This year I have witnessed a friend’s death and another friend’s serious life-threatening illness. It has been a sad and often frightening time for them and their families and friends. The expertise, kindness, compassion and care of health professions has been so crucial in ensuring my friends were heard and seen and given the attention they so desperately needed.
I, like many people my age, often seek the expertise of health professionals whether they are from the western medical model or alternative practitioners. I am hugely grateful for the knowledgeable care I receive that nurtures and restores (some of the time) my not always compliant body and mind!
I recently had to make another appointment to see the neurologist. I was apprehensive as I feared he might say I had reached the end of the road in terms of medication…again. But pharmaceutical research has produced new medication and he was able to reassure me positively that this was likely to improve things . Just what I needed to hear!
I feel so grateful that I have access to a health service that, at the time of writing, is free at the point of demand, and despite all its shortcomings is a resource that many of us would lead lesser lives without.
I am also grateful to those amazing people who provide such skilled services of massage, acupuncture, chiropractor, and kinesiology, the unsung army of professionals who enable me and many others to lead healthier happier lives.
I hope as the days get shorter we can remember those who are not as healthy as they would like to be and those who do not have access to supportive health professionals.
I have recently been measured up for my first prescription glasses…
A rite of passage that feels quite significant.
I now will probably use a glasses case, rather than throw them carelessly into bags, balance them on the top of my head or lose them everywhere…and handle the expensive, expertly created spectacles with due reverence rather than the ‘devil may care attitude I’ve had up till now…I’ve watched people take their glasses carefully out of their case…as if they’re a delicate flower or piece of china…
Up till now I’ve got away with cheap readers from discount shops and feel robbed if I’ve paid more than £20 for a pair. I say this to most glasses wearers and they blanch with envy…up until now that is…
They haven’t arrived back yet from the lens grinder so I’ve been waiting with great excitement…
I took the chance when being measured by the optician to show him a pair of glasses I found in my grandparents’ house. He estimated they were probably Georgian so maybe a couple of hundred years old…and were straight magnifying reading glasses:
I have carefully tried them on to see if I could see through them…and felt a frisson of timelessness as my eyes adjusted to the small round lenses and I read through them easily.
What a different world the earlier owner would have seen when they were first worn…it’s hard to imagine their world as it would be hard for them the other way round…and yet this is what we do all the time when we read a novel created in the past, or gaze at a created image, a painting or sculpture…
It’s what we do too when we listen deeply to another person…we begin to see the world through their eyes…It reminds me of a poem by John Fox, in the final verse he writes:
When someone deeply listens to you, your bare feet are on the earth and a beloved land that seemed distant is now at home within you.
May this Advent bring you the blessing of finding your beloved land within you.
I have never cared that much about what car I drive. In my younger days I had some shockers. There was a brown Mini Metro that turned out to be biodegradable (the floor rusted through while I was driving it). I had a snot-green Yugo 45 that rarely started and when it did start it had a problem with petrol incontinence. I once parked that car on a hill in Weardale and the handbrake didn’t hold – it overtook me with no driver inside whilst I was walking down a hill but fortunately not so fast that I wasn’t able to jump in and avoid disaster. One of my cars met its end at a scrapyard in Sheffield. As I drove it there, a man behind me was completely engulfed in the thick smoke pouring from the exhaust. All I could see in my rearview mirror was his fist emerging from a cloud of fumes.
Most of the cars I owned in my younger days ought to have come with a slightly larger instruction manual than you normally get: Section 1 would be a list of features, section 2 would be the troubleshooting section and section 3 would be selected prayers of intercession for passenger and driver use on motorway journeys.
Tracey, on the other hand, has always liked cars and minis in particular. She bought one many years ago and it’s still going well and still looking good. With her passion for all things Mini in mind I booked us in for a tour of the mini plant in Oxford in the springtime and it ended up being perhaps the most extraordinary day of the year.
We have all seen videos of factories before but standing in a vast room full of robots working on minis felt very Blade Runner. Each robot had 65 seconds to complete whatever job it was doing before handing the car over to the next robot, to do its job. The tour took us through all the different stages of car production (a detail that I particularly remember is that female ostrich feathers are used for dusting cars in the paint shop before the application of paint). As we wandered around, we had to avoid the driverless vehicles that were moving around the plant: their journeys were perfectly timed to deliver the right part to the right place in the production line at just the right moment. We watched the human end of the production line, where people work on moving platforms to install electrics, seats and dashboards, each process completed with precision in under two minutes and whilst part of me recalled the dehumanization of the production line as so memorably spoofed by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, I also couldn’t help but be impressed by the innovation and efficiency of this place.
