John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

A farmer's wisdom in an age of fire

Clapham Village Newsletter, August / September 2022

I am writing this during a record heatwave. Which makes it likely, given our weather, that you’ll be reading this during a snowstorm. But the reality is unquenchable: whilst temperatures always  fluctuate, overall, heat is steadily rising. Increasingly our weather maps show a blistering bright red. We have been playing with fire for too long to be good for the earth.

There has always been fire, writes scientific historian Stephen J. Pyne. But, “Over the past two million years … one genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the world. We developed small guts and big heads by cooking food; we climbed the food chain by cooking landscapes; and now we have become a geologic force by cooking the planet.”

Professor Pyne shows how the ancient, balanced, relationships between humans and fire “broke down when people began to burn fossil biomass - lithic landscapes - and humanity's firepower became unbounded.” He proposes that “fire-catalysed climate change” created a new geologic epoch. “The Pleistocene yielded to the Pyrocene.” ¹

It’s no fantasy that the ‘lithic landscapes’ of the fossil fuel age are finite: we are at or near ‘peak oil’. What may yet prove to be infinite are the practical values of the ‘old ways’. I’m encouraged by those neighbourhood groups across the world who are working out practical methods to help their communities become self-sufficient for a cooler future without oil. ‘Transitioning’ means rekindling the old ways of any particular locale help to reignite a gentler economy of life. 

In his inveterate farmer’s wisdom Wendell Berry encourages us not to be consumed by the insoluble abstractions of “global thinking”, of “how to care for the planet”. “Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence,” he says, and he invokes this set of modest actions as ways to begin turning the temperature down:

“Learn to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made. Put the interest of the community first. Love your neighbours – not the neighbours you pick out, but the ones you have. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighbourhood, and household - which thrive by care and generosity - and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.” ²

 

Notes

¹ Stephen J. Pyne, Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next. University of California Press 2021. 

² Wendell Berry, ‘Word and Flesh’ in The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. Penguin: Allen Lane 2017.

GOD IS SICK OF US NOT LEAVING THE MUNDANE

John’s Notes: Clapham & District Newsletter, Oct-Nov 2023

A plaque on the wall inside the Church of Saint John the Evangelist on New Briggate, Leeds, reads: SIC DEUS DILEXIT MUNDUM. Dick Bonham translates this as GOD IS SICK OF US NOT LEAVING THE MUNDANE. Dick was a theatrical producer of ‘ghost nights’ inside St John’s when he guided me around the ‘redundant’ church some years ago, and he was being playful. I was amused to discover that the Latin dictionary translation is GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD, which struck me as meaning almost the opposite.

I’ve been revisiting that day, in preparation for a talk I’m giving to Clapham’s Age UK group on 4th October. It was 19th September 2007, during a two-month-long deliberately slow walk I made from Hull to Liverpool, loosely following the motorway which connects them, which I called ‘Walking the M62’, and is the topic of my talk. 

My Leeds city tour was hosted by Dick and others from his theatre company, whose particular schtick was to create activities and events encouraging the general public to take a fresh and creative look at the world immediately around them, whether in Leeds city streets, or the hamlets of England along The Great North Road, or Cornish coastal towns.*

We connected on my M62 walk because our intentions were similar: to discover and celebrate the awe and wonder latent beneath the surface of everyday life. I was then living in a housing estate parish, one of those places which suffer from the lazy assumption that all these ‘little boxes’ thrown up in the 1930s, ‘all made out of ticky-tacky’, ‘all look just the same’ and must be therefore the location of very humdrum lives. A mere scratch beneath the surface gave the lie to that, of course, and this was confirmed in a series of ‘Parish Walks’ I did with locals and visitors, where conversation and observation brought the place to life in rich and unexpected ways.

You don’t have to Latinise or spiritualise this observation: that the minutiae of everyday life has significance and value, wherever we are; and intentionally exploring the life under our very noses is so unexpectedly enriching, we miss out if we don’t do it.

 

* See these blog posts for more on this: God is sick of us not leaving the mundane, September 19, 2007; To the edges and back, November 20, 2006.

“You are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you.”

John's Notes - Clapham Village Newsletter, February 2022

“You are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you,” says God to you and me, and all created beings (in Isaiah 43.4).

