Startling story of someone crushed to death on sale day at a Wal-Mart on Long Island. This is not the first time something like this has happened at such a place. With Christmas coming on, are there any alternatives out there to mindless consumerism?
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
What is provided is a daily opportunity to stand back from all that, and think. The text isn’t not preachy or specific in any way to particularly religious people. Each day starts with a daily snatch of ordinary conversation that captures one aspect of the season, with ideas and comment from Stephen, then some questions to help reflection. I don’t suppose doing it will take more than a five minutes a day.
Too much Thanksgiving Turkey? Keep a close eye on the background, and you may never eat one again. Thanks to Matt Wardman for one last Sarah Palin interview. She tells us that what candidates go through is brutal, but compared to the turkeys it’s a Sunday School outing. I gather the death penalty was abolished in Alaska in 1957, so all the Governor thereof has to deal with is bizarre farm animal executions. Whatever they did, don’t do it. And as you give thanks for home and family, and the pilgrim fathers and the mothers of the Revolution and the Grateful Dead, above all, I hope you remembered to thank God you’re not a turkey... 
Back in the 1930’s one iconic sign of the great depression in Jarrow was that the town’s Woolworths couldn’t stay open. Now that’s in danger of happening to us all, as Woolworths calls in the receivers — bad news for 30,000 staff, suppliers, and even competitors who may well find their businesses hit by the dumping of a large amount of liquidation stock on the market in the run-up to Christmas. Of course times have moved on, and Woolworth’s, like the rest of the high street, was in big trouble from out of town competition before ever the credit crunch came along. Ironically, Woolworth’s original winning formula was based on providing a comprehensive range of everyday practical goods conveniently under one roof — exactly the battleground on which it has been beaten by today’s out-of-town supermarkets. 
Tradition is lived reality — in the New Testament “I received of the Lord what I passed on to you;” I received it as I received it, and you received it as the person you were, lived it fallibly, but authentically enough to pass it on. Thus tradition renews itself in each generation, out of circumstances, by Grace and the Holy Spirit.
Therefore Tradition is always touched by human hands, never pure and unsullied, always subject to seasons and sin. Pure objective points exist, but they are beyond me. If, driven by fear and insecurity, I extract some element from my life in Christ and try to erect it into an objective norm to bypass the messy process, I am basically making an idol. The tradition I pass on wouldn’t need pickling if it were actually alive.
Lived tradition challenges tendencies, understandable in times of fast change, to romanticize, confabulate, fantasize or panic. It is those tendencies which invite us to fix on some Big Thing, hang desperately onto it, then make it the Grand Shibboleth.His biography is far more than an informative record about a character from the dark ages. It must live in us. That is difficult for our modern minds to grasp, given our habit of considering ancient writings as mere records, or souvenirs of a past age. This is that, but it seeds itself afresh in each successive present, in order to engage us and train us for the future, to live the life for real.
The publishing trade seems to have spotted a new market developing in Advent resources. Maggi Dawn got in first last year with Beginnings and Endings, a thoughtful daily Bible based resource that takes you right up to Twelfth Night. This year I want to try m’colleague and friend Bishop Stephen Cottrell’s down-to-earth Do Nothing: Christmas is Coming. Watch this space.
If that’s not enough to get you there, perhaps you need an Advent iPhone application. I’m trying Advent08 from iHabitus.com. This is a Scripturally based image enhanced supplementary office you run on your iPhone, that may well do nicely in the evening, complete with Celtic artwork that counts down from Advent Sunday, tying everything together. It can be used with personal or group meditation around an Advent wreath. For Liturgical anoraks, the scheme follows colour coded classic Advent themes up to and including the O Antiphons, and lands you up on Christmas Eve all dressed up and ready to go. All this for only 59p from the iTunes store!
Amazing things lurk in vestries — medieval faces at Newton Longville, or the massive Dormer memorial at Quainton.
