An Orchestra For Everyone

My mum told me about this video and said I needed to watch it, and I'm really glad she did. There's something weirdly moving about the fact that Jess Gillam has just sent out orchestra parts to anyone who wants to play, of any ability, and all these very different people from very different places have come 'together' to make this music.

I think it resonates with my heart right now in two different ways. The first one is to do with the title of the song she chose, 'Where Are We Now?'. It feels really powerful and true that it's as if musically this crazy array of people who haven't really got much else in common are all asking in the same moment, "Where are we?" What's happening? What is this strange new place we've all found ourselves in and where do we go from here? I was talking to a friend earlier who said something along the lines of, "It's just sort of made me realise that all the things in my life are kind of arbitrary and like... they don't really care about me." And I wonder if everyone is kind of having the same experience of being forced to slow down, look for a bit longer in the mirror, and ask some pretty deep questions about what our lives are really about and what's worth living for.

The other way it gets me is because it actually weirdly reminds me of church! One of the things I've really been missing (and to be honest I'll probably be missing it for a very very long time) is being able to sing together with everyone in our church. And I think automatically I am a bit like, 'Why am I bothered about that? Seems like a bit of an odd unimportant thing to miss doesn't it?' But this video made me think about whether actually there's something really quite deep about it that I'm right to be missing.


Because when we stand shoulder to shoulder in church and sing, what's happening is that hundreds of people, of all different ages, with all kinds of different stories and backgrounds, from different countries and continents, tonnes of whom to be honest would have very little in common otherwise are coming together. (I think for example of my friend Andre - he's absolutely ripped and works as a lorry driver, and he prayed to Jesus as he hit rock bottom in a life of drug abuse and depression and found that Jesus absolutely transformed his life almost instantly - and in November he got baptised on the same day as Christine, an older lady whose sister had been telling her about Jesus for years, and finally it got through to her and she realised it was true as she saw her sister facing death - and you just think, these two people have almost nothing in common. And yet now they have everything in common!) And all of us, this crazy orchestra, stand together to make music: to sing and express together something of our the joy, the beauty, the certainty that we share because we have all put our weight on Jesus who died out of love for us and triumphed over death. And some of us have had wonderful weeks and feel on top of the world, others are deep down in the darkness and can barely see the light, but we sing together because all of us know that Jesus has gone deeper down than any of us, and he will one day raise us all forever. And together our cracked and tuneless voices make music. We all make one song. And the God of the universe smiles wide. Because he sang songs of love over us long before we ever dreamed of singing back to him. And the whole thing is thoroughly human and thoroughly heavenly. And I miss it.

Wake Up For A Minute: 6 Questions to Ponder

I've noticed in myself and talking to other people, that it's very easy for this weird lockdown situation to leave us just kind of ploughing through our days, getting on with things or entertaining ourselves, without much sense of purpose or meaning. A friend said last night he wanted to kind of 'wake up' to why he was doing what he was doing, to the important things of his life, and I guess we all want to do that a little bit. So I thought it might be really valuable to slow down for a few minutes, and just ask ourselves some genuine questions. Here are the top six questions I could think of to get started with.


What is the job of pain in the body? What good can suffering do? Is there any?





What have you learnt about yourself in this crisis? What that’s encouraged or surprised you? What that’s worried or disappointed you?





What does it show us that as a society we responded to this both by being generous and looking out for others, and by stock piling, panic buying, and breaking the restrictions to enjoy the sun? 





If you didn’t do those unhelpful things (much), does that mean you’re a fundamentally better person than those who did? (And if you did, does that mean you’re a fundamentally worse person than those who didn’t?)





“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal, Pensees. 
What has it been like to be without many of the normal distractions from yourself these last couple of weeks? Or have you just found different distractions?





Why, until this crisis and even during it, do we in the 21st Century west talk about death so much less than other cultures and civilisations?

Daily Something Different

Hello wonderful subcribers!

This is just a quick message to let you know that I've started a new blog in this strange time, with a slightly different format, where I'll share something that I've found beautiful or thoughtful or surprising every day. Some days it will videos or poetry others have created and I've just loved, sometimes it will be blogs by me, other days it will be the scripts or recordings of my poetry! 

So please have a look and subscribe to that blog too at dailysomethingdifferent.wordpress.com

Thanks so much!
Mike

The Only Way Up Is Down: Boris & Jesus

We’ve all got a problem with authority.

In an election campaign, everyone knows that we need leaders. There’s a lot that’s not right in the world and we can’t put it right unless some people have the authority to change things. Even if things were going well, you can’t have a united human community without leadership that exercises some kind of authority. But the big question is, what kind of leadership? What kind of authority?

I couldn’t help thinking last night about Boris Johnson growing up saying he wanted to be the ‘World King’. And then cleverly manoeuvring himself across to the Leave camp when he saw an opportunity in the referendum. And then working his way into the perfect position to oust Theresa May and win the leadership. It basically feels to me like whatever you think of his policies, it’s pretty hard to deny that our Prime Minister was pretty willing to do anything to get that power. It’s pretty hard to avoid getting the impression that he wanted to be Prime Minister for his own sake, rather than for anyone else’s. I imagine that even my friends who are committed Conservatives feel a bit uneasy about that – to be honest I imagine quite a few of the Cabinet feel a bit uneasy about it. I think Plato said at some point that the only person wise enough to be King would not want to be King – but it feels like we’re a long way away from authority being thrust upon someone who doesn’t really want it for themselves but will accept out of duty and the desire for the common good. A very long way.

And yet I think we all know that we need leaders, that authority is actually deep down a good thing, because authority can unite and it can heal. If the right person has it.

