St George and St Gabriel, Stockport

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

Elon Musk has recently suggested that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will make work redundant.  That human beings will no longer have to work.  It will all be done for us by sophistically programmed machines.  

Quite some time ago it was predicted that machines would take away the drudgery of routine work and so all of us would have more leisure time.  Certainly, for example, digging holes, loading lorries, recording and storing information have all been made easier.  Communication too.  But I’m not sure that we are any less busy.

The poet Philip Larkin  wrote in his poem Toads, “Why should I let the toad work/Squat on my life?…. Six days a week it soils/With its sickening poison -/Just for paying a few bills!”    If you feel exploited and unappreciated, work might well feel like Larkin’s toad on your back.  But I’m not sure it needs to.

Work can give purpose, connection and an opportunity to be of help and service. It can give us opportunities to learn and grow.  Not only to learn knowledge and skills but to learn about ourselves and our relationships to other people – and, as priest and poet George Herbert suggests – our relationship to God.  We can even make “drudgery divine”.  And anyone “who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,/makes that and the action fine.”

Chris Dawson

I am the victim and you are the aggressor.

“A large group of us were crowded into the Gestapo hall, and at that moment the circumstances of all our lives were the same.  All of us occupied the same space, the men behind the desk no less than those about to be questioned.  What distinguished each of us was only our inner attitude.”  (Etty Hillesum, concentration camp victim, An Interrupted Life)

“As we are, so is the world.”  (Ramana Maharshi)

You are the aggressor and I am the victim. 

A settler in the Promised Land.  A refugee forced out of the Promised Land.

“A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping.  Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are not.” (Jeremiah 31:15)

“Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not a gift to be shared.” (Henri Nouwen)

“If we could read the secret history of our ‘enemies’ we should find in each person’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

“I do not want the peace which passeth understanding.  I want the understanding which bringeth peace.”  (Helen Keller)

Chris Dawson

“Are we nearly there yet?”  How often has this question come from the back seat of the car.  You’ve only just got on to the motorway and the children want to know if you are nearly at your holiday destination. 

As a fifteen year old I was on the train to London, on my way back to school.  It was one of those old fashioned carriages with a corridor, separate compartments and bench seats.  There were only two of us in the compartment.  A middle aged woman and me.  She suddenly said, “Are you saved?”

A question like that, out of the blue, from someone you don’t know, is a bit of a shock.  Not to mention embarrassing.  Especially to a teenager.  I told her that I went to church and that my father was a vicar.  She suggested that wasn’t enough for me to be saved and added, “Shall we pray about it?”  I think I said yes.

I’m not sure that “being saved” is a one off.  Any more than you can arrive at your holiday destination instantly.  Travel is needed in both cases.  The challenges of “Loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself”, come daily.  Jesus’ life and words are a gift to us.  Reflecting on them and putting them into practice is a lifelong process.

Chris Dawson

Sorting through old family photographs, I came across a picture of my grandfather.  He was the son of a Victorian evangelical preacher.  The Bible was big in their house, with a quotation for everything.  Perhaps because he was also a founder member of the Labour Party, one of my grandfather’s favourites was, “The labourer is worthy of his hire.” (Luke 10:7)

And I thought of the dockers.  The men who unloaded cargo before the days of containers.  Dockers were hired by the day to unload the ships.  No work, no pay.  The younger, fitter looking men would be chosen first.  As they got older some dockers would dip their combs into a pot of black tea to darken their hair.

Two Sundays ago the Gospel reading was the parable of the Labourers in the vineyard.   It begins, “For the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard.”   He agrees a price for the day’s work.  The householder goes back four times and each time hires more workers.  Men who have no work and are standing idle. 

The shock comes when they come to be paid at the end of the day.  The householder pays them all the same.  The amount agreed for a day’s pay goes to all of them, even if they only worked an hour.  In the “kingdom of heaven” the labourer is of intrinsic worth and not just “worthy of his – or her – hire”.

Chris Dawson

Terry (not his real name) was wheeling me along the broad smooth corridors at pace.  We were heading for a CT scan and an X ray.  “Have you been doing this long?” I asked.  “About six months.  I love it.  I used to be in demolition.  Straight from school till the 2008 crash and things changed.”

“What happened then?”  “With a friend we started a cleaning company..  It grew and we had big contracts.  Ended up doing work for McCarthy and Stone.  Then Covid came along and another change.  My wife suggested I took life a bit easier. She works in the NHS.

“Unbeknownst to me, she’d filled in an application for this job.  I only knew two days before the interview – the first I ever had.  In the building trade it’s all word of mouth.  So there I am in a white shirt and smart trousers on my way to the interview.  A button comes off my shirt and I’m running and sweating a bit, because I’m late.

“I have the interview on Wednesday and they say they will ring me in the next two days.  I don’t hear anything.  Then at Friday teatime the phone rings.  I’ve got the job.  I love it.  Wish I’d done it years ago!”

