new year reflections: december 2022

I’ve been scribbling New Year Reflections on my blog for a number of years now (as always – just a reminder for ME… because I forget stuff so easily!). This now all seems a little tedious and repetitive, so I’ll keep it much shorter than in the past!
 
WONDERFUL BOOKS:
The Storysmith Book Group (run by our lovely local bookshop) has continued to be brilliant - interesting books, lovely people and good fun too… and I’ve also been part of the ‘Blokes Books’ bookgroup involving some great mates (but it seems to take ages to read each book/organise a meet-up!). I continue to read a LOT of books (70 this year) and here are some of my favourites (in no particular order):
What Just Happened? (Marina Hyde); Walking Back Home (Ricky Ross); The Diary Of A Provincial Lady (EM Delafield); Plainsong (Kent Haruf); Eventide (Kent Haruf); The Help (Kathryn Stockett); Let Me Tell You What I Mean (Joan Didion); The White Album (Joan Didion); Back In The Day (Melvyn Bragg); Being Mortal (Atul Gawande); Saltwater (Jessica Andrews); The Beekeeper Of Aleppo (Christy Lefteri); Bad Apples (Will Dean); I Am I Am I Am and The Marriage Portrait (Maggie O’Farrell); plus I’ve enjoyed reading lots of Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti Mysteries.   
 
GREAT FILMS:
I’ve been to the Watershed rather more frequently in the past year (compared with ‘Covid years’). These were among my favourites:
The Worst Person In The World; Moonage Daydream; Belfast; The Banshees Of Inisherin; Brian And Charles; Vortex; Living; The Duke; and Eric Ravilious: Drawn To War.
 
LOVELY LIVE PERFORMANCES/EXHIBITIONS:
We’ve gradually been getting back into the ‘swing’ of going to the theatre, concerts and exhibitions this year – but still a long way to go! Here are a few favourites (I feel sure there are some exhibitions I’ve forgotten):
THEATRE:
Doctor Semmelweis (Old Vic, featuring Felix – had intended to see Belle and Sebastien but ended up having a hospital appointment on the day!).
CONCERTS:
Ricky Ross; Steeleye Span; Ellie Gowers; and Chineke! Orchestra with Evelyn Glennie (all at St George’s).  
Also: Maggie O’Farrell (interview, St Mary Redcliffe).
EXHIBITIONS:
Me, Myself, I: Artists’ Self-Portraits (RWA); Earth: Digging Deep in British Art 1781 – 2022 (RWA); 169^th Annual Open Exhibition (RWA); ‘Practice Assembly’ (Association of Unknown Shores at Saint Stephen’s); and 20^th Century Scottish Art exhibition(?)(Edinburgh City Art Centre?).
 
SPORTING MOMENTS:
Once again, this year has been pretty sparse in terms of watching first-class sport. Again, I didn’t renew my season ticket for the Bristol Bears (rugby), but did manage to get to 3 or 4 matches (thanks to Robin’s generosity – eg. handing me his season ticket while he was away in Australia/New Zealand). I watched three (I think) first-class cricket games at Bristol… plus a couple of games at Bedminster Cricket Club.
 
ART STUFF:
Following our house move and after participating in the last 15 consecutive South Bristol Arts Trail, we’ve now officially retired!  
Another busy year as we try to get back to pre-Covid times, including:
1. I’ve continued to post a drawing or photograph every day as part of my “One Day Like This” blog (now over 3,750 consecutive days – that’s more than 1,875 drawings and 1,875 photographs - since I started in September 2012, more than 10 years ago)!
2. Urban Sketchers, Bristol: I’ve continued to really enjoy this wonderful group (which I joined in March 2018)… it’s a worldwide organisation and, here in Bristol, we meet up every month and regularly get more than 20 people coming along. After the pandemic, it’s been great to be able to meet up with lovely friends again. It’s a real highlight and joy.
5. Blurb book (‘Ten Years Like This’): celebrating 10 years of my daily blog postings.
 
HOLIDAYS/LEISURE:
No proper holidays again this year (for the third year running) – although we did have a couple of lovely 3-day trips to Cardiff (June) and Edinburgh (September).
 
SPIRITUAL LIFE:
We continue to be part of the Community of Saint Stephens in the heart of the city but, rather like the previous couple of years, I’ve been struggling faith-wise. So much so that, in late October, I decided that I would take a ‘sabbatical’ from attending church services. How long this will last, only time will tell (indefinitely?). In the meantime, I’m trying to find a way of reflecting on the spiritual stuff in my life (not always convincingly!) – although I did take part in a thought-provoking, fascinating joint Advent blog with Chris Goan and a couple of others. Meanwhile, I continue to go along to our weekly 7.30am café gatherings for Blokes’ Prayer and attend the fortnightly Resonate sessions on Tuesday evenings.
 