And so I couldn’t help thinking last night about how glad I am that Jesus is real, and he is the one who has ultimate authority and one day will exercise it fully. That’s just such good news. Why? Because where many politicians are essentially willing to cause damage to others in order to get power for themselves, Jesus is the opposite. He was willing to suffer immense damage to himself, in order to use his power for the benefit of others. Where we tend to scramble our way up the ladder, he lovingly climbs down – down to being born into poverty, down onto his knees to wash our feet, down into the hellish depths of death itself – so that he can lift us up. 

I love this poem which is one of the very earliest songs written about who Jesus was:

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death –
        even death on a cross!

Isn’t that amazing? Jesus is in very nature God. He’s the Eternal Son of God, equal with God the Father in the unity of the Spirit forever – but what does he do with all that authority? He doesn’t grasp at it for his own advantage. He kneels, he stoops, he serves. And in the mystery of mysteries his ultimate act of service, his deepest way to do good to the world is to let himself die naked and humiliated, in tortured agony. And the poem goes on:

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
    and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

And I don’t know about you, but if it was just the second half I think something in me would feel uneasy about someone having all that authority, all that power, all those knees bowing before him. But the thing is, Jesus knelt first. Jesus climbed down, all the way into the dirt, all the way into the depth of that death, out of love for us. And if that’s what he’s like, then its such such good news that he has all the authority. He’s the only one we could ever trust to wield it. And it’s such good news that one day he will exercise that authority fully, and every knee will bow before him, mine included.

And of course if we grasp that, if we start right now to trust and follow the King who kneels to wash our feet, then we learn how to wash other people’s feet. We learn to have the same mindset, as the poem invites us to at the start. And I reckon that’s exactly what this hurting world needs right now.

Sometimes something just takes your breath away

Last weekend one of my student friends, Alison, got baptised at our church, and during the service she shared her story. It was only a couple of minutes, but as she looked out at her new church family and spoke you could tell it was right from the heart. I found it deeply, deeply beautiful. See what you think...

"Hello.

Christianity is just something people used to believe, right? It’s not something we need to think about anymore, and the people who do would believe anything they’re told. That’s the attitude I had starting from about age five when my mother told me that Jesus wasn’t really the son of God. For me and all the other default agnostics surrounding me, it seemed we had figured out one key truth about the universe – that there was no God – and everything else, like the terrifying finality of death and the implications of living in a universe without good and evil, could be left to look after itself.

When I reached university, I didn’t want to push those questions aside anymore. It seemed like there was no purpose or direction in the world, but everyone was making things up as they went, and I didn’t want the universe to be like that. Thanks to some persistent inviting by my friends, I started going to Christian Union events where they were actually addressing the issues which everyone else was ignoring. I went in expecting to disagree with everything that was said, but to my surprise found that the Christians had thought things through. They pre-empted a lot of my objections and gave me some of the evidence which I value as a history-slash-literature student. It was news to me that it’s possible to be both a Christian and a rational thinker.

This began a process which lasted several months. First, I wanted to get at what Christians actually believe, separate from the vague impressions I had absorbed growing up. I began reading the Bible and other Christian books, and talking through my objections, and even went to church to find out what it was like – then kept going back. Bit by bit, I became convinced that there was a God. Not only is the historical evidence for the events at the cross pretty good, but more importantly, this feels like a universe where things like love and justice exist, and those things don’t make any sense without something that exists beyond and outside of us. But it took a long time to admit that out loud, and even after I did, I was determined not to become a Christian.

It’s been almost a year since I finally gave in. No-one ever promised this would be easy, and in some unexpected ways it’s made things harder. When I’m with my non-Christian family or friendship group, there’s a contrast between the inside of me where God is increasingly becoming the centre of the universe, and the outside where he isn’t even real at all. But his existence isn’t dependent on our attitude to him. He’s there, which means that I don’t exist at random, and that is so precious and exciting that I have no choice but to give my life over to him. There’s no part of myself that I don’t owe, and there’s nothing else that could be worthy of giving it to."

Cleaning Our Windows Two Years Late

The other week we got our windows cleaned. For the first time. In two years of living here. It took about 45 minutes, cost £15, and it was like magic. It’s amazing, it’s like being in a different flat – the rooms are brighter, the outside world is a different colour!

But the funny thing is, before they got cleaned, as much as we knew they were a bit gross, we didn’t think it was making that much difference. We mostly didn’t think about it all. That was just what the windows were like, that was just what the sunshine was like, that was just what colour the outside world was. It was just normal.

And so this grime-based window episode has reminded me that just because something is normal, doesn’t mean that it’s right. Just because something is normal doesn’t mean that it could be wonderfully different. Just because something is normal doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem that needs to be solved, and really can be solved.

Tonight at my church a friend of mine was baptised – she’s a student who grew up agnostic/atheist and while at uni actually started asking the big questions of life, is there any meaning to it all or is it all just an accident? Is there such a thing as good and evil, and if not why does it feel so much like there is? And she became convinced that actually not only was there a lot of good reasons to believe that Jesus was real and he had come back from the dead, but that actually Jesus and the Bible made tonnes better sense of the real world we live in than the vague ideas she’d grown up with. And looking back on it, she said something I found really interesting, she said, “I and the other agnostics I was surrounded with had realised one great certainty about the universe, that there was no God, and decided that all the other big questions, how life wasn’t pointless if it was all an accident, how there could be real good and evil, could look after themselves.”

And what I thought was really interesting about that is that I bet if you’d asked her back then, she’d have never described it quite like that. Most people in our particular corner of white Western culture decide that life’s big questions can look after themselves, and assume that there is no God, without ever really doing those things consciously and carefully – that’s just the obvious assumption. That’s just what the windows have always been like. To stretch the metaphor, it’s like the windows are so grimy we can’t see anything outside, just enough light gets through for us to get on with, since we’ve got plenty of led screens inside anyway, and so we get by on the assumption that there isn’t actually anything much worth bothering about outside, and not asking too many questions about where that dim glow is emanating from. And everything on the shining screens that fill our every spare moment is designed to keep us occupied, keep us entertained, and keep our eyes adjusted to their artificial light and unaccustomed to the sunlight we’ve never properly seen.