There’s a lot of very clever science behind the successful operation of the Mini plant and to me it was a reminder that there are a lot of incredible scientists out there who are worth listening to. It was a strange and possibly contradictory leap to make from car production to environmentalism, but during our visit I found myself thinking about something I heard Kevin Fong, the popular space scientist, writer and broadcaster say six years ago on the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing. He was talking about John F. Kennedy’s famous speech where he promised that the United States would go to the moon within ten years, and of course it happened. Armies of scientists had to work with precision on every detail but it happened. Fong argued that if such a commitment was made today to put the same amount of effort into addressing the issues of climate change, then scientific innovation really could turn things completely around. It was at the time an inspiring thought. Former US president Barack Obama, echoing the language of former Vice-President Al Gore has said rather more soberly, “It’s important to listen to what scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient; especially when it’s inconvenient.”
So today I suppose I am giving thanks for the scientists who make the world a better place and I am dreaming of a world where scientific evidence is revered as it should be and listening to such evidence is not considered optional. To put it more metaphorically, this old banger we call science has brought us a long way. Let’s not stall the engine now.
May you receive the blessing of a reminder that we are all connected…and this can come in unexpected ways…serendipities, coincidences or synchronicities…however you understand it…
May I share a recent one that might ring a bell for you…
I try, when I can to buy books second hand…or ‘pre-loved’ if that sits better with you…
Over the past few years I have been trying to get my head around the concept of how people can do malicious or cruel acts to others, so jumped at an online training entitled; ‘Malice in Clinical Practice’ taught by a well respected clinician and trainer.
Her first and main reference was for a book written in 1989 called ‘the Tyranny of Malice’. In the tea break I went online and was pleased to see one for a few pounds and bought it. It arrived virtually the next day. In good condition and I started to read it.
I noticed the stamp in the inside cover of its previous owner: the Library of Sir Ben Helfgott MBE.
I didn’t think any more of this…until yesterday when, having a few moments to spare I put this gentleman’s name into Google…
Reading about his life and recent death, aged in his nineties gave me a shudder and then insight as to why this book had been in his library…
He was a survivor of one of humanity’s worst crimes against their fellow man.
Initially sent to Buchenwald, aged nine, Helfgott survived the Holocaust but was very weak, and was liberated in 1945. He was among 732 orphan refugees under the age of 16 brought to England after the war by CBF World Jewish Relief after being liberated from Theresienstadt; he formed a part of the initial 300 arrivals and thus of the group known as The Windermere Children who were sent to Troutbeck Bridge on arrival. He and one of his sisters (Mala Tribich) were the only members of his family to survive the war; his mother and youngest sister were rounded up and shot by the Nazis.
He campaigned that the holocaust must not be forgotten…and also seems to have wanted to make sense of and explore the dark side of character and culture…the focus of the book that has connected me with this amazing man…
I feel extremely honoured and humbled to have his book and wonder where this connection will lead me now…
May blessings of connection open up for you this Advent and may you be open to the gift they bring you.
I’m not a big fan of middle-of the-plate food. If we go out to eat, I want a good portion that goes right to the edge of the plate, not a lonely morsel in the middle surrounded by a sea of empty porcelain. If you pay to eat out, you shouldn’t feel the need to stop off for snacks on the way home, and the kind of place I like has waiters that don’t wince when you ask for ketchup.
My palate may not be sophisticated but I do like food and in June Tracey and I found ourselves in a wonderful Thai restaurant in Ambleside where the portions were good and the company even better (I have to say that of course, but it’s true). It was a lovely meal but for me the highlight, the moment of culinary ecstasy was a dessert that had a delicious warm doughnut exterior but on the inside it was packed with creamy ice-cold ice cream.
This dessert was a thing of beauty that Sunday night to match the Lakeland hills that surrounded me and the fact that all these months later I am still remembering it with a smile is a reminder of the importance of celebrating simple moments of life.
About twenty years ago I cited an American minister in a sermon that was all about the importance of simple pleasures. Unfortunately, I can’t find a record of who he was, but I will repeat his words below because they speak rather more eloquently than my ice cream doughnut of the transformative potential there is in celebrating simple things:
During my first year in theological school I was in despair about life, my own included. One cold, dreary Chicago day during the worst of it, wandering aimlessly along 63rd Street, going silently crazy, I suddenly, without intending or willing it, turned and stepped into a fresh fruit bar and ordered a glass of orange juice.
I drank it unthinkingly, then tasted the juice, the pulp. And slowly something happened. The orangeness of that orange juice, its sweetness and sunfilled-ness, the feel of it going into my throat and into my body, awakened me. I remember mumbling to myself how those oranges were doing good by me, actually caring for me without my asking, and the least I could do was say — if not “thank you” — at least “okay”.
Maybe if oranges could be such a pal — zinging good things through me — why not other things? The sun, the air, the sidewalk, the music pouring from the bells of Rockefeller Chapel across the midway. I finished my orange juice, walked back to the Meadville Library, wrote an A paper on Luther and the Anabaptists and went on into the ministry.
