The year turns
And so will I Lord…
Happy New Year all- may this one be a great one.
We have had a great few days- a house FULL of people (23 people per meal!) lots of music, food and a nice swim in the Clyde on New Years Day.
The latter being a deliberate attempt to put the events of February firmly behind me… I made the paper again recently as part of their ‘review of the year’- dangling below a helicopter for all to see.
Here are a few pics- click to enlarge…
Thanks Susan for pointing this out…
Great interview with Alistair McIntosh on Radio Scotland this morning (8 am- well done Susan for being up so early on a Sunday morning!)
You can listen again via the i player here.
It is all there- activism, faith, Scottish church abuse and hope for the future. Well worth a listen…
Facilitating patient use of naturally occurring social relations and community-based interventions may be more successful than providing social support through hired personnel..The magnitude of this effect is comparable with quitting smoking and it exceeds many well-known risk factors for mortality (e.g., obesity, physical inactivity.).The overall effect remained consistent across a number of factors, including age, sex, initial health status, follow up period, and cause of death, suggesting that the association between social relationships and mortality may be general.
This is rather startling… the strength of our social network will have more positive effect on our health than all the other lifestyle things we are hit with repeatedly- the weight loss industry, stopping smoking, vegetable eating etc.
(Perhaps we should all get together to share a good smoke and to eat large amounts of chocolate!)
It was part of a presentation done at this conference that I almost went to-
So living in loving community is good for you- in every physical sense imaginable.
It is the way we humans were made.
And it is the best that we can become.
I had an e-mail from a friend today.
I had not spoken to him for a while as our last communication had been rather contentious- first over Facebook, then by e-mail. I had been trying to catch up with him to have a face to face discussion but it had not worked out yet- phone calls missed, text messages crossed- you know how it goes.
It left me reflecting not for the first time (see here for example,) on how the internet allows for a million connections- all of which lack something crucially human. And of how it allows us to sit in our isolated boxes and have the illusion of human interaction via all sorts of electronic devices, but still to remainwholly alone.
That is not entirely fair of course- it is possible to send lots of information by means of our computers and the glorious internet. For example- you are reading this. But as a means of doing what humans were really made to do- to share our lives in community- it has major flaws.
It lacks flesh.
It closes us off from all of those human communication nuances- body language, facial expression, physical touch.
It is constantly open to misinterpretation.
It places communication at a distance from emotion.
It promotes volume (‘hits’, numbers of face book friends, connection speed etc.) over quality and depth.
When the going gets tough, it is even easier to move on- simply take someone off of your contact list.
The best of what we are is revealed through our human community- the love we show for one another and the sacrifices we are prepared to make for one another. You simply can not do this in any kind of complete way via a computer screen.
Back to the e-mail. This is what it said-
Hello,
I am caught up in a real mess and i need your help. I’m sorry I didn’t inform you about my trip ,I had a trip to the NEW YORK and a bizarre thing happened to me.I was mugged at gun point last night, the muggers carted away with all my belongings excluded my passport.Cell,c-card,cash and some important documents are all gone.
I was able to make contact with the US Police and i was directed to the Consular office, but they seems to be taking things to slow. i need your help so urgently.. My flight leaves pretty soon but i am having problems sorting out the hotel bills and also need getting my ticket straightened out. I need your help. I need a quick loan to get things fixed out here, I promise to refund as soon as i get back home.. please reply as soon as you get these email. so i can tell you what to do and how to get the money to me..
Hope to read from you soon..
Now to be honest, I was sceptical. But my friend has American connections, so I thought that it was not impossible that he was indeed in trouble and needed help, so I replied asking him what was going on, and what he needed. I then received a reply that suggested that he needed $1500, and way for me to pay.
I phoned my friend, and he answered. He was not in New York- of course it was a scam, as someone had hacked into his Google mail account.
But we managed to plan to meet next week- and I am really looking forward to seeing him again. E-mails are dangerous, but sometimes they can facilitate real connections, and for that, I am grateful.
We had a lovely day at Solas festival yesterday. Well- mostly lovely anyway.
Solas is a brand new festival held at Wiston Lodge, near Biggar. It is inspired by Greenbelt festival. A few of us from Aoradh went down, and we did ’40’ again, and set a few worship/poetry things. The festival was fairly small- a few hundred attendees. It felt a bit like it was looking for itself a little- not quite sure where it was coming from, but definitely heading somewhere…
’40’ was a bit of a disaster. The organisers had allowed no set up time, and inevitably we had technical problems, which meant that the soundscapes did not work. Also the room was really noisy as the rock band playing outside the window drowned us out. The end result was that we got all hot and sweaty and nervous- with me running around trying to get the sound to work whilst also reading one of the parts!