But just because that’s normal doesn’t mean it’s right. Just because that’s normal doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be wonderfully, wonderfully different.

This is why I love talking to people about Jesus, because I get to tell people the truth that the world is so much brighter than we assume it is. That life is a gift from a God who loves us. That we are not accidents, none of us. That our lives are not meaningless or even just average, but suffused with infinite and glorious significance. That we are not unimportant or unloved but that the Creator of a billion galaxies has crafted us in his image, to reflect his glorious nature, and even though we have ignored and avoided him, turned on each other and destroyed his world, he cares about us so passionately that he came as human being and died an agonised and humiliating death to suffer himself all the pain and shame that we’ve created. That we can know the God who made us, and be a genuine part of what he’s doing to redeem this broken world and right every wrong. That ultimately love will overcome hatred and loneliness, that ultimately life will overwhelm death, and that ultimately light will outshine darkness.

Maybe you’ve always assumed that’s rubbish and wishful thinking. I’m just saying that it’s normal to assume that. But just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it’s right. Why not take a look outside?

Some Un-sage Marriage Advice: Dance or Die

Is it better to be static or be moving?

Is it better to be stood still or be going somewhere?

My best mate is getting married in a few weeks’ time, which makes me feel like I ought to be dispensing sage advice. Unfortunately however, having been married less than two years and usually having the emotional intelligence of a cuddly dalek, I don’t have much sage-ness to pass on. All I could think of, was to compare it to the camp for disadvantaged young people that the two of us have been volunteering on for the last few years! (No offence meant to Rachael, genuinely, as you’ll see!)

Thing is we’ve always said about Falcon (that’s the camp) that it’s the hardest and the best week of the year. Now have you ever noticed that that’s a surprisingly common combination? That what’s hard is often also deeply joyful? That being easy and comfortable, and feeling fully alive don’t actually come together very often? And the reason is, at least on Falcon, that pretty much all day every day, you’re not asking yourself, ‘What do I feel like doing?’, you’re asking yourself, ‘How can I make that kid happier? How can I show them love? How can I help them have a good holiday?’ And then you go do it. And the weird thing is, that’s hard work, and it usually involves doing something you don’t feel like doing, but at the end of the day you feel both exhausted and alive.

Why is that?

I read something brilliant the other day that compared life to a dance. Or actually to planets and gravity – it was kind of a mixture of the two. And it pointed out that usually, what we want is for other people to orbit around us. We want to be the centre, not necessarily of attention, but in the sense of everything revolving around our feelings and our desires. But this book asked a brilliant question: if we all demand that everyone else revolve around us, what happens? Everyone just stands still. Imagine a dance where everyone is waiting for everyone else to dance around them. It’s the most boring dance ever. It doesn’t even count. They’re all just standing there, murmuring and twitching their heads at each other getting increasingly frustrated that the others won’t do what they want! The whirling, spinning, leaping delight of the dance never happens.

But imagine instead, a dance where everyone is trying to revolve around everyone else. Everyone wants to orbit around the others, and make them the centre. You see now I’m imagining something much more exciting – much more beautiful. What comes into my head is one of those spirograph drawings we used to do when we were kids – what you’d get would be complicated and intricate and fast! Weaving and whirling in and out and around, always moving, always interacting. It’s what the very best bits of a barn dance or a ceilidh feel like, or actually the most beautiful and satisfying moves in a game like football, or some of the most breath-taking moments on Planet Earth or whatever with vast shoals of fish or murmurations of starlings. Whatever you’re imagining, this feels very much alive. Whereas everyone standing there, waiting for the others to revolve around them, actually isn’t all that different to being dead.

And that’s why Falcon makes you feel alive. Because you spend all day revolving around other people – and that’s the dance we were made for. And I was trying to tell my best mate that that’s what marriage is aiming for – that’s what it’s meant to be – is two people revolving around each other, 24-7, wanting to put the other person at the centre, and in the process creating a dance that is beautiful and tender and alive. But that’s hard work. It doesn’t come naturally. What comes naturally is a grumpy grinding to a halt as you demand that the other person orbits around you.

And the thing is if you’re with me up to this point this should be raising a pretty big question. How come what comes naturally and what makes us feel alive are not the same thing? I mean that’s so obviously the case that we come to take it for granted and we happily write and read a thousand life-coaching books on exercise or mindfulness or destressing or relationships without ever asking ourselves, why on earth isn’t it natural for us to do what makes us feel alive? Why isn’t it automatic?

And there’s a lot that we could talk about there, because there’s plenty of intermediate reasons and issues and all of that, but I want to suggest a reason basic enough, fundamental enough, for a problem that’s so fundamental to our lives.

We were made for the dance, but we’ve got used to being out of it. The thing is, when Jesus turned up he gave us a glimpse of God. He turned up revolving around others, pulling them in to revolve around him and bringing them to life in the process (sometimes literally!) but at the same time telling us that he’d been doing this forever. That he had always existed and that he and his Father and their Spirit had been loving each other, giving each other glory, revolving around each other and putting each other in the centre since before the world was made. And we would have all called him a lunatic if he hadn’t been so, beautifully sane! If his madness hadn’t been unravelling the twisted knots of people’s lives and hearts and showing them how to be properly human again! And the closer you look, the closer the listen, the more it becomes inescapably, wonderfully obvious that this dance of love that Jesus is living, and talking about, and drawing people into – it’s what it means to be alive. It’s what we are made for. Because it is quite literally what we were made for!

But there’s something very deeply stupid about us that makes us want to be at the centre, makes us want to stand still and have the world and other people revolve around us, makes us want to not bother with the hard work of revolving around God and other people. Something very deeply stupid that prefers grinding to a self-centred gridlock than whirling and diving in other-centred movement. Something that, if given the choice, would actually rather stand on the spot and shrivel up than move and dance and grow.

