St George and St Gabriel, Stockport

I was waiting to turn right into the road leading down to the back of Stockport station, when I saw it.  A large advertising hoarding advertising Amazon Prime, with the words “Endless entertainment”.  Heaven or hell?

I had decided to watch a drawing programme on Channel 4.  I switched the television on and selected the channel.  A notice came up saying that it wasn’t available.  I sat and waited for a bit, a little impatient.  Suddenly there was activity.  Then I realised, Channel 4 is not 24 hour entertainment.  It doesn’t begin until 7.0pm and this was the first programme of the evening.

We are often not comfortable with waiting.  Having an empty space. Nothing to do.  With just being.  Perhaps even for a moment. Maybe it’s because, in that space, we come up against ourselves and that is not always comfortable.  We are tempted to fill these empty spaces with activity, with sounds, with distraction, with entertainment.

Distraction can be helpful for a bit.  We all need “time out” to relax from the pressures of life.  Hopefully, once entertained we feel able to return to our world refreshed, ready to be with ourselves and with things as they are.

Empty spaces can play their part too.  They can be creative. Emptiness is not a vacuum.  A space is full of potential.  After all, our faith is built on the potential of an empty tomb.

Chris Dawson

Paying taxes doesn’t have a very good press.  We tend to see them as something negative.  Something imposed upon us.  A necessary evil.  Something over which we don’t have much say.  Perhaps it’s no wonder, given their history.

In England,  Henry VIII put a tax on beards.  In 1696 William III – William of Orange – introduced the window tax.  The more windows you had the more you paid.  So people bricked them up and built houses with less windows.  At the height of Empire, the British prohibited Indians from trading in salt, monopolised the salt trade and, to add insult to injury, put a heavy sales tax on to the price of it.

Yes taxes can be ridiculous, inconvenient, unfair and abusive.  But could we begin to see them differently?  To see them as a contribution to the Common Good?  Church Action for Tax Justice thinks so.  They suggest that paying fairly based taxes is a way of showing love for our neighbour, care for creation and a way of creating the type of society we find in the teachings of Jesus and the prophets.

The Scribes and Pharisees were trying to trick him.  They handed Jesus a coin with Caesar’s head on it.  Should we pay taxes to the Romans?   His response? “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”  And he went on “eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners”.

Chris Dawson

Holy Week is like walking the labyrinth, the story always moving forward, yet doing so with twists and turns.  Going back on itself, but inexorably moving towards the centre, towards a climax.  You might say a revelation.

The stories of Holy Week and Easter are so familiar.  We know the characters. We know the actions.  We know what is going to happen.  But can we gain new insights – into the story and into ourselves?  

Walking the labyrinth with an open mind, moving steadily step by step, even as we twist and turn and pause for a moment, encourages reflection.  It gets us in touch with ourselves and opens us up to possibilities.  It takes us away from the familiar to a deeper understanding. 

Betrayal is a major theme of the Holy week stories.  By the Wednesday of Holy Week (known by the Irish as Spy Wednesday) Judas, the anti-hero of the drama, has featured in three, if not four of the Gospel readings since Palm Sunday.  It is easy to demonise the betrayer.  But what if we were able to walk with Judas and see something of ourselves in him? 

The Eastern Church calls today “Great and Holy Wednesday”.  For them, out of the clash between the extreme opposites of love and betrayal something wonderful and beautiful emerges, because Jesus looks Judas straight in the eye and allows things to unfold.

Chris Dawson

They came this morning in a big, open lorry – tools and barrows in the back – to clear next door’s wilderness.  Their task was to create a new turfed garden in two days.  To cut back all the intertwined growth that had sprung up since the space was last lived in and tended.

They put on protective gloves, goggles and ear muffs, pulled the cord and the machines were off, cutting and strimming.  The machines dictated the rhythm.  It was all speed, strain and smoke.  The chainsaw sounded angry, aggressive.  Noise is power, at least it is if you have a chainsaw in your hands.

