New Year’s Resolutions for Real People

It was not New Year’s Eve but I was in the resolving mood. I had just enjoyed some homemade biscuits. ‘This is the very thing’, I thought. ‘I will make a tray of biscuits every month for the family.’ That was back in 1987.  I regret to say that I have not made one batch of biscuits since that day.  What a predictable failure! I had broken just about  every rule in the good resolver’s guide. I imagined how I would feel if I did it – not what doing it would involve. But more seriously I made a resolution based not on the person I am but on the person I would like to be.  I wanted to be a biscuit-baker. I thought that thinking it so would make it so. It did not. It never does.

The ‘thinking it leads to doing it’ mistake is one that many are on the cusp of making, even as I write.

But this seven point guide might just save you from the humiliation of a broken resolution.

1 Recognise that if you are thinking of making a resolution you are almost certainly on the way to failure.  So if you can, banish all thought of resolution from your mind. It’s a trap.

2. Okay, it won’t go away.  You have to do something. Or at least say that you are going to do something. Resolve this minute that this is going to be a resolution that the real you has at least a cat’s chance of keeping. Forget what the ideal you would do. That much better you would not need to make any resolution that the real you could think up.

3. So let’s forget about sorting out our vices. Any vice worth the name is resolution-proof. If you are never on time resolving to be punctual is just not going to work.  Anyone can be on time if they are wired-up to value being on time.  If you are not now you won’t be in two days time just because you have made a resolution.  Forget your vices. They will spoil the fun.

4. Try to find a resolution that the real you is going to like. Chances are that something framed positively is going to serve you best.  ’Have more fun’. ‘Book holidays sooner’. ‘Take more rest.’ These are the sorts of resolution to please the real you. – to bring a smile to your real face.

5. Forget about SMART.  Hey, this is New Year’s Resolutions we are talking about. Great resolutions are vague, subjective and in your own time.

6. How about the one-word resolution? Just pick a word and decide to make it a bit of theme in the New Year. Obsess about it. Repeat it. Use it as your password. Write it on the front page of that nice new diary. Use it as a mantra when you walk or run or even as you slowly breathe yourself into a meditative trance or deep sleep.  This is the way to deal with the virtues we lack. Keep them in your mind and on your mind.

What word?  Up to you. Someone once used ‘flow’ and I hear it served them well.  How about using a virtue word?  What would you like people to say about you if you were gone?  Say it to yourself regularly.  How about words like,  ’kind’ or ‘giving’ or ‘hopeful’?

But remember this. It’s not about resolving to be kind of whatever. That is as daft as resolving to make biscuits. It’s about resolving to keep the idea of ‘kind’ on your mind as you live though the ups and downs of the coming months.

7. If none of that appeals there is always ‘decluttering’. That’s a real winner. There’s always junk that needs to be chucked out. Taking it to the tip (aka recycling centre) can be cathartic. Not as good as bonfire perhaps, but pretty good. And then there are Charity Shops queueing up to make you feel virtuous and free-cycle and even eBay.  The joy of a recently decluttered space is one of life’s simple but sincere pleasures. So why not go for it.

As for me. Not yet decided. But I think it will be to declutter all my old sermons out of my life – well at least those over ten years old.  Either that, or I will use the word ‘hope’ as my mantra and see if I can finally clear them away in 2013.

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Time is Not Money – A Christmas Carol for the Hyper-Busy

Everybody knows the story of Ebenezer Scrooge.  He started off mean and miserable and ended up generous and happy. His humbugging of Christmas turned into the warmest of good wishes. His belligerence became benevolence overnight. And everybody knows that the difference between ‘before’ and ‘after’ was not a self-determined change of mind but the terrified response to three ghostly dreams which showed him Christmas past, present and future.

But when everybody knows something you can be sure that everybody has missed something even more obvious and even more important.

A Christmas Carol isn’t mainly about miserliness and money.  A Christmas Carol is about something far more important than money. It is about time.