HEALTH:
My health has been pretty good this year… apart from the normal ageing process. My teeth continue to fall out; my left hip keeps telling me it’ll need replacing fairly soon (jealous of the previously-replaced right hip?); I’ve now got two hearing aids (Moira’s delighted!); I take tablets for my atrial fibrillation plus blood thinners and statins; I’ve finally (after 5 years) been discharged from my annual check-ups at Southmead Hospital in connection with lung fibrosis concerns; I take eye drops to deter my glaucoma; and I’ve been attending ‘Leg Club’ (I know!) on a weekly basis for the past few weeks in an effort to sort out my on-going leg ulcer issues (the staff there are brilliant; they sorted me out over a couple of months and I was discharged just before Christmas).
Meanwhile, Moira has been diagnosed as having Parkinson’s Disease (first suspected in May 2021 – so it didn’t come as a particular surprise). She’s generally pretty well (puts up with some shaking, the fact that she’s ‘slowed down’ and that gets tired more quickly) and her medication seems to have been pretty effective.
Having lived with the uncertainties of a pandemic over the past couple of years, we’ve become rather used to living with uncertainty!
 
OTHER STUFF:
We continue to be a no-car household (we gave up the car 5 years ago)… and, during the course of the year, I made a decision to stop driving altogether (I’d previously used a local car club very occasionally) – so buses and trains are now our default modes of transport.
During lockdown, I used to take regular ‘dawn walks’ to and around the harbourside but, strangely (given that we now only live 5 minutes from the harbour), my walking has probably reduced a little over the past 12 months – a combination of laziness and old age perhaps?

I love reflecting back on the things that have happened over the previous twelve months and, each year, it’s a reminder that there WILL be some very special things that they will happen in the coming year – even though, at this moment, I don’t know what 2023 will bring. Clearly, I’m also aware that there will inevitably be some sad stuff too… and perhaps challenges we feel ill-equipped to face? In such times, families and friendships will, once again, see us through.
Over the past couple of years or so, I sense that our activities have become rather less adventurous and our ‘horizons’ set much closer to home. Another case of laziness and old age perhaps?
Moira and I certainly think we made the decision to move house (in August 2021) at exactly the right time for us – the idea of us down-sizing in say 5 years’ time feels hilariously beyond us now! We’ve certainly settled into our new location really well and city centre living suits us very nicely.
For us as a family, it’s been another good year (despite its challenges)… and we continue to count our blessings.
I wish you (and all yours) a very happy, healthy and peaceful 2023. 

november-december 2022 books…

Drawing Conclusions (Donna Leon): I’ve read and enjoyed a lot of Commissario Brunetti mysteries this year, but I have to admit that this was perhaps the least satisfactory to date. An elderly woman is found dead in her Venetian apartment, apparently having suffered a heart attack… although Brunetti suspects there’s more to it. Brunetti discovers that she had been part of an organisation that cares for abused women and that her apartment was a safe-house… and so he begins his search for answers. As usual, I loved the characters (although I could have done with more of his own home life – always entertaining) but, this time, I found the story somewhat pedestrian in nature and the storyline lacking Leon’s usual spark. Disappointing.
The Marriage Portrait (Maggie O’Farrell): I’m a great lover of O’Farrell’s books (Hamnet was probably my favourite book of 2021). The novel is essentially set in the years 1552-61 and tells of the real-life Lucrezia, aged 13, being married off to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, as a last-minute substitute for her older sister, who died just before the wedding. She left Florence in 1560, aged 15, to begin her married life but, less than a year later, she would be dead. O’Farrell’s story was inspired by Robert Browning’s famous poem ‘My Last Duchess’ – a monologue which takes us inside the mind of the Duke of Ferrara, as he shows a painting of his former wife (Lucrezia) to a representative of the family of his next bride-to-be. When the novel opens, in 1561, Lucrezia is one year into her marriage, newly arrived at a ‘hunting lodge’ belonging to the duke. She becomes convinced that the vindictive Alfonso intends to kill her because she has failed to fall pregnant with the heir needed to secure his hold on the kingdom. It’s a rather disturbing, unsettling story of a time when ‘ladies’ were forced to follow the whims and dictates of their fathers (and mothers) and husbands. From the very beginning, you KNOW Lucrezia will die within a very short space of time and so the book is a tense re-imagining of the young Duchess’s inevitable demise. For me, not quite in the Hamnet category but, nevertheless, an impressive, beautifully-written, compelling book.  
The Heart Of Things: An Anthology of Memory and Lament (Richard Holloway): Holloway is one of my favourite writers/thinkers. He’s a great lover of poetry (in his own right) and poets and this anthology includes perhaps 50 poems, from both well-known and not-so-well-known poets, plus several of his own. In the book, he uses poetry as a link between various subjects – such as Mourning, Regretting and Forgiving. Although I frequently found his intellect left me desperately trying to play catch-up(!), again and again there were words that made me stop and think. For instance, I loved his reference to these words from Isaiah Berlin: “If you look… for some other goal, the moment will come when the singer stops and then you will only have memories and vain regrets because, instead of listening, you were waiting for something else…” (instead of listening, you were waiting for something else…). Holloway is somewhat older than me (he’s 89), but so many of his recollections resonated with my own, such as: “What I most regret is not paying enough attention to my children when they were young” (in my case, I thought I was paying attention at the time, but now realise I could have given them so much more). A rather lovely book. 
Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change (Nicholas Holtam): This is one of the resources I’ve been using during Advent; it’s the Archbishop of York’s Advent Book 2022. Holtam (he retired as Bishop of Salisbury in 2021) was the Church of England’s ‘lead bishop’ on the environment (and chaired the Environmental Working Group 2014-21). As one might imagine, given that background, the book is well researched and an excellent source for both information and reflection. I found it a challenging read, but a very apt subject for Advent… and, for me (currently struggling on my spiritual journey), one that provided me with a helpful focus leading up to Christmas. He doesn’t pull his punches and acknowledges that there’s been an awful lot of talk about the environment (and targets laid down) but, in practical terms, far too much lip-service and a disappointing lack of results. For example, in 2020, the General Synod of the CofE recognised the climate emergency (a little late in the day, one might think?) and committed the Church to becoming ‘net zero’ by 2030. Holtham was quick to point out that this constituted “an impossibly ambitious target”. It’s an excellent book and provides MUCH food for thought.
Beautiful World Where Are You? (Sally Rooney): I read Rooney’s first two novels in 2019, but it’s taken me a little time to get down to reading her third. I completely acknowledge that she’s a brilliant writer and this book, like the previous two, is full of dazzling (frequently funny, often cutting) dialogue. But, for all its literary delights, I found myself struggling with the book at times – or rather with the four characters (I really didn’t like any of them). The book focusses on the sexual entanglements of a prize-winning (but somewhat burnt-out) writer, Alice, and her old university pal, Eileen, both turning 30… and Simon, a political adviser, and Felix, a warehouse worker. At times, I found myself thinking that the book was simply Rooney’s excuse for expressing her opinions/frustrations/pleasures with the world/life/planet via a series of lengthy (they frequently ran to five pages), high-minded emails between Eileen and Alice – dealing with the sort of things that Rooney might well have simply extracted from her own personal diaries! I frequently found myself thinking “oh, for goodness sake!” (afterall, I’m just an old, intolerant codger!) at the behaviour and attitudes of these up-starts!
So, it’s the end of the year and I’ve just worked out that I’ve read a total of 70 books in 2022 (compared with 64 in 2021, 74 in 2020 and 94 in 2019).