In human society our understandings of identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage are always shifting; and in our own society these understandings have radically altered over recent decades.  For some, the Church has been frustratingly slow to respond in kind to a more open, inclusive approach to these issues; for others the Church’s very slowness is a blessing, for it offers the rarity of time to enable us to more fully, deeply consider the issues and our response, in heart and mind and in practice, to the challenges of different perspectives, to create space for mutual flourishing.

The church has been debating these questions for a long time; the focus and terms of the discussion shifting over time between gender equality, sexuality and marriage. The underlying question for Christians remains the same: how do these questions fit within the bigger picture of the good news of Jesus Christ - or what he himself termed ‘The Kingdom of God’, the way of God at work in the world.

In discussions which can too easily become polarising between extreme points of view, in more recent times a focus has been on creating a culture in which people can hold very different points of view whilst dialoguing together supportively, affirming each other’s created uniqueness. And so the emphasis in Living in Love and Faith is to ask us to face all these challenges hopefully and to consider, what does it mean to live in love and faith together as a Church?

The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “We are made for goodness. We are made for love. We are made for friendliness. We are made for togetherness. We are made for all of the beautiful things that you and I know. We are made to tell the world that there are no outsiders. All are welcome: black, white, red, yellow, rich, poor, educated, not educated, male, female, gay, straight, all, all, all. We all belong to this family, this human family, God's family.” The Christian way of life (in common with many other religious practices) is rooted in the uncompromising pursuit of unconditional love for each and all.

Living in Love and Faith is the title of a series of meetings in Lent, run by the churches of the Bowland and Ewecross Deanery (ie all the Anglican parishes from Ingleton and Bentham via Slaidburn to Gargrave and Kirkby Malham), in which those taking part will each bring their own life story - experiences, perspectives, joys and concerns - into an affirming, supportive discussion; an open conversation without fear of censure or criticism.

Those who have taken part in Living in Love and Faith courses elsewhere speak of the good experience of listening well to, at times ‘disagreeing well’ with, and being well-listened-to by people quite different to themselves, and many good lessons learned from interactions they might never otherwise have if stuck in their own social ‘bubble’.

The Living in Love and Faith meetings will take place between 7.30-9.00pm in person at Settle Parish Church on Tuesday evenings March 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, and April 5, or on Zoom if preferred… and you are very welcome to join. Find out more at bit.ly/livinglovefaith or from Revd John Davies at [email protected], 01524 805928.

The excellent, in-depth Living in Love and Faith book is accompanied by a range of free digital resources including films, podcasts and an online library, together with Living in Love and Faith: The Course, and a Pastoral Principles course booklet, which together will form the basis of our course sessions. Each are published by Church House Publishing: https://www.chpublishing.co.uk/features/living-in-love-and-faith, 01603 785925.

Birth and taxes, and the renewal of a broken world

John’s Notes - Clapham Village Newsletter, December 2021

As you know, the story of the birth of Jesus in Luke’s gospel begins with taxes. “In those days a decree went out from the Emperor that all the world should be registered”. This census of Caesar Augustus shook things up across the Roman Empire. It triggered the ambitious tax reforms designed to consolidate the Emperor’s already great power, diverting revenue from the provinces to the centre in Rome.

I wonder if any of the people pushed back against this decree, if there were any anti-registration campaigners (let’s call them anti-reggers) stirring things up in Bethlehem. I think we can assume that most first century Palestinians complied only reluctantly with the Emperor’s orders. An expensive and time-consuming disruption to the people’s everyday lives, the census was one of the shocks to the heart of that society which led to the Jewish rebellion of sixty years later, predicted by Jesus and brutally ended by the Romans when they destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 AD.

Now the shepherds, we’re told, stayed out in their fields while everyone else went to register; does this put them among the first anti-Roman agitators, or were they just exempt as key workers? And those wise travellers the Magi also avoided the census, being subjects of the Parthian Empire, another people ostensibly at peace with Rome but troubled by Roman interference in their affairs. In a gesture which today offends on many levels, around this time Augustus ‘gifted’ an Italian slave-girl to the Parthian monarch Phraates IV. Thea Musa later conspired with her son Phraates V to have Phraates IV poisoned, making them the co-rulers of the Parthian Empire in 4 AD.

