The Gift of the Ordinary

I will begin with an extract from “How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice” by Pat Schneider

"What I want back is the common everyday walk in awareness of the presence of mystery. Mystery isn't always strange. What is strange is how seldom we see it, how seldom we hear it. Mystery is as common as the gravel road and the blackberry hanging ripe on a vine in August heat in my childhood; it does not have to be paid for by any particular belief. It doesn't go away. I'm the one who goes away. Walks away. Runs away. Crashes away. The mystery is as common as the beam of light, spruce-filtered, falling on the fifth step of the stair this morning in my house in Amherst, Massachusetts. It is the common, seen uncommonly. When we see, when we hear, when we intuit how much we are loved, it is the common that is uncommon. It is the ordinary that is the body of spirit, the physical presence of mystery. I think I was reaching for this understanding when I wrote this poem:

"The Patience of Ordinary Things"

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How sales of feet know
Where they're supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

Lovely isn’t it.

I was chatting with a friend on a beautiful early summer evening when I noticed a flower tree in the gardens. I hadn’t noticed it before. It had white petals and yellow centre, with a gentle pink around the edges. It had thorns like a rose tree. I said to my friend I hadn’t noticed it before that day, I don’t know why. We didn’t know what type of flower it was, so my friend got out her phone and through her camera looked at “Google Lens”. It said it was a “Dog Rose”. It certainly looked like one, although apparently they are not meant to be climbing bushes and this was standing alone. Whatever it is it is beautiful and it doesn’t really matter that much what name we give it. It reminded me of a conversation I had a few weeks ago with friends who had obsessed with an app that told them what bird was singing around them. I remember thinking and saying at the time how that didn’t really interest me, I was much more interested in the song and perhaps joining in myself. By the way I am not decrying knowledge here, I am interested in many things, I just don’t want to get too interested in the intricacies of things that I lose sight of feasting on their natural beauty. This some thing that is so easy do.

I went for a walk around Altrincham on Monday evening with Molly. As I walked around I had the words of e.e. cummings singing in my heart “I thank you God for most this amazing day”. I had been carrying this feeling with me for a couple of days. I was not ignoring the troubles of life, I was just experiencing the giftedness of simply being alive. We had been out a couple of times already that day drinking in the gifts of the ordinary. We bumped into a couple of half drunk people who I know from the gym who were sitting in the sun outside the ”Con Club”. They told me how lovely Molly is and how lovely dogs are. They both had perfectly white teeth and perfect skin, it made me smile and wonder at my love for imperfect beauty of nature. We walked on and passed the town hall. There was a choir performing, I think it was part of “Pride in the Town Hall”. It was beautiful to listen from the open windows taking in these angel voices. When they had finished, I called out a bravo and applauded their efforts. We walked home chatting with a neighbour about the delights we had listened to before bumping into more friends who delighted in Molly.

It brought to my mind the following from “Small Graces” by Kent Nerburn. “We seldom pause to shine a light upon the ordinary moments, to hallow them with our own attentiveness, to honour them with gentle caring. They pass unnoticed, lost in the ongoing rush of time. Yet it is just such a hallowing that our lives require… For though we may not live a holy life, we live in a world alive with holy moments. We need only take the time to bring these moments into the light.”

There is a beautiful gift in the ordinary. It brought to mind a wonderful book, “The Gift of the Ordinary” by Katrina Kenison. At its heart is an encouragement to appreciate the simple, everyday moments and aspects of life that can so easily be overlooked and taken for granted. It's about finding beauty, wonder, and value in the unremarkable, and recognizing that the ordinary act of living itself is a gift. In essence, "the gift of the ordinary" is about shifting perspective and finding joy and meaning in the everyday, rather than always seeking out extraordinary experiences. It's about recognizing that true richness can be found in the simple things. Something I noticed while simply walking with Molly the other evening. Something I offer to us all as we step into the summer.

“The Gift of the Ordinary” is at the heart of “Ignation Spirituality”. Which is a form of Christian Spirituality developed from the teachings of St Ignatius of Layola. He was the founder of “The Society of Jesus” (The Jesuits) in the 16th century. At its heart is spirituality centred around seeking “God’s Will” through every day, life and prayer; to seek through the ordinariness of life, through love and service. Its emphasis is on finding God in all things and forming a personal relationship with God through this. It is so easy to miss the beauty and the divine nature of a flower because we are like Dorothy always looking for whatever is beyond the rainbow. It is about being fully present to everything right here and now and recognising the sacredness of everything.

I see parallels to the Buddhist concept of mindfulness. Not exactly the same of course, but there are similarities. A key component is to be present to everything, to most ordinary aspects of life. The following contemporary tale illustrates the point. A Buddhist student was trying to stay present to life but was struggling with why he had to do so. He was aware that the lessons he needed to learn could from any place, if only stayed open to everything. So, he was going about his day practising doing so, while not understanding exactly what that meant. Now while he was walking round town, in this open and aware mood, he heard a loud noise from what seemed like hundreds of people in a large hall he was passing by. It took his attention and so he walked into what turned out to be a Bingo Hall. There was a big game going on. He looked up at the wall of the hall and there in front of him was the lesson he was seeking. There was a huge sign that said, in large block capitol letters “YOU MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN”.

It is said that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Well, the teacher is always present, if we are awake and paying attention to everything. There is another lesson too. It is up to us to choose to be present, or you won’t notice these simple gifts of the ordinary. In fact if you search for the wisdom on some mountain top you might just miss it, because you are too focused on the peak. The lessons are everywhere in life. As Rob says it is in Tesco’s in Baguley just as much as some spiritual site in the back of beyond. It’s about where we are at within ourselves as opposed to where we are at geographically.

It is about being present, being open, paying attention to everything. As Mary Oliver has pointed out “Attention is the beginning of devotion”. There is something beautiful, simple and humble in her poetry. Her work was so real, something I identify with deeply; the spiritual has to be real for me, or not at all. Her beautiful and often life affirming poetry grew from her empathically observing her own life and experiences. Having observed the life in front of her she asks about life and how to live it. To her this is religious, devotional living, “attention is the beginning of devotion”. To love this world is to pay attention to the simple gifts of the ordinary.

Here follows one of Mary’s great poems. This one is essentially about Spring, and what a beautiful Spring we have lived through. It is also a poem about how we ought to live our mortal lives. The poems simply describes a black bear awakening from hibernation, coming down the mountain, and showing her perfect love by simply being a bear and doing what a bear does. For Mary there is only one question, “how to love this world”. How do we love the world, by paying attention, by recognising the gift of the ordinary.

"Spring" by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

This loving the world, seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary is a concept explored by the great Rabbi of the later 20th century Abraham Joshua Heschel who said “Let us love the ordinary. Let us love the closeness of God and the sacred, here and now. Let us cherish the everyday, the every breath, the where we are.” He also said “It takes three things to attain a sense of significant being: God, A Soul, and a Moment. And the three are always here.”

You see we live by breath, by moment and if we do so attentively we can know and experience the Divine in this life, in the extraordinariness of each and every ordinary moment.

How Heschel viewed the extraordinariness is exemplified in the following story from his life. It is something he would say when he gave an evening lecture. As he began he would say the following words.

"Ladies and gentlemen, a great miracle has just occurred!"

As the audience began to stir in puzzlement, the great theologian would elaborate…

"Ladies and gentlemen, a great miracle has just taken place...the sun has gone down."

Of all the things we take for granted in life, perhaps the fact that the day begins and day ends might be the greatest. Life is the greatest gift of all.

