The Beggar – a poem, and some conversations dressed as an elf

Last week I went into Warwickshire Further Education College with my Dad, who’s the chaplain there, and spent the lunch hour wondering up to unsuspecting 17 year olds in a Christmas jumper, explaining to them that I was a Christmas elf (which will make sense if you’ve seen my jumper), and offering to perform for them a Christmas poem. Several wonderful people were bemused enough to say yes, and this is what I performed for them:

When I’d finished, I’d ask them something along the lines of, “Have you ever thought of Jesus like that before?” And the conversations that ensued were very interesting indeed.

One man – pretty old so I suspect he was a teacher – didn’t even want to hear the poem because he ‘doesn’t do Christmas’. We chatted for a bit, and after a while he explained to me that he was ‘completely agnostic’ because he was a ‘see it to believe it’ kind of person. I thought about spontaneously performing to him my other Christmas poem, about Hamlet and Shakespeare and Yuri Gagarin, but had just enough social sense to refrain. It was hard to stop myself though because it is in some ways an answer to that very question! (If you haven’t heard it, have a look at this gloriously poor quality video: https://youtu.be/A4hSh56BNX4 )

What I said instead was that God has revealed himself to us by coming as a human in Jesus, who lived a real, public life for 30 years – drawing huge crowds and huge opposition by performing miracles and claiming to be God and to be able to forgive people’s sins – and then died a thoroughly public death, and rose from the dead and appeared publically to many people over a period of 40 days, before giving his followers his Spirit and returning to his Father. If that’s true, the sort of evidence we would expect to have for its truthfulness would be the continued work of that Spirit – and I’ve seen tonnes of that but it’s by definition pretty hard to pin down so I wouldn’t necessarily expect a ‘sceptic’ (like I used to be) to be convinced by it – but also you’d expect to have the account of those who had been there during Jesus’ life, who had seen him with their own eyes. And that’s exactly what we have! There’s this great moment at the start of a letter from John – one of the disciples who wrote (surprise surprise…) John’s gospel. He says:

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands of touched – this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” [that’s John’s favourite way of referring to Jesus]

So he’s quite emphatic that this is something he’s actually seen, heard, touched – not just something he’s made up. In fact, just in case we hadn’t got the point, he continues…

“The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it”

Oh really John? You’ve seen it? Why didn’t you tell us that before?

“and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.”

He ‘appeared’ to you, John? Like you saw him? How come you didn’t mention that earlier? Oh no wait…  Anyway, carry on…

“We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard…”

OK seriously John you can stop now we get it.

I wish I had asked the man whether he would believe his wife’s testimony about something she’d seen with her own eyes, whether he’d believe my testimony if I told him that the man over there was my Dad, whether he’d believe a doctor’s testimony about what the results of a scan meant, or a biologist’s testimony about how photosynthesis has been shown to work, or a historian’s testimony about how many wives Henry the Eighth had – none of which he could see and understand for himself! I wanted to talk to him about whether ‘testimony’ might actually be a crucial way that we come to know anything meaningful about the world we live in, and suggest that “I have to see it believe it” might possibly be a cultural myth that not even Richard Dawkins really lives by. But I didn’t, because all that stuff only occurred to me after he’d gone!

I wish I’d been able to ask better questions at the time. Not for the sake of my echo, because I wanted to win some argument. Just because I was gutted when he walked away – gutted because what I was trying to offer, what John and the others were offering when they went around the Middle East telling people, and when they wrote their gospels, was life. Real life, full life, joyful life, eternal life. I had one conversation with a student who said he went to church every week, but it was all pretty chilled, and all they ever said really was, “Don’t be a dick.” And that made me sad, because that’s nowhere near all that Jesus said. It made me think of the bit at the start of John’s gospel, his account of Jesus’s life, where he basically says everything I’m trying to say in the poem in two sentences:

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

He’s holding out to us grace and truth. Ridiculous love, impossible forgiveness, actual reality. That’s why it’s so gutting when people just don’t seem that bothered by it – you can hear the mixture of awe-filled joy and genuine tragedy when John says,

“He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognise him. He came that that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”