May you have the blessing of meeting a Goldcrest on a winter’s walk…
I have just had a quick nip out with the dog…both well wrapped up, but I’d left my gloves at home so my hands firmly pocket planted…there is still snow on the escarpment and a bitter wind.
And I heard a different squeaking in a nearby tree. We stopped to better listen and looked up to identify the squeak’s source
My eyes adjusted to see a tiny yellowy green brown bird flitting from branch to branch… a Goldcrest! …Apparently the adults weigh the same as a 20p coin…they are the UK’s smallest bird.
I felt truly blessed to be in the company of this minute miracle of nature…reminding me of Julian of Norwich’s words when holding a small nut in her hand…and marvelling at it’s smallness is told that ‘It is all that is made’ and ‘endures because God loves it.’.
May we all endure this Advent’s busy times knowing that we are truly loved…
Today may you have the blessing of picking something up, at home, and finding that long lost special thing beneath it…you perhaps put it somewhere for safe keeping…you got distracted…and then began to lose hope of ever finding it…
Until…
It reminds me of the words in the hymn Amazing Grace; ‘I once was lost but now I’m found…’
This brings together all those loose ends into something more coherent; those times when we do indeed feel lost…lost amongst the chaos and the clutter of life; the tiredness after a fretful night. Feeling ragged and not quite sure of our direction.
Perhaps a well timed cup of tea, finding that lost something or other, just noticing a glimmer of beauty even in the dying flowers can help us feel ‘found’ again…
May the blessing of ‘feeling found’ be part of your Advent path….
Driving home from work the other night I listened to the first in this year’s series of Reith lectures delivered by Rutger Bregman, whose excellent book Humankind inspired me several years ago, with its positive perspective on what humanity could be. In the lecture this week, Bregman was less positive than he sounded in his book (and this was before the BBC censored a line), and who can blame him in the year that is 2025? I have not fact-checked his lecture, but at one point he gave some sense of the horror of the war the world has seen this year when he referenced Israel dropping “the equivalent of six Hiroshima’s worth of bombs on Gaza.” What a deeply horrifying thought that is in a year which our daily news cycle has given so little scope for hope. The United States elected a new president who on day one denied the reality of climate change and whose agenda seems to be replacing the democratic forms of government that have served well for so long with a cruel authoritarianism made in his own image. There are also echoes of Trump in the UK, where right-wing populism has gained a foothold and the racism at the extreme end of anti-immigration rhetoric is becoming more normalised, fuelled to some extent by social media misinformation.
2025 has been a year when I have heard that sense of diminished hope expressed by people in church and in my work in a university, where high fees and modern day pressures are having a detrimental effect on curiosity. Indeed, in his Reith lecture, Rutger Bregman mentioned the American Freshman survey, which since the 1960s has monitored the values of students in the United States. In the early years students prioritised finding a good philosophy of life on their journey, and making money was lower on the agenda, but today this has apparently flipped and finding a philosophy of life is less important than before. I am not sure whether the same pattern is evident in the United Kingdom, but it feels like many students today are living in the shadows of diminished possibilities.
I don’t have the answers to any of the above, but as we enter into advent I am reminded that the Christian Christmas story is one of hope being born in a cold cruel world. I am also reminded that to some extent we have to construct our own realities. Perhaps in the grey moments of life we need to seek out the colour a bit more. Perhaps in hard times our friends can also help us see what is good.
With that in mind throughout advent I am inviting people to share their blessings of 2025. What follows is 24 blog posts of advent positivity, 24 blessings for which a variety of people have chosen to give thanks. At the time of writing, there is still plenty of room for more submissions, so if you wish to please send some words and a picture if you have something you don’t mind sharing of something that has given you a sense of blessing in 2025. Send your entries to cheltglosunitarians@gmail.com
On Sunday 28 December we will have a service at Bayshill Unitarian Church in Cheltenham celebrating some of the blessings that have come up. We could do worse than to use this adaptation of a Fransiscan benediction, which I offer as a blessing for day 1:
Day 1: A Fransiscan Benediction
May God bless us with discomfort At easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships So that we may live from deep within our hearts. May God bless us with anger At injustice, oppression, and exploitation of God’s creations So that we may work for justice, freedom, and peace.
May God bless us with tears To shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war, So that we may reach out our hands to comfort them and To turn their pain into joy.
May God bless us with just enough foolishness To believe that we can make a difference in the world, So that we can do what others claim cannot be done: To bring justice and kindness to all our children and all our neighbors who are poor.
And may God bless us with an appreciation of our aliveness, Our knowledge that we are still here and the world still turns, And in that world we appreciate laughter and sunshine, The books on our shelves, the people in our lives, The small details that make our lives complete.
May God bless us and help us be a blessing to others.