We can cultivate the miraculous out the ordinary out of what may seem mundane, the everyday. The sunrise and the sunset. Just simply being here with one another. This is the gift of the ordinary. We can help create and find the miracle and magic in the ordinariness of life, by simply truly being here and being present in life. We can help one another to do so too. We can find ways to plant little bits of magic in life for one another and for ourselves. We can leave little clues for one another too, things that can point the way. I am going to end this morning’s service by sharing a little story from “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” that Annie Dillard published in 1974, over 50 years ago. There is a beautiful peace of wisdom in this that for me brings to life “The Gift of the Ordinary”, a simple act with the humblest of objects, that can transform lives. I will leave it with you, with no further explanation.

She wrote:

“When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.”

May we all find ways to discover the gifts of life in the most ordinary places. May we know the “Gift of the Ordinary”

Let us learn to bless this world with our extraordinary ordinariness.

Please find below a video devotion based on the material in this "blogspot"

Radical Amazement: Walking Your Path in Service and Joy

I am often amused by people’s responses to what I do as a vocation. I’m even more amused by what they call me. A couple whose wedding I recently conducted called me Father and others assume I am a vicar. Alex the flower man in Altrincham often refers to me as father and a friends sister introduced me to her boyfriend as a priest the other. I made it very clear I am not. I have heard of someone else calling me Pastor Dan. I’m sure I’m called many other things too, which I won’t repeat. Now while my title is reverend, I am a minister and this is an entirely appropriate title for what I do. To minister literally means to serve and I believe this is what I do, I serve people, I serve life and I serve God. I am a minister and to minister is to serve. I often wonder when I listen to our political leaders if they are truly aware of this, that they are there purely to serve “we the people” and not the other way round. The Prime Minister ought to see them self as the number one servant in the land. Sadly power can go to anyone’s head. If I was to appear on Question time or to question the current candidates at the general election this is what I would put to them. As Prime Minister how do plan to serve we the people? Can you explain to me what it means to be the number servant in the land, the Prime Minister. That said enough of that. I am a minister of religion.

To minister is to serve. Now some say I am an unorthodox minister. I remember a congregant once saying that “I was like no minister she had ever met before.” I remember Rev Bill Darlison’s response to this comment. He quipped “Danny you are unlike any minister that anyone has ever met before.”

So it appears true that I am an unorthodox minister and yet to me I simply do my best to fulfil my role, to simply serve life through love. To show others the way of love and service and hope in the midst of suffering. I cannot take away anybody’s suffering, but I can walk with them and by doing so meaning emerges and despair is dispelled.

To quote Micah (Ch8 v 6), the inspiration to the second hymn we sang earlier.

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Will you come and walk with me?

I do not think that there is any doubt that we have lived through some difficult days, some challenging years. Most of us have had some difficult personal challenges in our lives and the lives of those we love. This has always been thus, there is always challenges in life. That said this does not mean we cannot find joy. Something that was so beautifully explored in the wonderful conversation John Poskitt led at Urmston last week. We all experienced Joy as we remembered and shared about past pleasures. It is vital to remember and to share our joy, just as much as it is to share our suffering

I was out with some friends on Monday. We were supposed to be walking Molly and Ronnie. Not that they needed us, they just enjoyed one another. One of my friends was suffering as his grandmother had just died. Two others talked of the struggles with siblings in their family and how they can help them. In sharing together some of the struggle was lifted. In fact, the conversations soon turned to joy. The dogs wrestling in utter bliss also helped. This is not to make light of the real suffering, we walked and we talked and we shared together. There is real faith and healing in this. In so many ways this is what gives birth to joy.

It is easy to feel powerless against this tide of suffering. How do we keep our heads up and our eyes and hearts open to one another and life, how do we find Hope in the midst of all of this? How do we transcend despair?

Well I believe it begins in being together; I believe it begins in ministering together; I believe it begins in and through service. Rabindranath Tagore said “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” It begins by bearing witness to the love and service and the coming together, holding and inspiring one another. People walking together in their suffering, in love. I see it in the little things as well as the bigger things. It doesn’t take away the suffering but it brings to life the love present in each of us, a power that will always overcome the powers that divide us. To quote those words that Jo Cox left us with “There is more that unites us than divides us.” or in the words of Harry Stack Sullivan “ We are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered, or whatever.” We all live with the same struggles, we are all born from the same earth, live under the same sun and I believe have the same spirit running through us all.

As we serve one another meaning emerges and we discover our own true hearts. It does not end the suffering but it creates Hope and meaning from the suffering and in so doing we build a legacy of the heart for those who follow. As we serve one another we develop our own hearts and souls, in serving one another we are working on ourselves, on our own souls; every act, every word, every gesture of genuine compassion naturally nourishes our own hearts and minds and souls. Service is soul work, it is the heart in action and it brings us fully to life. In so doing we transcend the very real suffering that is an aspect of all life; in so doing we transcend despair.

Through faith in life itself, by giving ourselves fully to life, we know joy. Joy is an attribute of a full, rich and deeply meaningful life. It is radically different to fun, pleasure and happiness, these are merely emotional qualities. Joy is a spiritual quality that is present within us, despite life’s circumstances. Joy is about connection, intimate connection. When I know joy I am at one with life and with myself. Through love and service we can begin to once again awaken to the amazement of life and know joy.

Joy for life itself can be known even during life’s troubles and difficulties. The people Jesus spoke to 2,000 years ago were not living easy and comfortable lives. Those people knew about conflict, oppression, tragedy and almost constant grief. He told them that all that was wonderful, life-giving, life affirming, all that is meaningful was theirs. He said to them “Enter into my kingdom with joy.” And “This is my commandment, that you love one another.”

The kingdom he spoke of can be with us right here right now, we can know and experience the commonwealth of love right here, right now. And how can we know it? Well by fulfilling the commandment to love one another. Love though is not some mushy sentiment, it is an act, it is a way of being. The commonwealth of love comes into being by giving ourselves fully to life, to one another; through giving ourselves fully to life and to one another we truly realise the joy of living. In so doing we will be awakened to the true amazement of what it means to actually be alive.

I witnessed a beautiful example of this the other day as I walked with my grieving friend. He told me he had spent two hours the previous evening listing to his auntie. His auntie had spent the final few hours with her mother, his grandma and she simply shared about the experience as he listened. He said little, all he did was bare witness, he helped bare her pain and suffering. It seems she hadn’t really spoken of this with anyone else. It brought him close to his aunt and of course to his beloved grandmother. He also allowed his auntie to share her suffering too. She had since the death been too caught up in practicalities, to speak of her own grief. As I listened to my friend I thought to myself. This is what Jesus was speaking of on the “Sermon on the Mount” This the Kingdom of Love” right here right now. Not some mysterious state in another dimension, but this walking side in this spirit, in the kin-dom of love, this commonwealth of love, coming alive through our humble human being.

.Tagore said: “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”

This is the purpose of the religious life to awaken joy through service to and for one another. Joy is about connection, intimate connection. When we give of ourselves to others and to life we know the joy that is truly living. That said when we live only for ourselves and live dis-connected from life, we quickly become joyless once again, we lose faith in God given life, our experience of life becomes dulled and meaningless.

Some people say “everything happens for a reason”, in so doing suggesting it is all part of God’s plan. I have never believed this and believe it simply opens the great theodicy question “How can an all-powerful and all loving God allow suffering? A question that comes into my consciousness constantly as a minister of religion.