Watchers of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ will know that Benjamin Franklyn’s image is on the one hundred-dollar bill. They will also know his most famous phase, ‘time is money’.  It can be a helpful phrase.  But like all pithy remarks it lacks the qualifier it needs – sometimes.

Ebenezer Scrooge’s number one problem was not that he was mean but that he did not have time. Anxious about the pennies, and believing Franklyn’s half-truth as if gospel, he gave all his time to his work.

The genius of Dickens, who must have been as industrious as the next man to produce so many words… was that he saw that the fundamental problem was not attitude to money but attitude to time.

There are plenty of witty clues in the book itself to suggest that time is the true theme of A Christmas Carol.  The three ghosts at the heart of the story: ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ have the task of introducing our anti-hero to the temporal dimension. Their visits come at precisely one o’clock in the morning and, while they are all extensive, they take no time. A main focus of Scrooge’s bullying of Bob Cratchit was timekeeping. Towards the end of the book the new Scrooge gets to work early so that he can catch Bob coming in late. And Dickens uses the drama of the ticking clock to bring it vividly to life. ‘The clock struck nine. No Bob. A quarter past. No Bob. He was a full eighteen and a half minutes, behind his time.’  As the book ends there is new hint every minute for the reader. ‘It’s only once a year, sir’ pleads the tardy Bob. ‘I was making rather merry yesterday, sir.’

And it all comes brilliantly clear as Scrooge’s conversion to a better life is narrated.  Certainly he vows to honour Christmas in his heart.  The next step is to try to keep it all the year. We are getting close now, but are not yet at the nub of the matter.  But here it comes:  Scrooge declares, ‘I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.’

What Scrooge learnt is that time is not money.  It is far more subtle and significant than that.  It is in the 3-D quality of the moment, the richness of the whole life, that true wealth is to be found.

The lesson of A Christmas Carol is this: rather than being money, time is priceless.

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Grace and Truth in Rev.

The Something of God

Nigel would not have approved – calling it a Christmas special but putting it out before Christmas Eve. But then Nigel never approves. He suffers from appreciation deficit – that’s what we all appreciate about him so much.

I’m talking about ‘Rev.’ the TV programme here. The second series ended tonight (20.12.12). If you missed it try: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0178fhq

They are dangerous, though, Christmas specials. As dangerous as Christmas itself. And there was real danger on Rev. tonight. On the doorstep the danger was physical – and it happened. In the church the danger was that chaos would erupt – and it did. And there was the deadly danger for Adam of too much to do and not enough time to do it in – and so he failed to be in the right place soon enough. The episode was as rushed as any vicar’s Christmas.

One well-meaning Christmas I arranged for one of my churches to be a shelter for the homeless. It was all right: the church was closing anyway. There was no need for it as a Church. It had been built by the Victorians for the people who lived in terraces and worked in factories. It was being made redundant. Like the people who worked in the factories. All fair and square.

But the shelter was a fiasco. It had to be closed down when two nearby off-licenses went into a cost-cutting war to get the best of the very considerable trade. I myself found it all quite moving and significant. I am sure plenty of people thought me sentimental. And maybe they were right. No real harm was done – but probably not much real good either; though it was good for a few headlines in the local paper.

When the first episode of Rev. was shown our grown up son phoned and said, ‘Put the telly on, now! There’s a programme called Rev. It’s just what it was like’. The ‘it’ was growing up in a vicarage – not in inner city London but in a market town in Leicestershire. The odd thing was that the vicarage was more inner-cityish than the neighbourhood. The events, people and issues that condense in inner cities seem to find clergy homes to be their local magnet. The doorbell would go at all hours. I wish I could say it was always answered. But it wasn’t. The diocese tried every known security device to make us feel safe. But they didn’t. Nothing really nasty ever happened. But it always felt as if it might happen one day soon. There were too many close shaves. In the end we moved out. At Christmas our new neighbours invited us into their homes. That had never happened while we were living in the vicarage. We had no neighbours. The same son – younger then – was disturbed. ‘It’s just so normal here.’

