St George and St Gabriel, Stockport

“I have a lot of commitments this week”, is a phrase we use when we are facing a busy week.   It says, “I am really busy, so I have little time for anything else.  My time is taken up with things I have committed to.”  But is it about “busyness” or “commitment”?

I found myself thinking about the nature of “commitment”, and what I am committed to and why, when I read an extract from a speech by Martin Luther King Jr.  It’s in his powerful, challenging, rhetorical style.  This is what he said:

“I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others.  I’d like somebody to say that day, that Martin Luther King tried to love somebody.  I want you to say that day, that I tried to be right on the war question.  I want you to be able to say that day, that I did try to feed the hungry…I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.

“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness…I just want to leave a committed life behind.”

Chris Dawson

I like the concept of “lovingkindness” – yes it’s joined up like that in the Authorised Version of the Bible.  I think of it as compassion in action. Compassion arising from empathy, that ability to see and feel the world from another’s perspective, to identify with another’s suffering.

Compassion takes us a step beyond identifying with another’s suffering, because merely identifying with that suffering can leave us feeling anxious and helpless. Showing compassion involves a commitment to act, to do something to relieve that suffering, to support and to be alongside.

Christopher Germer, who with Kristin Neff, has done much to explore and spread the practice of compassion, describes compassion as:”When love meets suffering and stays loving, then we have compassion.”

This can definitely be a challenge, particularly if that suffering is at a distance from us and on a massive scale – Gaza, Ukraine, …  So where do we begin?

I think we can begin with ourselves, with self-compassion.  With practising lovingkindness on ourselves.  Everyone gains when we take care of ourselves.  After all, we are commanded to love our neighbour as ourselves.  So where better to start?

Chris Dawson

“It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’”

So said the author Aldous Huxley.  He sounds a little apologetic.  I don’t think he need be.  When he refers to “the human problem” I guess he’s thinking about how we relate to one another.  I suggest that kindness is more than a good start.

Kindness comes from attention, attention to another.  A smile of welcome, a simple word, a note, a touch of a hand, a gesture of generosity.  All of these actions show kindness and  attention.  And attention is love.

Love and kindness come together frequently in the Psalms.  What is referred to in the RSV as “steadfast love” is called “lovingkindness” in the Authorised Version. The Psalmist refers to God’s “lovingkindness” more than a dozen times.  Jeremiah, Hosea and Isaiah too. 

“…Thy lovingkindness is before mine eyes.” (Psalm 26:3). “How excellent is thy lovingkindness, O God”.  (Psalm 36:7).  “I am the Lord which exercises lovingkindness, judgment and righteousness.” (Jeremiah 9:24)

So, we could say that, through simple acts of kindness we are not only connecting with each other, but with the source of all kindness. 

Chris Dawson

c“It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’”

So said the author Aldous Huxley.  He sounds a little apologetic.  I don’t think he need be.  When he refers to “the human problem” I guess he’s thinking about how we relate to one another.  I suggest that kindness is more than a good start.

Kindness comes from attention, attention to another.  A smile of welcome, a simple word, a note, a touch of a hand, a gesture of generosity.  All of these actions show kindness and  attention.  And attention is love.

Love and kindness come together frequently in the Psalms.  What is referred to in the RSV as “steadfast love” is called “lovingkindness” in the Authorised Version. The Psalmist refers to God’s “lovingkindness” more than a dozen times.  Jeremiah, Hosea and Isaiah too. 

“…Thy lovingkindness is before mine eyes.” (Psalm 26:3). “How excellent is thy lovingkindness, O God”.  (Psalm 36:7).  “I am the Lord which exercises lovingkindness, judgment and righteousness.” (Jeremiah 9:24)

So, we could say that, through simple acts of kindness we are not only connecting with each other, but with the source of all kindness. 

Chris Dawson

Christmas and New Year are often a time of recollection, reflection, and a bit of nostalgia. Family stories re-told round the dinner table, or by the fire.  Re-lived in the telling.  Stories with a meaning for those involved.  Family myths subtly changing, but with a core that connects.

We receive Christmas cards, open them, glance at the picture and see who they are from.  Each card will generate some reaction – a thought, a memory, a smile perhaps.  Even a mild panic if we have forgotten to send them one. 

This year I have looked more closely at the scenes depicted on the cards we have received.  Like the family stories, they too are mythical, often presenting an idealised, even nostalgic, Christmas.  A warmly lit church, choir boys outside in procession through the snow, carrying lit candles.  A vintage post van bringing greetings in the snow.

Even the Nativity scenes are idealised.  One might even say sanitised.  The Holy Family posed in a brightly lit stable with the animals strategically placed.  The Shepherds,though rough and ready outsiders in their society, beautifully dressed.  Not to mention the Magi in their finery, in spite of their arduous travels.

We live by stories and important stories stay around and become myths.  Stories with powerful messages about ourselves and our relationships.  And at Christmas, those myths contain central messages about our relationship to God.

Chris Dawson

How will you your Christmas keep?

With a family of four in two rooms.  No space, no privacy, no room to breathe.  Or in a tent in the derelict doorway of the once upon a time John Lewis store. Or in a doorway without a tent, on cardboard, wrapped in blankets with your dog for company.

In a prison cell with a hole in the window where a drug carrying drone crashed through.  No seat on the toilet and a broken flush.  A bucket of water instead.  Banged up for twenty three hours out of twenty four.  Surviving on two meals a day. 

Struggling to put food on the table, counting the pennies and turning off the heat, with the wet and cold outside.  Damp and mould on the walls.  Unsafe.  Landlord knocking on the door, threatening to evict.