In my childhood Chippy Ager and Bill Morris used to come and “brush” the churchyard grass when it reached a certain height.  They came in the evening after a day’s work, each with a sickle and a sharpening stone.  They worked with a gentle, rhythmic swing.  Noiseless, unhurried. Every now and then they paused.  The sound of the sharpening stone carried on the evening air.

One of our 21^st century drivers seems to be, “Hurry up! Get things done!  Move on!”  And how does it leave us feeling? Stressed, anxious, and worn out.  Sometimes we just need to stop and breathe – literally.  To change the rhythm.  To change the pace.

Silently, quietly nature responds to its environment.  It takes its time. First the snowdrops, then the crocuses, the daffodils, the primroses, the hyacinths and the bluebells.  Next door the turf will settle and become a lawn.  And if no-one tends it, the brambles, the buddleia and the blackbirds will be back.  “To everything there is a season….” 

Chris Dawson

A single statement can be very powerful.  It can set us on a path of discussion, debate and reflection.  It can lead to our seeing things differently, to a change of heart and to action.

I recently came across some postcards I’d kept from the 1980s, with quotations on them.  One quotation, by Dom Helder Camara, read: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.  When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”  I wasn’t sure who Camara was, but clearly some people saw him as a threat.

It turns out that he was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in the north east of Brazil.  A country then ruled by a military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985.  For those 21 years Camara led the church in that area.  He was an outspoken critic of the government and worked politically and socially for the poor, for human rights and for democracy.

Helder Camara was an advocate for Liberation Theology, a theology of action, which has at its heart, a concern for the poor and the liberation of oppressed peoples.  It’s also necessarily about human rights and human dignity and sets out to address inequalities and discrimination.  I think Jesus might have identified with that.  In fact, in various ways, isn’t all Christian theology a Liberation Theology?

Camara certainly upset people.  The old cliché goes that religion and politics don’t mix.  Don’t mix church and state.  Traditionalist Catholics urged the military government to arrest Camara for his support of land reform.  It’s easy to forget the Gospel when it threatens our interests.

Chris Dawson

“Is it an animal?  Is it a vegetable?  Is it a mineral?”  Those were three of the questions asked by the Twenty Questions panel on a quiz programme broadcast on the old Home Service.  They were trying to guess the name of an object which had been secretly told to the listening audience.  Often the item fell into more than one category.

We like things in categories.  We prefer something to be “either this, or that”, rather than “both this and that”.  It makes life easier.  We know where we stand.

Until the late nineteenth century, lichens were seen as individual organisms.  Under a microscope it soon became clear that a lichen was not one thing.  It was a partnership between a fungus and an alga.  Here was not competition and the survival of the fittest, but cooperation and partnership.  Today we know that lichens have a third partner, yeast, and some even incorporate bacteria, viruses and amoebas.

As human beings we are often torn between co-operation and competition.  We have a tendency to see ourselves as separate from the rest of creation.  Separateness can give us a sense of identity, but it can also give us a sense of superiority and an excuse to exploit rather than co-operate and act as part of the whole.

It was in our Contentious Christianity discussion about whether pets go to heaven that I remembered that, as humans, 60% of our genetic material, our DNA, is identical to that of a banana.  We share 50% with plants and animals in general and 84% with our dogs and 90% with our cats.  So why should they not go to heaven?  But then, is heaven a place, a state, or a relationship with God?  Or all three?

Chris Dawson

I have never understood why the CEO of a large international company needs a bonus on top of his (or her) very large salary.  Is the job not rewarding enough for them to do their best to help the organisation to flourish?

I can understand the need to offer an incentive to people working, say, in a call centre, expected to stick to exactly the same script on every call they make.  And where they even need permission for a toilet break.  No wonder the average yearly turnover of staff is 30% and in some cases, 100%.

We all need to feel acknowledged and valued. Money may give us recognition.  Recognition for the time and effort and skill we have put into the job.  But it does not  appreciate us as a person.  It does not remind us that we are of infinite value and worth just as we are.

Tolulope Ilesanmi left banking in Nigeria and went to Montreal, where he did his Masters in Business Administration (MBA).  Than he started a company, Zenith Cleaning.  Tolu considered everything about that company a mystery, something sacred – its people, its practices, its purpose. 