***

I had so many other conversations but I realise that I’ve gone on forever about that first one, so I’ll finish up. But here’s what I found myself saying to a lot of people as the chats drew to a close. I don’t expect one poem and a five minute conversation (or a blog) to have completely changed your mind about Jesus. That would be quite rash. But I think it would also be rash to not consider it any further. Because what if the testimony of these people is reliable and they really are describing the true source of real, both-now-and-forever, life? What if Jesus really is an unbelievably good God revealing himself to us so we can actually know him and love him? Surely it’s worth at least investigating, at least hearing them out? So I usually encouraged the people I’d been chatting to, and obviously I’d encourage you as well, to just have a read of John’s account of Jesus’ life (or any of the other three - they’re all good!) and see what you make of it. The New International Version is a modern, accurate and easy to read translation, and it’s free to read right here. It literally takes less than a couple of hours to read – and if you’d rather sit back and relax in your Christmas holidays then you can even download the ‘Bible app’ and get David Suchet to read it to you! (He reads the ‘NIVUK’ version.)

I’m serious – why not? I’m as aware as anyone that the primary-school-assembly version of Jesus, the nice bearded man who carried sheep over his shoulder and taught us not to push over other children in the playground, is at best a pleasant irrelevance! But the real thing is worth taking a look at. Why not see if God really did love you enough to come to you as a beggar, dressed in flesh and blood and skin, so you could know him as a person eye to eye, so you could start to fall him love with him? And once you’ve read it, if you’re intrigued, but you’re not convinced it’s true – drop me a message, we can have a think about where to go next!

Have a thoroughly Merry Christmas!

Who's afraid of #FOMO? (And who killed #YOLO?)

I was thinking about hashtags the other day. #relevant

I never managed to sustain both facebook and twitter so I dont know for sure, but it seems like #YOLO has drifted out of use a little bit - and I was thinking, what was that all about? Why did that go so big? And what did it even mean?!

My understanding of the logic of #YOLO is this:
You only get one shot at life, so at all costs, do not waste it. Take every risk, every opportunity. If you want it, take it right now because it's never coming back.

And that makes some sense; it actually reminds me a bit of Nietzsche, which isn't always a bad sign.

For me the defining #YOLO experience, the one that always comes to mind, was my mate - who I'll call Kat for the sake of anonymity - on a girls holiday in Magaluf. Someone suggested jumping off the pier into the sea and it seemed like the sort of diem that just has to be carped and so she went for it! #YOLO. And the water was slightly too shallow and she broke her ankle.

And this is the problem with #YOLO. I have a vague feeling it was pointed out by various sarky middle-aged people - or it may just have been the sarky middle-aged voice in my own head - but the thing is, if you only live once, that's surely all the more reason to be careful!

Of course that sounds a bit granny-ish to say (nothing against either of my grannies - you're great) but I think it actually is a genuine dilemma that cuts right to the middle of the whole #YOLO thing.

Maybe it's easier to see it in terms of #FOMO. #FOMO seems to me to be basically the dark side of #YOLO - for a popular hashtag, it's a shockingly vulnerable thing, isn't it? Our fear? That powerful fear that we can't quite escape because we know we do only live once, and if we miss out now, if we're not there, if we don't try it, even if we do try but somehow we mess it up: this chance is never coming back. As a wise man once said, You only get one shot do not miss your chance to blow, this opportunity comes once in a lifetime. The pressure is immense - uni years are the best times of your life apparently and right now most of my mates and me have only got two terms left. And then its gone. So it better be good, it better be fun, you better make the most of it.

But what are we supposed to do? How could Kat have just stood there and watched everyone take that risk, have that epic moment, and miss out on it? It would have been agonising. But then, how much did that broken ankle force her to miss out on? For the rest of the holiday; for the next few months? And in the last year of uni it's the same, you want to enjoy it but at the same time everyone's always asking, 'Do you know what you're doing next year then?' We're at networking events, and interviews, and writing endless applications and at the same time trying to work as hard as possible so we can get a good enough degree to get those jobs we're hoping for? It's exhausting.

And the bigger the #YOLO slash #FOMO moment, the bigger the risk, the more stark the paradox gets - if I've only got one life then I've got to really live it, but what if I end up throwing it away? Then I'm just a story in the local paper and that's that, I'm never getting it back. Or what about the more likely version, no spectacular accident, no tragic story; what if I just spend my whole life pursuing something, trying to be a [insert valid life ambition here] and I get to the end and look back and think, I wish I'd done something else. What if I end up feeling like I've wasted my only life?

The reality is, that having just one life is a pretty stressful situation. We usually don't think about it on the big scale, but we feel it whenever we face some big decision, the pressure is ridiculous. Our lives are so precarious, our plans are so fragile, the whole thing could swing completely on one choice and who knows what we'll miss out on?