advent conspiracy 28

This from Chris Goan  https://thisfragiletent.com

And so the advent journey comes towards its apotheosis. Thank you to those who have made the journey with us.
 
We have not put up a tree this year...until today.
It will not be a traditional spruce, we will follow a recent tradition of choosing some bare branches from a birch or willow the woods at the bottom of our garden. Emily is always a little disparaging, calling it our 'twig', but I love it for several reasons.
 
I love the fact that we are bringing something inside the house from just outside.
 
I love the fact that no tree has died to make our Christmas celebration more decorative. Birch and willow adapted to the activities of large herbivores, mostly not here any more- the giant elk and the hairy elephants that tore through these parts when the woods were wild. removing a few branches just encourages these trees to coppice.
 
I love that we are doing this on Christmas eve, to mark both the first incarnation (creation) and the second one in the form of Emmanuel.
 
I love too that this is a tree in winter, without leaves, but with tiny buds. It is a tree that reminds me that what is now dark will find the light once more.

Everything was created through him;
    Nothing - not one thing! -
    came into being without him.
What came into existence was Life,
    and the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
    the darkness couldn’t put it out.
 (John chapter 1, from the Message)
 
A couple of days ago, I tried to describe the first incarnation as the Great Becoming, starting with the great explosion of love that was the Big Bang.
 
Perhaps we might describe this second incarnation as the Great Compassion, in which what was zoomed out was now zoomed right in.
What was distant was now near.
What was heavenly was now human.
 
On this Christmas eve, it is appropriate to allow space for wonder.
 
It is appropriate to speak of this great mystery that we call God.
 
Let's hold those around us whilst we do it.

advent conspiracy 27

Today’s post is from Chris Goan https://thisfragiletent.com

Photo by The Humantra on Pexels.com

I hope you have enjoyed this little ‘conspiracy’ as much as I have. It has been lovely to share this space with different voices whose words took me places I would otherwise not have gone. Thanks so much to Bob, Graham, Steve B, Yvonne and Steve P for your thoughtfulness and companionship.

All of which made me think about how we encounter other voices, other thinking. It occurred to me that our social-media-shaped brains are increasingly inoculated against other views. Rather than freeing our brains for exploration and encounter, the internet seems to have set us up as oppositional avatars, whose purpose is to find the error in the ways of the other, not to listen and learn. Even when I try to NOT do this – to not engage – my brain still falls into familiar comfortable groves, thrilling to the failure of my intellectual/religious/political enemies…

…who are mostly not enemies at all, just people with different perspectives, doing their best to make sense of the complex broken world in which we live.

Advent could easily be a version of the same in which we wait only for what we know, from those who are from our tribe. This would certainly be a comfortable experience, but it seems to me that this would not do justice to the radical disruption that always seems to happen with the coming of the light.

An aurora blankets the Earth beneath a celestial night sky by NASA Johnson is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0

I was thinking too about the head/heart thing.

Increasingly I appreciate how an encounter with anything that matters is whole-body. In other words, when I am fully engaged, I feel it in my bones, my gristle, my heart. This is a very different kind of engagement than an intellectual titillation, in which I strengthen my own ego by bolstering my sense of intellectual agency.

In my limited experience, these kinds of embodied encounters are typically about two things:

1. Compassion – when we feel deeply drawn to the heart of another

2. Mysticism – when we sense the undefinable mystery that I will call ‘the divine’

Head and heart. I often find it difficult to go beyond the first, but I am getting better at the second.

advent conspiracy 26

This from Chris Goan  https://thisfragiletent.com
 
Today we celebrate the first Christmas.

