Autumn days and ways

Even on wet miserable days like we've had this week it's hard not to be amazed, yet again at the wonderful colours of autumn.  It's nature's way of course, of preparing for winter.  It discards all the unnecessary parts, all the extra commitment of feeding the leaves.  I remember a few years ago when I was fully committed to life within the organised church and working 3 days a week as assistant manager at the charity shop connected to the local church, I had this strange sense that I shouldn't be taking on any more commitments.  In fact, I was feeling that I should be relinquishing some of the things that I had been doing until then.  I didn't understand it but felt that God was leading me in a different direction and he wanted me to be free of commitments, free and ready to go or do whatever he wanted.  Eventually I laid everything down and felt quite naked spiritually.  All my life I had been involved in church activities and projects and yet now, here I was without anything, just me and God, no frills or attachments.  And that's the way I am now but what an enriching time I'm having.  

From autumn I learnt that even though the leaves fall,
the tree remains standing.

The other day I shared a status on Facebook that said (in Spanish)  'From autumn I learnt that even though the leaves fall the tree remains standing.'  Sometimes it's necessary to shed commitments to some things but that doesn't mean that the tree is dead.  The commitments must go but the tree remains standing firm and upright and regains strength for a new spring.  Nature evolves through the seasons and we need to evolve also.  Personally I struggle when Christians don't believe in evolution.  Looking around at creation, it all speaks of evolution.  Everything evolves all the time, changing, adapting and moving on to new phases in their lives.  For me in recent years this evolution has been to shed religiosity, busyness and commitments,  change the way I feed my soul so I can stand before God stripped of all superficial appearances and doing stuff and just be.


The other great lesson of autumn is the harvest.  Those who are gardeners (or farmers working the land) will be coming to the end of a very busy time of harvesting.  It seems that in our garden every year at this time I rethink and plan what I want to do next year.  I clear out the old and harvested and decide whether I'll do the same again next year or change things a bit.  Sometimes when things haven't turned out as I thought or expected, then I change things.  I don't do the same thing again.  It would seem a bit foolish.  If it hasn't worked then why waste time doing it again.  As Albert Einstein said, you can't go on doing the same thing again and again and expect a different result.  What a waste of time and effort.  And yet on a spiritual level we so often do just that.  We do not always have the deep satisfaction we hope to find, there is always something missing.  We go week after week, still searching and hoping.  So often we come away thinking, 'that was good but ... ...'   


As young people we were full of enthusiasm - we were going to change the world.  Yet we haven't changed our own town never mind the world.  In the big picture, nothing seems to have changed.  If a business doesn't get the result it's looking for then it changes how it does things.  Yet in 2000 years Christianity has failed to bring the world to God.  Maybe we are doing it all wrong.  Maybe we should change the way we do things or maybe look at the seed we're sowing.  After all you reap what you sow.  Maybe we should take notes from creation and shed whatever might hinder us.  We need to change, evolve and adapt.  

Culture Club

This week began, Sunday 12th October, with a day that is commemorated in many parts of the world.  It remembers the day in 1492 when Christopher Columbus set foot on soil across the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Hispaniola.  Until now, in Spain and the Americas, the day has been celebrated as a day of victory and conquest of the Spaniards over the indigenous peoples they encountered, being a national holiday with parades, ceremonies and speeches.  Recently, however there has been a move to recognize, although not officially, that it should be remembered as a day of the indigenous minority and how they suffered near extinction at the hands of the conquistadors.  Two completely different cultures and religions collided with catastrophic results.



This week in parliament there has been a vote to recognize Palestine as a state in its own right.  There has been conflict between Palestinians and Israel almost without a break ever since the Israeli Declaration of Independence, signed 14th May 1948 that recognized Israel's national home in Palestine.  Since then, Israel has celebrated the day with a holiday for all its citizens.  Again there is a similarity that one nation celebrates a victory and take-over of the land of another nation, leaving them virtually without a land they can call their national home.  The differences based on religious grounds seem insurmountable.  And so we could go throughout the world finding tribe fighting tribe, nation fighting nation because they infringe on 'their territory'.


