If I am right (and Richard Rohr) then if our belief systems remain the same from young adult into middle age and beyond, then something has gone very wrong.

Surely, any spiritual path that has meaning must involve transformation through reformation, rejection, rediscovery, letting go, doubting, leaving, finding and just… being?

I can not offer my own experience as any kind of exemplar, unless we add the word ‘failing’ to the list above (and perhaps we must) but in many ways it seems to me that defining beliefs is almost pointless. I don’t mean to be rude, but who cares what you believe?

So what that the Bible/Koran/Bhagavad Gita told you it was true?

What does spiritual truth mean if not anchored to our actual lived experience?

What is spirtual knowledge for if not to facilliate progress?

What is religion for if not to help us help things get better?

Having said all that, what we believe does matter.

Without new ways of understanding and seeing the world, how can we hope?

Sometimes it seems that my religion has gone. I have few rituals any more, few things that I collectivise with others around. When pushed I can give you an explanation but perhaps it might be easiest just to share this Mary Oliver poem with you, which says (like all poems do) what I was not sure how to say for myself.

I don’t know who God is exactly.
But I’ll tell you this.
I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a water splashed stone
and all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking.
Whenever the water struck a stone it had something to say,
and the water itself, and even the mosses trailing under the water.
And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me what they were saying.
Said the river I am part of holiness.
And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered the moss beneath the water.

I’d been to the river before, a few times.
Don’t blame the river that nothing happened quickly.
You don’t hear such voices in an hour or a day.
You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.
And it’s difficult to hear anything anyway, through all the traffic, the ambition.

2.

If God exists he isn’t just butter and good luck.
He’s also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke.
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

Imagine how the lily (who may also be a part of God) would sing to you if it could sing,
if you would pause to hear it.
And how are you so certain anyway that it doesn’t sing?

If God exists he isn’t just churches and mathematics.
He’s the forest, He’s the desert.
He’s the ice caps, that are dying.
He’s the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts.

He’s van Gogh and Allen Ginsberg and Robert Motherwell.
He’s the many desperate hands, cleaning and preparing their weapons.
He’s every one of us, potentially.
The leaf of grass, the genius, the politician, the poet.
And if this is true, isn’t it something very important?

Yes, it could be that I am a tiny piece of God, and each of you too, or at least
of his intention and his hope.
Which is a delight beyond measure.
I don’t know how you get to suspect such an idea.
I only know that the river kept singing.
It wasn’t a persuasion, it was all the river’s own constant joy
which was better by far than a lecture, which was comfortable, exciting, unforgettable.

3.

Of course for each of us, there is the daily life.
Let us live it, gesture by gesture.
When we cut the ripe melon, should we not give it thanks?
And should we not thank the knife also?
We do not live in a simple world.

4.

There was someone I loved who grew old and ill
One by one I watched the fires go out.
There was nothing I could do

except to remember
that we receive
then we give back.

5.

My dog Luke lies in a grave in the forest, she is given back.
But the river Clarion still flows from wherever it comes from
to where it has been told to go.
I pray for the desperate earth.
I pray for the desperate world.
I do the little each person can do, it isn’t much.
Sometimes the river murmurs, sometimes it raves.

6.

Along its shores were, may I say, very intense cardinal flowers.
And trees, and birds that have wings to uphold them, for heaven’s sakes–
the lucky ones: they have such deep natures,
they are so happily obedient.
While I sit here in a house filled with books,
ideas, doubts, hesitations.

7.

And still, pressed deep into my mind, the river
keeps coming, touching me, passing by on its
long journey, its pale, infallible voice
singing.

“At the River Clarion” by Mary Oliver, from Evidence: Poems, Beacon Press.

I am both excited and not a little nervous about the first of our live poetry/music/art events. We hope to do a series of them through the year. If you are anywhere near the west of Scotland, please come along!

24th Feb, 7PM, Uig Hall (Which is very close to Benmore Gardens, on the Lock Eck road out of Dunoon.)

In case you are wondering how such an event will work – one answer is, who knows? This will be our first, so we will be flying blind to a certain extent. But then again, this is not entirely honest. The ingredients are incredible after all- Yvonne Lyon will be weaving keyboard and song around my poetry, accompanied by Will Goan on Guitar/vocals and perhaps other instumentalists too (yet to be confirmed!)

Alongside this we will be projecting art from the book from the fantastically talented Si Smith, like this one.

The whole thing is about hope. Even when hope is hard to find. Our politics is often toxic, and the meaning we used to find in churches has largely been left behind. How else do we start to hope again, if not together with our friends, and if not through sharing art?

By the way, thanks so much to those of you who offered to host one of these events. If we have not already been in touch, then we will be soon. Michaela is trying to thread together a plan for the year.

We still have room for more events though. We can scale what we do to fit your venue, so if you think an event like this might be worth hosting in your living room/garden/pub/church hall/cafe/theatre, drop me a line!

I have mentioned a few times the plan for this year was to take some poetry from ‘After the apocalypse‘ on the road. We made a number of steps in this direction – identifying some hosts and venues (thankyou!) and imagining how I hoped this would work – but I have struggled to bring the final ideas together.

Partly this is because the last year has been one of the hardest of my life. I have been struggling with a number of things, probably related to the recent loss of both my sister and my mother. This left me grappling with the boy I was and still am within, bruised and broken by my upbringing, struggling to hide the shame that all survivors of abuse carry with them. Alongside some other family things, I was struggling to find the energy needed to invest in such a creative and collaborative endevour as I had imagined. In turn, this made me feel worse, as though I had nothing to give, nothing to offer. As if I was over.