I have since been in to hospital to have my buttocks surgically unclenched because of the severity of the embarrassment.
But the festival was good. Lots of great music, and interesting discussion. And it was really lovely to be with my friends in a new context- meeting some folk that we new, but also lots of others for the first time. This is the real value of festivals for me- the chance to meet people and allow new things to grow.
I enjoyed Yvonne Lyon as ever- and loved Juliet Turner too.
As for the talking- I enjoyed listening to Richard Holloway, retired bishop and author. He spoke really well about his appreciation of the wide wobbly spectrum of faith- from hard religion, through softer forms right through to militant atheism. Holloway himself appears to be wavering around a faith that does not require God- but remains grateful for the inherited traditions.
He also told a story about his early love of Mysticism, particularly the work of Thomas Merton. This love took him on a retreat where he sought to deepen his understanding of the search for God through contemplation and mystical experience. However it seems that things did not go well- and Richard Holloway remembers the Roman Catholic priest who was his spiritual director saying something like this- “Don’t be bloody stupid, you are never going to be a mystic- you are a writer. You need to worship with a pencil in your hand.” That made me smile ruefully!
I also listened to Labour MP Douglas Alexander, former Secretary of State for International Development. He was slick, but impressive- a future leader of the Party perhaps? Another son of the Manse who is destined for great things.
Michaela was impressed by Alistair McIntosh– unfortunately I missed most of his talk.
Here’s hoping that the festival survives in these rather challenging economic times. Lord knows, Scotland needs the opportunity to celebrate a different kind of religion…
One of the Aoradh crew uses crutches- she has Lupus, and like most people of faith who have long term illnesses, she has had a long journey in dealing with the God who heals, but has not healed her. Helen is a lovely optimistic person, who now sees each day as a gift from God, and does many things despite the pain that she gets when she moves, and the potential long recovery time afterwards. She arrived at the festival field, and within minutes a man came up to her and asked to ‘pray with her for healing’. She politely refused, explaining that this was something that she had kind of thought to do for herself over the years. We later laughed- but it was not funny really.
It was an insensitive thing to do, but what surprised me was that this kind of way of faith is present within a festival like Solas. It is a kind of faith that many of us have experienced in the past, but have been grateful to leave behind.
It is not fair to sum up a whole festival by this one encounter- after all, we are all capable of doing some daft stuff in the name of Jesus- and this man is probably a nice and well meaning bloke. However, I do think that is kind of sums up where we are in terms of developing new kinds of church in Scotland. New developments like Solas are small, fragile, and tend to be an amalgam of people with quite disparate views- who are forced together by expediency because ANY new Christian thing is worth being part of.
There is a danger that the ticking time bomb of doctrinal warfare is always about to explode.
I am sure that the organisers of Solas this year have had a rocky road.
Pray for them- and it.
We are away on a road trip tomorrow. We are driving first to Nottinghamshire to take Michaela’s mum home, the leaving the kids there with her while we go off to the Tautoko network weekend in Coalbrookdale, near Telford- not far from the famous Iron Bridge.
The weekend is a chance to get together with others who are into new ways of doing church/mission/worship. It is a very informal affair- and we are really looking forward to it.
I am not looking forward to the drive though. And we have a fairly late start as I have to entertain Argyll and Bute’s chief executive all day in Helensburgh.
Heres hoping that she is blessed with brevity…
There has been a lot in the news recently about loneliness.
One in 10 Britons often feel lonely, and those aged 18-34 are more likely to worry about being isolated than older adults, according to a Mental Health Foundation report.
Four in 10 have been depressed because of loneliness, and 48% believe people are becoming lonelier.
While 17% of over-55s worry about being alone, 36% of under-35s do.
The elderly, jobless and those who are disabled are most likely to be affected.
Persistent loneliness is bad for people’s mental and physical health and can be linked to stress, heavy drinking and poor diet, says the charity.
Peter Byrne, associate registrar of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “Our stereotype of the older person, home alone … is challenged by information [showing] the number of children calling a helpline who are lonely has increased by 60% in five years.”
I find myself interested for several different reasons-
I work in a mental health setting, and the role of community and social support is being ever more recognised as both cause and potential recovery of mental ill health.
I am interested in the role of social networking (and other on line health and social care platforms) in supporting us- and have a strong feeling that our reliance on the web is contributing to the isolation of many people. The stats above for example suggest that loneliness is especially concerning in the ‘facebook generation’- who might have three hundred on line friends, but no-one to go to the pictures with at the weekend.