So for me, I'm really grateful that my first thought every time I see or hear #YOLO is: what if you don't? What if you don't only live once? I saw a guy do a spoken word poem once for Easter, called 'the Death of #YOLO' - Jesus, in all seriousness, came back from the dead and discredited the #YOLO hypothesis. There is, at the very least, one exception to that rule, and Jesus said that if anyone will follow him, give themselves to him, he can take us through death with him and out the other side. #You don't OLO - not necessarily.

There's this epic bit in one of the letters in the New Testament where Paul, writing from prison, thinks he might be about to die. But he's happy - strangely, ridiculously joyful - it's the most joyful letter by far of the one's we have in the Bible - at one point he even says this:

For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

He's saying, why would I worry? Look at my options. If I live, whatever happens to me, whether I stay here in chains or wherever I end up, whatever I get to do or don't get to do, I get to do it with Christ. I get to do it with Jesus, in Jesus, with the True King, the ultimate lover, so close to me that no power in heaven or earth could pull us apart. And it's so good to know this - me and Rachael were talking about it the other day when we were trying to make big decisions about what to do next year, we were just reminding each other - all of these options are good options. Because wherever we go we get to love Jesus and be loved by Jesus, wherever we go we get to be part of God's work to redeem the world that he made, wherever we go there is peace, and meaning, and joy, and love. There's no getting away from it, no way we can miss out.

But then there's the other option - to die is gain. Death - the ultimate loss. The final moment where the examiner calls time and you have to put down the pen on the story of your life without even finishing the sentence. You had your chance. But Paul can put his pen on the paper and call death gain. He's excited about it, he can hardly say which he'd prefer, death or life, because he knows for a fact that he's not only living this once. His heart is racing with glorious anticipation - because he's met Jesus, the risen Jesus, the Jesus who has smashed a hole in death and come out the other side and that Jesus has promised that he's going to bring Paul with him. And there's nothing to fear. John Donne was a crazy poet around Shakespeare's time, and he wrote this:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

…

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

And for me, that confidence is so deeply liberating. The pressure is just nowhere near as intense - of course I'm going to go for it, and try to enjoy God and his world and do something meaningful with every minute of the life he gives me, but if it's not everything I hoped it would be; that's OK. If I pour everything into some particular cause and in my whole life I never see what I'd hoped for come to pass; that's gutting but it's OK. If I've given my life to something, and let so many other opportunities pass me by, and in the end when I die everything I've done dies with me; that is sad, but it is, literally, not the end of the world.

On the days when I remember the truth, I realise that I have been set free by the guarantee of glory. Utter joy; unfading beauty; inconceivable depths of love. I've been set free from #FOMO and from paralysing fear in general because #YOLO is not true. For me, to live is Christ, to die is gain. What about you?

[That can be a rhetorical question or not it's up to you - have a think about it or feel free to drop me a message, I'd love to hear what you think!]

#TMMMDI: episode two - violence and stupidity

Sometimes the metaphor makes me do things that are a bit stupid.

So a while ago, almost a year now, I was walking home from church on a Sunday night and I saw an old guy sitting in a shop doorway with a cup, asking for money. Part of me had a quick fish around in my mind for a good excuse to just keep walking, but there really wasn't any, I had nothing at all to get back to. So I said hello and I sat down next to him. (Digression: I prefer sitting down with someone to talking to them from a height, sort of because of the metaphor. If you get down to be on a level with a person it feels much more like you're interested in them, you've kind of physically committed to listening to them, and it shows your not ashamed to be seen alongside them, so the conversation can become a more genuine one; the metaphor being that Jesus is God getting down to our level to have a genuine conversation with us, #funmetaphortimes.)