So the story of the birth of Jesus begins with taxes and takes place in a world of sex and slavery, hostility and confrontation, conspiracy to murder and the will to power. Whilst tragically, eventually, Christendom embraced all these vices and more, the origin story of our faith is still so warmly celebrated because it offers us something refreshingly ‘other’. It offers us a picture of a gentle new world order being humbly born in the background to the mess and noise of our big broken world. Its protagonists move from the fringes - humble Nazareth, the upland pastures, a strange and distant land - to a centre which is itself a non-place, a stable in the back of an inn. This story astonishes because it opens up the possibility of a parallel world of justice and joy emerging almost invisibly from within this broken earth. 

The child would in time unpack all this in terms which turn our old ways upside down: affirming the meek, renouncing wealth as a source of happiness, expressing love for enemies as the formula for a safer, kinder world. He practiced what he preached all the way to Calvary of course, and gloriously back again. Over centuries this story has inspired countless movements for social good, care of the earth, generosity towards others, reconciliation and peace. Do we only love it as a fairy story, or can we grasp how this tale is intrinsically poised to release into the world the power to transform, redeem, renew?

In a rapidly-warming world, Wisdom has built her house

John's Notes - Austwick Parish Newsletter September 2021

They call this the ‘Creation Season’ in the church - around autumn time - when we pay particular attention to the good earth and all its flora and fauna, humankind included, celebrate its abundance and, increasingly, sadly, lament our contribution to its demise. This year’s Creation Season falls between the publication of the recent intergovernmental report confirming the widespread and 'unprecedented' changes to the climate that are 'unequivocally' the result of human actions, and the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow beginning on the 1st November.

Many are tiring of the noise of the news and social media reducing discussion of this most vital of topics to an opposition between the deniers and the doomsters - those who refuse to believe what is plainly before us and those who believe there’s nothing humankind can do to avoid destruction. Many are concerned to step away from this in search of a deeper, kinder, hopeful, practical wisdom to help guide us through the challenges to adjust our present destructive patterns of living to help to heal our relationships with the earth and its delicate ecology. 

Many seeking wisdom in a time of climate change look to the indigenous peoples of the earth: those who ‘despite centuries of political, social and ecological upheavals, have maintained their deep, ancient relationships with their historic lands and waters’. [1] The conservation biologist Gleb Raygorodetsky, after two decades of work with indigenous peoples worldwide, finds wisdom in these people’s 'sort of intimate, spiritual relationship with the land, with the planet… a more holistic way of relating to the land, the animals and our place in this planet.' [2]

Likewise, Christian Aid are finding wisdom in the words of partners and theologians from the global South, publishing a paper on a global theology of climate change featuring voices including that of Uruguayan Guillermo Kerber. He believes that climate change is an urgent question of justice and that it’s about our three-way relationship with God, the vulnerable ones of the earth, and the earth itself. 'Together with the cry of the poor, people, and Christians in particular, should listen to the cry, the groaning, of the earth and respond effectively,' he says. [3]

I often turn for practical and spiritual wisdom to Alastair McIntosh, a self-described ‘human ecologist’, studying ‘the relationships between the natural environment and the social environment… the network of connections.’ This requires a deepening of spiritual vision. ‘Science gives outer sight, but spirituality complements this with in-sight,’ he says. [4]

McIntosh’s search for wisdom embraces all kinds of spiritual practices and traditions, but is firmly rooted in his upbringing in the traditions and time-honoured ways of life of the Isle of Lewis. In his current book Riders on the Storm he addresses the global themes of climate change by taking a walk along the shore of his home village of Leurbost to closely observe  how the relationships between people and nature have shaped that particular landscape and how they are now changing. A deep conversation arises on the Leurbost shore, enriched all the more by the companions he has invited on that walk, a delegation of visitors from Papua New Guinea. [5]

The book of Proverbs in the bible says that ‘Wisdom has built her house. She calls us:  ‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.’ I suggest that if we’re looking for wisdom, then our place is the best place to begin. To rightly assume that Wisdom has built her house in our particular patch of land.  Whilst we may - and we must - learn a lot from the world’s indigenous peoples and those of the global South, and from the ways of nature itself, we must also be confident that we can find the wisdom we need for this time of climate change in our own ‘indigenous’ ways, in the old ways in which we have related to our own soil and each other, those traditional practices on the land and in the home which may have been eclipsed in recent decades by industrial agricultural practices and all the fripperies and distractions of the consumer boom, but which we still value. Making do and mending as an antidote to consuming and discarding. Collaborating as community as an antidote to ploughing on alone. 