We stand with our ancestors and mark the turning point when we turn towards the light. The darkest night has passed and now it is downhill towards spring. New life is coming.
 
I long for it in the same way as a man for his distant lover who avoids looking at her photograph lest the separation become too much to bear...
It is too soon to think about spring. First we must live fully in the season of waiting, firm in the hope that even in midwinter, we can dream of seedlings and spring lambs.
 
I use the word 'Christ' to describe this season unashamedly, not because I am trying to replace all those thousands (tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?) of years during which humans made ritual around the solstice. I am not trying to redeem or convert. Rather I would stand in the midst of the teaching of Father Richard Rohr, as he encourages us to think about 'the Christ' in a totally different way.

Everything you need to know about the Christ is already written in creation. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2zz9Do-n14 

But this teaching, emerging from a long line of thinkers starting with St Francis of Assisi and the Scottish 13th century theologian Duns Scotus, does a lot more than co-opt creation as a pretty backdrop for our narrow religious prejudices. Rather it proposes something that I encountered as a profound soul-deep yes.
 
What Rohr describes is the difference between the historical figure of Jesus Christ and the Christ, which is another name for everything. The Christ is the means through which all things have their being, the substance, the molecular, mycelial power behind the particles that make all of the universe. The thing through which all things 'live and move and have their being'.
 
There are other names for the Christ, but this grand-scale way of describing the life force that holds everything together, set against the context of kindness and love, breaks me down into awe (and often tears when it hits home.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA1adN1rUmQ
 
So, this first Christmas, before the clamour of the more modern one hits us like a train, I am going to think bigger - much bigger. Not because I am dismissive of the stories of Jesus the man, even Jesus the incarnation of the Christ.
 
I am going to remember that I am woven together from the substance of the Christ, and consider how this changes the responsibilities I carry into the world. Above all, it seems that the responsibility is towards love.

The great Becoming
How small we made you.
How constrained by our constraints.
We wore you like a lapel badge,
Pocketed you like a personal passport, then
Raised you at our borders like a flag.
We locked you in the pages of
Our Book, then threw away the key.
 
But how we worshipped you.
How we pointed at you with steeples.
You asked us to follow you, to
Give away our second shirts, but instead
We made one million icons, each one framed in gold.
We swayed and raised our own egos, singing love songs
Not to you, but to idealised versions of ourselves.
 
How is it that still, you love things by becoming them?
How was it that this brown-skinned man with the heart of a woman
Took upon herself another name for everything, so we could
Encounter her in all these beautiful things and bleed with her when she
Lies broken? And just when all seems lost, she whispers still -
See, I am making all things new.
Even you.

advent conspiracy 25

Just below our house is a stand of ancient oak trees. How ancient I have no idea, but the presence of certain plants in the ground cover (particularly now I have cleared back much of the invasive Rhododendrons) indicates that the woods have been there for many hundreds, possibly thousands of years. The grounding effect of large trees on our fickle human existence is one that is well documented, and I have something of a love affair with these oaks.
 
I am perhaps not alone, because they are also home to a number of animals, notably red squirrels, tree creepers, woodpeckers and, most noticeable of all, a large colony of jackdaws. Or perhaps I should call them a 'band' or a 'train' to use their collective noun.
 
Even though they are there all year, for some reason, these beautiful, fiercely intelligent birds have become symbols of winter for me, and therefore, creatures of advent.
 A Roxburgh Jackdaw (Walter Baxter): licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0
These jackdaws are there all the time, but most notably in the winter, where they are ever-present, almost unnoticed in their ubiquiosity as they flap the sky on apparently pointless journeys from branch to branch, squabbling with each other or an occasional gull or buzzard.
 
Sometimes the croaking noise they make reaches a distant peak, as it did when the sparrowhawk lingered to close to their untidy stick-nests in spring, but for the most part, the rasp and clatter of their vocalisation is part of the backdrop of living. Because Jackdaws love buildings (in the past often blocking chimneys with their) often they will rattle over the roof tiles - a disturbance until we became acclimatised.
 
I put out some food once and set up a camera trap to try to capture images of a local pine marten that I knew from glimpses and traces had been scouting out our chickens. all I did was to feed the jackdaws.
https://videopress.com/v/IVIqCLTd?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true
Unsurprisingly, our jackdaws have been featured in some of our art work, including this piece that Michaela made featuring an old poem about the burdens of winter:Jackdaws are often featured in our stories and our folklore, creatures onto which we project meaning in our attempt to make sense of the world. To some they have been holy, perhaps because they often make their homes in the high church steeples. To others they are devil birds, associated with chaos and war. 

Other stories come to us from Greek mythology:

...The story of Princess Arne of the island of Siphnos describes a beautiful young princess who is ruined by her own greed. In this story, Arne is offered a bribe by the legendary King Minos of Crete to betray…

… to punish Arne. The punishment chosen is to turn her into a Jackdaw. In this form, Arne is forevermore condemned to chase after gold; her greed is translated into a Jackdaw’s fascination with shiny objects.

Once more, we do disservice to creatures of the natural world by attributing to them the character traits that are ours, but it seems to me that this bird of winter - this bird of advent - might be a useful reminder of the tautology of this dark season, in which we celebrate the mystery of the incarnation using such exterior excess. Like the jackdaw, we have no need for shiny things, but we chase them anyway.

advent conspiracy 24

Today Graham Peacock talks about joy...