In some senses, such is the creative life. We mostly create out of our vulnerabilities and brokenness. Or perhaps not all do, but the works that moved me most came from these places. Because of this, creativity always comes with a shadow of self doubt and even (in my case) self loathing. The nature of creativity can be so self-centred too, so endlessly self-referential, which can form a loop in which the urge to make reflects backwards in a harsh light. (Some of you will know exactly what I mean.)

With that as confessional context, you will appreciate all the more what I am about to describe. It is the rack that you too are stretched upon. No amount of ‘sucess’ seems to change the realities of this kind of being.

Images by Si Smith, from ‘After the apocalypse’

Yesterday (because Michaela had not given up on me when I more or less had) I took a few more steps.I did it almost unaware, just knowing that I had to keep moving. (But Michaela had been making connections, doing things that seemed to me to be almost futile.)She had already been doing the drudge-work, without which no good thing can ever happen. The form filling, the diary making. The frustration suppressing. The loving. She thought I did not see it, but I did, I just mostly thought she was wasting her time.

Then, yesterday, things took an entirely unexpected (by me at least) turn.

Before I tell you what happened, perhaps I should describe my longings for these poetry events. I have come to realise, that the things I do that bring me the greatest joy have to start with a certain kind of ‘uuughh’.

It is that feeling you get when your chest feels pregnant with… how can I describe it?… goodness? Hope? Love? Grace? Excitement? None of these words quite contain what I mean, so let’s stick with ‘uuughh’.

I know too that for me, uuughh is a spiritual thing as much as a physical one. It may seem totally fanciful to you to suggest that uughh is about connection to the great spirit that made the world and holds it all together, but there it is, this is what I feel, somewhere deep inside myself.

I have tried to learn to look out (above all things) for the uuughh and to trust it when I feel it. To follow it when I can. I think of this as a spiritual practice, informed by thinking around theopoetics that I have spoken a lot about on this blog.

In my experience, uuuhgg is most likely to be encountered around some of these things;

Kindness (always always kindness, that most underated for virtues.)

Community, when we do good things together

Friendship, which is precious and rare, particularly for introspective men like me

Hope, even in the shadow of despair

Beauty (particularly arising from brokenness)

Stories of hope and redemption

Stories of liberation

Justice bringing and peace-making

It is perhaps most readily accessed when art (particularly for me, poetry and music) becomes a channel for the above.

Things like this;

Or this

You will understand then that despite the pressures we all feel to make a living, the plan for taking these poems ‘on the road’ was not about making money. It was about making moments of uuughh for others. Small moments of kindness and transformation. This or nothing.

But I knew I needed help. I needed to make community. I am fortunate enough to live in a family of musicians, but despite the best intentions, it can be hard to do things with your family. There is too much baggage and boundaries are too weak, even if love remains strong. Besides, what young musician wants to do something with dad? What we needed above all was a gifted catalyst from outside. But who would be kind enough to put themselves in the middle of such a project?

Our friend Yvonne certainly has the giftedness. She has even done poetry collaborations before;

Yesterday we got together to see how it would feel. My lad Will joined us on guitar and vocals. I read poetry whilst they wove sounds and then slid into song.

I can only describe what happened by saying one word.

Uuughh.

Wonder

.

I lost the wonder

With the watch I wanted (but never had)

With a button making red magic from time

The one for which my mother scraped and saved

Was not enough

.

I lost the wonder

Looking at the litmus people

Who show us what we are with their brokenness

Whose bodies are laid before us

On the shopping streets

.

I lost the wonder even when

People pointed at it with religion

I tried to see it but when I looked at stars

I saw only space

I looked at donkeys and saw donkeys

.

I found it in a song

Inside a friend

It was a child, but it also an old man

I saw it clothed in feathers and also

Charity shop cardigans

It was in trees and compost bins

It came not only with the light

But as the light receded

.

It was what I needed

And so the advent journey comes towards its apotheosis. Thankyou to those who have made the journey with us.

We have not put up a tree this year…untill 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 encourage 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.

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 occured to me that our social-media-shaped brains are increasingly innoculated against other views. Rather than freeing our brains for exploration and encounter, the internet seems to have set us up as oppositional avotars, 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 familliar comfortable groves, thrilling to the failure of my intellectual/religious/political enemies…

…who are mostly not enemies at all, just people with a 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 wiht the coming of the light.

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 titilation, 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.

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 seperation 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 solstace. 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.

But this teaching, emerging from a long line of thinkers starting with St Francis of Assisi and the Scottish 13th C 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 kindess and love, breaks me down into awe (and often tears when it hits home.)

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 reponsibiity 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.

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, prossibly thousands of years. The grounding effect of large trees on our fickle human existance 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 noticable 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.

These jackdaws are there all the time, but most notably in the winter, where they are everpresent, 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 aclimatised.

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.

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 the people of her island. Unable to resist the bribe, Arne relinquishes the island to Minos. Immediately, Minos and the army of Crete conquer Siphnos. Seeing her actions and disgusted by her avaricious betrayal, the gods decide 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.

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.

It’s a hopeful atheist/agnostic song, of that stance that is not harsh or seering 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).

Today singer/songwriter Bob Fraser takes on darkness once more, in the hope that love will win in the end…

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 appauled 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.

Bob Fraser

There’s a video of the song on YouTube

Or audio on Bandcamp –

Holding on to 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.