My truth is that I do not believe that everything in life is pre-ordained or pre-determined, the future is unwritten. I do believe in the Lure of Divine Love, that all life is given free will and it is our task to bring love alive in life and to encourage others to do the same through our example, in this sense we are not powerless against the tide of despair. It is our responsibility to become beacons of hope to others in their suffering, to become the light of the world. Hope rises from the ashes of suffering and meaning emerges through our living and breathing. This is why everything matters, every thought, every breath, every feeling, every action, and every word. This is also one way in which joy can be found in life, through love and service for others, despite the very real turbulence all around us. I believe in life I am constantly in awe and amazement at it, despite the very real suffering present. I live with eyes, with all my senses including the sixth sense fully open. It is the only way I know how to live fully alive.

Some may ask how and why can I believe this? My simple answer to this is “This is what my 52 years of living breathing and waking up has taught me.” I believe in life, it constantly amazes me. It has done so again this week, as I have walked side by side with others.

Life amazes me, constantly. Despite all the darkness and destruction that is present, that can overwhelm it all, life and love always seems to find a way through. Like that little shoot that finds its way back to life every spring time, finding its way through all the obstacles in its way, insisting on reaching out beyond and finding life. That amazes me; I find that utterly amazing.

Abraham Joshua Heschel said that:

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

Through living in love and service I am awakened to the amazement of life. My senses are fully awake. But what is amazement you may well ask? What is radical amazement?

“Radical Amazement” captures those moments, those deeply human moments when we find ourselves intensely connected to the mystery and the majesty of existence. It is found not so much in the big moments, when we mark life’s achievements, it is more about what Heschell himself describes as “the common and the simple” those small things that reveal “the infinite significance” of existence. In many ways “radical amazement” is about paying attention and looking deeply at the routine moments of our lives and experiencing just how incredible they are. There are parallels to mindfulness here, but I think there is more to it than that, there is a sense of eye popping awe and wonder in looking through radically amazed eyes. It’s about seeing the miracle in existence. How many of us truly recognise and acknowledge just how amazing it is that we exist at all?

“Radical Amazement” is about looking into life with truly open eyes, it is an ethical act and an intentional decision, it is the ultimate spiritual practise and as such it is one that involves great risk. This is because it opens us up to all that is, as it truly is. This requires courage, because to see the beauty also requires us to see the horror too. This may seem too awful for some, but it is the awe that accompanies vulnerability that is required to be awakened to radical amazement.

To see the world with awakened eyes, fresh eyes, open eyes is look into life in “Radical Amazement”. It is life as it truly is in its awe filled beauty. It is to truly let life in and to fill us to the brim.

It seems to me that “Radical Amazement” is how to live and breathe our human spirituality. At its essence spirituality is about being amazed it is about cultivating greater openness and deeper awareness of the beauty, blessing and mystery of life.

Suffering is an aspect of living, it cannot be escaped. Everybody suffers. Life itself though is not suffering, love and joy are also an aspect of life too. How do we experience love and joy? Well it’s quite simple really. It comes through living with all our senses wide open. It begins by simply opening our eyes and our arms. It begins in love and service. It begins by simply walking humbly with one another and humbly giving thanks that we even exist at all. This is what it means to live in and through Hope and it is this that will lift us from despair despite the very real suffering in life. It begins by simply looking into the eyes of our neighbour and recognising the amazing thing that is their existence and continues as we walk out of this chapel, look at the world in which we live and by simply giving thanks for life, for it truly is amazing that life exists at all.

May love guides us in the weeks ahead, may it lead us to Hope and away from Despair in spite of the very real suffering present in life.

Below is a video devotion based on the material in this "blogspot"

Sabbath Time: Becoming Human Beings Rather Than Human Doings

“The peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I vital it is to rest in whatever grace, with whatever peace we can find in this world. So often in life we find ourselves wrestling with someone or something, often ourselves. Like Jacob at the river side. In the end though I usually surrender and find myself resting in the presence of still water and find peace.

I have been somewhat tired and a little run down of late. This was probably caused by a bout of ill health, that was stomach related and drained a lot of my energy. I also had one or two difficult situations that drained my emotional, mental and spiritual energy somewhat. I have been physically resting, including avoiding the gym. I returned on Monday and I have to say it was a real slog. In fact last Monday was a slog in general. Later in the day ideas about what I might want to look this week began to form. I thought about the need to find, space, to rest, the need for sabbath time.

I felt much better on Tuesday. It began in silence in my meditation group. It felt wonderful to sit in silence with others, to rest and not wrestle. I then went to Urmston to join the “Common Search for Meaning” group. John Poskitt led a wonderful conversation on “Pleasure”, the things in life that bring us pleasure, especially in difficult times. It was a real joy for all who were there. I found it hit that lovely spot. It got me thinking not just about sabbath and rest as a form of recuperation, but also how much leisure and pleasure are vital to the soul. In some ways my greatest pleasure comes from space, from pause. I have also found that sometimes the greatest pleasure is pleasure delayed. We live in an age when we want things and we want them immediately, right here right now. We live in such an instant culture where pleasure must come on demand. There is though a joy and pleasure in patience and in waiting. In many ways this is essence of sabbath time and living by pleasure. We want it, we want it all and we want it now. So much so that we can race through life, feeling nothing.

This is wonderfully illustrated in a favourite story of mine. It is of a workaholic businessman who decided to take an African Safari. He plotted a course and determined a time-table. He hired workers from a local village to carry the various containers and cases. On the first morning, the entire party roused early, travelled very, very fast and went very, very far. On the second morning, they roused early, travelled very, very fast and went very, very far. On the third day, the same. On the fourth morning, the local tribesmen refused to move. The man gestured irately and fumed at the translator to get them going. “They will not move,” the translator relayed.

“Why not?” the man bellowed, thinking of all the time wasted and money spent. “Because,” the translator said, “they are waiting for their souls to catch up with their bodies.”

The story brings to mind a fantastic line from wonderful film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” when the hero of the film Ferris Bueller utters “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

The pace of modern life can be quite frightening. People are always on the move. They always seem to be doing something or nothing, so long as they are not standing still or idling around. People always seem to be in a rush to be anywhere, but where they actually are, to be doing anything other than what they are doing and to be feeling anything other than what they are feeling. Seemingly we need to always be on the move; for fear that life might just catch up with us. So often we try to force things through, wrestle with everything to get our will, so much so that we tie ourselves and all around in knots. Sometimes we need to pause and to simply rest into the Grace of life.

I noticed myself doing this on Monday when I was out walking with Molly in the park. Instead of enjoying the experience of her enjoying herself. I was preoccupied with what I needed to do that day. I was wrestling and arguing with myself. Thankfully I let go of control and got chatting with folk there, while she ran around and played with the other dogs. I get great pleasure form Molly’s natural joy, friendliness and playfulness. It helps me to connect to and to allow my soul to catch up with my body, it feels like such a Grace. It is a spiritual practice as it increases my sensitivity to life, as I rest into life. Prayer and meditation do the same. They slow down my being and enable me to connect and somehow in that space I get to hear that still small voice of calm, that voice Divine, the “I am in everything”, including little dogs in the park. This Sabbath time in my daily life allows me to live more fully in the world, to rest into the Grace of life.

I remember a few years ago a friend invited me to Hale Synagogue to attend Friday evening Shabbat (pronounced Shabos). It was powerful, beautiful and moving, especially the singing as Shabbat was welcomed, like a bride. During the ceremony I felt like I was allowing my soul to catch up with me. I found myself resting in the Grace of the day and not wrestling with everything. I have also been in Jerusalem on the Sabbath and experienced virtually the whole sitting resting in silence. It was quite an experience, something we who live in the UK will probably never experience again. This shows to me how important it is to rest in sabbath in the busyness of life.