I like sad songs; in fact, I'm prepared to argue on some days that the only good songs are sad songs.
I can't remember when I first heard this song, but it had an instant impression on me: many Christmas songs are full on sleigh bells and schmaltz- only a few like this one hint at the sadness that lurks inside all of us, however much we try and hide it or seek refuge in 'Christmas Magic' (sic). The first verse, in particular, seems so close to home and present experience. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YATi-BzC-

It's a hopeful atheist/agnostic song, of that stance that is not harsh or searing about faith, but rather sorrowing that it is not there and still seeing that there's something...something... that might just give hope. In that sense I think it is an Advent song.
 
The song invariably makes me cry, but this time when I listened to it, this verse hit me: 
All that they destroy
And in their face we throw our
Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy
 
Faced with challenge, evil or nastiness, most of us- especially when social media is so accessible and can accommodate the darkest parts of our ego- attack back even harder. Those of us who consider ourselves informed, caring and on the side of the oppressed, despairing that things will ever change and sometimes overwhelmed with the reality of it all are often tempted to hit back with snark or mirthless condemnation. I know I have done. I know I do.
 
I don't think anyone is changed by our angry virtue, but I think they have a chance of change if they experience our joy. In any case I think that joy is one of the greatest acts of resistance.
 
As ever, Mary Oliver puts it better than me:
Don’t Hesitate
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
From Devotions (Penguin Press, 2017).

advent conspiracy 23

This from Bob Fraser…

Photo by Skitterphoto on Pexels.com
A few years ago a friend invited me to go with him to see one of the Hobbit films. Lots of us love myths, legends, and stories of adventure. Especially epic stories of adventure, where there’s a struggle going on between good and evil, darkness and light. They hold a strange fascination for many of us.
 
We duly met at the cinema only to find that the schedule had been changed and it was not on that afternoon. And it wasn’t on anywhere else within striking distance that afternoon. Once we’d got over that disappointment, his ‘Plan B’ suggestion was to go ten-pin bowling. Now I’ve only played occasionally since school days and probably the last time I went was ten years previously as part of an office Christmas party. So I was a little rusty to say the least. However, amongst the many rounds where I didn’t get a strike at all, I had one when I got four strikes in a row! I knew three in a row and you were a ‘turkey’, but never before had I heard of anyone getting four. I’d never even had three strikes! So I was unprepared for the declaration that came up on the screen that I was a ‘four-bagger’. To me at least it was a story of epic proportions, albeit a short one. Me – a four-bagger!
 
All of this made me think about whether there is some sort of epic struggle going on in our lives and whether we have a battle on our hands against an unseen enemy who is determined to sideline us and cause us to lose heart. Is the story of our individual lives set within a much bigger epic story, which is still unfolding? As in most epic adventures, darkness holds both fear and fascination. Hidden dangers lurk everywhere. We go through a door out of curiosity and before you know it the door slams behind us and there’s no handle on the inside. We have no alternative but to go further and risk getting totally lost in unfamiliar surroundings. We can lose hope. What if we can’t find our way back?
 
Most of us have some consciousness of good and evil. We’re well aware of the many cruel things that happen to innocent people, and of the need for justice and truth. We’re utterly appalled at what’s happening in Ukraine. We’re desperately uncomfortable with the number of people living as refugees, trying to make sense of a life they never imagined they would be experiencing. We’re angry about the number of people living in poverty and the broken health and social welfare system in the UK.
 
When hiding in a dark cave seems better than facing the light of reality; when dwelling on our failures seems easier than getting up again and moving forward, when Advent darkness seems to overwhelm the light of the Christmas story, what do we hold on to that will give us courage and strength, and hope for the future? 

I wrote a song to capture something of that epic struggle and it’s helped me to embrace a bigger story where good triumphs over evil, where I don’t lose heart and give up. Where I find my way home again, and where love wins in the end.
 
There’s a video of the song on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4MgzezwzFQ
 
Or audio on Bandcamp –
Holding onto Love | Bob Fraser (12 Tracks) | Bob Fraser (bandcamp.com)

Most of us can see that some things seem more associated with darkness than light. Yet we all have a strange fascination with the darkness, and can easily get drawn into it if we are not careful.

advent conspiracy 22

This post from Chris https: //thisfragiletent.com
TRIGGER WARNING. This post deals with theological discussions which have often upset people. Read with caution and kindness, or simply move on. Not all tenets of faith need to be deconstructed, at least not by all of us, at this time of year. I hope that those who persist in reading this might understand that there is majesty and divine grace in the ordinary parts of this story too...

Let's talk about virgins...