Anyway, after we'd been chatting for a bit, struggling slightly because he was evidently not quite sober, another man came towards us. He was a big, burly, dark-haired Scotsman, dressed pretty smartly but shouting angrily at the man I was with (Steven) and not seeming sober either. He was shouting at Steven about the money that he owed to this man, for some cans that he'd bought him the other week or something like that – really aggressive. I didn't really know what to do so I tried to just engage the guy in conversation, I got up and shook his hand and introduced myself, at which point I think Steven told this guy I was a Christian. My memory of it is a bit blurry now but the conversation for the next few minutes was really stressful and quite disturbing, as this man alternated between boasting to me about how he was a 'born-again Christian' who had read the whole bible and knew that there was no other God, and turning on Steven again and again, shouting at him about giving him the money, threatening him. I tried to say something about Jesus forgiving us our debts, and asking us, out of gratitude for that, to forgive the debts that others owe us – but he responded quite viciously, telling me about how you can't forgive the devil, and this man Steven was the devil, and he had to get the devil out of him, or something like that. I kept trying to keep the man talking to me about theology instead of threatening Steven but at some point Steven stood up to our level, and the man turned to him, shouted at him, and when Steven once again said he had no money to give him, he suddenly struck him, very hard, with an open palm on the side of his head, knocking him to the ground.

I really didn't know what to do now, and this guy was shouting at Steven, threatening to kick his head in, and I tried to stand in between them, not really knowing what else I could do but just desperate for him not to hit Steven again, and tried to keep talking – and after a while the man just looked at me and said, “Well are you going to pay it for him then?”

I said, “What?”

He said, “Are you going to pay me back for him then? He owes me twenty quid.”

And I didn't want to give this man £20 so I thought of something to say and tried to divert the conversation again but before long he realised I was just trying to distract him and came back to the question, “Are you going to pay me back for him? Or am I going to kick his head in?”

And I felt pretty sure that those genuinely were the only two options. And I decided to pay the price. So I gave this man £20 and after a few more sickening minutes of him shouting about his twisted version of Christianity and asking me to also buy him a burger, he walked away, burger-less, and still shouting, down the street and out of sight.

The rest of the night was an eventful one – seeing if Steven was OK, chatting to a young doctor who'd seen it happen, chatting to the police when they came and trying to explain to them why I'd been sitting on the street with a homeless man; and then a whole different episode where I saw (or rather heard) the scottish man again and went to get the police to arrest him. No one pressed charges in the end and I never heard anything more about it.

The police told me I was really stupid to give the man money – and they were probably right. But the thing is, I couldn't help thinking about the metaphor, and I just couldn't resist it.

See the thing is that I would like to think that I'm fundamentally, in and of myself, better than Steven. I'd like to say, 'Look, he's got himself in trouble with this man because he's addicted to things that aren't good for him, he can't make the effort to get himself out of it, and now he's got a debt to pay. I'm not like that.' But actually Steven isn't fundamentally worse than me or any of us. We're all addicted to things that aren't good for us – whether it's that we need to criticise others silently to give ourselves a sense of superiority, or we need people to depend on us so we feel valuable, or the more typical addictions – power, success, money, sexual conquests – even if we can't pin any of those things down I think that all of us are in a very deep sense addicted to selfishness – to caring more about ourselves than anything else. And it traps us. We don't have the strength to just get ourselves out of it, it goes too deep for our self-control to fix.

Maybe a lot of people would agree with that in a sense; but what most of us might not believe is that it means we've got a debt to pay. But I think we do. We don't owe £20 to some spiteful, angry man, who's just lending us money to manipulate our weakness; no, we owe a debt of pain to a good Father who loves us. A Good Father who is more grieved, more hurt by our rebellion, our running away from him and our addiction to selfishness, than we can ever properly imagine. A Father God who created us and gave us everything good that we have and to whom we owe every drop of our joy and our love and our obedience, but who gets instead at best apathy, and at worst downright disdain. We owe him a debt far greater than our very lives are worth.

But instead of just allowing our selfishness to destroy us, instead of compelling us to bear the pain that we've created, God comes and sits next to us in Jesus. He became like us, showed us that he cares. And then as people began to reject and despise him, he didn't resist, but knowing it was what he'd come to do he allowed them to condemn him – and he payed our debt for us. We owed far more than our lives were worth and he gave his perfect life, freely, for us. He let them break his body and drain the life out of him, so that we could be put back together and filled with his life. And then he rose from the dead, which is so good that it would require a whole different set of metaphors!

My reluctant £20 feels pretty feeble when I talk about it as a picture of Jesus giving his whole life willingly – but I'm still glad that in that brief moment, I got to walk like Simba with my tiny little feet, inside the huge footprints of my King. It was a pretty nasty night overall to be honest, it felt pretty dark. But I guess it's easy to get sheltered from that side of human reality when I'm spending all my time being a nice happy student and with a nice happy family; and that makes it easy for me to prefer shiny happy metaphors for who God is and what he's done. But I'm glad that actually, he isn't just a shiny happy God who loves us in a Sunday-school kind of way, he's a real God in the real world, and he pays our real debt, and it really hurts – and I reckon that's real love.