Through a fatal misreading of the Genesis story Christianity has often justified the ravaging of the earth by presenting it as God’s gift to humankind for us to dominate and exploit. But there is so much within our scriptures which celebrates creation, and illuminates humankind’s deep relationships within it, shares the wisdom of God’s ecology if you like. There is the Wisdom tradition itself, found in the books of Proverbs, Job, the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, which ‘are about everyday life. About how to keep going.’ The Wisdom tradition in scripture ‘focusses on things like misbehaving children and mischievous gossip. It's about chronic illness and how to cope with it. It's about keeping your temper and keeping to time. It's about the perils of making money and the joys of making love. … It is obviously and immediately relevant to the concerns of ordinary people.’ [6]

Where has Wisdom built her house? Here - where our everyday duties meet the life of faith. Wisdom has built her house here - in our world of work and of getting on with other people. Wisdom has built her house here - as we draw on our experiences of life in nature, and our life in this land. Wisdom has built her house here - as we recall the instructions our forebears gave us as to how to live our lives in tandem with nature and its ways. And finally, Wisdom has built her house here, in our little village places of worship - as we practice the old religion which is always aligned to the seasons of the year and the ways of people on the earth, as we share in the bread and wine, ‘the ordinary things of the world which Christ makes special’ to us [7], renewing our hearts and minds by allowing ourselves to be reminded of the love God has for us, receiving God’s Wisdom to refresh us in living out the way of that love in our everyday lives. 

Here’s a thought. This Creation Season, why not spend some time with the Bible's books of Wisdom: 

'Come, eat of my bread, says Wisdom, and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.' (Proverbs 9)

There will be a day of resurrection

John’s Notes: Clapham Village Newsletter, April 2021; and my Easter Day reflection

I saw a vision: 

it was last Thursday at eleven o'clock in the morning. 

I was standing at the top of Ingleborough, above the farms and villages and towns

stretching out to Morecambe Bay

and the crisp, blue springtime sky broke open over my head 

and the Spirit of God breathed on my eyes and my eyes were opened: 

I saw a new country, a holy country, coming down out of heaven 

shining like a rare jewel, sparkling like clear water in the eye of the sun; 

and all the sickness was gone from the country 

and people moved in its lanes and streets 

and people hugged as they met there

and sang in their churches, pubs and homes. 

I saw the Ribble running with the water of life, 

as bright as crystal, as clear as glass, 

the children of Settle swimming in it.

And the Spirit showed me the tree of life 

growing in the heart of Bowland. 

I saw the teeming towns of Lancashire 

shining in the sun

where there were no more homeless people,

there were no women working the streets; 

there were no more junkies up the closes, 

Covid and cancer were things of the past; 

there were no more racist attacks, 

no more attacks on gay people, 

no more rapists, no more stabbings -  

because there was no more hate.

And I saw women walking safe at nights; 

and the men were full of passion and gentleness, 

and none of the children were ever abused 

because the people's sex was full of justice and joy. 

I saw closed signs on foodbanks

for there was work and just remuneration for all,

and at the gate of BAE Systems was a shining sculpture of a midwife nursing a newborn child

and lorries emerging, full of sophisticated new hospital equipment.

I saw an old woman throw back her head 

and laugh like a young girl 

and when the sky closed back her laughter rang in my head 

for days and days 

and would not go away. 

This is what I saw, looking across towards Heysham, 

looking up from the country of death 

and I knew then that there would be a day of resurrection 

and I believe that there will be a day of resurrection. 

 

Adapted from 'The Prophet's Speech', in ‘Words From The Late Late Service’, Glasgow 1993 (author uncredited, likely Doug Gay or Andy Thornton) - downloadable here: http://bit.ly/words-lls. See also my previous reimagining of this text for my home city: Liverpool Hope, 2003.

 

Church leadership in the pandemic

John’s Notes: Clapham Village Newsletter, February 2021

The Church doesn’t do so well in pandemics. The Black Death intensified because the people believed that the way to be rid of the plague was to appease the deity by coming together for mass and pilgrimages. When in time people realised that their prayers had had the opposite effect they turned on their clerics: at least, those few who themselves had survived and hadn’t fled the parish when the plague arrived. The church - bonded to the landlord class - was a prime target of the subsequent Peasants Revolt led by radical priests such as John Ball preaching liberty and equality for the common people. Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury who had introduced a poll tax, was hunted down and beheaded by protestors.

