Today’s post is from the brilliant Steve Broadway, a friend I have never ‘met’ – in person anyway. We have history however, in that we have previously collaborated on another advent project, via the curation of Si Smith and also involving meditations by Ian Adams. You can download our efforts here.

Steve is a prodigious talent. He has been an architect, but left all this behind to make art. His sketches, often done ‘live’ in outdoor settings are alternated with photographs on his blog, which I highly recommend. It is like alchemy to me.

Today, Steve offers us this;

Here is what he had to say about the inspiration;

A TIME OF EXPECTANT WAITING AND ANTICIPATION…

We’ve recently moved and so this will be the first Christmas in our new home. We’ve down-sized to a third-floor apartment and share a core staircase with nine other apartments. We also now have Bristol cathedral as our new next-door neighbour (literally!).

Over the past week or so, I’ve become increasingly aware that Advent – that time of expectant waiting and anticipation – has taken on a double significance. The cathedral has posted lots of Christmas notices inviting people to join in its Advent and Christmas services and the bell-ringers have been very busy showing off their skills…

At the same time, the number of online packages being delivered to our ‘staircase neighbours’ has sky-rocketed (and left at the bottom of the stairs in significant numbers!) – a time of expectant waiting and anticipation for that online Christmas delivery?

The one ‘social’ event I have attended fairly regularly in these Covid times is a music session in our local pub. We sit around tables and play folk music. The quality of the musicianship is… irelevant. I drag myself down there sometimes, but always come home the better for it.

Music is a big part of our advent. The arrival of the Christmas muzak. The promise of carols, just a short while down the road. For us too, there is another kind of Christmas music that makes and appearance; the sort that cuts through to the heart.

Over the Rhine’s Christmas albums for example;

Or Low, or Tracey Thorn, or our dear friend Yvonne;

At some point, Covid allowing, we will gather to sing together. I will play the piano as if wearing boxing gloves, Michaela will play her trumpet, in which we will hear whisps of that Salvation Army band on a busy shopping street… Emily and William will weave some sounds on Fiddle and guitar that will make me weep.

Music carries us. It allows us to feel. It becomes a place marker to give pause in the press of life.

(Musicians need our support more than ever… consider buying some actual albums this year.)

Here is a poem I wrote a year or so ago trying to make sense of the complexity of feelings that overwhelm me at Christmas and how music comes closer.

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Peace be with us

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In the quiet space between snowflakes

We listen to sad songs, and

Feel the prickle of tears, pushed

By beautiful broken things

Less than half-perceived

But never forgotten

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In the warm space you made for me

I hide, guilty for those we left outside

Wishing our table was bigger

That every mouth was filled

Every refugee was home

Like we are. Hoping that

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In the dark space between all those twinkling lights

Peace is waiting

Like scented water

Fingered by frost and ready to fall –

Ready to anoint our dirty old ground

Like Emmanuel

This morning, Michaela and Emily are off to do a pottery workshop for a medical practice over on the other side of Cowal, the lovely place in which were are privileged to live. It was booked as an alternative to a Christmas party, and Emily went off singing carols, declaring herself ‘feeling all Christmassy’.

I promised that this advent journey would be primarily about hope and I intend to stick with this promise. But hope is born in the most unlikely places. How about Britain, in 2021? The Britain of coronavirus, Brexit, unholy hostility fostered by people in power towards the weak and broken? Where do we even start to look for hope, when our news outlets and social media bombards us with ever more extreme versions of the negativity we have already been consuming?

It is everywhere, when we choose to look for it…

…but much like it was two thousand years ago, it is a very different kind of Messiah that we will encounter from the one that was expected. He will not come as a superhero, or a movie star, or a charasmatic game changing politician. He will have no fanfare, no three-point sermons or fancy image managed by a team of consultants.

He will be where the weak and broken are. He will be listening to their conversations, taking a sip from a circulated can of special brew and the odd drag from the stubs gathered from the gutter. He will weep with those who are weeping and laugh out loud with those who have also noticed the absurdities of modern life. He will see each small acts of kindness and quietly flush with pride.

I wrote a new version of my favourite carol last Christmas. A few days later I overheard my son singing it and it broke me open. Here it is, full of humanity. Full of hope.

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Bleak midwinter

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What can I give him, wealthy as I am?

Does he need an i-phone, or a well-aged Parma ham?

Should I bring him trainers, a pair of brand-new jeans?

Or Halo for the X-box (whatever the hell that means)

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In a tower block in Camden, a woman breaks her heart

Her credit score is hopeless, her marriage fell apart

Her cupboards all lie empty, her clothes are wafer thin

Her kids can thank the food bank for turkey from a tin

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If I were a kind man, I would bring good cheer

I would house the homeless, if for only once a year

I’d buy my cards from Oxfam, for virtue is no sin

I’d send some Christmas pudding to poor old Tiny Tim

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In the bleak midwinter, frosty winds still moan

And Mr Wilson’s waited ages to get the council on the phone

He’s worried cos his boiler has given up the ghost

And since Mabel got dementia, she feels cold more than most

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If I were a wise man, I would do my part

I’d sell that gold and incense and invest it for a start

In gilt-edged annuities and solid pension schemes

For without good fiscal planning, what can ever be redeemed?