#TMMMDI: episode one - jumping off a bridge

[To understand what TMMMDI stands for or why I'm writing this blog, see the previous post…]

As I'm sure I've never mentioned to any of you, I went on a gap year. And on that gap year, I went to Victoria Falls, which turned out to be quite a story. But before all of that had happened, I got offered the chance to bungee jump off a bridge over the river, just after the falls. And it was pretty expensive so at first I decided that actually, it'd be really fun and everything, but I couldn't justify spending the money on it. And then I had a conversation with my mate Emily, and I really can't remember what she said, but somehow it made me think about the whole thing as a metaphor – and once I'd had that thought, there wasn't much I could do.

I thought to myself – it's kind of like a leap of faith.

But to be honest, I'm not a big fan of the phrase, 'a leap of faith', I think it's stupid because it implies kind of closing your eyes and jumping out into the dark without really knowing what's going to happen, just with a sort of blind optimism that there must be something there – and in my opinion, and indeed my experience, believing in God doesn't have to be like that at all!

But what's especially fun is that, thinking about it now (and I honestly can't remember how sophisticated my understanding of the metaphor was at the time) it turns out that a bungee jump is a surprisingly good metaphor of what it's like to follow Jesus.

You're standing on the edge of a bridge. It's solid enough, you're in control. Of course, you're not completely in control – the bridge could snap at any time, there could be an earthquake or whatever – but it feels like you are and to a pretty major extent that's true. But then you look over the edge, look up, deep breath, arms out: throw yourself off.

And it's exhilarating. It's mental. It's amazing. Because you are in free-fall – you are rushing through the air, watching the seething mist of the river fly up towards you – and you can't see anything that's going to stop you. Your senses are telling you that you are falling from a great height and you're not going to stop – and your body accordingly produces tonnes of adrenaline and it feels epic.

But here's the thing: it's not exhilarating because you're not sure if you are actually falling to your death or not. It's not thrilling because there's a decent chance you're going to die – or at least, I wouldn't find that thrilling. If I actually wasn't sure that there was a big fat piece of elastic securely tied to my ankles I would have just been flipping terrified. It would have been horrific! And I wouldn't have felt free, liberated, expansive – I would have been paralysed by fear.

No, it's incredible because you know for sure that you're safe – you know for sure that they've tied the thing to your feet and you've seen the guy before you do it and it all works, it can take your weight. You know that. But your body doesn't know that. You can't see, and you can't particularly feel this thing that you're relying on – you're trusting it. And that feeling – free-falling in trust – is awesome.

And that's not a bad metaphor for what it's like to follow Jesus. There are plenty of good reasons to think that some kind of God must exist – I personally found the startlingly simple argument about the fact that anything exists all pretty powerful when I was becoming convinced about Christianity. Then there's Jesus. Historians are convinced that he existed. And there's a spectacular weight of historical evidence that his disciples must have encountered him having come back from the dead. (Basic intro to that argument here, or this video is brilliant and goes into a bit more depth, I'd recommend.) So for me, starting to follow him wasn't much like a leap in the dark – I definitely had some big fat elastic tied to my ankles!

But nevertheless, it does involve that crazy moment, where you look down from the solid bridge of self-security that you're standing on – you know who you are, you're in control of your own life, you're the master of your fate, the captain of your soul – and you take a deep breath, put your arms out and jump off, into the exhilarating free-fall of trusting someone else completely.

And it's exciting. It's epic! And even when it doesn't feel that great, even when it feels like there's no hope for you, no way you're coming back up, there's always this: you've seen the guy before you do it. You've seen that Jesus dived all the way down into death and came rocketing back up again, out of the grave, into the disciples' faces and then back to his Father. And he promised that if you trust him, he's got hold of you and you'll come back up too.

And that's good to know. Really, really good to know. So there you go - that's what the metaphor made me do. Don't ever let them tell you English isn't exciting...

The Metaphor Made Me Do It

This world is a mosaic of metaphors.

And I like pretentious opening sentences.

