The Bloggies
There are 3 blogs I regularly read and I have decided to vote for them in the Bloggies for this year:
www.ekkleisa.co.uk/blog
peterrollins.net
anamchara.com
Who knows if they’ll get voted for, I don’t care, I just wanted to register my appreciation of them in some way and keep the category of Spiritual or Religious Blog open for business.
Why not list your favourite? And for my less convinced readers last year’s winner was The Friendly Atheist. Go for your life!
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,300 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Thanks all for coming to visit and keeping me on my toes. I pray that you’ll enjoy a peaceful, blessed and thought provoking 2012.
Trying too hard
It has been a strange Advent. I have been rushed off my feet and really not been able to enjoy the Christmas season at all this year. And now I have lost my voice (a blessing for others I like to call it). But it has helped me with one thing. I never understood fully the stresses that Christmas can put you under. Intellectually I got it, but that’s not the same as emotionally getting it.
We all know this but really we’re trying to hard. We try to condense the magic we wish we could feel all the time into a 4 week period and we try to get hold of that magic through food, drink, presents, friends, music. We want everything to be the childlike form of play we remember from our own past or we see in our children or worse, the ideal Christmas we see on tv.
Perhaps childlike is the wrong word, perhaps a better word would be childish. It’s not possible for those of us who aren’t children to play in that completely care free way we aspire to. We belong to the adult world where bills have to be paid, where life can be hard, where there is always something still to do. And at Christmas our belief that we should have that kind of play experience becomes almost pathological. This is one of the reasons we put ourselves under so much stress. And end up not enjoying ourselves at all.
What is the adult way to enjoy and play at Christmas? To be conscious of what we really do have at Christmas and try to distance the voices that tell us how much more we “need”. To allow those around us – grown-ups and children – their space to play without demandinng they play with us or that we play first. To participate in the Church’s rituals of Christmas in order to clear a space for God to pop in. And to ignore such rituals as the ritual argument on Christmas afternoon, the ritual of backbiting about the relatives, the ritual of getting pissed and falling asleep when the children would like to show you their toys etc etc.
Christmas can be magical in an adult way when we really consider what God did for us again. How he came to us – not as we would expect, but as the poorest of the poor, in an oppressed nation, born amidst the cow shit. Think about that and you might find something magical sneaking it’s way back into your heart.
Ahem….
Not that this is a public confessional but I have failed.
I have so far managed to give up women’s magazines including Wednesday’s freebie Stylist which I love. But have utterly failed on the chocolate front. The sad thing is that it wasn’t about being tempted and crumbling. It was about forgetting what I had committed to.
This would be the definition of sins of ommission vs sins of intention.
Still, onwards and upwards. I shall get back on the wagon for the last 11 days.
Advent stuff
So I gave up chocolate and women’s magazines. And I took up reading “Do nothing Christmas is Coming” by Stephen Cottrell because I do too much stuff and I am hoping to get a bit of perspective on my busy-ness.
It’s refreshing. Here’s a sample of the kind of thing that’s in it,
The four stages of Christmas are:
1. You believe in father Christmas
2. You don’t believe in Father Christmas
3. You are Father Christmas
4. You look like Father Christmas
Ho! Ho! Ho!
Advent – suggestions?
Does anyone have any suggestions for something I could do to mark Advent this year? Advent is just as important as Lent to the Church as a period of reflection and preparation – and self-discipline – but sadlyl is neglected in the modern rush to buy, buy,buy and party, party, party (which yes of course I get sucked into! Every year!).
I want to mark the season but I don’t really have any big ideas. Do you have any thoughts on things I can give up? (Don’t say blog writing or being a Christian!) or things I could take up?
Also, if any of you are on Twitter then I would love to follow you. Post your id on the comments.
Waiting, waiting, waiting…
Ok, I really don’t want this to turn into a mommy blog and I don’t want to bang on about children, but the more time I spend with my daughter the more I gain new perspectives on my relationship with God. And the latest is around the waiting, waiting, waiting we sometimes have to do or feel God puts us through.
When I am making Beth her breakfast she manages to be calm for about 1 minute before she starts to make little whining noises – even though she can see me making it. If I don’t get a move on these whines turn into pseudo crying (because she obviously thinks that will get her the food faster) finally, if I really take a while (3 minutes or more…) we get tears.
This morning I said to her “These things take time, everything has to be done in sequence you know, everything at the right time” – no she is not a child genius, she can’t actually understand, though it did stop her crying – but it suddenly put me in mind of how we react to God when we don’t get the things we want at the time we want them. And God’s reaction to us.
We all desire things and we think we need or should have them as soon as the desire strikes us. But we live in a time-limited dimension. Our bodies use time to move us through it, to allow us to interact with it. What do we want from God? The suspension of the natural order so that we can get married/find a job/fall pregnant/recover from an operation when we think the time is right? Well, yes. And it would be nice, but for whatever reason that’s not actually how the world works – literally.
