‘Tis the season

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on the Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2. In the studio were Lee Mack, Paloma Faith, Tom Kerridge and Catherine Tate and the Kingdom Choir. Last time before Chris moves to Virgin after Christmas.

‘Tis the season to be joyful, ‘tis the time to be glad. Apparently. And so it should be, too. Christmas is about God surprising earth with heaven and leaking some hope into the stuff of human life.

A remote fairy tale? Some might think that, but the stories in the gospels tell of ordinary people – sometimes the unlikely people – finding light interrupting their darkness and opening up a new future.

So, ‘tis indeed the season to be joyful and a time to be glad. But, ‘tis also the season to have humdingers of arguments and family squabbles. How do I know this – when my own family exemplifies perpetual and imperturbable peace and harmony, (of course)?

I read in a newspaper on the train yesterday that it’s good to argue with your partner and bad to keep it all in. The article was actually about couples where one vents their feelings and irritations and the other keeps schtumm – keeping in what really needs to get out. It seems it’s bad for your health to do this.

And, as Christmas approaches with the speed of a kid running away from the sprouts, we all know that tensions rise and tempers flare. The pressures of money, time and relationships all pile on, and some people cope with it better than others.

I know people this Christmas who will be spending the day in a church or community centre with people who are alone, lonely or otherwise isolated. Many bishops will be going into prisons where ‘happy Christmas’ sounds a bit hollow. I will be in two cathedrals (because I am greedy and have three of the things in my Diocese), conscious that apparent joy can hide grief … and it needs someone to help it out.

So, ‘tis the season to look out for your neighbour – to look behind the tree and the tinsel to the flashes of pain and grief that might be lurking underneath. But, it’s also the time to belt out the carols – even the ones that have a baby who never cried – , be surprised by heaven, and to have your imagination grasped by a God who comes among us as one of us and whispers behind our defences: “I am with you, I am on your side.”

 

Food for Thought

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on the Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2 (with Sara Cox):

Isn’t the internet a wonderful thing? Coming down to London on the train yesterday, I had a quick look for 16 October 2018 and discovered – to my amusement – that today is Dictionary Day, Steve Jobs Day, Boss Day, Department Store Day, and Feral Cat Day. Can you believe it? Who invents these things. And does anyone actually do anything on Department Store Day other than go shopping? As someone once put it: Tesco ergo sum … or ‘I shop, therefore I am’.

But, it’s also World Food Day, and here it all gets a bit more serious. World Food Day was first launched in 1945 to celebrate the start of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. Its focus has been on food security and how agriculture needs to be developed a round the world in order for growing populations to be adequately fed.

Now, it’s easy to quote Jesus in the gospels praising those who feed the hungry and clothe the naked, but someone else then has to do the economics. Food banks around the country are absolute life-savers for individuals and families and are usually run by volunteers who believe that no one should go hungry in twenty first century Britain. But, we need to ask why they are so necessary and why use of them is increasing so markedly. But, World Food Day draws attention to the fact that global measures are needed if all people are to be fed. Look at Yemen and other places where famine and hunger are appalling, and food banks are in short supply.

Well, I can hear the voices already telling me that “I can’t change the world’s agricultural policies!” And I get that. But, today I could use my iPhone – or any other mobile phone, obviously – to celebrate Steve Jobs Day and locate a decent department store (hopefully without feral cats hanging around) where I could buy some food and take it to my nearest foodbank.

This way I can pay a small price for making a big difference to someone who otherwise will go hungry. And, in doing so, I’ll also be changing the world.

Anyway, it’s food for thought, isn’t it.

 

Mis-speakings

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on the Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2:

I know it was a week or two ago, but I am still – somewhat perversely – amused by Donald Trump’s ‘mis-speaking’ in a press conference with Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Do you remember it. He missed the word ‘not’ off. Easily done, obviously.

The funny thing is that as soon as you hear the … er … wrong statement, it makes your mind search for the real thing.

I remember speaking at a dinner for charitable financiers in London and concluding with the words of Jesus: “It is easier to put a needle through your eye than for a rich man to pass a camel.” Silence was followed by laughter as the mental cogs turned in search of what Jesus had actually said.

Or, do you remember Jeremy Thorpe’s famous judgement on Harold Macmillan’s so-called ‘Night of the Long Knives” when he sacked loads of ministers in order to stay in power: “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life”?