For me the saddest thing that happened tonight was not that Adam arrived at his visit too late or had an ‘episode’ in Church but that Colin head-butted him. I felt that. But it was great when Adam showed his anger and distress in the turning the other cheek scene. It reminded me of when I once chased someone down the street because, having cadged some money from my wife who was home alone, he then bumped into me as I was returning and cadged some more, hiding the fact that he had just had a hand out. But there were lovely moments too. One man came back with a brown paper bag ‘for the Reverend’. It contained some new and still-in-their-cellophane ‘M and S’ underpants. ‘I have sinned,’ he opened. ‘And this is a gift to say I am sorry for using the money he gave me for drink. I was given these,’ he held up his offering, ‘but I never bother with them.’

And it was great too that Adam grudgingly forgave him. Grudging forgiveness is forgiveness of a sort and so not to be sneezed at. It certainly worked for Colin.

And then there is the spirituality of it all. At one level there are Adam’s voice-over prayers: naïve, honest, basic and mostly believable. At another level are moments of what I want to call – in vicar speak – ‘the sacramental sublime’. I am talking about the deathbed scene at the end of the first series. And Colin’s baptism. And the address in the school after the teacher died. And the disappointed individuals all wandering into the church at the end of last week’s all too very true selection/preferment episode. And yes, Christmas lunch which was more like the Last Supper than the bacchanalian chaos of the night before.

It’s hard to get the grace of this across on the telly, just as it is hard to get the truth of vicarage life across on the telly. But my hunch is that something has been communicated here. And that something is what, for me, is at the heart of true ministry.

Thanks to Rev. we are becoming more familiar with the plot. The minister – representing the whole local church – bumbles along well-meaningly and in some anguish while manifesting just as many flaws and weaknesses as anyone else. So the good old – or naive young – minister plods along life’s way as if walking through bog in the fog. And then, just as the deepest and bleakest darkness descends, and it gets as bad as we thinik it can get – it gets worse. All hope is eclipsed. And then, and only then, something else begins to emerge. And that something has a quality of peace, of community and of silence, actually. For it is the something of God. The most wounded, ordinary and broken ones find themselves participating in that something of God which is both utterly ordinary and at the same time entirely transcendent.

As I say. It does not quite work on the telly. But Rev. got frightening close. And it pointed us in the right direction.

And that, essentially, is the best any of us can do when we see something full of grace and truth. We can just point.

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Christmas Carding

It had never occurred me until today that opening Christmas cards is like drowning. Here you see your whole life flash before you in a few minutes. Right there on the kitchen table, not yet cleared of tea, stands today’s crop, and, like yesterday’s, they have come from friends made at every stage of adult life.  And they all mingle together confusingly.  If I were to die in January, say, the Christmas Card Friends would gather, and stand around in this sort of jumble as they look at the flowers in the drizzle. Devonians would rub shoulders with good folk from the Midlands or Cambridge or Manchester while the local majority wonder who these strangers might be.

Maybe that is presumptuous. Is the gift of annual Christmas card really a promise to be there to the end?  Is being on a Christmas card list the same as being on the funeral invitation list? Not that any such actual list exists. Happily. But there are some people you’d expect to be there. And if they are not on your Christmas card list – then surely something’s wrong.

The chilly rectory in which I write these sobering reflections predates the earliest Christmas card.  That came just a couple of years after the creation of the penny post. Which means that the first door of this house had no letter box.  Nor was there a pillar box half way down the street.  It is said that Anthony Trollope had a hand in inventing that. And that the idea was immediately denounced as outrageous – as it made discreet written communication possible.  What father could happily let a postman deliver sealed mail through a flapped hole in the door?

But where would the Christmas card be without it?