And if you don’t believe me, try being married. Try living with someone else and trying to love them all the time. Any impression you may have of yourself that you are naturally selfless will fade very swiftly indeed! We are not naturally other-centred, we don’t naturally jump into the dance. But that’s not cos it’s unnatural or unhealthy – it’s because there is something unnatural and unhealthy about us! The dance is our truer nature; the dance is our real life.

So there you go mate. Amateur sage-ness dispensed. Happy wedding!

“Hit Disney songs whose messages outshone and subsequently undermined the messages of the films they’re in” – a playlist about freedom

Last week I wrote a blog about dancing and freedom, and this week I couldn’t resist a few thoughts on the catchiest, most-popularest song about freedom I’ve ever heard.

‘Let it Go’ has now got 1.7 billion views on YouTube. People like what it has to say about freedom it seems. 

Here’s a few of the key lines on the subject:

The snow glows white on the mountain tonight

Not a footprint to be seen

A kingdom of isolation,

And it looks like I'm the queen.

… It's time to see what I can do

To test the limits and break through

No right, no wrong, no rules for me: I'm free!

It’s actually a brilliantly captured snapshot of how our culture thinks about freedom! Let’s see what I can do – no right no wrong no rules – nothing to hold me back or tell me what to do, I’m just going to be myself – let it go! And there is something really beautiful about that: no constraints, no restrictions, just pure freedom to express ourselves and fulfil our potential.

But then, you actually watch the film…

And if you have seen the film you’ll have noticed the problem with this song. Because when Elsa sings this, what’s actually happening? She’s running away from home, from her kingdom, and from her sister Anna to live in an ice palace all by herself. So, is she free? Is she free because there’s now no one to get in her way or stop her doing what she wants?

Well here’s a question, imagine that was the end of the film: “Let it go! The cold never bothered me anyway” - she flicks her hair and walks into her ice palace and the credits roll. 

How would we feel? Would that be an uplifting story about liberation? Or actually would it be a depressing story about isolation?

A mate of mine tweeted ages ago with this playlist that he’d made:

And as you can see, this song was top of his list.

Do you see his point? It’s the hit single because we love that message, but the actual story of the film says something completely different – what makes us happy at the end, what feels meaningful and beautiful to us as a story, is the two sisters being reconciled and coming back together! It’s Elsa saving her people and becoming their queen rather than living for herself and by herself. And ultimately the powerful ending – ***SPOILER ALERT*** - is about Anna sacrificing herself to save her sister, not about Elsa sacrificing her relationship with her sister to save herself.

And I think it’s really important to notice that! The message about freedom and individuality that we hear a lot in our culture and we love in theory – when it comes to real life or even just a full length film, deep down we know it doesn’t work! If all freedom means is me being at the centre, and no one getting in my way, then it’s not necessarily what we actually want or need.  

And this isn’t just something we sense in storylines, it’s something actual psychologists have studied – there’s a psychologist called Jean Twenge who expresses this so perfectly just in the title of her book that you don’t even need to read it:

“Generation Me: Why Today’s Young American’s Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable Than Ever Before”

And that’s surely just as true in the UK as in America – self-confidence and assertiveness is drilled into us at school and in films and songs from the minute we’re born, and yet with all our confidence that “this is me”, with all our belief in ourselves, Generation Me is not enjoying life very much.

Why? There’s a New York Times columnist called David Brooks who wrote an article recently which argued that if we believe what most inspirational speakers say about being “true to yourself” we end up with 

“a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self”

and that leads us gradually to 

“an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys.”

Or we get the same thing in a bit more depth in a mind-blowing speech written by the late David Foster Wallace, a fascinating author and thinker. He says that

“[The] world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.”

So however anxious or frustrated it makes us the marketing executives are very keen to sell us a particular kind of freedom, the ‘Let it Go’ kind of freedom:

“The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.”

But he says there are different kinds of freedom that are actually more important, and

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

Interesting idea, isn’t it? And in many ways, although none of those three writers are Christians, they’re drawing on the insight of one of the strangest teachings of Jesus:

“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.” (Mark 8:35)

I think there’s a deep paradox here. It’s there in Frozen, in all these writers and then it’s there put vividly by Jesus himself: if we try to live for ourselves, to “save our lives”, grasp hold of them, we end up losing our lives, wasting our lives, miserable and stressed and bored. But if we give our lives away – if we live for someone else, if we truly care about someone more than ourselves and we’re willing to sacrifice things for them – that’s when we come properly alive! That sets us truly free. We have to choose: either we lose control of our life by giving it away, or we just lose it altogether. We can give our life away and find that we get it back transformed, or we can try to cling on to it and watch it slip through our fingers like sand. 

And Jesus is saying that’s true on a deeper level than Foster Wallace or Brooks or Disney even realise – that it’s true not just in our relationships with each other but, underneath that, it’s true in our relationship with him. Real freedom isn’t just no one getting in our way, it’s not just God not getting in our way. And It’s not letting go of everyone else like Elsa does – real freedom comes when we’re able to let go of ourselves.

Dancing Lessons for Life: musings on freedom

Is there a word that, whenever you hear it, strikes fear into your heart? A word that pierces you like an icy knife of dread? There is for me. Perhaps you feel the same. It’s the word, “Freestyle!”

OK, I’m exaggerating, but let’s be honest, how do you feel about the command to ‘freestyle’ in a public dancing context? I’m sure there are many people out there and even some reading this blog who enjoy a casual boogie with friends considerably more than me, and have a great deal more competence in that area – but I’m also pretty sure a lot of people will understand what I mean about the fear of publicly facing the demand to improvise. Soren Kierkegaard famously said that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”, and when I imagine being shoved into the centre of a dance circle and being told to do whatever I want, I know exactly what he means.