Anyone who knows me well will know that I love metaphors – in fact, they may possibly be a bit sick of me constantly going on about them – but there's a good reason for my obsession. Metaphors make something make more sense, they make your understanding of it richer and more vivid, by showing you something else that's a bit like it. (Yes, English Lit friends, it is more complicated than that, but go with me for now.) And actually, we pretty much rely on them for good communication, especially when we want to describe something that was somehow astounding or powerful or strange:

You should have seen her, she fought so hard, I was so proud

He just looked at me, and there was that fire in his eyes, you know?

You've got no idea, she was like a mother to me all those years

And yes, I know that last one was a simile, but technically a simile is a type of metaphor! Anyway, they're really useful because some things are just hard to communicate in precise, technical language – we need to paint pictures instead. And that's so much more true when it's something that actually invisible – a feeling for example – or when it's something that's difficult to understand, like when you teach some weird mathematical concept by visualising it. Or does anyone remember being taught how atoms 'want' a full ring of 8 electrons, or a multiple of 8, so they react with things to get that? For 5 years of Chemistry at my school we always talked about what atoms 'want' or don't 'want', because it's such a helpful metaphor that we barely even notice it's there. 

We need metaphors, because without a good metaphor, we can barely understand or communicate anything worth understanding or communicating! And what's more – and this is why I'm so thoroughly obsessed with them – even God needs metaphors. In fact, he especially needs them, because he is on such a fundamentally different level to everything else we know – being, of course, the Creator of everything else there is to know – that actually, if he didn't use some metaphors it would be pretty much impossible for us to really get much about him at all. I suppose in a sense he could give us a kind of point by point, precise philosophical explanation of his being – although there's probably a decent argument that even the most precise language is just a different kind of metaphor for him – but if it was all just bare, technical fact I think we'd struggle to know how we felt about him, how we related to him.

So because God loves to communicate with us, because he loves to relate to us, he loves metaphors. And the Bible is full of them, rich, complicated, powerful metaphors, or sometimes delightfully simple ones. But he doesn't stop there – the whole world is scattered with these beautiful rays of metaphorical light, these bits of existence that show us a new angle, that paint a new picture of what God is like or what it's like to follow him. And again, anyone who's spent a fair bit of time with me will know that once you start looking, I reckon you can see these all over the place – and I love 'em.

But sometimes it goes a step further. Sometimes I find myself realising that I could create a metaphor – that I could do something that would be a picture of something that's true about God – and that is an offer that it's pretty difficult for me to resist. I moved house and job for seven months once, mostly because of the metaphor. So I'm going to do a few little blogs now, about some of the things that the metaphor made me do. I hope you enjoy them.

To Be Continued...

I Want To Be A Radish

God has massively challenged me over the last couple of days, and today I wrote a poem trying to express some of what that has been about! Hope you enjoy. (You can read it and listen to it, hopefully the soundcloud thing works!)

https://soundcloud.com/mike-hood-11/i-want-to-be-a-radish

I want to be radical like a radish.

Because radish and radical have the same root word
Which is 'root'. Or, 'radix'.

Radix; radish.

Radix; radical.

I want to be radical.
I want to be deeply, dangerously different,
I want to be part of a people who were previously perfect strangers,
But who purposely, not perfectly but still persistently
Have knit themselves together as a people of peace.
A peaceful people.
A people who have learnt the long way,
the slow way,
the lowly way,
that the lonely way

of my plans, my ambitions,
my life so get out of my way
is a bad way.
A lost way.
A people who have learnt the long way,
the slow way,
the lowly way,

to really love.
To lay down their lives for each other

day after day.

But there's still a long, long way for me to go.
Because me,
my default,
is to try to be
a rootless radical.

Radical
So impactful
So dynamical
Unforgettable.
Doing everything at once
So much on my plate

Wake up early
Stay up late
Harder
Better
Faster
Stronger
If only I had a little bit longer.
Stress to impress.
Once in a generation
I want to be the best.
I say “we”
“We did it”
But if I'm being honest
I really mean “me”.
And what about 'me'?
I'm all show no substance
Talk the talk
And I walk the walk
But if I just sat still for a minute
I might not feel
quite so strong,
Might start to see
there's something wrong.

Because a radish is all about the root.
That's the big, fat, juicy bit.
The deep down bit
that most of the time you can't even see.
Once there was a Hebrew prophet,
a man of weeping and of words,

and he wrote:

Blessed is the one who trusts in God,
whose trust is in Him.
They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes,

its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought,
and never fails to bear fruit.