The 1918 flu pandemic saw many churches close across the world (‘Churchless Sundays’ they called them in the States) and there was plenty of dispute about the rights and wrongs of doing so. In Egremont, Cumbria, where the death rate was appalling, the medical officer asked the rector to stop ringing the church bells every time there was a funeral because he wanted to “keep people cheerful”, whilst some London churches remained open throughout the pandemic, on the grounds that during a crisis people should turn to religion, not be excluded from it. Some congregations took their worship outdoors, much to the ire of local authorities. Giving went down. Tensions rose between traditionalists (insisting on the church’s right to be considered exceptional to the lockdown rules) and innovators (accepting the restrictions and finding new ways to communicate the gospel, eg by telephone). Attendances dropped in a society whose faith had already been shattered by the most brutalising world war. Does all this sound familiar?

This time around, some commentators have criticised Archbishop Justin Welby for his perceived weak leadership during this Coronavirus outbreak. A.N. Wilson in The Times recently lambasted Welby for lacking any ‘display of loyalty to what the church historically stands for’, and instead speaking out ‘wokely’ on social issues and introducing funding to support innovative forms of ministry such as sports chaplaincy. Quoting T.S.Eliot, “The Archbishop shall be our head, dispelling dismay and doubt,” Wilson lamented Welby’s lack of such persona, and quoted sociologist Stephen Bullivant as saying that decline in church attendance, well entrenched before the pandemic, is probably now irreversible. 

It is true that we could have heard more from Archbishop Welby to address the genuine concerns of those for whom closing churches is unconscionable, even in a pandemic. Instead, Archbishop Welby’s focus has been on encouraging us to find other ways to pray, in our homes, eg by using the Church of England daily telephone prayer line (which I know some parishioners here do use, and value). Overlooked in this argument is Archbishop Welby’s willingness last year to publicly discuss loss, disability and depression and explore how to find ways through them. In 1983, the Welbys lost a seven-month-old baby, Johanna, in a car crash. Twelve months later another of their children was critically ill. Their daughter Katharine has mental health difficulties and Ellie, learning disabilities. It has often led him to question his faith. 

Welby’s confessional approach contrasts sharply with the temporal power exercises of Eliot’s Thomas Becket, but his empathic vulnerability has been a genuinely appreciated ministry to so many people reeling from loss and caught in doubt and turmoil. Does this sound familiar? Another church leader once said, “The greatest among you should be like the least, and the one who leads like the one who serves.” The church will emerge, scathed as ever, from this pandemic. But this model of humility, prayerfulness, and empathy, might just be the kind of leadership we need through  which to rebuild.

Capturing the spirit of Tennyson’s ‘wild bells’

John’s Notes: Austwick Village Newsletter, January 2021

It is said that the New Year's Eve peal of the twelve bells of Waltham Abbey inspired Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘Ring out, Wild Bells’. He was staying nearby at the time. In some versions of the story it was a particularly stormy New Year's night, and the ‘wild’ bells were being swung by the wind rather than by ringers - a fanciful idea which campanologists think unlikely. It would seem truer to imagine that the storms which roused Tennyson that night were internal. The tumult he felt was within. ‘Ring out, Wild Bells’ forms part of the longer poem ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’, a requiem for the poet's beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who was engaged to Tennyson’s sister Emily, and who had died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged 22. 

Many composers have set ‘Ring out, Wild Bells’ to music, including Karl Jenkins who makes it the centrepiece of the finale of ‘The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace’, his resolutely anti-war epic based on the Catholic Mass, commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum to mark their millennial move to Leeds. Jenkins powerfully conveys Tennyson’s defiant appeal for the darkness of the present time to shrink before the light of a coming better future. 

This is the spirit I hoped to capture as I read Tennyson’s poem in church over Christmas. After the crippling year we have had, as a community, as a nation, and as a world, I wanted to help us channel our pain and anger at the plague we’re in and all its brutalising effects, by spitting out the line: “The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.” In face of ‘the party strife’ - the social and political upheavals which beleaguer us, the suffering many and the profiteering few - it feels right to voice our loud appeal to “Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times.” And, engendered by the great goodwill generated in this crisis, is the longing to move forward in hope: “Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good.” (‘The common love of good’ puts me in mind of one MP’s appraisal of the food poverty campaigning footballer Marcus Rashford, “He has the sort of principles and moral values that most people hold.”)