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In a lock-up by the roadside a bastard-child is born

To another teenage mother whose future looks forlorn

A host of heavenly angels up high in star-strewn sky

Sing blue-scale hallelujahs as lorries thunder by

I would contend that any journey worth making will contain elements of the spirit.

By this, I mean that it will often contain a certain depth of meaning – a kind of inherent significance that is often difficult to define and in hindsight is easily dismissed as romanticism or random seredipity.

These moments of encounter are precious, not because they imbue our ordinaryness with something that feeds our own ego; not because we can boast about them on social media or record them on our smart phones for later consumption. Rather because they draw us towards a truer form of ourselves that is not constrained by our bodies.

This is what the mystics have taught for thousands of years and whilst I can claim no great enlightenment, what I have seen and experienced fills me with something that I would describe as ordinary hope.

We are not only this.

There is not only now.

These transendent moments are fleeting. Even as I try to honour them by noting and naming them, even as I try to capture some of them in the things that I write, I must also acknowledge that I often fail to do justice to the light they bring to my life. I too easily fall back on old destructive patterns, old distractions. I too easily fall into the old dualistic patterns in which my profanity seems entire seperate from anything sacred.

Humanity is complex. It is broken and it is beautiful. It is chained and it is free. It is clever but lives in almost total ignorance. It wraps itself up in a cloak of thick cloth in a futile attempt to hide from the consequences of eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Today I want to share an old poem with you, written whilst I was on a ten day silent retreat back in 2014. The poem tries to describe an envy of wild things, whose living seems somehow more complete, more connected, more sacred. It was written from the sudden realisation that the religion I was part of had so much baggage, so many barriers and restrictions, so many uncomfortable obligations and compropmises, so much humanity. I longed for a different kind of journey.

May a bird sing an ordinary song of worship and may we hear it, as if for the first time.

The feathered Eucharist

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Happy are these birds above who

never go to mass.

Happy fragile feathered things with

light not stained by glass.

Blessed are they beak and claw; their air

Is ever sacred.

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Blessed be their treetop temple, each twig

a flying arch.

And sacred is each song that choirs

from sparrows and from larks.

Happy are the crows and cranes

Whose Eucharist is endless.

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And may the vaulted holy sky

Be full of wings as birds fly by

On their way to ruffled worship.

This piece was written by Michaela and and speaks of another kind of immanuel…

Often on a Sunday morning, I am the first up. I boil the kettle, tidy up the kitchen a little, feed the chickens then settle with a cuppa and radio 4, in my favourite corner of the kitchen, often listening to the Sunday morning service.

Sometimes I feel no connection to it, but sometimes, the beauty comes through to me.

Either way, Sunday mornings find me sitting, thinking, clearing my head a little, writing down things that need to be done during the week, so I can switch off and enjoy my Sabbath. Then I have a think about whose birthdays are coming up, who has new babies, or new homes or bad news. Who needs a letter or a card or a call…. It is a most comfortable time.

But last Sunday, I woke still feeling agitated from the week’s news. The dreadful deaths of those seeking refuge was hard enough to hear, but to hear it surrounded by political bias, rhetoric, hard voices, accusations, even celebrations that for people to be seeking such danger shows the ‘achievements’ made in closing off the ports. Achievements. My heart broke. My heart breaks.

Then into the anxiety, the fear of what was to come, the hopelessness.. voices from the radio service…

O Come, O Come, Immanuel.

The hope, the pain of longing, the feeling of being held in waiting..

You can hear a beautiful version of the song here by our friend Yvonne.

Or even better, set aside twenty-five minutes. I promise it will be worth it. Hear Yvonne’s song embedded in some beautiful and hopeful words but Katie Emslie-Smith, spoken at the Steeple Church on Sunday.

KE-S Message 281121_0.mp4

Folowing on from Crawfords post yesterday, this poem seemed apt.

It was my attempt to lift my head towards goodness when it had been bowed down in despair.

(By the way, the photo is of a wildfire that swept over a mountainside above Loch Etive a few years ago. It seemed like the end of everything. It was not.)

The laugh

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When you feel despair at the state of the world,

Do something small.

Ignore those voices without or deep within

Calling you fool for refusing a tyrannical logic

Achieved only by cynical wisdom –

Then do it anyway.

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When you feel broken by all the cruelty the world contains,

Reach out, remembering that humanity

Can only be collectively encountered.

Allow empathy to be an umbilical conduit

For a nutrient called kindness.

What else are we for?

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When overwhelmed by the size of the mountain

Walk slower, saving breath for conversation

For miles pass fast in company, then as words fade

Listen for the fat laugh

Deep down in the belly

Of all that is still becoming.