On the other hand, last summer I was helping run a student camp in Eastern Europe, and the UK team were asked to perform some of our ‘cultural dances’ for an international evening of entertainment. This led to a bit of cultural soul-searching, and eventually the conclusion that we should do an easy-to-copy dance routine to ‘Reach For the Stars’! We did a bit of practice, decided what we were doing, and then in front of 50 or so students, we went for it!

 

Now that experience felt weirdly like freedom. I was doing exactly what I had been told to do by the more competent and enthusiastic members of the group – and I was doing exactly what everyone else was doing – but, contrary to what some of the most fundamental principles of postmodern Western consumerism would tell you, that actually set me free! Free to go for it, hurling my limbs into various moves, circling round with everyone else, singing my heart out whenever I had a clue what the words were! All the people watching and joining in filled my body and brain with adrenaline, but not with anxiety. Why? Because freedom is not actually being allowed to do whatever I feel like. Freedom does not equal unrestricted choice. That is a woefully inadequate idea of freedom, because it’s based on a cruelly oversimplified idea of how humans work.

I wish I’d grown up where my mate Innes did in Scotland where they understand this and so they learnt the moves to ceilidh dances in school until they didn’t need anyone to tell them what to do they could just announce the dance and everyone stepped and jumped and whirled each other round in unison, to the rhythm of the music. That’s what dancing is meant to be like. And it’s a lot closer to what being human is meant to be like than taking turns to be shoved into the middle of the circle and trying to be funny or do the worm. (Don’t hear me wrong – there’s a lot that’s great fun about non-organised dancing, we did a lot of it at our wedding and it was EPIC. But aren’t the best moments the ones where you’re dancing with other people and you realise you kind of know what you’re all doing together? Or a song comes on that you know and you can all sing along to every word?)

So dancing lesson for life number one is this: is it possible that freedom is more than ‘freestyling’? Is it even possible that the deepest kind of freedom comes from knowing the moves?

But what got me onto this idea in the first place was actually something a bit deeper than that, which I’ve massively learnt by experience in the last couple of years – so I’ll write about that soon as well.

Chew your food: why I’m taking up blogging for Lent

Have you ever wondered why giving stuff up for Lent is still a thing? In our largely non-religious culture when faced with the choice of going big or going home on parts of the ecclesiastical calendar we have, on the whole, gone home. In our deeply consumerist culture we would usually say that to be asked to give something up is to be deprived of some vague sort of human right. But we still quite fancy giving something up for 40 days before Easter. Odd, isn’t it? Surely, if we’d be happier and healthier without something during Lent, we’d be happier and healthier without it all year – so why do we not just give it up full stop? And if giving it up doesn’t make us happier or healthier, why are we doing it?

But then I guess we all know that in real life things are messier than that. There’s all kinds of stuff we know we’d be better off without, but we keep wanting it anyway, and we keep giving in. And there’s all kinds of stuff we know we’d be much better off doing which we just never quite find the energy to get up and do. When you think about it, it’s almost like whatever is actually in control of what we do does not entirely have our best interests at heart! Which is quite a troubling thought…

And this is why Lent is useful for us, basically as a cunning way for the bit of ourselves that does want the best for us to negotiate with the less benevolent bit that seems to actually be calling the shots, and say, ‘Well come on I’m not asking for forever, how about just 40 days?’ And we do indeed get temporary permission. But even that permission turns out to be an ingenious counter strategy! You can have 27 days but then on day 28 you’ll cave and you will know for certain who’s in charge around here. Or perhaps even more devious, Go on – take the full 40. Enjoy yourself. And when you’re done you’ll feel so proud of your self-control that you’ll run back into my arms all flushed and pleased with yourself, and you’ll joyfully give me back control and let me ruin your life for the rest of the year!

I realise it all sounds a bit over the top there, but if you think about it, unless there’s some kind of conflict inside us doing something for Lent makes no sense at all – and it clearly does make quite a lot of sense because so many people still do it.

Including me.

And what I’m going to do for Lent this year is take blogging back up. Because I actually love writing, but the less-than-benevolent bit of me that doesn’t have my best interests at heart but tries to run my life anyway (I call it ‘Sin’), has this infuriating tendency to always offer me something a bit easier to do, a bit lazier, and a lot less satisfying.

And the more I think about it, the more it seems a very appropriate thing to do for Lent. Because traditionally, the whole point of giving things up for Lent was this: use a focused period of time to exercise the power Jesus has given you to overcome that inward drag towards stuff that’s a bit easier and a lot less satisfying, and in doing so make more space in your life to enjoy Him – which is a bit less easy but a lot more satisfying. And actually I have always found that writing about Jesus is one of the best ways I know of making more space in my life for me to enjoy him! To mix my metaphors horribly, it’s like the act of trying to share with other people how delicious he is motivates me to chew on it properly, and not just gulp it down like a microwave dinner in front of the TV hardly even noticing the taste.

And I was reminded of that the other day by a brilliant talk I heard about why God wants us to praise him. It’s not that he’s got a fragile ego and he needs us to give him some self-esteem. It’s not that he’s a narcissistic despot who demands that his subjects cringe and fawn before him. It’s that we humans love to praise what we enjoy – when we come across The Good Place on Netflix, or the Lake District, or a peanut butter and honey and banana sandwich, we want to tell people about them! We want to communicate and express their astonishing brilliance! (I’m serious about the sandwich, try it.) As CS Lewis once put it,

“I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.” 

Praise is the consummation of delight. And Jesus it utterly and ultimately delightful. So I’m looking forward to the next 40 days.

Almost the Best Day Ever - a massively overdue blog about our wedding!!!