For over 350 years it was hidden behind Tudor panelling. Dating from soon after Eton’s foundation in 1440, It shows William of Wykeham’s foundation at Winchester (Left) and Henry VI’s at Eton (the two coats of arms), with a 15th century schoolmaster and pupils.
There is writing on this wall. I may be wrong, but I think I caught a significant bit of Terence “Aliud legunt pueri, aliud viri, aliud senes” (“boys, men and elders learn in different ways.”). Some aspects of education have changed, like the stick with which the master drives his pupils, but one basic principle shines through 568 years — connecting with the potential of the pupil as the person they are. Everyone, at all ages, learns in their own way.
That is actually what this extraordinary place is all about. Laying aside inverted snobbery, visits to Eton College always intrigue me. Many of those whose names are carved in the school room have shaped our national life over more than 500 years. Yet Eton is a thriving, and surprisingly effective, evolved community. Nobody today would require a full time chair of governors, a fomer head, to share a stately home with his successor... However, it works.
It’s is a phenomenally subtle, understanding and humane learning environment. For all the strange traditions, there is deep commitment to developing people as they are (à la Terence). Stability, deftly worn, begets creativity. This place remains an antidote to the silly end of contemporary education — the tickbox mentality, churning out clones by the yard.
There’s also a real desire to deploy the strengths of a mature community (or rather network of communities — 25 houses and College) creatively and positively for the future. There is a fudamental commitment to excellence, a big community development programme, and an awareness that people come out of themselvess in completely different ways. Eton has Muslim, Hindu and Jewish Tutors alongside its Christian chaplains. College and diocese are working together to make this country’s first 
open residential centre for interfaith dialogue among young people. We are actively recruiting a director, and hope to get going in earnest next year. The more this partnership rolls, the more passionately I feel this project has a unique potential for connecting people and offering hope at a point in our national life where there is a lot of ignorance, foolery and hype. I’m sure it will facilitate real learning for life; and suspect that Henry VI, King behind the plaster, would appreciate what we’re trying to do here...
In the week a BNP membership list leaks onto the internet with the names of three ministers on it, (none of them Church of England, one allegedly in error) thoughts inevitably turn to Father Ted, and the day an unfortunate accident with a lampshade and some dirt on the window made everyone think he was a racist and revealed a few BNP sympathies, even on Craggy Island:
After yesterday’s post about the International Eating Disorders Centre, Aylesbury, someone asked whether I think you have to have faith to make progress there. Of course people of all faiths and none use the Centre effectively, but some kind of faith about yourself has to grow, I suppose, for treatment to work. And if staff have faith that takes the form of unconditional acceptance, Grace, all sorts of things begin to seem possible.
I’ve now managed to capture the script of Suz Hemming’s dance on Tuesday. She’s one of the most inspiring people I’ve met. She thinks kinetically, and is recovering from an eating/exercise disorder. They are a message of hope for anyone who’s gotten into the habit of boxing themselves up in a place that’s to small to sustain real life:This world is so unfathomable in its magnitude
It's so chaotically huge,
I'm a large person, a MASSIVE person,
And I DON'T mean my body
Even though it FEELS huge,
Even now,
But my mind; your mind; the mind itself,
is infinite beyond of all comprehension,
Interconnected pathways, brim to overflowing
With masses of meticulously defined
thoughts, feelings and notions,
Big ideas, obese with possibilities,
FAT with opportunities
Measure the world in women's clothing sizes
and it's in the outsize collection,
It's the 36GG bra, the big granny knickers,
It's a colossal giant of a place to inhabit
Why make your home within it so insignificantly small?