Or Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ where the people at the back of the crowd at the Sermon on the Mount think Jesus said: “Blessed are the cheesemakers”?

I love it. Being so familiar with the real thing means we sometimes don’t listen and catch the power of the words or the idea any more. We just hear “blah blah blah”.

It’s a bit like drawing. My wife is an artist and she once tried to get me to draw a chair. I drew it … and it looked terrible. When I showed it to her she told me to go away and this time draw the spaces around the chair. I did it – still badly – but the chair emerged from the spaces and I got the point.

The point here, of course, is that we become surprised and curious when we see and hear things differently. So, if Jesus didn’t bless the cheesemakers, who did he bless? Isn’t the startling truth that love is seen in the sacrifice of my life for my friends?

I think misspeaking can, if handled right, shine a light on something even more powerful and true. Anyway, didn’t Jesus also say: “Let your yea be nay, and your nay be yea?” Didn’t he?

 

Everybody hurts

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Chris Evans Show (in Mental Health Week):

It seems to me that some people are better at talking than others. I don’t mean just driving everyone else witless by endless rambling – the classic pub bore. What I mean is that some people find ways to open a valve and let the pressure out by putting into words what’s going on deep down inside them.

Remember that great REM song ‘Everybody hurts’? “Everybody hurts, sometimes, everybody cries.” There’s even a line about “Cause everybody hurts, take comfort in your friends.” It reminds me of that line in Crocodile Dundee when the Ozzie Outbacker responds to an explanation of New York ‘therapy’ with, “Haven’t you got any mates?”

Well, friends are important, but even the most gregarious people sometimes find themselves in a place best described as dark. And it’s easy then to think that you’re the only one who hurts – the only one who cries.

Now, I would say this, wouldn’t I, but anyone who reads the Bible will find utter realism here. People are portrayed as they are and stories are told that reveal a deep empathy with raw human experience – including what we now would call mental health challenges. Look at the Psalmists – poets writing three thousand years ago – who cry out of the depths and give us a vocabulary for pain and suffering. “How long, O Lord, how long” must we endure this suffering? “I feel like I am being hunted and there is no escape – who can I trust in this world?” These songs and poems are ripped from the heart of the sort of experiences many of us endure today.

But, the Psalmists also offer a different take. They shine a different light on this experience. “Where can I go from your presence?” one of them asks. “If I go up to the highest heights or down to the deepest depths, you are there. I go to the farthest east and the remotest west, and you are there, too.”

In other words, if you don’t find the words to express your own anguish, these guys have given you some. Everybody hurts, everybody cries, everybody bleeds. Just don’t believe the ones who say they don’t. And you are not alone. Everybody hurts. Sometimes.

 

Martin Luther King: 50 years

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Chris Evans Show with Sara Cox:

I have seen the Promised Land.

50 years. I remember thinking that if you could look back ten years, you were already old. But, I now remember too much.

50 years today people in Britain were waking up to the news that Dr Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis, having just delivered a speech that suggests in hindsight that he knew his end was coming. He got cheered to the rafters when he said: “I have been to the mountain top … I have seen the Promised Land”. But, like Moses who three thousand years ago peered over into the land for which he had given his life, he died before he could enter it.

Listening again to this immensely moving speech from Memphis, what is powerful about Martin Luther King isn’t just the vision he had – a vision that denied the power of the reality he experienced every day – but his ability to fire the hearts and imaginations of people … to get them to look beyond the limitations of their society and its injustices and have their imagination grasped by a vision and a hope that would not let them go.

It is the power of language and music. Dr King almost sang his evocation of liberation for black people in the United States. The Civil Rights movement was fired by the melodies and words of spirituals, the language of the Old Testament prophets whose poetry haunted their imagination, fired their courage and coloured their defiance of ‘the way the world is’. God was awake to the suffering of his people, and freedom was coming – one day, even if not to-day.

“Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord” were the last words spoken by Dr King to a crowd before his death at the age of 39. Here he dares to suggest that the glory of the Lord is not about some other-worldly realm of pious fantasy, but is to be glimpsed coming to us right in the heart of human suffering and confusion. Dr King had found his own heart and mind captured by a love that would not let him go – by a God who gets down and dirty in the muck and bullets of the real world we all recognise.