Because the tree is all about the root.
I want to be deeply, dangerously different.
I want to be part of a people who were previously perfect strangers,
But who purposely, not perfectly but still persistently
are ploughing up the sun-baked soil
of perfectionism

and professionalism,
of impatience
and impersonalism,
and putting down deep roots.
The long way,

the slow way,

the lowly way,

of knowing we are not alone today.
Of loving God more than we love ourselves today.
Of loving people,
Of loving peace,

Of knowing that that

gentle, humble, faithful love

will never cease.

I don't want to be a rootless radical,
Reckless, restless, breathless, worthless.
I don't want to spend my life
drawing masterpieces in the sand
and just pretend that they won't vanish.
So God please plant me in your fertile land,
'Cos I want to be a radish.

Today. (A sort of semi-journal.)

21/07/2015, 11:02am

Today, I feel overwhelmed.

I feel like a hundred thousand things depend on me.

I feel like I will buckle under the weight of the stuff I've picked up.
I feel like it wasn't this heavy when I picked it up, but it's just multiplying in my arms.

But today, I know the Father.
I know that he is in me and all around me and there's nowhere I can go that's out of his reach.
I know that he loves me to death.
I know that he it utterly capable of doing anything and everything that he wants.
I know that what he wants is always what is good and what is best.
I know that he can do these things without me.

I know that he can do these things with me.
I know that if all I could do for the next six months was lay, curled up in bed, achieving nothing, he would love me just as passionately, be just as proud of me as his kid, as if I'd done a thousand amazing things.
Today, like every other day, I am a fragmented person, shattered into pieces by the fall of man, so what I know and what I feel are not in perfect unison.
I feel much more fearful and confused than I know I need to be.
But I know that I won't always feel like this.
Because I know that the Father loves to help me grow what I feel into the shape of what I know.

Who I know.

21/07/2015, 12:48am

And then I mentioned to a guy I barely know called John that I do poetry, and he asked me with unexpected excitement whether I did written or performance poetry – and when I said performance he stood up and said he'd like us to share some poems with each other! So we went and found a bench and spoke poems to each other for an hour or so, and it was one of the most deeply refreshing things I have ever done. Because he was a great poet, his words were fascinating and strange and felt like the tip of an iceberg of thought and feeling that I had only the tiniest hints about. But more than that, because he was an incredible audience. Here was someone who not only understood with his head, but knew in his heart the reality of what my poems are talking about, and he was laughing and weeping and gritting his teeth with a kind of intense delight that my words, if they were just my words, could never produce. And it made me realise that telling true stories, telling The True Story to people who are willing to hear it, is the most precious imaginable privilege. So today has become a very good day.

WASTED - why I want Kate Tempest to be my friend

Thing is, in a few hours – I’ll be staring at her name on my phone, too late to call, coz she’ll be gone, and I’ll just be sat there like a prick, staring at the shape of the letters, the way they fit together, so perfect, just like her, and I’ll sit there, wishing I could show her that when I’m with her I feel so fuckin’ real, like, not pretending nothing, just who I am. I feel like I can be the man I want to be. And I do want to be that man, Tony. I do. But for some reason. For some fuckin’ reason.

I’m in a play this week called WASTED by Kate Tempest, and it breaks my heart in the best possible way – the way that only great art can – where it’s just gently tragic, but in a really satisfying way because you go ‘YES, that is it, that is what it’s like to be a person.’ The part I’ve just quoted gets me like that. To be honest it sums up a lot of what’s going on in the play – this sense of the characters wanting to be something more than the lives they are living, wanting to be better, wanting to be more real, wanting their life to mean something, but for some f**ckin’ reason they just can’t quite do it.

I asked the other guys who are in the play why they loved it, and my mate Jake said something I thought was really interesting. He said he thought it expressed something universal – and at first he wasn’t quite sure what that was – but then he said maybe it was a universal feeling of inadequacy, or maybe of connectedness, or both. And I think he’s nailed it – what the play captures so beautifully – as does pretty much everything Kate Tempest has ever written, is this agonizing tension between our human longing to be part of something bigger, something meaningful – some world-changing moment, some shining city – and this unshakeable reality that we are not what we want to be. That we are a mess. Glorious ruins – standing and falling together – hoping for more but settling for less. Tempest knows like no one else I’ve ever heard, just how deeply we were meant to be more than this, but at the same time how seemingly impossible it is for us to really change. For some fuckin’ reason.

