at Stonehenge the main orientation of the monument is towards the rising of the sun at mid-winter.
One of the great gifts to us from the pre-Christian people of ancient Europe is a set of festivals which mark the turning of the seasons. There are eight of these in total: Mid-Winter and Mid Summer, the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes as well as at the beginning of February, May, August and November. Although no one particular religion celebrated all of these days, they were all marked at least somewhere in pre-Christian Europe. It was left to the universal nature of Christianity to bring all eight festivals under one religious roof, so that now you will find Christian festivals overlying all of these days, beginning with Christmas, Candlemas, Lady Day, May Day, Saint John’s Day, Lammas Day, Michaelmas and finally All Saints and All Souls.
Although these festivals were primarily used by Christians to commemorate the story of Christ in different ways, in recent years they have returned to their perhaps original use. The modern Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD) is among many contemporary pagan groups to use the “eight seasonal celebrations to help us attune to the natural cycle, and help us to structure our lives through the year, and to develop a sense of community with all living beings.”
I love the festivals of Harvest, Easter and Christmas. At these times the outside comes inside, by way of decorations garnered from the natural world. I have one very vivid small child’s memory of going out to collect holly in the forest with my father. Everywhere was washed out brown fern and grey bark, with cold almost white skies. These celebrations and others are still special to me because they remember in me that child’s joy in the natural world.
It seems to me, whether we are Christian, Pagan or of no religion at all, these eight festivals help us to pay attention to and mark the changing year.
Who knows what the builders of the tombs and stone circles thought or believed? What we can know is that they were keenly aware of the seasons and how both land and sky changed throughout the year. For them it was important enough to mark these events in stone; using the first great technology. In so doing, they have left us with a gift that we should not ignore. They were a listening people who heard a speaking earth. Perhaps like them we can use the festivals of our year to learn to listen again. Who knows what, or whom we might hear?
One of the great gifts to us from the pre-Christian people of ancient Europe is a set of festivals which mark the turning of the seasons. There are eight of these in total: Mid-Winter and Mid Summer, the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes as well as at the beginning of February, May, August and November. Although no one particular religion celebrated all of these days, they were all marked at least somewhere in pre-Christian Europe. It was left to the universal nature of Christianity to bring all eight festivals under one religious roof, so that now you will find Christian festivals overlying all of these days, beginning with Christmas, Candlemas, Lady Day, May Day, Saint John’s Day, Lammas Day, Michaelmas and finally All Saints and All Souls.
Although these festivals were primarily used by Christians to commemorate the story of Christ in different ways, in recent years they have returned to their perhaps original use. The modern Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD) is among many contemporary pagan groups to use the “eight seasonal celebrations to help us attune to the natural cycle, and help us to structure our lives through the year, and to develop a sense of community with all living beings.”
I love the festivals of Harvest, Easter and Christmas. At these times the outside comes inside, by way of decorations garnered from the natural world. I have one very vivid small child’s memory of going out to collect holly in the forest with my father. Everywhere was washed out brown fern and grey bark, with cold almost white skies. These celebrations and others are still special to me because they remember in me that child’s joy in the natural world.
It seems to me, whether we are Christian, Pagan or of no religion at all, these eight festivals help us to pay attention to and mark the changing year.
Who knows what the builders of the tombs and stone circles thought or believed? What we can know is that they were keenly aware of the seasons and how both land and sky changed throughout the year. For them it was important enough to mark these events in stone; using the first great technology. In so doing, they have left us with a gift that we should not ignore. They were a listening people who heard a speaking earth. Perhaps like them we can use the festivals of our year to learn to listen again. Who knows what, or whom we might hear?
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Wells not walls
The story is told of an English farmer who went to visit a sheep farm in Australia. The farm was immense, stretching in all directions as far as the stretch of the sky.
“You must need an awful lot of barbed-wire,” the English farmer observed.
“Not at all, we don’t use any, we just dig wells, and there the sheep stay.”
We humans also gather around wells. In fact many early Christian settlements were founded near sources of water. They provided all that was needed for drinking and washing and baptisms too. One of the ironies of history is that the building of St. David’ s Cathedral completely destroyed the reason for David settling there in the first place: for in order to construct the foundations of this massive statement of ecclesiastical power, the wells and water-courses had to be drained and diverted.
Where are today’s spiritual wells, where do the thirsty come for drink and the heavy laden find rest?
The wells are still here, but are all too often enclosed, hidden by walls and fences of ambition and fear. They are walls that imprison, and fences that say, ‘this is mine’.