The other day we got through the video that Rachael’s mate Dave had made of our wedding – and we absolutely loved it! I suppose that wasn’t particularly surprising, because it was a video of our wedding, and we absolutely loved our wedding. And it reminded me that I have been intending ever since the wedding to write a blog about why we loved it so much. Now I realise this has the potential to sound a bit ‘Ooo look at how great my wedding was, aren’t I great?’ but my thinking is that since a) everything that was good about it genuinely is thanks to God rather than thanks to us and b) all the best ideas were Rachael’s and it’s OK to boast about how great I think she is, and c) everyone thinks that their wedding day is the best day ever, this is a situation in which it’s actually right to celebrate the things that made us love the day so much!

And like I say, the really important things that made the day what it was were all thanks to God rather than us, because we were borrowing them from a much much bigger wedding. So I’ll just splurge a few thoughts about the three biggest things we borrowed!

Thing One: Joy

When we sat down a year ago to start planning our wedding, and we talked about what was important to us, basically the first thing we said was that we wanted it to be fun! We wanted the primary experience of being a guest at the wedding not to be feeling impressed, but to be feeling joyful. So we ended up with loads of outdoor games, bubble swords, mates performing acoustic music, a tea and toast station, and an ice cream van! We also asked my friends Dom and Hannah – who are two of the most gifted people we know in the art of celebration – to bring their band and play for everyone to dance. And it was class. Dom had even accepted my challenge to do a cover of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air rap!  

But there was a moment earlier on in the night when Dom came up to me and said thank you for inviting them, and then, “you guys really know how to celebrate”, and my heart properly sang. Because to us that is profound praise. CS Lewis once wrote: “Joy is the serious business of heaven”. I think that is beautifully true! I believe in God who revealed himself in Jesus, a man whose first display of miraculous power was to fuel the exuberant joy of a wedding celebration with gallons more high quality wine when the supplies had run out! I believe in God who invented music – created the way your mind and body responds to a good beat or a beautiful tune; God who when he was crafting humanity in his own image, as a reflection of what he is like, gave them the bizarre gift of laughter! What is it for? Why are we creatures that laugh? This strange capacity for the utterly pointless, utterly glorious sharing of joy. I believe in a God who invented bodies and hugs and the smell of good food and sunshine and who did all of these things saying to himself, “This is very good.” And I believe in a God who describes the fulfilment of his whole creation – the ultimate future to which his whole intention for the world is headed, the new everlasting chapter to the story he’s inviting all of us into – as a wedding feast. As a massive, massive party. So this was the first thing we hoped and prayed and tried to borrow from that much bigger wedding – the sheer joy of it. And one of my favourite things was the way that the wedding service in the church, was every bit as joyful as the party afterwards – because focussing on this God didn’t sap the fun in the slightest: it just made the fun deeper and richer and full of glory. I’m actually beaming again even as I think about it now.

Right, moving on…

Thing Two: Care

Thing two is actually one of the biggest things I love and admire about Rachael, and one of the things I’m most excited about learning from her now that she’s my wife  – she cares about people, like really, really cares. And a huge part of what she wanted for the wedding – and obviously once she’d suggested it I agreed! – was that people should be able to feel that we cared about them and valued them. Mostly this manifested itself in Rachael spending hours and hours hand calligraphy-ing people’s names onto their place names, and then between us writing little messages to everyone that they would get when they sat down at their place.

Now here’s something really cool – we could actually feel the difference in how people interacted with us after dinner, when they’d read their messages. There was something new – a new warmth or depth or something – because people knew that we actually cared about them. And this is what I love about Rachael (amongst many other things!), is that when I think about it, this is the effect that Rach has on people all the time! She cares about people, and that is tangible, and when you know that someone cares about you it actually liberates you to be honest with them, to be joyful with them or be sad with them, and to care about them too.

And once again, it’s a gift – I was going to say borrowing but I’m pretty sure Rachael can keep it – that she’s got from Jesus. Because if  you look at any of the stories of his life – of God walking around in flesh and skin and interacting with messed up people – you see exactly that quality. There’s a bit where he’s literally on his way to save a little girl who is dying, and an old woman who’s had menstrual bleeding for 18 years reaches out in the crowd and touches his cloak, and gets healed! And Jesus stops, and asks who it was – he holds up the mission to save this girl’s life because he wants this woman to know that he actually cares about her. And when she comes forward, trembling, ashamed, and explains her story and what has happened, he calls her “Daughter.” And when their conversation is finished, he goes and raises the little girl from the dead. And I just love imagining the impact that would have had on that woman, it’s like the thing with the little place name messages but super-charged: this man who can heal even dead people, this Giver of Life, this man of literally world-changing significance, he stopped because he cared about me, wanted to know me. And he called me, “Daughter.” It must have liberated her just like it liberates me: knowing that God actually cares about me, genuinely wants to know me, is what liberates me from ‘religion’ where I’m desperately trying to look respectable to the Deity, into genuinely having an honest relationship with God – where I can be joyful with him or angry with him, where I don’t even try to hide the selfishness and the mess that runs right through me, but instead just lay out my broken pieces in front of him and ask him to put me back together.

Now actually being married is teaching me so much more about all of this but this blog is about the wedding itself, so on we go…

Thing Three: Love

This is a fairly obvious component in a wedding, isn’t it? But it’s also the root that the other two things grow from. And it’s the maybe the root that goes deepest back into the bigger wedding. Actually there was a bit from one of the Bible readings we had, which me and my brother were praying about on the morning and meant so much to me:

“As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.”

Those are just incredible words – and whether or not right now you trust that the Bible is telling us the truth, I hope you’ll agree that if that was true, that would be amazing news! Because that says that the insane level of delight that I felt in Rachael, the unstoppable joy in her, in who she was, in loving her, in giving myself to her forever, that made that day the best day of my life – is a taste of how God feels about me. How God feels about any one of us who agrees to be his bride!  