The Sabbath relates back to Genesis I, which depicts six acts of creation and on the seventh day, the climax, God rests, looks at his creation and sees that it is very good indeed. He pauses; he smells the roses and allows his soul to catch up with him. Why on earth would God need to do this? Why do we need to pause and look at our own creations, our own lives? Well maybe because it is only when we stop and look at our lives and our work that meaning begins to emerge. If our hearts, our souls, are not in what we are doing it is unlikely that we will make a good job of it.

How often do any of us stop and look at the meaning behind what we have created, what we are creating? How often do we actually spend time increasing our sensitivity to our own lives? When we do take time to stop wrestling with something and begin to rest into the Grace of life.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel claimed that “The Sabbath as a day of rest is not for the purpose of recovering one’s strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labour. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life.”

Maybe by welcoming in the Sabbath, we allow our souls to catch up with our bodies. It allows us to connect to life and I have found that in life itself the Divine speaks to me, through reality, somehow in that still small voice of calm, something incredible happens.

The Jewish people invented Sabbath, but it didn’t make them popular. Again according to Rabbi Abraham Heschel “When the Romans first encounted the Jews and noticed their habit of keeping the Sabbath, of refraining from labour every seventh day, their reaction was nothing but contempt.”

The Jewish people had escaped slavery. Exodus recounts their wanderings in the wilderness as they searched for a home. They knew that slaves never rested and perhaps, during their time in the desert they never rested too. Maybe on Sinai they realised that although they had escaped Egypt and slavery, they were still slaves in so many other ways. Maybe this is why Sabbath was created

Maybe the rejection of Sabbath is not progress at all, but a return to a more de-humanising culture, where human beings are seen as nothing more than commodities who do without ceasing; “human doings, not human beings”. Perhaps we have all become enslaved by this need to constantly be doing. By constantly doing have we actually enslaved our souls. Maybe we don’t actually need to let our souls catch up with us, what we really need to do is free our souls once again. We need to find ways to stop wrestling with everything all the time and simply learn to rest in the Grace of life.

We live in an instant culture, which demands instant results. I think we even demand this with our leisure and pleasure time. We have lost patience with everything it seems.

They say that patience is a virtue, but it seems it is one that most of us still seem to need to learn. When things seem difficult I think patience is the hardest spiritual practice of them all. We want all our troubles over and over soon. Something I’m feeling in this run up to the election, it seems to have gone on for ever.

Patience, silence, stillness, quietly, humbly and passively waiting is considered almost inhuman, uncivilised in our age, like the businessman in the earlier story. Something I experience when stuck in queue or in traffic, or waiting on the phone for some operative to finally answer.

This brings to mind a wonderful piece of wisdom from Wayne Muller from his book “Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest and Delight”

Here is tells a wonderful story about the wisdom of waiting and resting.

He writes:

“I was speaking with Hans-Peter Durr, who for twenty years collaborated with Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg, discoverer of the famous Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics. Himself a noted quantum physicist, Hans-Peter told me that he often had long, impassioned discussions with Heisenberg when they were working together on a particular problem. "We would be talking excitedly about the problem from every angle, and then suddenly Heisenberg would say, 'Wait, I think we have touched on something very important here. Let's not talk about it anymore. Let's wait for two weeks, and let it solve itself.' Then, when we got back together two weeks later, it would invariably be solved. We would begin talking, and we both knew we had the answer."

There is something deeply humble about sabbath time, about rest, about not wrestling, fighting with everything, about waiting. This in many ways is the power of spiritual practice, as it is this humility that opens up to something more, to something beyond ourselves. Something that is so easily missed as we rush around frantically trying to get from where we are to where we want to be or to solve all our troubles in an instant. Instead of constantly struggling and striving, sometimes all we have to do is be still…be still and know we are not God, and to rest in the Grace of the world. Then suddenly, in time and rest and space the answers come. We let our souls catch up with our bodies, we connect with reality and find we can be of use once more.

We need Sabbath. We need to stop and take in life. We need to feel our feet on the ground. We need to be still and silent enough to hear that still small voice. We need to rest in the Grace of the world. We need to allow our senses to sense life and then and only then we will see the riches in our lives and give thanks for life. We need to practice patience And then what ever our work may be, we will do it well, heart and soul.

Patience my friends, patience. Let us find peace and rest in the Grace of the world.

I am going to end with a wonderful poem “First Sabbath” by Nancy Saffer. A wonderful reflection on that first Sabbath, that beautiful mythos that was the first creation story in Genesis.

“First Sabbath” by Nancy Shaffer from “Instructions in Joy”

Tell me: did you really rest?
You who made day and night
and sky that separated
waters above and below,
you who told the waters
below the sky
to stay in one place
and out of them
asked dry land,
who told the earth
to send out growing things
and then made sun
and moon and stars,
who made birds that fly
and everything that swims,
and cattle and all creeping things
and every animal untamed
and then made man and woman
and finally, supposedly, rested:
tell me: how —
in the midst of all that buzzing
and flapping
and slithering and stepping,
all that bursting forth of leaf
and fruit and stem
that never had known themselves
before — tell me:
how could you possibly have rested,
after seeing what no one
ever had seen before:
beak, hoof, pebble,
after losing yourself
in a thousand versions of blue:
water in sun,
sky against sky,
the horizon where
sky and water meet:
how did you shut your eyes,
how not keep
turning and looking?
Didn’t you long to caress
each small thing — notice
how toes work, and
stamens, and fingers?
Weren’t you hollering out in amazement?
Weren’t you so filled up glad*
you couldn’t sleep?

Please find below a video devotion based on the material in this devotion 

“Meeting Matter: It Matters How We Touch and are Touched By Life”

I recently returned from an intense week at Great Hucklow. I was a part of the Summer School team and together some 60 or more of us were exploring “Theology in the Flesh”: How Might Our Embodied Experiences Shape Our Answers To Life’s Ultimate Questions?”. As part of the week everyone attended or lead an engagement group. This year I was co-facilitating, with Rev Sarah Tinker, a group we had called “Sacred the Body”. We were exploring our bodily experiences and how we experience and live in the body of life, how this affects us and how we affect it. Looking at what life has done to us and what we have dine to life and to try and find better ways to recognise the sacredness of our lives and the whole of life.

I was grateful there was no major health problems this year. If you remember last year my co-facilitator was unable to attend and during the week about a third of the people at Hucklow were struck down by the Norovirus.

I was particularly grateful to work alongside Sarah. I feel we complimented one another. What we created together, along with the thirteen participants, was far more than the sum of the parts we brought to our time together. I know I have grown as a result of the experience and I believe that others did too

Each day we explored the theme “Sacred the Body” from a variety of perspectives. iI was fascinating to observe the ways that different people interacted with the subject, Sarah and myself and with each other. It was deep work, challenging at times, but I feel that we held them through the process. I am sure that many of us discovered new truth and understandings, I know that I did. The experience changed me, it opened me to new truths, but this was not pain free and my word it took a lot out of me. Summer School is like that.

Of all the themes that we explored I think the one that touched me the most was the one we titled “Aspects of the Body: Meeting with the World”. I noticed a shift within the group dynamic and people began to really get into the marrow of the subject this day. It was an attempt to explore what David Whyte has called the “conversational nature of life”, by reflecting on the two most visible aspects of our bodies, our hands and our faces. I introduced the subject by suggesting that our faces symbolise how life touches us and as a result how we face life in response to this “conversation”. While our hands express how we touch life. You see our hands are one of the tools, perhaps the most significant, with which we work with one another within this our material world.

Our hands and faces are the most exposed aspects of our humanity. If we look at them and at one another, they have many stories to tell. Our hands and our faces show our vulnerability, but also our power to both love, create and damage. Who we are is written on our faces and what we do is shown through our hands.

Abraham Joshua Heschel said of the human face.