It is time to brake down those walls and cut through those fences.
For many are thirsty, and others still are in need of rest.
“You must need an awful lot of barbed-wire,” the English farmer observed.
“Not at all, we don’t use any, we just dig wells, and there the sheep stay.”
We humans also gather around wells. In fact many early Christian settlements were founded near sources of water. They provided all that was needed for drinking and washing and baptisms too. One of the ironies of history is that the building of St. David’ s Cathedral completely destroyed the reason for David settling there in the first place: for in order to construct the foundations of this massive statement of ecclesiastical power, the wells and water-courses had to be drained and diverted.
Where are today’s spiritual wells, where do the thirsty come for drink and the heavy laden find rest?
The wells are still here, but are all too often enclosed, hidden by walls and fences of ambition and fear. They are walls that imprison, and fences that say, ‘this is mine’.
It is time to brake down those walls and cut through those fences.
For many are thirsty, and others still are in need of rest.
Friday, 18 June 2010
Liberality
I must confess to being an old-fashioned liberal (note small l ). What does that mean, and what connections might it have with the Christian faith?
The word liberal is often connected with a similar word liberty, which of course is about freedom. When liberals read the bible, they should be able to do so in a way that is free from dogmatic and apologetic concerns. Put in other words: There is no need to defend the Christian faith from important questions. I’ll give you an example: If we consider the different accounts of the resurrection of Jesus we find anomalies. In Mark’s gospel the women go to the tomb when the sun had risen, whilst Matthew and Luke place the visit at early dawn. John’s gospel, however, insists that it was still dark. Whilst that might possibly harmonise with Matthew and Luke, it cannot possibly be dark when the sun had risen. It seems to me that we need to be at liberty to ask the question which gospel has it right? Or do any of them?
This is the heart of what it means to be liberal when reading and interpreting the bible. For the liberal there can be no orthodoxy, no truth which is not the result of questions freely asked and freely investigated; with the proviso, of course, that any answers that we find are, in and of themselves, still provisional; they may have to change in the light of further evidence. Until the Christian Church as a whole is able to fully embrace this liberality, it remains able to speak only to itself and to those who require certainty, whether or nor that certainty is true.
Liberality has another connotation. I was a guest recently and was blessed by the liberality of my host whose generosity was remarkable.
Liberality, generosity; they mean the same thing. He might have said be free with all that is mine. Liberality, to my mind, ought to be at the heart of Christianity. When asked how many times should we forgive another, Jesus replies seventy times seven. This is a piece of rabbinic overstatement, didactic exaggeration to drive home a point. A generous, liberal attitude is requisite for those who seek to follow Jesus. For God is liberal, big-hearted as the writer of Ephesians reminds us
“but God who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together in Christ. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”
What we see here is a generous God who liberally distributes his mercy.
In the words of a former Bishop of Ludlow, John Saxbee: We serve a Christ-like God who calls us to be Christ-like so that we might win others to the likeness of Christ.
Put another way, we serve a generous God, a loving God, who calls us to be generous and loving with one another, so that through that generosity, that liberality of spirit, others are won to the way of .
Whether you believe in God or not, you can practice in liberality and grace, for in their practice perhaps the world becomes a little kinder.
The word liberal is often connected with a similar word liberty, which of course is about freedom. When liberals read the bible, they should be able to do so in a way that is free from dogmatic and apologetic concerns. Put in other words: There is no need to defend the Christian faith from important questions. I’ll give you an example: If we consider the different accounts of the resurrection of Jesus we find anomalies. In Mark’s gospel the women go to the tomb when the sun had risen, whilst Matthew and Luke place the visit at early dawn. John’s gospel, however, insists that it was still dark. Whilst that might possibly harmonise with Matthew and Luke, it cannot possibly be dark when the sun had risen. It seems to me that we need to be at liberty to ask the question which gospel has it right? Or do any of them?
This is the heart of what it means to be liberal when reading and interpreting the bible. For the liberal there can be no orthodoxy, no truth which is not the result of questions freely asked and freely investigated; with the proviso, of course, that any answers that we find are, in and of themselves, still provisional; they may have to change in the light of further evidence. Until the Christian Church as a whole is able to fully embrace this liberality, it remains able to speak only to itself and to those who require certainty, whether or nor that certainty is true.
Liberality has another connotation. I was a guest recently and was blessed by the liberality of my host whose generosity was remarkable.