It’s a quirk of my personality that I love the feeling of realising you are inside a really good metaphor – but this has got to be the best of all. Jesus is always using this metaphor of him as the Groom and his people as the Bride. And this is why my favourite moment in the whole thing was a bit that me and Rachael said to each other in the ceremony. There’s a place where you each say to the other:

“All that I am I give to you, all that I have I share with you.”

Of course that is a very beautiful thing in and of itself: you are giving yourself freely as a gift to the other person, all that you are and everything you have. And the thing that makes that so poignant is that yes, it is the beautiful bits of yourself that you’re giving, but it’s not just those bits. I’ve given Rachael my tongue-numbling-ly limited range of cooking abilities. And I’ve given her all of my arrogance, and all of my careless self-centredness. I’ve given her all of the parts of me that I hardly let myself see let alone anyone else.

And yet, incredibly, she has received all that. She has knowingly, willingly, received all the lights and the shadows in me and said, essentially, “I take you – all of you, right down to the bitter depths – to be my husband, and I will always love you, whatever it takes, and I will never leave you.” And there’s no point even trying to write a sentence about how glorious that is.

But here’s the thing, like everything else that was great about that day, it was a picture of what He’s like. Except he’s even better. Because of course when Rachael did that to me, I was doing the same thing with her, and we both know that the other one won’t always keep those promises perfectly because the shadows inside us screw things like that up. But when Jesus says to us, “All that I am I give to you, all that I have I share with you,” he’s offering something entirely beautiful. He’s offering everything that he has – overflowing, everlasting life, unstoppably deep peace, joy, patience, and most of all his place in the family of God: as a beloved child. And he’s offering everything that he is: the ultimate Lover, the true King, the ever-faithful Friend. And that’s not even the most glorious bit – the glorious bit is what his love for us is willing to take.

Because Jesus stands, with his arms wide, wide open, offering to receive us. All of us. All the parts of us that we hardly let ourselves see let alone anyone else. He offers to take into himself the taste of our bitterness, the wounds of our carelessness, the lash of our anger, the agony of our loneliness and even the loneliness of our death. He looks at us and says, “I take you – all of you, right down to the bitter depths – and I will always love you, whatever it takes, and I will never leave you.”

It’s that love, that ultimate expression of love, that will fill the ultimate, everlasting wedding celebration between Jesus and us with all of its exuberant, unstoppable joy. Because that kind of love sets you utterly free to celebrate! And that was what me and Rachael were so deeply hoping everyone would get a taster of at our wedding:

“As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.”

Trump & Truth: do we want facts back now?

A year or so ago I shared an article on Facebook about a man who had been travelling the world for years and years, increasingly miserable, but insistent that he couldn’t get a job because he still hadn’t ‘found himself’ – I captioned it as being a sad reflection of the huge sense of meaninglessness in today’s culture. Later that day my brother messaged me, gently pointing out that the article was from the Onion, a satirical magazine which writes spoof news stories. I felt very silly indeed.

But just now, I read an interview with a guy who makes his living writing fake news articles and posting them on the internet. He intends it as satire but during the US election stuff he’d written to mock Trump supporters – what he thought were ridiculous conspiracy-theory stories or outrageous caricatures – ended up getting shared crazily widely, sometimes even retweeted by Trump’s own account, with the vast majority of people never reaching the desired point of “Oh, this isn’t actually true, he’s taking the mick.” He remarks in the interview that he’s concerned that he accidentally helped the campaign by providing a stream of propaganda which was lapped up by supporters.

This is just one aspect of a frightening shift in how the world works which has led to the Oxford Dictionaries of both the US and the UK declaring this year’s ‘word of the year’ to be “post-truth”: which is an adjective that means ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. (The Guardian)

Now for someone who just graduated from doing English Literature at university, this rings some very loud bells. [My apologies if you have also done a fair bit of study in the humanities and you are super-familiar with the next couple of paragraphs, humour me!] For about thirty years now the dominant philosophy in the universities of the Western world has been ‘post-modernism’, which is a pretty slippery term, but could be described as the idea that objective Truth does not and should not exist, rather each person has their own perspective on reality which is ‘true for them’, and we ought to respect all such perspectives as equally valid.

I’ve got a lot of time for post-modernism (especially having read James K A Smith’s brilliant book which essentially argues that the humility it insists on – admitting that as humans we don’t just have perfect access to reality through our reason – is actually a humility that Christianity has been calling for for 2000 years). But especially I want to say that the political motivations behind the rise of post-modern thought were really brilliant: the desire to value and protect the voices of those who had been belittled, ignored or oppressed by mainstream societal opinion – especially women, and ethnic and sexual minorities. To simplify horrendously, the idea was that Truth with a capital ‘T’ was oppressive – it was the way the big rich white men trampled on everyone else and told them that that was just the way things were, it was the Truth, whether they liked it or not. So in order to find liberation, to protect the weak and the easily silenced, various thinkers started to reject the idea of Truth altogether, saying in very complicated theoretical terms, “why should we listen to you and your oppressive rational Truth claims?”, and declared boldly instead, “Everyone’s perspective is equally valid!” So ta-da! Post-modernism is born.

But here’s the thing: I think right now we’re watching post-modernism eat itself alive. The ideas of post-modernism have gone out into the world and while in some limited ways they have done what they were sent to do, we are now seeing them leading to exactly the opposite of what they were intended for. Because I don’t think ‘post-truth’ is an unrelated cultural phenomenon: it is what has happened once the big post-modern idea got into the cultural air and got breathed in by all kinds of people – not just the intellectual elite in the universities. Let’s think about it: if ‘post-truth’ is about a situation ‘in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’, then it is just post-modernism being lived out in political debate: Donald Trump knows full well that he doesn’t need to tell the truth. He doesn’t need facts. Nobody cares about them anymore, or at least not enough people for it to bother his campaign. He just needs to say things that resonate with people’s own perspectives. This is a politician who has essentially said (whether he knows the theory behind it or not),

“Ah, OK, so you’ve been telling everyone for three decades that objective Truth isn’t real or important, that whatever they believe is true for them. Great. I reckon there are a lot of people who believe things that you would find intellectually ridiculous and morally disgusting, but if I tell them that I agree – that it really is ‘true for them’ – then there’s no way anyone is going to be able to convince them otherwise.”

