A Challenge for the New Year

This morning I was finally re-connecting with the computer, having had a few days away from it over the Christmas period, and catching up with the daily meditations from Richard Rohr's Center for Action and Contemplation, which usually give me a nice, spiritual start to my day.

And I came across this passage, from The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness: Preparing to Practice, by Rabbi Rami Shapiro, which Richard Rohr quotes, and which has really resonated with me, as a challenge for the coming year:

"Will you engage this moment with kindness or with cruelty, with love or with fear, with generosity or scarcity, with a joyous heart or an embittered one? This is your choice, and no-one can make it for you. If you choose kindness, love, generosity, and joy, then you will discover in that choice the Kingdom of God, heaven, nirvana, this-worldly salvation. If you choose cruelty, fear, scarcity, and bitterness, then you will discover in that choice the hellish states of which so many religions speak. These are not ontological realities tucked away somewhere in space - these are existential realities playing out in your own mind. Heaven and hell are both inside of you. It is your choice that determines just where you will reside."

"Heaven and hell are both inside you. It is your choice that determines just where you will reside." Wow. For 2018, I resolve to try to engage with the world, with each moment, with kindness, love, generosity and joy.

It's A Wonderful Life

I've just been watching one of my two* favourite Christmas films, It's A Wonderful Life. It stars James Stewart as the central character, George Bailey, who lives in the first half of the last century in the small town of Bedford Falls, runs the local building society, and lives in a ramshackle house on the edge of town with his wife and children.

Trying not to spoil the plot, I'll just say that as the film begins, George has hit rock bottom, and wonders bitterly whether he has wasted his whole life. All his contemporaries, and his younger brother, have left the town and got on, got ahead, but chance and circumstance, combined with a strong sense of duty and honour, have kept George in Bedford Falls.

He is on the point of suicide, believing that it would be better if he had never lived, when his own personal guardian angel, Clarence, intervenes, and proceeds to show George the many ways in which he has made a difference for the better. There is a wonderful happy ending - hence the title It's A Wonderful Life.

When I watch it each year, I always wonder, like George, how or if my life has made a difference to the people with whom I share it. And end up being reassured by the film's message: that if you do the best you can, and follow the best you know, it will all work out right in the end.

I'm not as unselfish as George Bailey, but I share Brene Brown's aim of living wholeheartedly. In the Introduction to her wonderful book, Rising Strong, she writes:

"I define wholehearted living as engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It's going to be at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn't change the truth that I am brave and worthy of love and belonging."

I believe that if we can do that - strive to live wholeheartedly, then, like George Bailey, we will be able to lead lives where we can make a difference, for the better. Merry Christmas!

*the other one is Love Actually

Quiet Interval of Peace

I've just spent a week in the beautiful Welsh village of Trawsfynydd. Its setting is beautiful, above a deep blue lake, with the green and brown mountains and hills, noisy with sheep, all around. Last night, on my return, I felt moved to write a sestina about it:

Trawsfynydd: A Sestina

I have this blessèd interval of peace,

A pile of books and notes and files to read,

The hours stretch out before me like a path,

A week out of time to do some writing.

Inside the cottage all is very still;

Out in the world, the sky is dazzling blue.

Unsettling my mind, I’m yearning for blue –

The hills lure me out with promise of peace.

I walk to the lake, its quiet waters still,

The beauty of God is there to be read.

Yet somehow I must get back to writing …

I sigh and retrace my steps down the path.

And muse as I walk down the soft, green path,

Turning my back on the water so blue,

On my research, that I should be writing;

Instead I’m possessed by a deep, quiet peace,

Which bids me forget what I need to read

And start on this poem in quietness still.

So I get out my journal, sit quite still,

Fall into reverie, follow the path

Of my thoughts as I write, re-write, then read,

Begging the muse to come out of the blue

Bestowing on me her blessing of peace

As words start to flow, and I am writing.

Bliss happens. I would not exchange writing

The joy of creation, that serves to still

My restless heart and restore my lost peace,

Placing me firmly back on the right path.

Words down on paper – why was I so blue?

I pull the files towards me, start to read.

I read and take notes, then once again read,

Nothing now stops the flow of the writing.

I glance outside, the sky is now dark blue.

I look at my watch, quite unready still

To stop work just yet, now seeing the path

To fulfilment, and a deep, grace-filled peace.

No more time to read, it’s time to be still;

No more swift writing, I’ve mapped out the path,

With quick strokes of blue, time to trust in peace.

Not the best sestina in the world. But it has satisfied a very deep need in me, to translate what is in my heart into words on paper. Writing is such a glorious satisfaction. I feel so very blessed.

Every Picture Tells A Story

A friend of mine shared the picture below on Facebook:

And my mind instantly interpreted it as the front bean hugging the rest. Then I looked again, and perhaps it is trying to hold the rest back, or to protect them from whatever is behind it. Or has just jumped from on high, and landed on them, squashing them flat. It is amazing how the human mind can interpret pictures in so many different ways. Hugging? Crowd control? Protective parent? Flattener? This little bean could be anything!