50 years. Yet, those words – and his delivery of them – still resonate, still sing out in defiant hope. The now is not the end.

 

Number your days

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Chris Evans Show:

I was on the train down from Leeds yesterday – at some unearthly hour – and caught a glimpse of someone else’s newspaper. The story facing me was that Manchester Town Hall is going to close for six years for massive refurbishment. A similar fate awaits the Houses of Parliament in London, but the details of that one haven’t been nailed yet.

Anyway, the bit that I saw about Manchester that grabbed my attention is that the Town Hall clockface has inscribed on it the words: “Teach us to number our days.”
Now, how miserable is that? You’re off to the pub or to do your shopping, happy as Larry, and you look up to check you’re not late, and staring back at you is a warning to dampen your enthusiasm! Good grief. Or, is there another way of looking at it?

“Teach us to number our days” wasn’t plucked from just anywhere. In fact, it comes straight out of the Bible – Psalm 90 verse 12 – and the full version says: “So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.”

I think what this is saying is: come to terms with the fact that you are not going to live for ever! Despite all the self-help courses and ointments aimed at keeping us eternally youthful, you only get free once you face your mortality. And that, believe it or not, is very cheerful … because it sets us free from anxiety and let’s us live every day to the full. Which is not bad, is it?

So, I can’t gain wisdom – or wise up – until I face up to reality – that every day counts. Which, of course, works in a variety of ways, because it also says to me: don’t waste your time! Don’t let the sun go down on your anger (to quote the Bible again), but sort out your relationships now, while there’s still time. If you get the chance, learn how to play and not just work: do I work to live or live to work? Why let trivia divide us and break us up when time is relatively short.

You probably get the point. Let’s learn to number our days and we might even become wise!

 

Closer to the Light

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Chris Evans Show:

A few years ago I found myself in the Foreign Ministry of a Middle Eastern country having what we would probably call a robust conversation with the deputy foreign minister of that state. At one point he stood up, banged the table and said: “Sometimes it seems there is no light at the end of the tunnel. But, it is not because the light is not there – it is because the tunnel is not straight.”

I have never forgotten that. I admit that when I mentioned this recently someone responded by saying that the light in the tunnel might actually be the oncoming train. But, taking a more positive view, I think it is helpful to recognise that sometimes life is pretty complicated and messy, and that the present darkness isn’t the end of the story.

This month of all months this should be clear. Our Jewish brothers and sisters celebrate Hanukkah, and they do so with candles and lights. Christians are living through Advent – which, even in the word itself, is about waiting and not running out of the darkness in order merely to escape it.

There’s a great Bruce Cockburn song called ‘Closer to the light’ which actually focuses on the dark stuff. In a different song he says: “Sometimes the best map will not guide you; sometimes the darkness is your friend.” I think as I get older I understand this more and more. Rather than look for instant escapes from difficulty or challenge, I try to stay with the reality, trusting that even though the tunnel is not straight, … the light will come and, in the words of John’s gospel that will be read at Christmas, “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

A different way of putting this was told to me by a guy who said: “When you’re in the desert, look for the flowers that grow only in the desert.” What he meant was: if you spend your time in the desert looking for daffodils, not only will you be disappointed, but, you will also miss out on what could be experienced or learned only in the desert.

This isn’t easy or romantic, is it? But, I do think it’s powerful.

 

Nothing Wednesday

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Chris Evans Show:

What day is it today? Wednesday? Just ‘Wednesday’? It can’t be – I thought every day now has to have a tag: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Buy-more-stuff Saturday, and so on. So, surely, today can’t be just ‘Wednesday’, can it?

Well, I just had a quick look online to see if today is significant for any other reason in history, and this is what I found: in 1775 Sir James Jay invented invisible ink. (Not that anyone noticed as they couldn’t read the press release …)

See what I mean? Not a great day – ever – in history. The sooner we get through to St Andrew’s Day tomorrow, at least the Scots will be happy.

Or have I got this wrong? I think we try to bring order and significance to dates, looking for patterns and sequences, but the truth is that one day follows the next and most days are very similar to the days that have gone before them. In other words, most days are ordinary – the everyday is what matters, not the rare dramatic excitements.