St. Paul was pulled kicking and screaming in another direction.  For most of us it’s not so dramatic.  Winston Churchill’s observation that we stumble over opportunities and simply get up and carry on, is probably more accurate.

Chris Dawson

Some tour guides on the bus between Jerusalem and Jericho point to a roadside building and say, “That’s the inn the Good Samaritan took the wounded man to be cared for.”  We all smiled when Canon Nigel Ashworth told us this during our recent choir weekend at Manchester Cathedral. 

I’m not often on my own in Manchester at 7.30pm on a Sunday evening, striding towards Piccadilly Gardens. Tired after an uplifting but busy weekend.  Relieved too, that when I get to the stop, a 192 bus is about to leave.  I sit in one of the few seats left, one at the front facing the aisle.

I look to my left.  A young man is resting against the single seat next to me.  He is wrestling with a sack barrow loaded with a plastic box full of very large, empty cordial bottles.  We exchange a smile.  I look at the people around me and realise that I am the only white person on the lower deck.  A minority of one. 

We journey on.  Ardwick, Longsight, Levenshulme.  Men at tables talking in lit cafe windows.  Persian, Turkish, Indian, Middle Eastern.  Huge displays of fruit and vegetables.  Money transfer, immigration lawyers, sari shops and Halal.  A few people get on the bus, but mostly they leave.  And just at the Stockport boundary, by McVitie’s biscuit factory, I realise that I am the only person left on the bus.

Every journey a parable?

Chris Dawson

Autumn is in the air.  It’s that little bit cooler.  Flowers are fading and a few leaves are turning and dropping.  Days are shorter.  Holidays are coming to an end.   It can feel a bit melancholy. 

For many young people it’s a time of change. Particularly for those who received their GCSE and A level results.  For some it will be a time of disappointment.  They didn’t get the grades they hoped for.  It may also be a time of regret, wishing they had worked harder. 

Each week, on Radio 4’s The Life Scientific, Jim Al-Khalili interviews a leading scientist about his or her life and work.  Last week he interviewed Chris Barratt.  Professor Barratt, as he now is, did not do very well in his A levels.  His favourite subject was history and that’s what he wanted to study at university…but his grade was not good enough. 

Instead he studied Zoology and found he enjoyed it.  He qualified as a teacher and, after spending time teaching in a school, studied for a PhD.  He became fascinated and went on to further research, which led him to look closely at male fertility.  He is now Head of Postgraduate Medicine and Head of the Reproductive Medicine Group  at Dundee University. 

Sometimes things don’t go where we think they should.  They don’t work out as we hope or expect.  I wonder what Jesus’ disciples thought when he called them from the jobs they were doing and said, “Follow me.”

Chris Dawson

I remember hearing about a church clock that, at midday, struck thirteen.  Workers in the fields did not possess timepieces, but they could hear the church clock.  The first strike was to get their attention.  Most of the time the movement of the sun gave them their daily rhythm.

When a worker retired from years of working in the mill or the  factory, as a reward for loyal service the owners often presented them with a watch.  They were given back their time. 

Young people don’t bother with watches.   In fact I have a nephew who has a first class degree in computing, but he can’t “tell the time” from a clock face.  Like everything else, time is on their phone and it’s a series of passing numbers.

As we hurry through our lives, we talk of “spending time”, of “running out of time” and “getting behind”.   Later in life we might reflect on how, if we “had our time again”, we might do things differently.   But “time passes” and that is not possible.   We only have the present and the challenge of being with “what is” now.

Jesus asks us to “Consider the lilies of the field…” and Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests something similar in his poem Perfect:

These roses under my window

make no reference to former roses or to better ones,

they are for what they are; they exist today.

There is no time to them.

There is simply the rose; it is perfect

in every moment of its existence.

Chris Dawson

The little girl standing outside Cale Green Park stamped her foot and said loudly, “I want to go!”  Beside her, her mother and a friend were struggling with two buggies and two toddlers.  Clearly the allure of the children’s playground was very strong.

We often talk of children going through the “terrible two’s”, or the “terrible threes”, a time when they are beginning to assert their individuality.  Up to that stage life has been about safety, connection and dependence.  Now the part of us often referred to as the ego, is telling them that they can be separate and individual.

In August, when there is no choir, I enjoy joining the congregation.  A change of place suggests a change of perspective.  But where shall I sit?  Where do I feel comfortable?   On the left, two thirds of the way towards the back, as usual?  That’s the ego doing another of its jobs – keeping me feeling safe.

In the service, saying the Sanctus, rather than singing it, prompted a sudden thought, “Words wander from their original meanings”.   Holy, Holy, Holy.  That’s about “wholeness and completeness.”  A God who is whole and complete.  Who has no ego.  One in three and three in one.

The road to wholeness may begin with separation and stamping our feet.  But that is not the end.  The ego only gets us so far.  And we can get stuck.  The challenge is, as Jesus told his disciples, to “deny ourselves“ – to leave our ego behind.