Photo by Antonio Guirado Rivas on Pexels.com
I grew up attending an Anglican church which was very much on the 'evangelical', or even 'charismatic' wing of the church. Those for whom these labels mean little just need to know that we practised a fundamentalist version of Christianity, claiming biblical inerrant truth alongside an embrace of charismatic gifts like speaking in tongues and divine healing.
Whilst we had little time for what we saw as the idolatrous worship of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, that seemed to be happening in other parts of the church, nevertheless, we were firm in certain beliefs about Jesus' miraculous conception.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.
(From 'the apostles creed')
 
Into this safe world of secure truth came the distant rumble of disruption, in the form of this man, who we regarded as the enemy:

I remember well how we denounced him because, above all else, he dared to doubt the virgin birth. A quote from this article gives some idea of the febrile atmosphere that I remember well: 
In the mid to late 1980s the bishop of Durham was a public figure in the way no church figure has quite managed since. He had been a wholly unknown theology lecturer when he went on a scarcely watched television programme to say that he didn’t believe in the literal truth of the virgin birth. He also said that the resurrection “was not just a conjuring trick with bones”. This was reported, with a dishonesty that is still astonishing, as “comparing the resurrection to a conjuring trick with bones”.
I should probably explain that “the resurrection” refers to the central Christian belief that Jesus was raised from the dead. A prime minister saying on the eve of the World Cup that football was extremely boring and they hoped England would lose quickly might carry the same emotional charge of treachery.
In Jenkins’ case, an Essex vicar raised £2,000 from his scandalised congregation to mount a campaign against Jenkins getting the job; the archbishop of York, John Habgood, went ahead and consecrated him a bishop anyway – and three days later York Minster was struck by lightning.
(Andrew Brown writing in the Guardian, 2016)
Leaving aside the fact that we seemed to believe that God would send an angry thunderbolt at the enthronement of a heretical bishop, whilst failing to intervene in any visible way at all those other human excesses like war and genocide, what this story reminds me of is what I have come to see as the house of cards version of religion. The edifice of faith I grew up always felt like a shuggly stack of cards. If you removed one of those cards, the whole thing would come tumbling down. Jenkins was shaking this tower and because of this, we hated him an everything he stood for.
 
As an aside to this story, years later I read an article in which an interviewer asked Bishop Jenkins to reflect on his leadership and in particular, asked “what if, when you get to heaven, you discover that you were wrong?” His answer will stay with me forever. “I will fall in to the arms of a loving god”.
Jenkins was trying to encourage people to interact with the stories of the Bible in the way that he was used to doing with his theological studies - to see the stories not as scientific facts, but repositories of truth of a different kind. These days, I am fully at peace with this.

[Virgin Mary crying] by Library of Congress is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0
But back to our virgin. If you are interested in exploring the narrative around Mary's virginity in a deeper way, both in terms of the theology and history of how it has been interpreted, then I very much recommend listening to this podcast.

Does it matter whether Mary was a virgin or not?
 
To many people, it matters enormously. Perhaps this is because of the house of cards stuff I was describing earlier, but more than this, for many, this part of the story is precious in that it carries an idea of the separateness, the special purity of Mary herself, and how her pregnancy was entirely different.
This kind of incarnation seems to concern itself with extra-ordinary humanity. I like the idea too that the god child was born into the mess of the ordinary life.
 
God-with-us is not a reluctant participant, holding his nose against the stench.
Mary is a woman, not a pristine test-tube experiment in a heavenly air-gapped laboratory.
I no longer need to tick a doctrinal box about the nature of divine conception.
 
There, I have said it. All these years later it still feels transgressive. I am still ducking potential thunderbolts.
And does the house of cards come tumbling down?

Photo by Photography Maghradze PH on Pexels.com
 
Mary
Where you born already divine;
A scrap of human flesh with a
God only skin deep?
 
Or did the shape of Messiah-
The mewling lion of Judah
Need nurture?
 
At the breast of this mother
Scarcely beyond child herself
You took in milk
 
What sort of woman
Might school the star maker?
Whose sharp words
 
Could cut through a
Heavenly tantrum like a
Shaft of light through shadow?
 
Did she teach the turning of
The other cheek against some teenage
Provocation?
 
Or perhaps this was always the point-
Power and might made tender flesh
The highest now most lowly
 
The filling up of hungry mouth
The arms that hold
The pride at a first step
 
The learning and the loving
The pulse of blood in fragile vein
The summer cough
 
From this material
A man was made
Who was also Messiah. 

advent conspiracy 21

This from me… about connections between the waiting season of advent and the wait for genuine action on climate change...

One of the resources I’ve been using during Advent is the Archbishop of York’s Advent Book 2022, by Nicholas Holtam (he retired as Bishop of Salisbury in 2021), entitled “Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change”. Holtam was the Church of England’s ‘lead bishop’ on the environment (and chaired the Environmental Working Group 2014-21). As one might imagine, given that background, the book is well researched and an excellent source for both information and reflection. I’m finding it a challenging read but a very apt subject for Advent. In his introduction, Holtam describes it thus:
“Advent is urgent. We are getting ready for Christmas and there is a lot to do. We are also reminding ourselves that Christ will come again (do I personally really think that?). We do not know when that will be so we need to be prepared. Most of the time we just get on with life and live without much urgency, but that feels less possible in a world that is becoming more and more alarmed by the climate and environmental crises”.