I once published a book of scripts and called it ‘Speedbumps and Potholes: Looking for Signs of God in the Everyday’. I bent the title from an Asian thinker called Kosuke Koyama who wrote a book called ‘Water Buffalo Theology’ in which he says that westerners do their theology (that is, thinking about God, the world and us) sitting in a university library reading dead German theologians … whereas in the East they start by looking at the world around them … and everywhere you look there are water buffalo.

Well, I was living in Streatham in South London. There were no water buffalo to be seen anywhere; but, life was shaped by dodging speedbumps and potholes in the roads where we lived.

The point is simple. Most days are routine – sometimes boring – but I reckon the knack is to take the everyday as a gift and look for signs of God in the ordinary … for example, where there is healing, or where people hear for the first time that they are loved and infinitely valuable, where injustice is confronted and truth told.

Today might turn out to be wholly unremarkable – just like any other day. Yet, it can be shot through with light and hope and grace and generosity. It’s our choice.

Happy Nothing Wednesday!

 

Fright Night

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Chris Evans Show:

I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of Halloween. It’s not the spooky stuff or the violence done to a generation of turnips; its the Trick or Treat stuff that gets me. Isn’t the trick for me to not be at home that night … and the treat that the kids knocking on the door don’t have to meet me?

On the other hand, I love Halloween. I love the fact that it takes darkness seriously and compels us to face the reality of life and death.
OK, that’s not exactly what Halloween has become; but, it is what lies behind it all. All Souls night is when, traditionally, Christians remember those who have gone before them, face the power of bereavement and loss, and confront their own death. Here is where the rubber of faith hits the road of really tough human experience. As I know only too well – my dad died only a few weeks ago – the loss of people you love brings you face to face with your own mortality and the fragility of what it is to be human.

Well, that has the potential to plunge us into misery first thing on a Tuesday morning, doesn’t it? But, actually, All Souls (Halloween) can’t be separated from the day that follows it – by which I don’t just mean ‘Wednesday’, but All Saints Day. The darkness is followed by the light of celebration. For Christians this is all about our mortality – that death and fear don’t have the final word. At Christmas – now only seven or eight weeks away – we hear the great Gospel reading that defiantly whispers into the messiness of the world: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot extinguish it.” Carry on with the story and we eventually get to Easter and the darkness of crucifixion being transformed by the quiet eruption of resurrection.

To live as if all were darkness is to cave in to the joylessness of fatalism; to live as if all were happy-clappy light is to prefer fantasy over reality. The celebration of All Saints – ordinary people discovering that light and love are eternal – only makes sense once we have taken seriously the darkness of All Souls that is all too real.

Anyway, I am missing Trick or Treat this year because I am here in London and not in Leeds.

 

Long journeys

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Chris Evans Show.

It’s that time of year again. For me August slows everything down and I finally get some space. But, it’s also the time for long car journeys … and that means loads of time to listen to music. The great thing about your kids having grown up is that no one argues with your choice of CDs.

Well, what you’ll find in my car this morning – I have just checked – is a strange mix of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Richard Ashcroft, Elbow and the wonderful Imelda May. I got back from a trip the other day feeling that my emotions had been shredded, listening to songs that seem to have been dragged out from the depths.

And that’s the power of music. Words on their own can pack a punch, but add a good tune and some decent backing and your guts go on a different journey.

There’s nothing new about this. One of the other things I do during August is read all 150 Psalms from the Hebrew Scriptures. Why? Simply because I get immersed in a song book that doesn’t always reflect my mood or circumstances, but does provide a vocabulary for times yet to come. Whether howling with complaint about the injustices in life, or laughing with joy at the wonderful enormity of the cosmos, or weeping alongside those whose lives have been torn apart, or encouraging your mates to stick with it regardless of the hindrances … the whole of life is in there and there’s a song for everyone at every time and in every place.

Just over a week ago I was talking to child refugees in the countryside outside Khartoum in Sudan. Kids whose family have disappeared and who find themselves abandoned or orphaned through the violence of others. Yet, they still hear the echoes of a haunting melody that whispers of hope as they are taken in and cared for by strangers who meet them where they are. Lament is coloured by laughter; memory does not just belong to the past, but is being created for tomorrow.

So, in all the twists and turns of a fragile life, it is still possible to detect the sound of a plea uttered by Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn: “Love that fires the sun keep me burning.”