Since lockdown I have noticed that a lot of people have been taking to social media to sing their favourite songs, and I can’t decide whether this earnest and heartfelt gesture is a blessing or something that makes a bad situation worse. There is an old Yiddish proverb, which I know I have quoted before that says, “A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the accordion but doesn’t.” Possibly something similar is true of this online phenomenon, but I suppose people have to do something to cope with isolation. All I would say is you might think about exhausting other possibilities before launching yourself onto other people’s ears – try gardening, painting, indoor football, throwing cards into a top hat, writing a novel, and musical appreciation before you record yourself and if you must make a recording, think about your neighbours. Will the sound of your dulcet tones coming through the wall fill them with good cheer or will they think some birds have fallen down the chimney and are now squawking for their lives?
As I write this, I am started to get used to the relative silence of Cheltenham. Where normally at this time I would be getting the sounds of car engines and people returning from work coming through the window, today the birds dominate, chattering musically away perhaps about how much the humans have improved recently. In the Groundhog Day era of isolation there is a great deal to be stressed about and yet there are moments like this when I have an experience of something being better than it normally is, so I feel momentarily good about it and then guilty because it feels wrong to appreciate that good moment when so many people are suffering. This undoubtedly is the same kind of adult logic that made no sense to me as a small child when I didn’t like something on my dinner plate and my mother would remind me that I should eat it because there were starving children in Africa. I would reason that I was happy to send my food to them, but that suggestion never went down well. Eat your dinner; remember people less well off than you; think yourself lucky; feel bad that you’re glad that you’re better off than someone else.
I decided that over the next couple of weeks, I would present through this blog, some music from the Kevin hymn book, by which I mean, songs that are not in hymn books that I know, but songs that have spoken to me over time. So I invite you to put on some headphones, and listen first of all to a song that resonates with the current moment, and in particular our tendency to feel bad about ourselves, the things we do and the thoughts we have. It’s a song from 1995 by Marcus Hummon, a song of guilt and self-reflection and it gets me every time.
I first heard that song at university in 1995 at a time when I had come out as a country music fan. Indeed, years later, when I moved in with my wife Tracey, my love of this genre of music was something we had to have a conversation about, and she graciously told me she loved me as I was and then bought me a set of headphones. I think she was trying to save herself from being subjected to the country music hall of pain for this is a genre of music that is not always helped by its stereotypes, which are reflected in ridiculous song titles like You Can’t Have Your Kate and Edith Too, My Wife Ran Off with My Best Friend and I Sure do Miss Him and I’m so Miserable Without You it’s Just like Having You Around.
Chris ‘in the morning’ Stephens, a character in the excellent 90s TV series, Northern Exposure celebrated the sense of myth in country music, explaining that “There’s heroes and villains, good and bad, right and wrong. The protagonist strolls into bar, which he sees as a microcosm of the big picture. He contemplates his existence and he asks himself, ‘who’s that babe in the red dress?”
For me, though, country music at its best takes me to places I have been and realities I have lived; it’s three chords and the truth, raw exposed emotion rendered even more raw and emotional by the sound of a mournful fiddle and a three part harmony. If you want to wallow in misery, country music lets you do it more woefully than any other musical genre so the grey mood of a Sunday when the shops were shut in my adolescence was translated into the much darker hues of Kris Kristofferson’s lyrics:
Well I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad so I had one more for dessert
And I fumbled in my closet for my clothes and found my cleanest dirty shirt
And I combed my hair and washed my face and stumbled down the stairs to meet the day….
…On a Sunday morning sidewalk, I’m wishing Lord that I was stoned,
‘Cos there’s something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone…..
This is a phenomenally miserable song, up there with Ralph Stanley’s O Death and Merle Haggard’s Misery and Gin.
Country music songs can sometimes be positive, though often only in a backward looking way that pines for a simpler past that never was (hence the joke about what you get if you play a country song backwards – your mother back, your dog back, your truck back). This is particularly true when it comes to spirituality, a word that isn’t in the country music dictionary because in this genre it’s all about that old time religion: a boy leaves home and his parents send him off with A Bible and A Bus Ticket Home, Ricky Skaggs reminisces about the childhood Little Mountain Church House where he heard the word he based his life upon and so on. Liberal religious sentiments are rarely heard so the exceptions stand out, which is absolutely the case with Iris Dement’s classic, Let the Mystery Be, a song that embraces the things we don’t understand with memorable lines like:
Some say that they’re coming back in a garden, bunch of carrots and little sweet peas;
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.
I heard a variation on this theme in a sermon many years ago in which an extra beatitude was suggested that Jesus never said. ‘Blessed are the cracks for they let in the light.’ Life doesn’t give us all the answers but if we are open to them, amidst the strangeness of life and all the things that don’t make sense, there are moments of illumination. If we use them well, that may be enough.
Living in the Moments 