Liberality, generosity; they mean the same thing. He might have said be free with all that is mine. Liberality, to my mind, ought to be at the heart of Christianity. When asked how many times should we forgive another, Jesus replies seventy times seven. This is a piece of rabbinic overstatement, didactic exaggeration to drive home a point. A generous, liberal attitude is requisite for those who seek to follow Jesus. For God is liberal, big-hearted as the writer of Ephesians reminds us
“but God who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together in Christ. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”
What we see here is a generous God who liberally distributes his mercy.
In the words of a former Bishop of Ludlow, John Saxbee: We serve a Christ-like God who calls us to be Christ-like so that we might win others to the likeness of Christ.
Put another way, we serve a generous God, a loving God, who calls us to be generous and loving with one another, so that through that generosity, that liberality of spirit, others are won to the way of .
Whether you believe in God or not, you can practice in liberality and grace, for in their practice perhaps the world becomes a little kinder.
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
I have just returned from a large international and ecumenical church event in Munich. To give you an example of the scale of it, the exhibition area, where many of the lectures and seminars, as well as exhibitions, took place, is made up of twelve huge buildings each the size of a football pitch. These were filled with people for five days.
On Friday evening, in the Odeon Platz, there was an Orthodox Vespers entitled Service of a thousand tables, where blessed bread would be shared after the service. There were indeed a thousand tables, each with around ten people on them, and more people standing where there were no tables. The service was an hour and a half long, and it was bitterly cold.
That’s over ten thousand people, patiently working their way through a very unfamiliar kind of service and breaking bread with one another. There was more than enough bread, even for those who were standing, in fact the baskets were filled with left-overs. These were people of all Christian denominations (and, I suspect, some of none) coming together to share food. I sat with people I did not know, could barely converse with, and would never see again. It’s interesting to note that the word “company” means “with bread”, and we were indeed a great company.
My accommodation for the conference was with a family who had been instructed that they only needed to provide me with breakfast. Breakfast was rolls, bacon and eggs, all kinds of wonderful foods and a lovely pot of tea made especially for me. Well beyond their call of duty, I was feasted liberally every evening with a wonderful meal and good Bavarian beer besides.
The theme of the conference was “That you may have hope”. The world’s religions offer much in the way of hope on the packaging, but perhaps fall short, as we all humanly do. But it is in the kindness of strangers that hope is really to be found, and it is something that I find all over the place, sometimes where you least expect it. Kindness, of course, means treating others as if they were kin. I have found that it is more readily available than its opposite numbers cruelty and mean-mindedness.
On a recent television programme, the Reverend Peter Owen Jones existed for two weeks on the kindness of others. He noted that “If you are reliant on the goodness in others, that’s what you will find – the goodness in others. But that means making yourself vulnerable, which is not easy.” I didn’t need to go to his extremes to find the kindness of strangers but in their hospitality, I found the real truth in the theme of the conference. For it is in that generosity of the human spirit that you may have hope.
On Friday evening, in the Odeon Platz, there was an Orthodox Vespers entitled Service of a thousand tables, where blessed bread would be shared after the service. There were indeed a thousand tables, each with around ten people on them, and more people standing where there were no tables. The service was an hour and a half long, and it was bitterly cold.
That’s over ten thousand people, patiently working their way through a very unfamiliar kind of service and breaking bread with one another. There was more than enough bread, even for those who were standing, in fact the baskets were filled with left-overs. These were people of all Christian denominations (and, I suspect, some of none) coming together to share food. I sat with people I did not know, could barely converse with, and would never see again. It’s interesting to note that the word “company” means “with bread”, and we were indeed a great company.
My accommodation for the conference was with a family who had been instructed that they only needed to provide me with breakfast. Breakfast was rolls, bacon and eggs, all kinds of wonderful foods and a lovely pot of tea made especially for me. Well beyond their call of duty, I was feasted liberally every evening with a wonderful meal and good Bavarian beer besides.
The theme of the conference was “That you may have hope”. The world’s religions offer much in the way of hope on the packaging, but perhaps fall short, as we all humanly do. But it is in the kindness of strangers that hope is really to be found, and it is something that I find all over the place, sometimes where you least expect it. Kindness, of course, means treating others as if they were kin. I have found that it is more readily available than its opposite numbers cruelty and mean-mindedness.
On a recent television programme, the Reverend Peter Owen Jones existed for two weeks on the kindness of others. He noted that “If you are reliant on the goodness in others, that’s what you will find – the goodness in others. But that means making yourself vulnerable, which is not easy.” I didn’t need to go to his extremes to find the kindness of strangers but in their hospitality, I found the real truth in the theme of the conference. For it is in that generosity of the human spirit that you may have hope.
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