Why dull the mammoth scale of colours,
sounds and tastes careering through your body?To be a skeleton of the life you knew,
on a catwalk so big
it could consume what's left of you
The Size ZERO body is a label for
ZERO creativity, ZERO Passion,
ZERO spontaneity, ZERO Fulfilment;
ZERO LIFE
Still I've tried to edit my rainbow,
Safe black and white
mixed with an off peach pallor skin,
Made my world as big and unexciting
as a mini rice cake,
I've had bones bruise from lying down,
felt cold in a 25°c room,
Passed out on a treadmill,
(needless to say I was running in completely the wrong direction)
Staring at a plate of food in tears,
Having food eat me rather me eat it,
I've fallen when I go to stand,
and been out of control
by the very measures I took to contain and mediate my life,
I've eaten, and I've starved,
I've lived and then I've pretended to live,But now I've chosen to up roots,
and move into my body
like a new home on moving day,
I'll buy some new furniture for my mind,
And throw out the old décor I don't need anymore,
It'll take a while I know ... to feel like I'm at home,
And I'll miss my old house,
and the neighbours that came with it,
All skinny and all just as sick as me,
But this house is warmer and brighter
throughout the year,
And has a big comfy bed to sleep in,
because sleeping is no longer a sin,
And an average size kitchen
where cupboards are allowed to have food,
And a lounge big enough to throw a party in,
now I've gotten back a social life
and the energy to dance again,
And though there will always be a part of me
That holds that kind of nostalgic idealism
for that house in which I used to live,
That recalls why I moved there in the first place,
And stayed there as long as I did
I don't wish to sell up and move back in,I don't wish to look upon
that tiny broken down shell again,
Sit within its small cold rooms alone
Because this house can be as big
as it needs to be to house the person inside it,
BIG really IS beautiful
It's a BIG, GIGANTIC, HUGE, VAST,
IMMEASURABLE world out there
And it's spectacular,
It's Beautiful
And I know if I try, I can be beautiful too
Just give me time,
And I know I can recover my body,
Make Recovery my home,
And so can you
Recovery IS possible,
NEVER GIVE UP HOPE,
A wonderful Tuesday in Aylesbury, at The International Eating Disorders Centre with Andrew Blyth, the local Vicar. Dr James Clarke was a local GP, who has led the project over many years, taking a fresh approach (for the UK) to Anorexia, Bulimia, and overeating. In the early days he took his inspiration from Isaiah 58 with its stirring call to “Loose the fetters of injustice, swap every yoke, set free those who are bound!”
If the problem is people not eating, common sense says all you do is make them eat and they’re sorted. Right? Wrong. Why are people’s eating patterns cursing them? How is that impacted by the personal context? If the eating disorder is basically a symptom as well as cause there’s no more point trying to manage it behaviourally, manipulating symptoms, than there would be treating a cold by taping up your nose. Of course anorectics need to eat more, but they won’t do it until they want to do it, and they won’t want to do it until they believe they’re worth it. The approach here is holistic and progressive, and based on people working together intensively with a range of professionals — psychologists, art therapists, dietitians, spiritual and community counsellors, in an an integrated programme which tries to create a safe space within which people can painfully but truthfully engage with what’s driving their thing in the first place.
Much of the morning was spent with a group of people struggling with Anorexia. There was a strong feeling in the room that this is often portrayed as being all about gormless teenage girls wanting to be supermodels (the “size zero debate”). Nobody in the room fitted this stereotype. Anorexia affects men, too. Indeed anorexia often afflicts caring mature people who set a high standard. There’s a fine line between what athletes and dancers put themselves through in training (scarily impressive) and the rigours of anorexia (life threatening), with associated highs, lows, and hardships along the way. And, of course, eating disorders include a variety of conditions, including much more prevalent overeating, said to affect about one in four of the population at any time.
Two people at the centre spoke of it as a place they’d found unconditional love, and that was what stoked up their courage to press on and beat their disorder, so that world class professional help actually had something to go on. Like all compulsive behaviour there is an addictive dimension that has to be acknowledged and lived through meal by meal for what it is.
There was amazing, down to earth honesty all round, especially in those having a bad day. There’s so much pretending and low grade social hypocrisy around our lives — a whole system that builds up around the compulsion and makes it seem unbeatable. This is often fuelled by the unreflective, collusive, evasive and gormless comments from freinds and family. It takes incredible courage to step out of all that, and face the problem down for where it is and what it is.
