Bucket List

Hey! I've only got ONE THING on my 'bucket list': to take part in 40 days of prayer and fasting!

Just imagine lying on my deathbed...'I'm glad I went to New Zealand and saw the little hobbit houses'?, 'At least I jumped out of an aeroplane strapped to some stranger and got a video of me pulling funny faces'?, 'I'm glad we had that family holiday in Disneyland and managed to pay for it out of the mortgage'?

But how about 'I reached a point in my life where I so seriously sought the Creator of the universe that my friends  and I prayed solid for 40 whole days, regularly skipping meals just to express how vital we think God is'.

Bonkers! Wonderful!! How could I NOT do it??!! (and it costs nothing! In fact...it could save me a few quid in grub). I'm free to not do it. But I must do it.

As a church near here once said on it's website, 'we believe that nothing of any lasting value will take place unless it is energised through an encounter with the spirit of God.'

Significance

On Boxing Day a tweet went around the world to millions of people. It was a recommendation from a humanist website to read an article called, ‘We’re Puny, Insignificant and Doomed – and that’s the good news’. It was written by a man who described how he told his 3 year old about the universe.

That’s it son, you’re ‘puny, insignificant and doomed’.

Now I happen to believe that the universe is 14 billion years old, that it is absolutely ginormous, that one day planet earth will crash into the sun, and that compared to these things we are tiny and short-lived.

But I really object when we use descriptions of stuff to talk about value.

The value of a person is a personal thing. It’s got little to do with size or lifespan.
God is a person. He is the ultimate person. We need to remember that people have value. Not stuff. Whether it is the stuff of stars or the stuff of ipads. Value is a personal thing. Not a stuff thing.

http://richarddawkins.net/news_articles/2012/12/26/we-re-puny-insignificant-and-doomed-and-that-s-the-good-news#.UOGvom_eQ6l

Cosmos

‘We are the cosmos made conscious’ says Brian Cox, ‘Life is the means by which the universe understands itself’.

Although Professor Cox doesn’t believe in a God, he is full of wonder and awe at our ability to understand how things work and our awareness of what things are made of. In the Narnia books one of the clever children comments that a star is simply a cloud of collapsed hot gas. An older, wiser person comments that ‘even in your world that isn’t all that stars are’.

Just because we understand what stuff is made from, it doesn’t mean we understand what they really are.

Like people! Just because I understand what you’re made from, doesn’t mean I understand you!
People are wonderful things. But not just because of what they’re made from.

New Year (3)

Happy New Year!

How long does it take for a New Year Resolution to be broken?

I’m a regular swimmer – twice a week I do lane swimming at Rugby School swimming pool. And January is notorious for the influx of people determined to get fit! The place is heaving until around the second week.

Then they all disappear. And the New Year becomes just like the old one – a year when we have failed to live-up to our own expectations.

The trouble is that we get so fixated about the wrong kind of newness. There is a newness that God makes. It’s a newness of the future, not of the past. We see it reflected in the newness of springtime, when new things grow out of the old and, what seems to be dead. If we look to God for our newness it is full of promise and hope. If we look to manufactured human things then we are soon disillusioned.

How can you tell the difference between something that God has made and something that people have made? When you magnify them the human-made things look very crude.

New Year (2)

Happy New Year!

The moment I drove my brand new Ford S-Max out of the dealership, the value plummeted by about £5000. Just a few miles and the car was no longer ‘new’.

Newness is such a transient thing. As soon as we grasp something new, it starts getting old, tired, damaged, scratched.

But spring will soon be upon us. Already we can see the snowdrops. New things are growing from old. Fresh and perfect buds glisten with a bright and clear goodness.

In this New Year, lets not chase after the manufactured newness wrapped in plastic. But lets look for the newness that is given to Creation and enjoy what we can never, ever make for ourselves.

New Year (1)

New Year (1)

Happy New Year!