“A human being has not only a body but also a face…A face is a message, a face speaks, often unbeknown to the person. Is not the human face a living mixture of mystery and meaning? We are all able to see it, and are all unable to describe it. Is it not a strange marvel that among so many hundreds of millions of faces, no two faces are alike? And that no face remains quite the same for more than one instant? The most exposed part of the body, it is the least describable, a synonym for an incarnation of uniqueness. Can we look at a face as if it were a commonplace?”

Among many things Heschel says that no two faces are alike. Now I’m sure some will object and say “what about identical twins?”

Now I recently had an experience with two seemingly identical faces. A few weeks ago I conducted a wedding for a couple. The groom is an identical twin and I was told that his brother would be flying in from Australia for the rehearsal. Now when I first met them I could not tell them apart, after all they were genetically identical. They were the same, but then again they were not. After a while I began to notice differences in them. They were not as identical as they first appeared. Life had shaped them in different ways and I could see this in their faces and their bodies. One of them even appeared a little taller than the other, although I suspect that this was more about how they carried themselves.

So here were two identical faces that had been somehow changed by how life had touched them. Our faces show who we are to one another. Mine certainly does. I do not have a poker face. How I am feeling is written all over my face. I am particularly sensitive to how other people are feeling, I am aware of this as I look into the faces of others. Summer school revealed my deep sensitivity to the emotions of others; I see it in their faces, hear it in their voices and notice it in their body language. I find this exhausting at times. From a child I have always had a heightened awareness of the feeling of others. I used to consider it a great handicap, I no longer do so. I have to be careful of it though. For there have been times when it has been too much and as a result I have found myself turning away from life.

Our faces reveal so much of who we are, it I written all over them. Think about when you meet up with and old friend or relative, one who you have not seen for many years. How often do they say or do we ourselves say “come on let’s have a good look at you” and how often do they or do we then look into one another’s faces to see how we are? And isn’t the response often fascinating for it either brings immense joy or gut wrenching sadness as we see our loved one as they are, for it is written all over our faces. I remember in my darkest days how I used to hate people doing this to me, for I was afraid that they would be able to see right into my soul and know that things were not ok. For how I am, I know, is written all over my face.

Our hands say much about who we are too. There are stories in those lines and scars on our hands. There are many memories in our hands as there is in all of our bodies. Our bodies carry so much of our lives within them; we can express who we are in the world through our bodies, particularly through our hands.It is through our hands that we interact with the world. They express so much of who we are and what we do to the body of life that we interact with life. We are not passive beings in this life. We touch life as much as life touches us.

It matters how we touch life, how we interact with each other. For how matter touches matter, really matters. We need to be careful and loving with our hands, the world needs us to touch one another and life gently for all that we do impacts, it really matters. We are all a part of the co-creation of life.

Just think about all the things that you have touched already today, in fact think about the last few days. How many people have you waved at or gestured towards, was there love in the interaction? How many people have you physically come into contact with? How many hands of you shook, people you have hugged or patted on the back? Perhaps those you have kissed? don't worry I won't go any further. What have you picked up or dropped, opened or closed, torn apart or repaired?

What have you touched in life, how have you touched life? Have you done so loving, gently, or have you done so aggressively? Have you brought violence to life?

It matters how we touch life for how we touch life plays a part in the healing or the destruction of this thing called matter that we are all a part of. Matter really matters you know.

Life is a conversation and it matters, it really matters how we engage with matter, with the skin where in and the skin we live in, with life. We have all been touched by life in so many ways and we all touch life in so many ways. It matters how we do so. We can not alter how we have been touched, we carry that with us in our being, in our bodies and sometimes this really shows. We cannot change this. That said we are not passively blown about in the winds of life. We can do something about how we ourselves touch life. It matters how we touch life, how we take care of the little bit of life we interact with. We can do this with love and care, or we can do it violence and lack of care.

It is in our hands. So what is your choice to be.

How will you face life today?

How will you touch life today?

It matters it really does

Matter really matters…

Prepare for Surprise

"The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!"

Robbie Burns

No matter how careful we plan and scheme life never works out exactly as we would like. Life is full of surprises, some amazing, some terrible. Life is awry and usually or do I mean unusually incredible. Brother David Steindt Rast said "Another name for God is surprise." Ah yes the God of surprises, isn’t this the true nature of life? Surprise. It fills me with awe.

I’ve been thinking about surprise quite a lot these last few days. I’ve also been thinking about how we respond to life. How the things that happen to us can shape our lives in incredible ways. How many times in life have we received that phone call that has changed our lives forever?

I received one such phone call just a few weeks back when my sister called me, broken, to inform me that our step brother Daniel had taken his own life. A moment of numbing shock, not merely surprise. At our Daniel’s funeral I talked with many people. One conversation in particular stood out. It was with an old friend. Someone I have known for almost forty years. During the conversation he asked me about the work I do. He informed me that he calls himself a “born again atheist”. He talked about church parade etc when we were cub scouts and his early encounters with religion. He then began to talk about his family. Of him nursing his father while he was dying and then of the death of his son in a car accident. He spoke of his step children and his mother. Of his physical difficulties and the amount of opiate based painkillers he has to take each day. We spoke of old friends too and times gone and then he wished me well in my ministry. There was a lot of love, but also pain and loss in the conversation. It was a day filled with conversations about love and loss, but then that is the nature of grief.

Over the last week I’ve been thinking of similar moments in my life, when I have received devastating news about those I love and how I have responded to these moments. There were times when I turned away from life in despair, something that happens rarely these days; these days I usually turn towards the Divine and back towards life. This may seem strange to some, but it is actually in the hardest and darkest times that I experience the Divine most intensely, when I truly feel that God is with us. The God of my limited understanding is not the controller of life, instead I find God with me in suffering, but also Joy. I find the Divine at the heart of experience. Now I cannot adequately explain this, I can only share my experience and to stand here in awe.

This still surprises me…

We live in an almost death denying age. I think I understand why. I have known such temptations. That said by denying such realities we do not transcend the suffering that loss brings all we really do is block ourselves off from the joy that comes with truly living. In so doing we also deny the love and depth of meaning that comes with living, with truly being alive. Life, love and death is meant to fill us will awe. For life is truly awful, it is meant to fill us with awe. We are meant to be filled with awe in the old meaning of the word.

Now while we live in a world that wants to sanitise suffering we see ever more violence on our screens that we spend so much of our time staring into. Our entertainment seems to be ever more violent, punctuated by advertising. How many times I have sat of an evening recently, with Sue, looking for something to watch on Netflix and struggling to find anything worth watching. So much of what passes for entertainment is just full of murder, intrigue and violence. They are so predictable too. I have noticed that virtually every film I’ve watched recently has been so predictable that I have worked out the plot twists in the first 10 minutes. Gosh how I wish for a surprise. When we sanitise death, we sanitise life and it almost becomes unreal. So much so that it no longer touches. Life is meant to touch us deeply. Life is meant to surprise us constantly to fill us with awe.

Yet so often we don’t want this. We want to know what’s coming, so we can prepare ourselves. What was the phrase that the character played by John Cleese in the film “Clockwise” cried out “It’s not the despair, I can live with the despair, it’s the hope” that destroys you. It seems if he could have just given in it would have been easier, but hope kept on rearing its head.

A friend recently sent the following story to me, told by Roger Housden in “Ten Poems to Change Your Life”

"There is a Jewish story saying that when you are about to be born, God takes you to a field covered with bundles. Each bundle represents a particular set of troubles. You can choose any bundle, but the one you choose you have to take to Earth with you. The rabbis say that if, at the moment of death, God were to take you back to that field and let you choose another bundle with which to relive your life, you would always pick the same one.”