And in a world where our source of news and opinion is increasingly fragmented into articles, blogs, papers and TV channels with their own strongly held perspectives – a real life reflection of the multiple small ‘t’ truths of post-modernism – this approach to politics works terrifyingly well. At least one layer of the shock that hit many of us last Wednesday morning was the realisation that you no longer need to have any regard for what is true or factual at all to be the President of the United States.

And I don’t need to explain the ways in which the non-truth that Trump has thrived on is the exact opposite of the liberating intent of post-modern thinking: he is very clearly bad news for the easily silenced, the weak, the unusual, the oppressed. So is Marine le Pen, so are UKIP.

It turns out that abandoning Truth with a capital ‘T’ is not ultimately liberating, because by declaring all truth claims to be nothing more than power-plays it leaves us in a situation where the only thing left is power, and inevitably it is the interests of the powerful that end up getting served, while the weak bear the brunt. Again. I just found some random person on the internet putting it very powerfully:


"To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights."

Post-Trumpism

So may I suggest the outline of the new approach I think we might need – trying to keep the best of post-modernism while learning from Trump and avoiding post-truthism. We could even call it “post-Trumpism”… maybe.

• Be suspicious of truth claims coming from the big, powerful and self-interested.
• Really listen to the Other – try to understand the perspective of those who think very differently from you.
• Look for objective realities that provide a solid basis for liberating the oppressed and discriminated against – and if you find them, put them into practice and tell people about them! Not in a blurred outburst of personal anger or manipulative rhetoric, but with passion and conviction, focussed on the fact that these things are actually true – and would still be true if no one in the world believed them.

These thoughts have been gradually formulating in my mind, and when I was chatting with a couple of my best friends who are really serious about liberation politics and especially feminism, I found myself putting the last point like this: there’s a big difference between seeing something wrong and oppressive and saying, “It shouldn’t be like that – it’s just obvious, isn’t it?”, and saying, “It shouldn’t be like that because the reality is this.”

As a kind of analogy, and also another area in which this applies, I have a good friend who is a Christian, and did CBT a while ago.* You have this table where you write down the negative thoughts you have, and then you try to correct them, and in the other column you write your replacement thought. It was a bit weird for her to write these things and hand them in, because when she had a negative thought like, “I’m rubbish because I’ve achieved nothing today”, she felt like she was expected to just replace it with a kind of rival idea plucked out of the air like, “I’m actually great and I have achieved some things”. But what if actually it’s been a really rough day? What if she hasn’t managed to do anything that she is honestly proud of? Should she just lie to herself to try to make herself feel better? Well no – what she wanted to write instead was, “I am valuable and precious because God loves me deeply, and that does not change in the slightest when I have achieved literally nothing today.” I’ve actually got a tear in my eye as I write this because I just think it’s so, so beautiful that that is the truth. It is the reality. It can be relied upon however we feel and whatever is happening and so it can truly, really, set us free.

“If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

And this is the same for structural oppression: why should women be treated with respect and dignity equal to that we give men? Why should they earn the same for the work they do? Why should they be protected from exploitation, commodification and relentless sexualisation in the workplace and the media? Not just because I feel like they should. Obviously I do, but if there are people in the world who don’t feel the same – and there most certainly are – then I need a reality to appeal to, I need a way to try to persuade them that their current perspective isn’t grasping reality as it actually is! But the good thing is I think there is such a reality. I think we should do all of these things because

“God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.”

There is an inherent dignity and value in every woman that is equal to the inherent dignity and value in every man because they are each created with the immense dignity of being in the image of God. The imago Dei. A privilege and a calling far too deep for me to capture here, or even fully understand, but easily, easily enough to provide an unchanging basis for equality.**

So let me end by posing a couple of questions which I would genuinely implore you to think about for yourself.

•  We’re right to be suspicious of Truth claims when they come from the powerful and are in the interests of the powerful. But that quote about the truth setting us free is from Jesus – he said he was the Truth, himself. As we wind up to Christmas, and little, slightly twee stables and cribs start popping up everywhere, ask yourself – did Jesus’s claims about truth come from a position of power, or of vulnerability? And did they serve his own interests, or the interests of others? Of course, his claims have been co-opted and used by powerful and self-interested people through the centuries, but what about the man himself?
• We’re right to insist on listening to the voice of the Other – especially minorities and the easily silenced. But why? If the secularists are right and there’s nothing at the heart of reality other than “blind, pitiless indifference”, if the underlying principle of all life is simply that the strongest survive, why is it actually wrong for the strong to exploit the weak? Isn’t that just the way things are?
• Do you think it’s possible that there is an objective reality that gives us a basis for liberating the oppressed? How could you look for it?

That’s it for now, I would love to hear some real life answers to these questions at some point.

Peace and hope,

Mike

*It’s worth saying, in the context of an article about post-truth and so on, that my recollections of my friend’s experience are not precise or word for word, but I think I’m faithfully reflecting the gist of the situation.

** I am painfully aware that some transgender people might be very uncomfortable with this idea, and I think this is another instance of the recurring complexities and difficulties in the relationship between feminism and support for transgender people. But while I’m not wise enough to get into that here, what is without doubt is that the Bible’s insistence on the value of every single person as created by God and loved by God, and its insistence that no one has a right to sit in judgement on anyone else because everyone is broken, should give us a profound basis for compassion, respect and sacrificial love towards everyone, including all minorities ethnic and sexual.