The story we hear at Christmas - of ordinary Mary, Joseph, the innkeeper and the shepherds, the wise explorers responding audaciously to the extraordinary circumstances they found themselves in - resonates to every ordinary person in this world who has each had to respond, on an almost daily basis, to our extraordinary situation this year. The mourning, storm-crossed Tennyson, inspired by the exuberant message of the gospel story, found faith to believe in the ultimate triumph of “The larger heart, the kindlier hand”, in the ringing out of “the darkness of the land”, and the ringing in of “the Christ that is to be”.

It’s extraordinary that the simple birth of a child in Bethlehem brings so much hope to a struggling world. In the defiant spirit of Tennyson, Jenkins, the gospel writers and everyone who has ever raged against the darkness, may we look forward to better times ahead, and play our part in ringing in these changes.

 

In Memoriam (Ring out, wild bells) - Alfred Lord Tennyson

 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

   The flying cloud, the frosty light:

   The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

 

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

   The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

 

Ring out the grief that saps the mind

   For those that here we see no more;

   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

 

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

   And ancient forms of party strife;

   Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

 

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

   The faithless coldness of the times;

   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

 

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

   The civic slander and the spite;

   Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

 

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;

   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

   Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

 

Ring in the valiant man and free,

   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

   Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

 

Can we save Christmas…. or can Christmas save us?

John’s Notes: Clapham Village Newsletter, December 2020

Can we save Christmas? There’s a lot of anxiety at the moment around that question. Or if not anxiety, then a pushing back against the sobering thought that coronavirus regulations will restrict the ways we can celebrate, where we can go, who we can meet with, and so on. We’re anticipating a trimmed-back Christmas with absurdities like Carol Services with no singing, pubs closing at 10.00 on New Years Eve, blowing kisses to granny through the window of her care home, and so on.

‘Saving Christmas’ means far more than salvaging the high street shops by our bounteous spending. For many the question is clearly, how can we ‘save’ this Christmas from being a sad time of silence and distance and loss? Of course, we understand that for some people, every Christmas is a time like this, for all sorts of reasons; that because of bereavement to family breakdown or other circumstances, for many people every Christmas needs ‘saving’ - or avoiding. The idea of our ‘hibernating’ Christmas this year may be an attractive one for those who find this season painful. 

If we can’t find a simple answer to the question, can we save Christmas?, will it help to dig a little deeper by asking instead, can Christmas save us? In this year’s stripped-back celebration, if we go back to basics - give time to the original story - will that help and direct us in the challenges of our lives today? It’s a story full of magical moments, with angels and cosmic signs and exotic visitors; but at heart it’s a human story, of how some ordinary people responded to the extraordinary circumstances they found themselves in, with faith and hope and love.

One good consequence of this past year was the way that for a while, the monetisation of every aspect of life took second place to neighbourliness, fellowship and community. For a few weeks, even months, we reset our values to a human level, finding ways to express how we most merit those who show love and generosity and self-sacrifice in their life and work; and taking time to listen to each other, including to some more-often-than-not neglected voices.

Can Christmas save our young ones trying to find a place in a world which seems to be closing more doors than it’s opening to them at present? Can Christmas save our faithful old ones wondering if the countless hours they’ve spent in the place of worship have been worth anything at all? Can Christmas save our leaders torn between the trappings of power and the calling to integrity? Can Christmas save our working men and women in squeezed economic times? 

I’m confident that we can tease out some answers to these questions if we spend time with Mary, with Simeon and Anna, with Herod and with those innkeepers and shepherds this year; by reading  the early chapters of Matthew and Luke, seeking to make connections between their very human story and our own.

Clapham pupils capture a moment in history

John’s Notes: Clapham Village Newspaper, August 2020

Watching the school leavers of 2020 planting a time capsule in Clapham village park on the school’s last-ever day, 17th July, reminded me that a long time back - staggeringly, 49 years ago - I buried a time capsule of my own in our back garden. The Clapham Time Capsule - now set in concrete - is due to be retrieved in 2050. Maybe one or two of this year’s ‘last-ever’ pupils will be around to take their children along to share in that revealing moment. 