And yet it’s so difficult to relax and trust in God because our future is unknown to us. We’re like Beth – we know what we want, but we don’t know enough to know whether we’ll get it and we can’t imagine happiness without it.
A word about God then in all this. I respond to Beth by calming her, encouraging her and getting on with making breakfast – but I don’t give it to her straight away as either it’s not finished or it’s just not time. I don’t judge or condemn her for it.
Not being able to trust God and just wait is something we all have to strive to master – but though that’s what we should do, God doesn’t condemn us for our failure to achieve it.
An appropriate thought I think as we head into Advent, and wait for God to do something to deal with the mess the world is in.
Bearskins and difficult questions
I bought yet another poppy today at Marylebone. I must buy at least 4 each November to wear as mark of respect for those who have died serving in the armed forces. There was a band from the Scots Guards with bagpipe and drums and it was a good way to remind me to get my money out early. As I was getting my poppy I heard a man stride past muttering something about finding this all offensive – moving fast enough to give his opinion without having to actually face any of the soldiers who were standing there in red coats and bearskins. It was a little surprising, but not shocking. There are plenty of people who feel the same way as him, particularly in the Church.
It set me thinking about a difficult topic – God and the soldier.
What do you do with a God who makes a whip out of rope and causes mayhem in the temple, driving people forcibly out who hadn’t done anything to him personally and then let’s himself be crucified with nary a murmur. A Christ who says turn the other cheek and forgive 70 x 7 but says of the centurion not, this man is a man of violence and must be dealt with but ““I have not found faith this great anywhere in Israel.” Where in the midst of all this do we look for God’s ideas?
The Early Christian thinkers obviously found this a tricky topic too. They certainly bothered themselves with war if not soldiers, working out doctrines of just or, more accurately, last resort war, namely:
- innocent life must be in danger and need protecting
- comparative justice – ie the war must outweigh the evil otherwise done
- competent authority – “A just war must be initiated by a political authority within a political system that allows distinctions of justice. Dictatorships (i.e. Hitler’s Regime) or a deceptive military actions (i.e. the 1968 US bombing of Cambodia) are typically considered as violations of this criterion.” (quote from Wikipedia)
- right intent – ie not for oil, territory etc
- probability of success – ie not the charge of the light brigade
- last resort and proportionality
I’m not sure that many of our wars do stand up to these criteria, which is why we are so comfortable talking about World War’s 1 and 2. Looking at the criteria above our involvement in both those wars broadly fits.
Current liberal Christian thinking, certainly in the UK, cannot bear war at all, does not countenance that it might sometimes be right and is concerned that wearing poppies is glorifying warfare. Glorifying something so destructive and horrendous is something I certainly don’t want to be involved in.
But I think there is a measure of respect due to people who have volunteered to go into an army, set up within a competent authority (see above), and who have died because of it. In addition to which, much of the activity of the services is around peace keeping missions for the UN, alongside the other less justifiable activity. It’s difficult to judge as you walk past a man in a bearskin whether he got his medals in Kosovo or Kabul.
So I will carry on wearing my poppy and giving my money for people who have taken a bold decision and for those who had no choice and were called up.
Respect and acknowledgement isn’t glorification.
What’s your one big theme?
An article for you from the Harvard Business Review by Peter Bregman. This is actually a business article – should it be on the Spirituality of Play? Yes, of course, and not just because I decide what goes on Spirituality of Play! It’s a useful way to look at yourself, and assess what’s going on in your life. And why not do that around Rosh Hashanah, when it’s traditional to do so just as much as around Lent or the next big Christian season for reflection, Advent?
Enjoy – http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2011/10/whats-your-one-big-theme.html
The easiest thing in the world
Just 2 thoughts…
1) I was recently considering going to a church that I thought might be not quite in accordance with how I practice my faith. It made me uncomfortable. I then realised that I constantly hope for and expect a liberal attitude from those of different approach to Christiantiy than myself (specifically evangelical if you must know). Well then, if that is the case I should practice that myself and not judge. A bit of a wake up call. I went to the church in the end and then discovered that actually it is very much of my persuasion – the Lord works in mysterious ways.
2) I remember watching The Big Silence, a programme about trying to find silence in the every day which followed a number of people attempting to build the practice of silence into their daily lives both at Worth Abbyey and then afterwards. At the time I thought they could perhaps have made more effort to get the silent time they craved, though most of them found it incredibly difficult to fit into their days. Of course, at the time I was fitting in silent prayer because I didn’t get woken at 5.30 in the morning by a small person desiring some playtime and milk, going to work and then fitting in all the cleaning, washing and shopping at the end of the day before collapsing into a heap with no desire (or energy) to do anything but watch CSI.
I realised this morning I was in the same boat they were.
Moral: Take out the plank from your own eye. Then address the speck in your neighbours (not my moral of course….).
Just think for a moment of an area you are sure you are right about and ask yourself whether you really are.
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