I found the IEDC a really positive place to be. Afterwards there was a reception at the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital (the first civilian hospital building designed to the specifications of former Buckinghamshire resident Florence Nightingale). There Suz Hemming, a gifted dancer, took us through her story in dance. I’ll post her poem tomorrow, when I’ve got it scanned, but here are her words about how Art therapy had helped her, as someone who thinks kinetically and was trapped in an exercise and undereating compulsion:Until I had put some distance between my feelings about my body, about myself, and my life, I carried too much weight mentally. Once I began to unpack that weight, I had a way of eopneing up to the people around me. I could develop conversations in therapy from something I had drawn or written in a “safe” way. I could fine space inside of myself to begin exploring the issues I’d poured out onto paper, a bit at a time, page by page, without trying to take on the big issue as a whole.
My artwork kept me still during the early stages of my recovery when I was told I wasn’t allowed to exercise. It trasfixed me and kept me sane during the time when my safety net of obsessive over-exercise was taken from me, allowing me to begin weight restoration. I’d draw and paint after meals instead of exercising. I’d get angry with the paper, cry at it, I’d try to draw through the panic attacks, I’d keep pressing deeper through the feelings, because the stronger the fear became, the stronger my artwork became. The stronger my voice became.
Oh, and it does take time. This is no fluffy bunny before and after story. The struggle goes on, but now Suz has got a reason to keep going, and the trends are good. I am immensely proud that this extraordinary place should have grown from a network of Christians in the town, Roger Axtell of Anorexia Bulimia Care UK, Dr James Clarke, and be surrounded by the love and prayers of a network in various churches, including Holy Trinity Walton, a growing and engaged Evangelical parish where it has especially close links. Its strapline is “Passion for Life.” They certainly need that here — clinical excellence goes with personal engagement — but the key is the fountainhead of all Christianity, unconditional love.
What did medieval people make of their church experience? Much the same as we do, it seems, from yawns, to a holy disconnected stare, to the gritting of teeth! These utterly wonderful late medieval carvings are to be found hidden away in what’s now the vestry of St Faith’s Church Newton Longville. They seem to have been supporters hidden under the floor of a gallery structure, perhaps a medieval guild chapel, but now exposed to public view.
I was in St Faith’s, to licence Canon John Saunders last night. John brings us a missionary and pastoral heart, big experience, and great hope. Newton Longville itself is a very positive and engaged village, where people seem to get on, everybody is somebody, and there’s a clear sense of mission and purpose. It was good to feel all this last night... no call for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth they went in for round here 500 years ago.
Saturday night was the hottest jazz ticket of the year, Herbie Hancock’s Sextet at the London jazz Festival. This man played with Miles Davis. Herbie rides again! This man is legend: and he packed the stage with some of the greatest musicians in the world. If you were dong a fantasy football best sextet ever, these guys would be in it — Terence Blanchard, James Genus, Lionel Loueke, and Kendrick Scott. No Sax, but a Swiss Harmonica man called Gregoire Maret. And this was not fantasy, but happening feet away from us, with an ease and grace that blew me away.
The programme was a cool mix of barnstorming stuff from the Head Hunters era and cool exploratory playing — HH’s freshness, vitality and skill just seems to grow all the time. At the end people went wild, and we got an encore which consisted of HH, playing one of those keyboard guitar things straight off the set of a 70’s cop show, going round the band, dialoguing with each of them, showin’ em up, in all humility, as five of the greatst musicians in the world.
I’m greatly struck by the parallels between jazz, ministry and creative leadership. This is how you integrate humility and passion. I was helping last night on a residential with our diocesan Developing Servant Leaders Programme, workshopping with some of our curates where our docesan strategy is and could be going (another really motivational evening with some great colleagues). One thing we did together was just observe a clip from the final encore, how each voice was different, how the structure and discipline of being together set people free to be themselves, how Herbie led never dominated, and, above all, the grace and ease of the handovers, the little gestures of affirmation that say so much about what’s really going on.