I must have buried mine during the second week of June 1971, as that was the week that John Noakes, Peter Purves and Valerie Singleton planted the Blue Peter Time Capsule in the grounds of Broadcasting House - to be reopened in the year 2000 - and encouraged all us young viewers to do the same. Whereas the BBC team filled their ‘capsule’ (actually it was a humble box) with Blue Peter memorabilia and film reels, I vaguely recall that mine contained a plastic action figure and a Dinky car, a poem (the one I was proud to have had printed in the school magazine that year), and I imagine perhaps a page from a comic and maybe a picture of my 1970 Division One Championship-winning heroes (just like Slade and power cuts, Everton were all set to be big in the Seventies, but it was 14 second-rate seasons before they lifted that trophy again).

Following the Clapham ceremony I suggested to my Mum that maybe I should try to dig up my capsule, as I’ve a rough idea where I planted it. She was noncommittal, understandably, given the probable havoc I would create in their garden; also, judging by the decomposed condition of the contents of the Blue Peter box when they retrieved it after just 29 years underground, I doubt there’d be much left at all of mine.

We can be confident that Clapham’s corrosion-resistant steel capsule will keep their memorabilia and memories intact. Which is good news, as the Clapham pupils’ time capsule also contains something quite unique: extracts from their ‘Lockdown Diaries’. Unwittingly, the class and staff of 2020 were in a position to capture something of distinctive historical value - the thoughts of a community’s youngsters during the most exceptional worldwide event in decades. It will be fascinating to those who open the capsule in 2050 to read about how they spent their days, apart from their friends but connected by online games, home-schooled and learning new skills in baking and creating artworks on stone. There are many memorable passages (you can read them in the souvenir newspaper which the pupils produced in the Summer term): the most poignant for me being  Sammuel’s comment as they began lockdown in March: “When we were home I thought that would be the end of Clapham School.”

This ending has been sad and painful enough, and an enforced premature finish would have been even more unbearable. Thankfully those who remained until the end, did return to enjoy their last few weeks in a bubble together. We hold in our prayers the leavers from Clapham School, including the staff team led by Matthew Atkinson and Adam Kay, as they move to new beginnings; and the whole community at this time of loss and adjustment. 

Through acts of collective will, we have created a new sort of world

Austwick Village Newsletter May 2020

In the space of a few short weeks, through acts of collective will, we have created a new sort of world. It is a world where hedgehogs safely meander across our roads; a world where armaments engineers now make medical equipment; a world where every homeless person is gifted a room of their own; a world where rare wildflowers colourfully multiply on uncut verges; a world where neighbourly acts are flourishing; a world in which we stop once a week to applaud the low-paid, high-stressed workers whose care, skill and sheer hard graft saves and sustains our lives.

Yes, it’s true that this bright new world has only been created in reaction to the dark threat of a virus we have yet the knowledge to understand or the means to inoculate against. But whilst many of these world-changing decisions have been taken by government, it has nevertheless been our willingness to accede to them, to cooperate for the common good, which has made the difference.

By acts of collective will, we can change the world for the better. I write this in Easter Week, with its stories about ordinary people inspired by a man who showed them a new and brighter way, and who threw themselves together to form a movement with mutual accord and the common good at its heart. The vision that they followed was hard-won. For Jesus’ adherence to a new ‘way’ of being, which he often called ‘the Kingdom of God’, brought him head-to-head with elites whose power he challenged and who - in the course of a week of protest and confrontation - collaborated to have him executed not as a common criminal but as a threat to the state (for the Romans reserved crucifixion solely as a punishment for political rebels).

His entry into Jerusalem on a donkey and his rumpus in the Temple were what we’d call ‘direct actions’, symbolic, provocative statements challenging in the first instance the Roman emperor’s incorporation of military power and divine right, and in the latter the corruption of the high-priestly Temple rulers. Because of this, he had it coming, his crucifixion. But belief in his resurrection has inspired countless people throughout the centuries to create new sorts of worlds in unpromising places.

Even in the midst of this terrible coronavirus, if we have been thrilled by these glimpses of how a better world could be, then we may not want to stop here. We may want to ensure that those wildflowers flourish even after this lockdown is over; we may want to guarantee that every homeless person will always be housed. We may want the arms makers to continue their transformation as suppliers of life-saving equipment. We may want to protest the relative poverty of those key workers who ought to be better rewarded; to change the rules on housing, debt and welfare which so oppress the low-paid and the unemployed. We may want to secure ways to keep our new-found neighbourliness going.

Changing the world may sound like a childlike, simplistic dream. But in the face of a desperate situation, in the space of a few short weeks, through acts of collective will, we have created a new sort of world. Why not push for more? Why not carry on?