On the internet of course.

And so it happens – the eChristmas card.  But does it do the business? Does it speak enough of effort, of care, of love? With the right data base, a couple of clicks you have you wishing hundreds, thousands perhaps, a ‘Merry Christmas’. But you won’t be promising to attend their funeral. You might not even be able to put a face to their name.

Maybe Christmas Cards are the original social media. ‘X wants to be your Christmas Card Friend,’ announces the card that arrives on December 1^st. You ‘accept’ by sending one back on December 7^th.  You are now linked indefinitely.  You are Christmas Card Friends. A few years later no card arrives from your ‘Friend’ and you have to decide whether or not to send your December 7^th card. You decide against and, to your horror, theirs arrives on December 17^th with a note saying how difficult life has been, some illness perhaps, and how it was a last minute scramble to get the cards out.  Help! Do you stay with your decision?  Or do you weaken and send that most ambiguous of cards – the one that arrives on Christmas Eve?

The point of all this?  I take some comfort that the house where live has seen every chapter in the Christmas card saga unfold. Over the years it has seen the very first few printed ones arrive. It has seen them come in sackloads and in dribs and drabs. It has seen religious ones and drunken mice; it has seen cards made at schools and craft clubs; it has seen glossy cards and novelty cards. It has smiled with approval as the proportion of charity cards has grown to be the vast majority. It has seen cards with gushy handwritten messages in ink and illegible scrawls after the mere word ‘from’ which send you scurrying to read the postmark – unless it is your ritual to seek to determine the identity of the sender before opening the envelope.  A task rendered ever more difficult by address labels. Which are also a bit dubious. Surely there is love in the lettering on the envelope.

There ought to be an agreed set of rules for Christmas Carding. An etiquette. Indeed in the absence of one I am inclined to step into the breach and issue some.   Here goes:

• ‘never write “and family”’’.
• ‘if you can’t write ‘with love…’ don’t write at all’.
• ‘don’t save up the religious ones for the clergy, send them to the atheists to annoy them and send the clergy the jokey ones to cheer them up at their ‘busy time’.’

But like all sets of rules they only make the author seem more ridiculous than anyone else (Doh!).

It’s irredeemable chaos out there. There can be no agreed Christmas card etiquette. There is no serious tradition on which we can base our behaviours or with which we can calm our anxiety that somehow we might be doing it wrong. You just have to go for it.  Write what you want to whom you want and enjoy any that land on your mat without worrying about the need to reciprocate.

After all, if they turn up at your funeral – you won’t be going to theirs.

Merry Christmas!

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Carols of Light

Often when I go to my stall in the Cathedral to get my prayer books ready for the service there is some music playing. Organ music. So it was a real change yesterday evening that the background music to my pre-prayer activities was a soulful rendition of ‘When A Child Is Born’. And who is that singing? Joe McElderry. And accompanying him? Rick Wakeman.

My next task of preparation is to get vested: that is, put on my robes. Between me and them, however, Kathryn Tickell is sitting on the floor doing her hair. Someone has set up an ironing board too. And among the colourful and heavy vestments already laid out for Sunday, various performers’ stage clothes are just as carefully organised.

Robed and ready for the daily evening service, there is chance to talk to the friendly staff from the Sunderland AFC Foundation and the County Durham Foundation who are on duty for what is going to be the most spectacular of Christmas Concerts: ‘Carols of Light’.

But first Evensong. Men’s voices: plainsong and Latin words sung to the beautiful music of Cristόbal de Morales – the Spanish renaissance composer of the early sixteenth century. We prayed for those suffering the blast of icy storms across the country and all ravaged by extremes of weather across the world, and that true light would be shone by the events late that evening: that it would truly be carols of light.