By the way it is no doubt we would do the same with our bundles of joy. When I think of all the things we fear in life, it is surprise that we fear the most. We like to know waht's coming, even if it's abundle of troubles. It seems that it is surprise that we fer the most.

We spend so much of our times finding ways to avoid the suffering and pain that are part of life. It seems we can only really bare to look at these things through our screens and devices. This seems to me to be going against the nature of life as it is meant to be. Life is full of surprises, they move us and change us. I have been surprised by many things over the last week. Before Daniel’s funeral I was apprehensive about what might occur. I was worried about what might happen, by how people might be with each other. Yet when the day came I was pleasantly surprised. I was more than that I was deeply moved by the expressions of love and healing shared by so many. I bore witness to almost miracles actually. I’ve bore witness to a few others in the last few days too. I have noticed and absorbed several things. I have been awed by the people and events I am surrounded by.

I have found myself trembling in awe. I have never felt more alive.

Awe is perhaps the ultimate form of surprise. When we are stirred by awe it is so unfathomable, vast and complex that we can’t quite believe it. Like all forms of surprise awe makes us stop, it awakens something within us and it shifts our perspectives. It changes us and makes us want to share our experiences with others. Sadly these days so many of us want to freeze the moment, take out phones and take a picture of it. We cannot capture moments. All we can do is open ourselves to the vastness of life. The most dangerous thing to life is the ability to predict what is coming as it will stop you living life. It will freeze us completely in the moment.

We cannot predict the future. None of us know what is coming. If we could we would probably do all we could to avoid it and thus commit the ultimate sin, to live an unlived life. All we can do is open ourselves to the God of surprises and be filled by the awe of life. Life should fill you with awe, it truly is awe filled, it is literally awful.

Life is meant to be awry, we are meant to be surprised by it. We cannot prepare ourselves for life. All we can actually prepare ourselves for is the fact that we are always going to be surprised, and awed by life…The only way to do this is to be open and to remain open and when we begin to close down, open ourselves again…To live our lives fully alive is to find ourselves constantly trembling in awe at the amazement of life...Life is the ultimate miracle if you think about. Isn't it amazing that we live at all. It should always stir us, move us and ultimately surprise is.

I’m going to end this little chip of a "blogspot" with a wonderful, perhaps awful (it certainly fills me with awe) quotation by the great twentieth century Jewish mystic Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel was a contemporary of the great twentieth century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who was one of his closest friends. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr in Selma, they were great friends in the civil rights movement. When he introduced King as the keynote speaker to the Rabbinical Assembly, the Conservative rabbis sang “We Shall Overcome” to him in Hebrew, the language of the biblical prophets who both King and Heschel came to embody for that generation. Dr King was meant to share the Passover Seder dinner with the Heschel family, but was murdered just two weeks after giving that speech, 50 years ago almost to the day.

To truly live our lives we must be stirred by awe and wonder every day. I suspect that Heschel believed in the God of surprises and that the Divine is with us in our suffering and that we bring that love alive when we stand with others in theirs.

He said:

“I would say about individuals: an individual dies when he ceases to be surprised. What keeps me alive — spiritually, emotionally, intellectually — is my ability to be surprised. I say, I take nothing for granted. I am surprised every morning that I see the sun shine again. When I see an act of evil, I am not accommodated — I don’t accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere. I’m still surprised. That’s why I’m against it; why I can fight against it. We must learn how to be surprised, not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society.”

So let’s attempt to become more maladjusted to life, to live in constant surprise and to stand side by side with one another in total awe.

Let's sing of the total amazement that we are alive. A song of praise, the only true prayer of life.

Love Service and Radical Amazement: Walking your Path with Joy

“Faith” by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

"Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement, to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted.

Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness. Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge. Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn, or scoff at the totality of being.

Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself. The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song.

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power… Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art."

~Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
(January 11, 1907 – December 23, 1972)

“Help us fulfil what lies within the circle of our lives – each day we ask no more, no less. Untangle the knots within, so we can mend our hearts’ simple ties to others…Free us to walk your path with joy!” by Neil Douglas-Klotz – “Prayers of the Cosmos”

Towards the end of August I have the honour of serving as “Minister of the Week” at “Hucklow Summer School”. The theme for this year is “‘Walk Your Path with Joy’- Finding Hope & Resisting Despair in Turbulent Times”. I will be serving those present and helping them spiritually, mentally and emotionally through what will be a deeply challenging week. It is not a holiday, I am there to serve, to minister to all present.

I am often amused by people’s responses to what I do as a vocation. I’m even more amused by what they call me. A couple whose wedding I recently conducted called me Father and others assume I am a vicar. I have heard of someone else calling me Pastor Dan. I’m sure I’m called many other things too, which I won’t repeat. Now while my title is reverend I am a minister and this is an entirely appropriate name for what I do. To minister literally means to serve and I believe this is what I do, I serve people, I serve life and I serve God. I am a minister and to minister is to serve. I often wonder when I listen to political leaders if they are truly aware of this, they are there purely to serve “we the people” and not the other way round. The Prime Minister ought to see themself as the number one servant in the land. Sadly power can go to anyone’s head.

Now some say I am an unorthodox minister. I remember a congregant once saying that “I was like no minister she had ever met before.” I remember Rev Bill Darlison’s response to this comment. He quipped “Danny you are unlike any minister that anyone has ever met before.”

So it appears true that I am an unorthodox minister and yet to me I simply do my best to fulfil my role, to simply serve life live through love. To show others the way of love and service and hope in the midst of suffering. I cannot take away anybody’s suffering, but I can walk with them and by doing so meaning emerges and despair is dispelled.

To quote Micah (Ch8 v 6)

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Will you come and walk with me?

So how do we find hope and resist despair in the turbulent times. This is most definitely a pertinent question for everyone right now, we seem to be in midst of incredibly turbulent times. As a nation we are facing the most challenging period in my memory. There are many forces at work that seem to want to divide us. Our political class are at war and economic troubles on the increase, there is violence on the streets from haters of life and extremists of many kinds. Every day the news is filled with chaos and loss of life. Now I am not naive, this is not new. This has been happening all over the world throughout my lifetime, it’s just I’ve never seen it to this extent in this country. It is making us look at life wholly, as of course we should always do so. It is opening our senses to everything and this is painful. It should be painful. If it didn’t hurt then there would be something deeply wrong with us. Hell is indifference.

It is easy to feel powerless against this tide of suffering. How do we keep our heads up and our eyes and hearts open to one another and life, how do we find Hope in the midst of all of this? How do we transcend despair?

Well I believe it begins with what I have already witnessed. It begins in and through service. Rabindranath Tagore said “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” It begins by baring witness to the love and service and the coming together I have witnessed on the same tv screens and also very close at hand as I have seen ordinary people helping, holding and inspiring one another. People walking together in their suffering, in love. I see it in the little things as well as the bigger things. It doesn’t take away the suffering but it brings to life the love present in each of us, a power that will always overcome the powers that divide us. To quote Jo Cox “There is more that unites us than divides us.” or in the words of Harry Stack Sullivan “ We are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered, or whatever.” We all live with the same struggles, we are all born from the same earth, live under the same sun and I believe have the same spirit running through us all.

As we serve others meaning emerges and we discover our own true hearts. It does not end the suffering but it creates Hope and meaning from the suffering and in so doing we build a legacy of the heart for those who follow. As we serve others we develop our own hearts and souls, in serving others we are working on ourselves, on our own souls; every act, every word, every gesture of genuine compassion naturally nourishes our own hearts and minds and souls. Service is soul work, it is the heart in action and it brings us fully to life. In so doing we transcend the very real suffering that is an aspect of all life; in so doing we transcend despair.