It made me wonder how often we judge situations in an instant, rather than standing back and taking a "long, loving look at the real". Every time we see something, or hear something, our mind jumps to an instant conclusion, which is very often wrong.

I am grateful to my friend, who was only sharing her garden's produce, for the reminder, to look at least twice, before jumping to conclusions.

The Next Right Thing

It's a funny old thing, life. Every morning we get up, wash, eat breakfast, and then face the day ahead. But how often do we actually appreciate each day, moment by moment? And how do the choices we make, moment by moment, affect how our days go?

Wayne Muller, in his wonderful book A Life of Being, Having and Doing Enough, asks: "What is the next right thing for us to do? Where in this moment, shall we choose to place our time and attention? Do we stay or move, speak or keep silent, attend to this person, that task, move in this or that direction?"

I don't know about you, but to me, this seems to be such a simple approach to life, much less stressful than being worried about a thousand possible alternatives. You just concentrate on the Next Right Thing - give that your time and attention, and then go on to the next one.

But I'm very conscious that "simple" does not mean the same thing as "easy". This moment by moment approach to our lives *is* elegantly beautiful in its simplicity, but it is by no means easy to do. Because it means that we have to be conscious, awake, moment by moment, so that we make our many small choices with awareness, rather than blindly, depending on how we are feeling at the time. Actively considering each choice, moment by moment, actually sounds quite like hard work.

But it is the most important work in the world.

Because if we look at our lives, really examine them, we can see that they *are* the result of all the choices we have made, in the past days and months and years. It is a gradual, moment by moment process, yet the results of it have shaped our lives. All of us are where we are now, today, because of our past choices. And where we end up, tomorrow and the next day, will depend on the choices we make today.

Samuel A. Trumbore wrote: "Each moment of wakefulness has so many gifts that offer energy and delight. Yet too often they seem unavailable, as the weight of our troubles press down on us ... Even in moments of great danger, the direction of attention is a choice. Fear can dominate the mind, binding it like a straitjacket. Or love can unbind it, and open it to resource and opportunity. ... Holding reality and possibility together is the holy, hope-filled work of humanity."

May we all choose love, may we all choose to follow the Next Right Thing.

The Gift of Laughter

I have been feeling quite sad just lately. Two important parts of my life are coming to an end (which is right and good, but still makes me sad) and my prevailing mood has been one of gentle melancholy, which has made normal functioning feel like pushing a rock uphill. I've kept on keeping on, but it has been an effort.

So this evening, I took Terry Pratchett's wonderful book 'A Slip of the Keyboard' off the shelves. It is a posthumous collection of his non-fiction pieces, and is full of gems. I was reading it with quiet amusement, chuckling to myself occasionally - he writes so beautifully, on a wide variety of topics.

Then came a sentence which made me laugh so much that the tears were rolling down my cheeks: "That was because we realized that the Race for Space had been a mad bout of international willie-waving."

I am giggling again as I type - it is possibly the best description of international power politics that I have ever come across. It took several minutes for me to control my mirth sufficiently to explain to my bemused husband what was so funny.

But since then, I have felt so much better, so much lighter. Truly, a good laugh restores the soul. Thank God. And thank Terry.

Embracing Equality

I have been watching the new BBC3 series Queer Britain with fascination. I have many LGBT friends, who are just that - my friends - simply because I like them as unique individuals.

But the topics which each of the programmes have covered - faith, body image, homelessness, and ethnicity, have never been so clearly defined for me within the LGBT context. So I have learned much, and have new insights about what it means to be an LGBT person in the UK today.

Some of the stories have been heartbreaking - it seems that discrimination in all its nasty forms is alive and well, not only among heterosexuals, but also within the LGBT community. The issues of body image and race have great potency - one black lesbian woman commented sadly on the latest programme: "I feel like a triple minority - black, lesbian, and female."

And I thought: "Sh*t! She's right - I get that." Because as a straight, white woman, I am only too aware that I shelter behind two bastions of often unconscious privilege, but can understand from the inside what discrimination against women looks like. And can understand what having body image issues feels like, although I had not formerly appreciated their particular significance for many LGBT folk.

Ultimately this is all about judging people by how they identify themselves or how we identify them - by what they look like, how they dress, the colour of their skin, their age, and their sexual orientation. Whenever we judge people by what they *are*, rather than for their behaviour, we are guilty of being non-inclusive, on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, skin colour, age, size and [dis]ability, to name the most common nasty behaviours. Which seem to be all to prevalent in UK society today, no matter what we look like or whom we are attracted to.

Why do we do this to ourselves, to each other? We are all human beings, each one unique, each one worthy of love and justice and respect, each one with unique gifts to offer. As my friend Yvonne remarked when I shared this post with her: "everyone is an unique combination of beauty and diversity, and we should celebrate that. And each form of oppression of that beauty and diversity is different, with its own distinct history which is different in different places, which is why we need feminism, and LGBT liberation, and Black liberation, and the disability rights campaign, ... rather than a single munged-together "human" campaign."

We need to be aware of ourselves and each other as "unique combinations of beauty and diversity" and to respect and appreciate the struggles that each of us goes through to be recognised as such.