Lunchtime sketch in a local bar: ‘we just get on with life and live without much urgency’

The sad thing is that, as the book’s sub-title infers, we’re still only starting to get serious about the environment… it seems that we’re very good at the thinking and writing bit but, when it comes to action, we’re pretty inadequate. For example, in 2020, the General Synod of the CofE recognised the climate emergency (a little late in the day, one might think?) and committed the Church to becoming ‘net zero’ by 2030. Holtham was quick to point out that this constituted “an impossibly ambitious target”.
Another case of yet more talk and inadequate action perhaps?
We can all recall the early days of the pandemic and the dramatic effects it had on our daily lives – quite apart from the horrible business of thousands of deaths, the overstretched NHS et al. The planes had stopped flying, there was very little traffic, the streets were empty, the sounds of nature were all around us. Many people resolved that “we must never go back to the way it was before” (or words to that effect)… but, of course, we have.
And, of course, it’s not just a ‘technical fix’, there are morals involved too... it cannot be acceptable for the carbon footprint of the richest 1% to be equivalent to that of the poorest 50%.
Holtam provides MUCH food for thought. Take this, for example: “It would help if we were more fearful about the damage we are doing to environment by flying… Aviation makes up 7% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, yet few people are aware that aviation kerosene is NOT taxed, due to international agreement. The missing tax is made up for, to some extent, by the level Air Passenger Duty… but, in 2021, the UK’s Chancellor cut this by 50% on domestic flights to encourage us to fly. It is crazy that it is cheaper to fly from Manchester to London than to go by train”.
This is an extract from the wonderful John O’Donohue’s ‘Blessing On Our World’… which seems somehow appropriate:
“Believing ourselves to be helpless, we hand over all our power to forces and systems outside us that then act in our names; they go on to put their beliefs into action; and, ironically, these actions are often sinister and destructive. We live in times when the call to full and critically aware citizenship could not be more urgent”.
It’s a depressing, slow-moving world when it comes to taking action and legislating on environmental issues… especially when governments frequently seem happy to be paying ‘lip service’ to it all.
One of the positive outcomes of the environmental crisis is that it’s highlighted the need for us all to nurture the planet… to be far more mindful of its resources and to take on board sustainable policies that avoid the kind of damage caused by past actions. Sadly, there are still powerful and influential people who continue to follow strategies that reward themselves at the expense of the environment.

Photo: nuclear fusion: ‘a near near-limitless, safe, clean source of energy’? (Damien Jemison/LLNL/NNSA).

Given all our concerns about the Climate Crisis, the recent, remarkable announcement from the US about a breakthrough in nuclear fusion which could mean “a near-limitless, safe, clean source of energy”, comes as a potential ‘game-changing’ discovery. No doubt, it will take several years yet before we know the full implications of this research and the impact (or not) it might have on the future of the planet… but what a remarkable life-changing breakthrough this could be.
I only hope that such possibilities don’t mean that all those ‘climate sceptics’ will effectively tell us “we told you that science would be the answer… so, forget all that talk of having to nurture the planet, we can now pursue stuff that will simply maximise financial rewards, increase our influence on the world and its people”.
Power, greed and riches for the few… at the expense of the few (and the planet)? 

advent conspiracy 20

Today we hear from Graham Peacock. He used to be a methodist minister - actually, do you ever stop? - now he works as a chaplain in mental health services. Here he reflects on his own season, amidst the losses of later middle age.

There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
(This is part of a set reading for the first Sunday in Advent, November 27th)

There are often readings like this on the first Sunday of Advent: I've always struggled with them. At first, they felt like the apocryphal embarrassing aunt whose presence is tolerated once a year at Christmas: the family heaving a sigh of relief when they leave, knowing that they won't have to see them again until next Christmas.

(By the way, I do not have an aunt, so I can only speculate what they are like).
Then, when faith made sense to me, I was around Christians who believed that these strange, wild prophecies were literally true, ignoring the colourful literary imaginings and poetry and - it seemed to me - invariably remaking them into angry prose. Strangely this God often seemed to hate all the things they did, only more so.
I've only preached from them when I've had to do so and I haven't in the last few years: I knew death and destruction happened, but that was in far off places. I'm middle class: bad things happen to other people- the villages near where I live don't need to hear readings like this.
And then...
Just over two years ago, a friend in the pub looked around at our group of friends and said something like; 'We've all done very well: mid 50s and we are all still here'. I laughed, but over the next few weeks I stopped laughing; within that group two long term relationships unravelled, one person developed a lifelong health condition, and another got a terminal diagnosis.
The suddenness shocked me- it still does; what I imagined was a stable group- a bulwark against the uncertainties of life, was fractured.
It is perhaps a mistake to narrow down the majesty, unevenness and unpredictability of that reading at the start, to the tiny world of myself and my friends. However, in my experience, micro shocks make me think about bigger issues like nothing else: I was never good about preaching the big issues- not that I couldn't comprehend them or that I'm not interested in them- but rather I was liable to lapse into generalities or comfortable bromides.
The micro shocks I experienced through those events opened me up again to something bigger and more profound - all that I'm certain of could disappear in an instant: what I hold onto is only provisional. I think that's why these set readings appear on the 1st Sunday in Advent - to remind us of that in shocking, sometimes opaque imagery: it's no wonder that I/we want to shoo them away.
Maybe next year I could chose to preach on the 1st Sunday of Advent.
Maybe.
Maybe one day... 

advent conspiracy 19

This from Chris https://thisfragiletent.com/

It goes without saying that here in the northern hemisphere, the advent season is inseparable from the deepening of winter, the shortening of days towards icy darkness. The longing for light. It is this juxtaposition that adds immeasurably to the poignancy of how we approach it, so much so that I find it difficult to imagine what a southern hemisphere advent, with just the opposite trajectory, might look and feel like.
 