Through faith in life itself, by giving ourselves fully to life, we know joy. Joy is an attribute of a full, rich and deeply meaningful life. It is radically different to fun, pleasure and happiness, these are merely emotional qualities. Joy is a spiritual quality that is present within us, despite life’s circumstances. Joy is about connection, intimate connection. When I know joy I am at one with life and with myself. Through love and service we can begin to once again awaken to the amazement of life and know joy.

Joy for life itself can be known even during life’s troubles and difficulties. The people Jesus spoke to 2,000 years ago were not living easy and comfortable lives. Those people knew about conflict, oppression, tragedy and almost constant grief. He told them that all that was wonderful, life-giving, life affirming, all that is meaningful was theirs. He said to them “Enter into my kingdom with joy.” And “This is my commandment, that you love one another.”

The kingdom he spoke of can be with us right here right now, we can know and experience the commonwealth of love right here, right now. And how can we know it? Well by fulfilling the commandment to love one another. Love though is not some mushy sentiment, it is an act, it is a way of being. The commonwealth of love comes into being by giving ourselves fully to life, to one another; through giving ourselves fully to life and to one another we truly realise the joy of living. In so doing we will be awakened to the true amazement of what it means to actually be alive.

Tagore said: “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”

This is the purpose of the religious life to awaken joy through service to and for one another. Joy is about connection, intimate connection. When we give of ourselves to others and to life we know the joy that is truly living. That said when we live only for ourselves and live dis-connected from life, we quickly become joyless once again, we lose faith in God given life, our experience of life becomes dulled and meaningless.

Some people say “everything happens for a reason”, in so doing suggesting it is all part of God’s plan. I have never believed this and believe it simply opens the great theodicy question “How can an all-powerful and all loving God allow suffering? A question that comes into my consciousness constantly as a minister of religion.

My truth is that I do not believe that everything in life is pre-ordained or pre-determined, the future is unwritten. I do believe in the Lure of Divine Love, that all life is given free will and it is our task to bring love alive in life and to encourage others to do the same through our example, in this sense we are not powerless against the tide of despair. It is our responsibility to become beacons of hope to others in their suffering, to become the light of the world. Hope rises from the ashes of suffering and meaning emerges through our living and breathing. This is why everything matters, every thought, every breath, every feeling, every action, and every word. This is also one way in which joy can be found in life, through love and service for others, despite the very real turbulence all around us. I believe in life I am constantly in awe and amazement at it, despite the very real suffering present. I live with my eyes, with all my senses including the sixth sense fully open. It is the only way I know how to live fully alive.

Some may ask how and why can I believe this? My simple answer to this is “This is what my 45 years of living breathing and waking up has taught me.” I believe in life, it constantly amazes me.

Life amazes me, constantly. Despite all the darkness and destruction that is present, that can overwhelm it all, life and love always seems to find a way through. Like that little shoot that finds its way back to life every spring time, finding its way through all the obstacles in its way, insisting on reaching out beyond and finding life. That amazes me; I find that utterly amazing.

Abraham Joshua Heschel said that:

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

Through living in love and service I am awakened to the amazement of life. My senses are fully awake. But what is amazement you may well ask? What is radical amazement?

“Radical Amazement” captures those moments, those deeply human moments when we find ourselves intensely connected to the mystery and the majesty of existence. It is found not so much in the big moments, when we mark life’s achievements, it is more about what Heschell himself describes as “the common and the simple” those small things that reveal “the infinite significance” of existence. In many ways “radical amazement” is about paying attention and looking deeply at the routine moments of our lives and experiencing just how incredible they are. There are parallels to mindfulness here, but I think there is more to it than that, there is a sense of eye popping awe and wonder in looking through radically amazed eyes. It’s about seeing the miracle in existence. How many of us truly recognise and acknowledge just how amazing it is that we exist at all?

“Radical Amazement” is about looking into the familiar with what Rumi called “fresh eyes”, it’s about recognising that even the most routine moments are in actual fact outrageous. Just think about our existence here on this spinning planet rushing through a universe some 13 billion years old, or so they tell us. We are formed from stardust and yet made from flesh that are homes to entire eco-systems and billions of cells that are neatly balanced so as to allows us to exist, that are constantly altering and changing and adjusting to all that we experience. We who are made from stardust are more than merely stardust though, we are made up of complex thoughts, emotions and experiences and there is a spirit within each of us. We are more than merely our biology; we are more than merely thinking meat. It is amazing and marvellous to truly be who we are.

We need to look at all life with eyes wide open, through “fresh eyes”, something that can be hard to do when turbulence strikes, when we experience and witness suffering, but we must if we are to live in the full amazement of existence. When we see life through such eyes all this that we are made from reacts in positive and powerful ways, something we can feel with real intensity at times. I know that there are times when our whole make up responds to the whole of the make-up of the universe and that this occurs every time that we see the miracle in existence, in a new way. This blows me away. It is amazing that we exist at all; it’s amazing that everything came from the same nothing.

Bang…and here we are in a fabulous place…what are you gunna do here…in this sacred place, in this sacred time, in these are sacred bodies, in these our sacred lives…

“Radical Amazement” is about looking into life with truly open eyes, it is an ethical act and an intentional decision, it is the ultimate spiritual practise and as such it is one that involves great risk. This is because it opens us up to all that is, as it truly is. This requires courage, because to see the beauty also requires us to see the horror too. This may seem too awful for some, but it is the awe that accompanies vulnerability that is required to be awakened to radical amazement.

To see the world with awakened eyes, fresh eyes, open eyes is look into life in “Radical Amazement”. It is life as it truly is in its awe filled beauty. It is to truly let life in and to fill us to the brim.

It seems to me that “Radical Amazement” is how to live and breathe our human spirituality. At its essence spirituality is about being amazed it is about cultivating greater openness and deeper awareness of the beauty, blessing and mystery of life.

Suffering is an aspect of living, it cannot be escaped. Everybody suffers. Life itself though is not suffering, love and joy are also an aspect of life too. How do we experience love and joy? Well it’s quite simple really. It comes through living with all our senses wide open. It begins by simply opening our eyes and our arms. It begins in love and service. It begins by simply walking humbly with one another and humbly giving thanks that we even exist at all. This is what it means to live in and through Hope and it is this that will lift us from despair despite the very real suffering in life. It begins by simply looking into the eyes of our neighbour and recognising the amazing thing that is their existence and continues as we look at the world in which we live and by simply giving thanks for life, for it truly is amazing that life exists at all.

May love guides us in the weeks ahead, may it lead us to Hope and away from Despair in spite of the very real suffering present in life.

Time to inhabit space

Last Saturday afternoon I was out with friends, it was my day off and we wandered together around Dunham Massey, a place I love. I wasn’t quite myself. I could feel it in the core of me. I was not enjoying this time with friends in such a beautiful space. Something just didn’t feel right, my heart wasn’t in it. Not that it showed in how I was with them, but in the core of me I wasn’t quite myself. I was not connecting with them or the nature in which we walked. In fact if truth be told I could feel myself getting increasingly irritated as time went on. So much so that I was half relieved to get home and be on my own. Things got worse there though and I had an awful night’s sleep. I discovered that night what the problem was. I had obviously picked up some kind of bug and spent the whole night up and down to toilet.

I was not happy when the alarm went off next morning as I had such a busy day ahead. It was not just caused by the lack of sleep, I felt lousy, I felt weak. On top the services I had to lead I had appointments all afternoon too. I could have cancelled, of course I could, but I felt duty bound to continue on. I got through the day and did a decent, job as tough as it was. So many people were kind and loving and something carried me through. Love is such a powerful and gentle force. Human love and kindness and the love of God is comforting and sustaining. It kept me going all day, although I can’t claim to have truly experienced the day. I was not fully present.