New! Fresh and unspoilt. A new leaf. A new resolution.

We love the sense of newness of something fresh out of the packet, never touched by another consumer. And a new year has a chance of not getting soiled and damaged like the last one.

This is the consumer’s definition of ‘new’ – the pristine virginity, that once it is spoiled, it is gone forever.

But God has spoken of a newness for the future. When confronting people who’s lives and society are completely screwed-up, God says, ‘Look, I am doing a new thing’. When it comes to ‘God’ newness is not a transient thing that disappears when the packet is opened, it is a promise of new growth, regeneration, transforming what is broken into something that is right – a better kind of newness altogether.

A thought on prayer

A thought on prayer

I’d just like to spend a few moments talking about something that people tend to do in private. They rarely mention it to other people, although in fact most people do it quite regularly and probably everybody has given it a go at some stage. Maybe they think its embarrassing but the reality is that most, if not all of us do this.

I’m talking about prayer.

I reckon that even the Pope hasn’t the perfect idea of who it is that he’s talking to when he’s praying. Yet I also suspect that even a child has some idea. This ‘God idea’ is something that most people latch-on to quite easily when we’re thinking of what lies behind this strangely wonderful and sometimes terrible thing we call ‘life’.

We have had several completely non-religious people come into our church because they need to say ‘thank you’ for a new child, or ‘sorry’ for something they’ve done wrong. Maybe we don’t talk about prayer because we have so little idea of who it is that we’re talking to? Or maybe we don’t talk about prayer because it only works when we are totally and utterly honest?

Guardians of the truth

Guardians of the truth

They come in many guises do these guardians. Ardent and fixated they push and battle their truths to the fore.

It has dawned on me that dogma is often a response to doubt and the cognitive dissonance such doubt generates.

I'm peeved to confess that sometimes the guardian of truth is me. When I see myself playing that role then I look at myself and wonder where I'm feeling weak and in need of bolstering my own dogma. Real truth can handle itself, and my prime responsibility is to submit myself to it. When I'm bashing other people over the head with my truth, it is quite possibly not truth at all, but instead my own failing faith clinging to a simple dogma that shrouds the weakness.

Memory and meaning

Kath said, 'Some people make a patchwork quilt, but I'll just make a little pile of memories to keep.'

We were clearing out our old bedroom - part of which included 18 years of stored materials that Kath had used to make curtains, kid's toys, camping accessories and a huge number of other things over the years. So many things that reminded us of the vast number of experiences that comes with setting up home, making a family and extending the house. Throwing out the things that hold memories does violence to who we are, because our memories encapsulate the meaning of a life. So let's hold on to them, in a little pile, to keep, to treasure, this life of ours together.

It reminds me of Richard's sadness as he told me of the weekend he spent shredding his late father's photographic collection. Its hard to comprehend the brutality we see in ourselves, as we dispose of a dead relative's possessions, especially ones that are pregnant with meaning and memory. With my mother's things we had at least three goes at getting rid of stuff - each time feeling a little less sensitive to the fact that we were throwing away something about Mum. Binning memories. In a way, disposing of Mum. In a way. Ouch.

And if we hold on to things for a generation or two, it can only be a matter of the vast infinity of entropic time, before the greatest treasure and memory becomes nothing. And meaning has gone. We have gone.

It struck me that 'meaning' doesn't happen without people. Things only matter when there's a living person to appreciate them - whether that is today or a memory of today. There is no meaning without people.

Surely it is obvious from our daily experience of disposing of things, and the realisation that death eventually overtakes each one of us, that there can be no meaning in this physical universe at all, unless there are some kind of everlasting people or at least an everlasting person, who doesn't forget, but treasures the memories of the things that happen in the lives that he loves. There is no meaning without people. And there is no ultimate meaning without an ultimate person. When there's nobody left it will all have been meaningless, unless there is someone everlasting to treasure the patchwork quilt of our lives.