Discriminated against for disability, colour, gender identity or ethnicity.  Or as a refugee,   tortured for daring to speak out.  Leaving family, fleeing country.  Knowing no-one in a foreign land.  Isolated.  Just hoping………

“How will you your Christmas keep?

Feasting, fasting, or asleep?”

Eleanor Farjeon

Chris Dawson

We had a Congregational chapel in our village, but in all my 25 years living there I never saw inside it.  We were C. of E.  In my teenage years I had a Quaker girlfriend.  There was never a word of disapproval, but I always felt I was coming close to a line. 

Chatting up the Greci girls would have been a step too far.  They were the only Roman Catholic family in the village and went to a convent boarding school.  Their father had been an Italian prisoner of war and he had stayed and married a local girl.

As students in a fiercely Catholic country in the 1960s, we were used to the annual sermon by Archbishop McQuaid.  In it he condemned Dublin University as a Protestant abomination founded by Queen Elizabeth 1^st and forbade any young Catholics tempted to attend it, from do so.

In August of this year the Parliament of the World Religions, first convened in 1893, was called in Chicago.  Over seven thousand participants attended, representing more than two hundred faith traditions in ninety-five countries.  So many people from diverse backgrounds coming together, exploring, sharing, praying and responding to the Call to Action on the final Day.

On Saturday morning I shall be joining the Churches Together carol singing on Davenport Green.  This week I could go a step further and join our Jewish brethren in celebrating Hanukkah.

Chris Dawson

Words can be enlightening.  They can also limit our deeper understanding.  It’s natural for us to explain, to solve, to work things out through words.  But this keeps us in our head and in the realm of ideas and some things are beyond the realm of ideas.

As John says in his first Epistle, no-one has ever seen God.  But plenty of people feel that they have encountered God.  And that takes us into the realm of experience.  Experiences change us and affect our actions and our relationships. 

The most profound experiences come when we are paying attention – to ourselves, to another, to the world around us.  It is then that we may get glimpses of peace as an experience, wholeness as an experience, God as an experience.  These glimpses may be brief, but they are there because, at some level, we have let go the urge to analyse and explain and just to be.

Words and ideas are very attractive, because they help us to keep a grip on ourselves and the world.  We can explore what is right and wrong, we can explain how things work, we can express ourselves.  Perhaps, above all, it is through them that we maintain our separateness and our individuality.  But as the 13^th century Sufi mystic Rumi puts it:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing

there is a field.  I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.”

Chris Dawson

What we focus on expands and grows and any emotion attached to it increases and intensifies.  It’s easy to overload ourselves with negative input by what we notice around us, by what we watch, what we listen to and by what we read. 

It’s not a question of burying our heads in the sand.  It’s good to be aware of the challenges in society and the world.  But also to check the balance occasionally by asking the question, “Why am I watching/reading/listening to this?” 

We’ve just received the Countryfile calendar for 2024.  Like the 2023 calendar it has wonderful wildlife pictures chosen from hundreds sent in by ordinary people.  Like the programme itself, it rejoices in our beautiful countryside.  Profits from the sale of it go towards the BBC Children in Need Appeal – £26 million has been raised by the calendar since 1998.

Like the Children in Need Appeal – which last year helped nearly 460,000 children and young people to overcome the challenges of poverty, family crisis, bereavement and injustice – Countryfile and the calendar are examples of the light shining in the darkness. 

Isn’t that what Advent is about?  Encouraging us to look forward to the light coming into the world and encouraging each of us to shine our light in the darkness.

Chris Dawson

It’s hard to know how to respond to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war between Russia and Ukraine, the climate crisis and all the other suffering that human beings inflict on each other. 

“Yes…and” is one of the golden rules of improvised drama.  You accept what the other person says and does – that’s the “yes” part of the equation – before you make your response.  Which may go along with, or counter, what has gone before. 

There is a danger that, in our anxiety about the state of the world, we fret about the situation and, perhaps, bury our heads because we feel powerless.  This is where “Yes…and” comes in.  First we can say “yes” to the reality in front of us – in all its brokenness and suffering.

Next comes the “and”.  It is not within our power to change all of this suffering, but we can – in a beautiful phrase I read recently –  “shape our presence before it”.  We can decide how we’ll face it.  And the way in which we face it will ripple out beyond us.

My “and” has been to look for those who seek justice, reconciliation and peace in the Israeli-Palestine conflict.  I recently came across these two groups: Jews for Justice for Palestinians (jfjfp.com) and the Parents Circle – Families Forum (theparentscircle.org) – Jewish and Palestinian families working together, all of whom have lost a family member to the ongoing conflict.  Both groups are impressive.

Chris Dawson

At the end of last week I was suspended from Facebook – for the second time!  I only joined so that I could watch the live-stream of the Sunday morning service.  This morning I appealed.   Having given them some details,  I received an apology and was re-instated .

Apparently I had transgressed “community values”.   Not sure how.  That set me wondering who sets these values – or are they rules?  We’ve seen the rules change, of course.  People banned for inflammatory speech and then allowed back again.

I started to wonder about where most people get their values from in the first place.  Particularly young people.  Family, yes, friends, mates, teachers even, but what about Social Media – X and the rest, not to mention the so-called “influencers” who get paid to tell people what is “in” and what is “out”? 

Then there are the “disruptors”, suggesting through their podcasts and social media an alternative truth.  Some of them attaining a guru like status. Even traditional Christian family values are pressed into service by politicians seeking power.  Whether practised or not.

All this is not new.  Jesus warned us to be wary of false prophets. The Old Testament prophet Micah spoke out when he saw values being distorted.  Of the houses of Jacob and Israel he said, “their heads give judgements for a bribe, its priests teach for hire, its prophets divine for money.”  He also predicted it would lead to disaster.  In their case it did.

Chris Dawson