That evening I went for a short walk with a friend just around Altrincham. We walked through the deserted town which just a few hours earlier would have been buzzing with activity, just around the corner the bars and eateries were crowded and full of life as people enjoyed the beautiful evening. I was just grateful for loving company, the ground at my feet and air to breathe. I smiled to myself as I thought that peace is always available to us if we allow it to be, if we allow ourselves to occupy the space. It’s amazing what a little bit of quiet time in any space can do for the soul. There is even peace to be found in the centre of town, although only on a Sunday evening these days; we no longer observe Sabbath, Sunday rest, these days. I wonder how often in life we find the time to truly experience the space in which we inhabit.

I went to bed that night, exhausted, feeling delicate, but with a sense that I would feel better in the morning.

I was wrong, very wrong. If anything I felt worse. I ate a good breakfast and thought I just need to get going, I know I’ll go to the gym. That didn’t work. I lasted less than half an hour before I gave in. So I came home showered and ate and thought, I’ll do some work. I’ve got so much to do this week I’ve got to make a start. I’ve not got the time to be ill this week, but I couldn’t work either. I just felt exhausted, I felt utterly bankrupt, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. So I went to sleep. All I could do was rest and sleep and find peace in the silence. I dreamed too which is something I rarely am aware of doing. Wow! They were some wild and wacky dreams.

I did nothing that day and nothing that evening. I spent the next few hours in dreamtime. It was a day and night of rest and eating. Did I feel better the next day? No not really. My stomach still felt very delicate, but again I made myself eat. I also went to my usual meditation and in the silence, shared with others, I began to finally revive and reconnect to life. In that time and space I felt held by that all sustaining love and it nourished me. All I had to do was surrender to it. I then returned home and these words just started flowing out of me. I felt alive once again. Not so much physically but most certainly spiritually, emotionally and mentally.

We all need a time for rest, it is vital to living an active life. We all need time to receive love too. I know I’ve been running near to empty recently. I’ve been told off several times for not taking my day off, let alone the two I’m meant to take. I seem to have an increasingly busy life, which I am grateful for, but I do need to find time to rest, in order to truly inhabit the space in which I live. My body told me that last the weekend, it refused to continue on. It was having none of it and I had to obey. It’s interesting that it was in my stomach, the physical home of both love and fear, that it manifested itself. It always seems to be so with me. I remembered the last time this happened a couple of years ago when I got gastric flu. I also remembered another time over ten years ago when I was coming to terms with an intense and heart-breaking grief, around the time of the first anniversary of Ethan’s death when my body just gave in in the middle of Albert Square in Manchester and I had to stop completely. I could not move. I sat down on a bench, for over an hour and wept. This was the last time I suffered a bout of depression in my life, thank God. I was utterly exhausted and my body just refused to move any more. My body forced me to fully experience the time I found myself in. It forced me to stop trying to run from the space of grief. Thank God I obeyed it, because it was in this time and space of surrender that my journey into ministry began.

Last weekend was a warning to me and one I need to take heed of. You cannot run from time. 

Everyone needs a time of rest, a time to fill themselves with love, a time to take in order to give back to life. This is no doubt why a time of rest is so enshrined within the great religious traditions. We cannot live without rest, for without rest we will not appreciate the lives we have, we will not feel the love present and we will be like zombies, live a slow meaningless living death. In Exodus 31 it is said that if a person works on the day of rest they should be put to death. Now this is a bit strong, extreme beyond reason I know, but if you think about, if you don’t read it literally and instead metaphorically, if we live without a time of rest are we not living as if we were dead? Life quickly becomes meaningless and we live like zombies. This seems like a living hell, a fate worse than death, to me.

According to Jewish teaching the seventh day is a time for rest and refreshment, for even God rested on the seventh day and was “refreshed”. The time of rest is needed in order to love whatever it is we create in our lives. For without a time of rest we will not see what we create as good, we will not love those we share our lives with and the world in which we live and breathe and share our being. Such time allows us to live in the space in which we inhabit.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel claimed that “The Sabbath as a day of rest is not for the purpose of recovering one’s strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labour. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life.”

We need to take time to rest, to connect to life. This doesn’t have to be a particular day though. I feel frustrated by having to have Friday’s as mine, which to be honest I rarely take these days. My work and life doesn’t allow for this kind of rigidity. In fact I find that such rigidity ends up destroying the spirit of time. It is so easy to find ourselves becoming slaves to such rigidity and resenting the time as a kind of function. This is the problem of prescribed religion in many ways, it kind of destroys the spirit at the soul of the teaching. What I feel Sabbath is really about is a time for sinking into the heart and soul, a time to let go absolutely of all rigidity. It is often called free time, I see good reason for this.

Why are we so afraid to let go of rigidity?  Why are we so afraid to be set free? So many of us are.

During the early years of the twentieth century Sandor Ferenczi, a disciple of Sigmund Freud, discovered a phenomenon that he described as “Sunday Neurosis”. He noticed that seemingly normal healthy successful people would experience extreme mental and physical distress on the Sabbath. Ferenczi believed that these people, having been deprived of their normal busy routine by Sunday began to panic, as they feared that they would lose their usual self-censoring mechanism and therefore their wild impulses would reign. They felt out of control and this terrified them. Therefore this extreme pain and or mental anguish developed as a way of staving off the anxiety.

I see real wisdom in Ferenczi’s discoveries. I suspect that the fear of stopping is somehow rooted in the fear of our humanity, the fear of our animal heart, the fear of the soul, the fear of the spirit and this is why so many of us live in our heads and become slaves to rules. I’m not just speaking of the religiously inclined here either, actually I suspect that this is more of a symptom of secularism and modernism and the worship of the mind. It is a symptom of functionality of not valuing time and space. Time is sacred I have discovered. Life is not just about what we do but the spirit in which we do it. While you may be able to purchase a lifestyle, you cannot buy a life.

Again in “Sabbath” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote

“There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.”

Sabbath is a celebration of life, of love, of our part of the creation. It is a time of liberation and appreciation. Jesus recognised this in the Gospel accounts. He was critical of the way his own tradition was practiced and it’s slavishness to the rules, not because he was opposed to a time of rest of spiritual sustenance, far from it in fact. No he was critical because he witnessed that by slavishly following the rules the pious had lost the spirit and the love at the core of the tradition. Sabbath you see is about Love, the love of life, for it is Sabbath time that allows humanity to bring the spirit of love alive in life. Again as Heschell wrote in the 20th century “The Jewish contribution to the idea of love is the conception of love of the Sabbath, the love of a day, of spirit in the form of time.” In Mark's Gospel (Ch 2) Jesus remarks “‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.” This is the Love that is at the core of Jesus’s teachings, the love of God, the love of life, the love of other and the love of self. I believe that this same spirit is at the core of all the great spiritual teachings, it’s just that at times it gets lost. The spiritual life is as much about the love of time as it is a love of space and place. It’s an appreciation of the sacredness of every moment of time; the love that allows the space in which we find ourselves come alive.

This to me is our religious task, to bring alive the space in which we find ourselves. This is the whole point of Sabbath time

We need Sabbath time. We need to learn to live in the space in which we find ourselves, this a lesson I’ve once again been taught this last week or so. We need to breath in the air all around us, we need to take in life. We need to feel our feet on the ground. We need to allow our senses to awaken to all that is, we need feel the love in our own bellies and those we share our lives with. We need to appreciate the preciousness of this moment and the sacredness of all life. We need to learn to be people of time and not only of place. We need Sabbath time.