And the really funny thing is, that she’s got no idea how to fix it. There’s a bit of poetry that we all perform together at the end of the play, and it’s trying to tell the audience how to make things better – but to be honest, it’s not that good. It feels a bit hollow and cheesy, because all she can say is stuff like, your dreams are worth pursuing, mate, you do deserve everything you dare to want. And it feels empty because we know that’s not enough, it doesn’t really change anything. It makes us feel a bit upbeat, but ultimately, that hope is not lasting, and like she says we end up desperate for someone to help us, but convinced we can’t be saved.

And I find myself doing this play, wishing so much – as to be fair I do anyway – that I was mates with Kate Tempest. Because I want to tell her that there actually is hope. Take just one example. One of the things the characters are always longing for is to break out of their monotonous, nine-to-five lives, and go somewhere, do something. They all want to cut loose, change stuff, be free. But they’re either powerless to change or addicted to security. And I want to say, what if there was a God who said, “Come to me, be my kid, and then go – go and do something incredible and terrifying because I’m the king of the universe and I’ve got your back, and if you fall flat on your face I will still love you and be so, so proud of you, so go.” That’s the kind of freedom these characters are longing for, and honestly, not being arrogant, but on the days when I realise the truth and really get it, I have that kind of freedom. Because God’s my Dad.

Or take another thing – all the stuff in that first bit I quoted about how beautiful it is when you’re with someone and you can be real, not pretending, just who I am – but at the same time not just wanting to be what you are, but to be the person you want to be, to be better. It’s all the way through the play, the longing to be seen and known and loved exactly as you are with all your imperfections, but also to change, to become more. And it seems like a paradox, like it’s impossible. But I see it and I want to grab Kate Tempest and say “It is possible!” What if there was a God, who knit you together and knows you better than you know yourself – there’s this bit in the bible that I love so much where it says -

As a father has compassion on his children,
so the King has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.

He knows that we’re a mess, he sees our glorious ruins and he has compassion for us. He flippin’ loves us. Exactly as we are. But way too much to leave us that way. And this is the epic thing, is that he also gives us a real hope, the real power to become who we were meant to be. There’s a bit in one of the ancient prophesies were God promises his people -

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you;
I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

And through Jesus that is just what he’s offering right now. To any one of us who’s willing to trade in our old heart – the heart that longs for something better but just can’t do it, can’t bring itself to change, the heart that can’t help putting itself first – to anyone who’ll trade that in he’s holding out the offer of real hope, real change – a new heart that is really alive in a way we just can’t get by ourselves, that loves him, and loves people, so deeply and richly that it almost forgets itself. We were made for so much more than what we are. And in the play, when we just tell people that, and tell them to be better, it feels hollow because it’s like we’re asking everyone to receive something but there’s no one actually giving it – it’s everyone’s round but no one’s buying – something this good, this big, has got to cost something. But the thing is, what God is offering, does cost him something. He had to die to bring us to life. And he did – he’s paid the cost, and it hurt – but he’s holding out the hope he’s bought for us. Jesus is saying ‘Come to me, and you can have my Dad as your Dad, and my Spirit as your Spirit, and you can be free.’

I feel like it’s unlikely I’m ever going to get a chance to tell Kate Tempest this, so I thought I’d write a blog about it, and who knows, she might see it some day.

P.S. If you’re in Cambridge, come see the show. https://www.facebook.com/events/374964179368061/

the rest is footnotes

There is an ancient song,

that speaks of shattered earth,
of mountains swallowed whole by
foaming, white-teethed mouths of rabid seas,

that speaks of dark days,

crumbling,
of earth’s foundations
quaking fearful underfoot.

But the refrain is sweet,
and deep, and gentle.
His voice, his voice, his voice.

He lifts his voice –
amidst the roar
of fear and fall –
He lifts his voice –
amidst the roar
and at his call
all is not put back
neatly in its proper place,
as if it had not seen

that all-surpassing face,
all is not as it had been
as it was planned,
unaltered by this
all-sufficient hand –
He lifts his voice –
amidst the roar
of fear and fall
amidst the roar
and at his call –
the whole earth melts.

God is God;
the rest is footnotes.

And now I must remember this old song,
Surrounded as I am by bustle and by throng,
By stress and pace and all that is not peace;
remember Who it is that lies beneath.

Beneath, above, before and beyond,
exalted before this small life had begun.
And know that even now I have the chance –
right here
amidst the roar
on quaking ground –
to hear that voice, and learn to dance.