This is a recurrent theme on this blog- here for example.
It is also a key theme for our Greenbelt worship event this year.
Here is the question- if the statistics suggesting that loneliness, isolation and disconnectedness are increasingly defining characteristics of our society- then what should be the role of we, the agents of the Kingdom of the living (relational) God?
Who made us in a way to be at our best when we love and serve one another?
As we seek to serve those around us, how might we need to structure our activities to better shine light and sprinkle salt to bring out the good flavours of the societies we serve?
It used to be the strength of our institutions of faith- the way we brought together and unified our communities (sometimes for ill as well as good.) We birthed a thousand community groups- womens groups, mens groups, kids groups. And we served our communities at points of crisis and celebration in a way that marked and deepened our understandings of transitions.
We still do many of those things- but perhaps we need to think outside of the boxes in which we currently work within. There is great need out there…
We are heading down to Telford to the Tautoko gathering in a few weeks. This is a chance to spend a weekend sharing ideas and hopes and prayers with other people who have found themselves doing similar things in and around the edges of established church.
There are some places left on the weekend- Check out Jonny’s description– (He has a thing against capital letters I reckon?!)
for a few years there has been a network of leaders/communities that initially got together off the back of al hirsch and michael frost’s visit back in 2005 and following on from various blah… events round the country. it grew out of alt worship and emerging church friendships. every so often there is a gathering of the network and there is one coming up in june. it’s a pretty low key affair – mainly hanging out and conversation with some space for talking around issues and some prayer and worship. we usually stay in a youth hostel to keep it cheap.
the next gathering is in june – info is here. if you think you fit with the description around the network below you’d be welcome to join us – just book in or e-mail me if you want to know more. there are spaces left on the weekend that we’d love to see filled…
The tautoko network was originally formed out of friends connected with alternative worship, emerging church, or missional communities. Why? Well mainly because we love hanging out together. The network was made a bit more intentional/formal recognising that there were plenty of others involved in the same kind of stuff who didn’t necessarily have the history of friendships but could gain a ton from being part of it. These were the words we put together to describe why it exists and they still seem a pretty fair reflection…
- To share the journey with others who face similar mission challenges.
- For mutual friendship, encouragement, solidarity, support, gift giving, discernment, resource sharing, ideas and learning
- To see what emerges as creative people connect.
And the ethos/values we try and shape the friendships around are…
Open set | Spin free | Generous | Vulnerable | Questioning
We had a family day with some of the Aoradh folk today.
This usually takes the form of a shared meal (lots of good food) and then some worship. Today Paul led the worship- which started with a game of hide and seek! Brilliant.
I love it when we come together and share like this. It is simple and profound.
Paul used these words for us to speak out together…
Circle us Lord
Keep protection near
And danger afar.
Circle us Lord
Keep hope within
Keep doubt without
Circle us Lord
Keep light near
And darkness afar.
Circle us Lord
Keep peace within
Keep evil without.
Amen.
You may well already know, dear readers, of my recent rather dramatic act of self publicism.
Following this, there was also the rather unfortunate letter published in our local paper, which categorised me as an ‘idiot’.
Today, the letters page of the good old Dunoon Observer is mostly about our family. There were three responses to the letter mentioned above- from 2 of my friends (no money exchanged hands) and also from someone I did not know. The letters bring compassion, common sense, and an understanding of the risks involved in all of life.
Even though I had taken a decision not to reply myself, and had wondered about the point of such a discourse, in the end, I am grateful that the other side of the issue has been expressed so well. Thanks guys!
Also in the paper this week I was very surprised to see a letter from my mother in law Mary!
It was a letter thanking people for their support during Robert’s (my step father in law) illness. Robert has spent weeks in hospital undergoing the first round of chemotherapy as part of the treatment for leukaemia.
What Mary’s letter was referring to was that some folk who meet to pray and talk about God-stuff at our house put together a box for Robert during his time in hospital. It contained lots of envelopes to be opened over the days and weeks he was in hospital- with poems, prayers, sweeties, dvds, books and jokes. It became a ritual for him to open the envelopes each day, and I think (and hope) it was a real blessing to him- and to Mary.
Robert was discharged from hospital on the day of opening of the last envelope. You could not make that up could you?
It makes me want to sing of the beauty of small things, and people who think that life should be about bringing joy to others in a time of great need.
Robert is due back in hospital for more treatment soon- and he is so far away from where we live, if constantly in our thought and prayers. He is probably reading this, and will protest my choice of photo!
I’ll post a better one of you Robert, taken when I next see you!
this fragile tent 