Tolu cleaned kitchens, bathrooms and offices and this is how he saw cleaning: “Cleaning is the process of removing dirt from any space, surface, object or subject, thereby exposing beauty, potential, truth and sacredness”.  Benedictine monk Laurence Freeman says something similar: “Ordinary things done with other-centred attention become not less than divine.”

Chris Dawson

I like the Greek word Metanoia.  Say it out loud and you can stretch the sound, especially of the last two syllables.  It also has an expansive meaning.  In fact it has several meanings, depending on context.  There’s even a pop group called Metanoia. 

In a religious context, Metanoia means a transformative change of heart and mind.  It means considering something and coming to see things differently.  It means coming to new understandings, taking action and making changes.  A rethink.  A form of repentance.

Repentance is, of course, one of the themes of Lent.  As is giving something up, denying ourselves some pleasure for the forty days.  Often something quite trivial, which, come Easter, we can indulge in again.   But repentance and self-denial could lead to something more profound.

“Giving up” something for Lent holds great possibilities.  It could be about giving up our stance on anything.  We could ask ourselves what areas of our life could do with a re-think, a letting go, a renewal.  The answer may not come straight away.  Just sitting with the question is powerful in itself.

Lent has so often come to be associated with a time of restriction rather than growth and expansion.  But that is not its origin. It comes from the Old English word “lencten”, with its obvious connection with “lengthen”.  And so it means Spring, a time of lengthening days and more light.  A time of renewal.  A time for Metanoia.

Chris Dawson

It must be hard to be shut into a small, bare space.  Deprived of your liberty.  During the Covid pandemic we all had some experience of what that might be like.

Sorting through papers recently, I came across the programme for the Journey Into Light  exhibition held at St. George’s back in December 2019.  A display of art works created by people in prison.  An exploration and an expression of identity, by people forced to be with themselves in a confined space.

At the service to mark the completion of the exhibition’s journey, we sang these words from Jan Berry’s hymn:  “When life’s chances lead to prison and the key turns in the lock……..People lose their sense of meaning, known by number, not by name.  But the common spark of living lies beneath the guilt and blame.”  

Shaka Senghor was convicted of murder at the age of nineteen.  He served nineteen years in prison, including a total of seven years in solitary confinement.  At the beginning of his sentence Shaka was angry and violent.  But after six years something shifted.  Locked in his five feet by seven feet cell, he began meditating, reading, writing a journal and what would eventually become his bestselling memoir, Writing My Wrongs.

His son had written him a letter:  “Dear Dad.  My mother told me you was in prison for murder.  Dear Dad, don’t murder anymore.  Jesus watches what you do.  Pray to him and he’ll forgive your sins.”

“That was the moment that I decided that I would never go back to the darkness and that I had to find my light.  And that I owed it to him to find my light.”

Chris Dawson

The archetypal refugees for Christians are, of course, the Holy Family: “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there till I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him.”  So says the angel to Joseph.  Like most refugees today, they fled to a neighbouring country. 

One third of all refugees come from Syria and they flee next door to Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.  According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Turkey hosts more refugees than anyone else in the world (2.8million) and Lebanon (hosting 1 million) comes after Pakistan (1.6 million).  Jordan is in the top ten.  In proportion to its population, the UK, one of the top six wealthiest economies, comes fourteenth in Europe  for asylum applications.

But refugees are “out there” for most of us – unless you live on the south coast, I guess.   If you know someone, the perspective tends to change.  You realise that they are people like us. People with hopes and fears, needing safety, and willing to come to a new country and contribute. (Check who developed the anti Covid vaccine in Germany.)

They are not “swarms” and “invasions”.  Though we do label some groups as such.  Most of those crossing the Channel are people fleeing war-torn or oppressive countries, where no safe and formal routes, such as refugee visas, exist for making an asylum claim.  They are labelled “illegal”.  In contrast, more than 200,000 visas have been issued to those escaping the war in Ukraine.  We make choices.

“I am part and parcel of the whole and cannot find God apart from the rest of humanity.”  Mahatma Gandhi.

Chris Dawson