I was fortunate enough to attend as the guest of a company of architects and sat with a Quantity Surveyor and a couple of engineers who are collaborating on a major Cathedral development project. ‘You come in here every day… does the wow factor ever wear off?’ Newcastle supporters all, they were delighted to be at this event which was a joint Durham-Sunderland venture. We talked about the old St James’ Park and how they as teenagers (and I as a Durham student in the 1970s) had popped in to watch matches at half-time when the gates were opened to let people leave early. We were sorry about the loss of something for nothing opportunities like that for young people and we shared our worries about growing levels of youth unemployment.

The Cathedral was beautifully illuminated within. The best lighting rig since Sting recorded ‘On A Winter’s Night’ here two years ago. The Salvation Army Band were a wonderfully atmospheric warm-up act. We all stood to welcome the Royal guest, to be welcomed ourselves and to sing the carols. Readings, from the Bible and elsewhere, moving and amusing, were read by the likes of Sir Tim Rice, Kate Adie and the Countess of Wessex herself… oh and Kevin Ball and, oh yes, and children from Belmont C of E school and Gillas Lane Primary School.

Rick Wakeman told us the story of his piano accompaniment to Cat Stevens’ no1 hit ‘Morning has Broken’ and then played it on the brand new Cathedral piano. Later he played his ‘Nursery Rhyme Concerto’ – familiar tunes in the style of great composers, except that one of the ‘great composers’ is Dawson, Les… If you need a smile, watch an earlier performance on You Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB7RpAtfajM

The Cathedral’s girl and boy choristers were on the stage all evening. It was a two-hour marathon of best behaviour interrupted only by beautiful singing. Children from the Cathedral’s Music Outreach project also sang and reminded us of one of the purposes of the event: to support young people of the area and to allow some, at least, to develop their musical aptitude in the Cathedral choir. And if anyone doubts whether it is really going to happen that an ordinary local lad or lass is going to do that, they just need to be reminded that one of the first young stars to be found through the scheme went on to become a BBC Chorister of the Year. The new Bishop of Durham, who said the final prayer and blessing, wants the church to use the language of success and failure more easily. Well here is a place to start: and it is the ‘S’ word that is relevant: big time.

And so the evening sped by, with Sir Thomas Allen commanding the Cathedral with ‘The Little Road to Bethlehem and Clare Teal moving everyone deeply with her interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Halleluiah’, a song that bears all the repetition it gets. Alan Price reminded us what a friend we had in Jesus and Barbara Dickson offered a version the ancient hymn ‘Creator of the Stars of Night’.

It was, of course, a fund-raiser. The Cathedral’s Music Endowment will be the stronger for it, and so too the Sunderland AFC Foundation, which goes great work encouraging purposeful and worthwhile activity, developing skills in the young and raising their aspirations will be able to develop their work yet further. These are difficult days for many, but in the North East the recession is biting especially deep and hard. Like the winter wind in Laurie Lee’s poem, ‘Christmas Landscape’, which South Shields MP David Milliband read, it has teeth of glass.

And so the final question. Were the prayers at evensong answered? Did true light shine?

Yes it did. Those of us lucky enough to be present saw, heard and felt not just moving performances and stunning lighting effects, but the collaboration of talent and hope which life at its best is all about. In the final reading we heard the words: ‘In him was light, and the light was the light was the life of men.’ This whole event was about light as the purpose, meaning and hope of ordinary life. But it also reminded us that there is no such thing as ‘ordinary’ life. True life is what matters and the word ‘ordinary’ is far too mundane to do it justice.

True life is life infused with the light of love, the light of God and the light of potential being fulfilled, however fleeting the moment. Life becomes light when lived in a world where those who have done well care about those who are struggling, and where all come together to be humbled and inspired by the true light which comes from the creator of both stars and mortals.

As we slipped away into the evening, the winter wind bared its teeth threateningly. It was enough to make anyone one shiver – but only a little. Looking up, the sky was clear and the stars were shining with a brightness that no wind, however chill, could diminish. You could say we had seen the light in the carols, the light which no darkness can overcome. Ever.

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