Here there is also a feeling that we are treading pre-Christian paths too, in that the traditions that come to us only in fragments suggest that our ancestors also felt the spiritual significance of this season, so much so that they celebrated their own rebirth in the great festival of Yule, the winter solstice. Of course, any of these fragments live on in our Christmas traditions - the date itself, the mistletoe, the father christmas, the tree, the candlelight...
 
Rather than disturbing our Christian world view, I think it is more helpful to attempt towards a gratefulness because we stand in a long line of people trying to hold and help each other through the darkness.
I don't need to tell many of you about how hard the season of darkness can be, or why these depths of winter, approaching the enforced jollity of Christmas, can sometimes be the loneliest place.
 
Perhaps it was not like that in the more connected, agricultural communities that were previously celebrated the winter solstice, but then again, there are always outliers in any human grouping. Those cast low or cast out.
Despite the stark beauty, winter can be cruel.

In to this dark place, the Jesus that comes through the old stories, and through the lives of those trying to hold and help, is not one who makes the winter go away. That searing passage from the beginning of John's gospel about the darkness not being able to put out the light never pretended that darkness would not continue to exist.
Light exists in the midst of darkness, just like solstice comes at the depth of winter.
 
I would like to share with you a poem, which means a lot to me. It was my attempt to banish my own winter blues and to look for light. 
Light of the world

The low winter sun takes power from
Puddles of last night’s rain and I turn away
Resonating to signals sent from distant stars
 
Something glints in the tops of bare branches -
A flash of wing or a white tooth or the
Coming together of choirs of angels
 
And in a wet manger of clogged earth, summer
Sleeps, waiting for light to burst out
Brand-new hallelujahs
 
For behold, the light is with us. The light is
In us. The light shines in the darkest places -
It even shines in me. 

advent conspiracy 18

This from Chris Goan https://thisfragiletent.com/

Photo by Alex Wolf mx on Pexels.com
This post invites you to do a bit of pondering...
One of the gifts of Advent is to set the business of hope in both a historical and an extra-historical context. In other words, hoping has been going on for a long time, even if our own version always seems the most pressing. Even in the span of my own lifetime this seems true, in that my own adult children believe that the political and economic circumstances they are forced to endure are the worst ever - a view that is unchanged despite my description of the Thatcher years I grew up in.
 
To help us think about this a little more, I offer you two videos. The first one is rather long and describes anthropological and architectural work to try to understand the pre-agricultural hopes of ancient civilisations.
 
Why? I hear you ask.
The answer to this is perhaps more evident in the light of the second video, which is of me reading a poem.
 
Until the realities of man-made climate change and ecocide became more widely appreciated, human history was almost always understood in terms of rise, ascendence, progress, advance. We moved from being primitive towards civilisation. It is perhaps of note that the history we speak of is only a fraction of human history. Homo Sapiens - people just like us - have been around for at least three hundred thousand years, but our knowledge only goes back a few thousand. For all of those year, our ancestors hoped.
 
What where they hoping for? David Wengrow (in the video) describes a fascinating account of the abandonment of a sophisticated city, and a return to the land. The hint here is that people may have trying to find a better way to live.
Just like us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR-EN0YIBIg
 
Here is my poem, written a few years ago, recorded in the spring hills.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qojg-wFZD1A

advent conspiracy 17

This from me...

For the past two months, I’ve been attending a remarkable weekly ‘Leg Club’ (don’t laugh, it’s a clinic specialising in treating people with all sorts of horrible foot and leg issues)… and, brilliantly, they’ve just discharged me! It’s led by 3-5 specialist nursing staff plus a team of perhaps 8 volunteers. They probably deal with perhaps 30-40 patients a day. Most of the patients are ‘regulars’ who come to have their condition monitored and their specialist dressings changed.
It’s a rather humbling, compassionate experience - which includes nurses kneeling on the floor and carefully washing patients’ feet (and legs).
It’s an almost biblical scenario.

Over the past weeks, I’ve been cared for by the same nurse on three occasions. We’ve chatted and it turned out that, apart from her weekly attendance at ‘Leg Clinic’, she was a full-time Carer for her mother… and apparently had been for most of her adult life (the nurse is perhaps in her late 40s). The last time we’d chatted, she told me that her Mum had recently been transferred to a ‘home’ and so I enquired how her mother was getting on.
The nurse paused, looked at me and gently explained that her mother had died a fortnight ago.
As you can imagine, I was quite devastated.

We continued to chat about her mother and how the nurse had been coping since her death (I’d previously got the impression that the nurse was single and lived at her mother’s house). She told me that her mother’s death had left an enormous vacuum in her life – it had happened so suddenly and that her mother was ‘her life’… and that’s what she did. What was going to happen now? What would she do? How would she cope? We continued to chat quietly and I hopefully said the ‘right things’. I even asked her if I could give her hug… and she said yes, that would be ok… and so I did.
And then she said: “My mother was quite religious and fairly recently told me that she’d like to die either at Easter or Christmas… and so I think she’d be happy”.

I’ve been thinking of the nurse quite a lot over the past few days.
I hope she’ll be alright.
I hope she’ll be able to take time to evaluate things and be able to find a new focus in her life.
I hope her mother’s God will be with her on her journey this Advent.