The problem seems to be that people of a specific culture are so often intolerant of people of another culture, looking on them as evil and needing to be got rid of however that may be.   Within most religions of the world there are different sects that interpret their sacred writings in a particular way.  We are aware of how much animosity there is between Sunni and Shi'ite, noting that terrorists have mercilessly executed Muslims who are not from their particular brand of Islam.  There are other groups of Muslims that differ because of the culture of where they are living.  The same can be said of Jews, depending on whether they are European or Oriental in origin.  Oriental Jews have in the past been persecuted by other Jews but recently have become accepted by the mainstream of their religion.  Of course the same thing applies to Christians.  The differences within the same religion, let alone differences with other religions is often due to the cultural differences of where people live.  Their customs as a nation often colour their perspective on their particular religion and their interpretation of sacred writings, causing different views and practices depending on which part of the world they live in.  If I had been born and raised in India, would I be an evangelical Christian or maybe Hindu?  If I had been born in Saudi Arabia, would I be Muslim?  If so, which strand of Islam would I follow?  Is it any wonder that non-religious people blame religion for most of the wars in the world?

  
 Thinking of different cultures, I was interested to discover that the members of the successful 80s band Culture Club have a very valuable lesson to teach us.  When they first got together to form the band, they realized just what a mixed bag they were.  The lead singer Boy George was an Irish transvestite, the bass player Mikey Craig was a black Briton, Roy Hay on guitar and keyboards was Anglo-Saxon and drummer and percussionist Jon Moss was Jewish.  (Taken from Wikipedia)  Each one of them came from a completely different cultural background and so they decided to reflect this in their name - they were a club of different cultures making harmony together.  Religious people might have considered them out on the fringes of society, outrageous in their dress sense, sexuality and behaviour but if we have eyes to see, ears to hear and hearts to understand, we can learn a very valuable lesson from their example. 

We need to ask ourselves which club of culture are we in, recognizing that our outlook and way of living is very much influenced by and reflects the culture of where we are living and how we have been brought up.  Wouldn't it be nice if different cultures could join together in harmony instead of killing and persecuting each other?  I might not be in a position of power to change things on a national scale or have any influence in an international debate but I can make a difference where I am.  I can live in the spirit of Culture Club, accepting others, not as wrong but just being different, making harmony instead of discord with people who might have a different idea of God from me or have different ways of.living and outlook on life.  Let's make heavenly music - together!

  

Nothing Times

It's been one of those weeks when nothing much has happened - a nothing week.  Last week the weather was like summer and so I got loads done and sorted in the garden.  By the weekend I felt that I had achieved a great deal.  This week has seemed quite the opposite.  Right from Monday, the storms came with horrendous wind and rain.  Although since then we haven't had the strong winds, the rain has persisted on and off all week, raining at some point every day so no gardening for me this week.  (I do it for pleasure, not out of obligation!)  You know there are times when you've been busy all day and yet looking back, you can't really see any difference.  It's as though you haven't done anything at all.  Well this week has been like that!  I've been as busy as last week but I can't see where.  There is no big sigh or relief or sense of achievement just the usual -  cleaning, washing, ironing, shopping and cooking..


I guess you could say that life has just been plodding on as usual - much of the same, ordinary, non-spectacular, hum-drum life activities.  Why is it that the ordinary seems so boring and unappealing?  Why do we crave the spectacular?  I am as guilty as the next in this.  I look at the facebook posts of friends and read the main heading of an article, looking for something that grabs my attention.  It's the same with newspapers and magazines.  Editors know that clever headlines can very often raise their readership figures, the more sensational the better it seems.  Films or TV programmes show the most intriguing bits in their adverts and trailers, making us curious and drawing us in, whetting our appetite and teasing us to want to see more.  Inevitably programmes that are part of a series, leave us with a cliff-hanger so we'll be sure not to miss next week's episode.


Most of life is not the sensational, headline-grabbing experience, yet we want that more than anything.  We yearn for some out-of-this-world experience believing somehow that it will give us some special insight into some life mystery.  Religious people search out events that might give them a spiritual edge over others, a sort of spiritual one-upmanship.  The truth is that plodding along in the ordinary is so often what shapes us and hones our senses to what goes on around us.  The spectacular is 'nice' and 'good' and yet somehow distant, way out there, with no or little connection with what we need to do on a daily basis.  It reminds me of Jesus and his disciples on what has become known as the Mount of Transfiguration.  The disciples had a great experience.  WOW!  What an experience - like touching the immortal, so much so that they wanted to stay there.  They wanted to build shrines so they could go back again and again to relive the experience.  How many of us have felt like that after some great meeting where there has been a great presence and outpouring of the Holy Spirit?  Jesus' reply was that now they had to go down from the mountain top experience and deal with real life where people were desperate for help and hope.


Special events, visitations or spiritual encounters are wonderful but don't let's get carried away.  They are not the norm or to be lived perpetually in a state of 'other-world'-iness.  So I thank God for the ordinary.  That's where I need to be - at least most of the time.  That's where life is really lived, in the hum-drum, sometimes boring, unspectacular plodding on.  As my mother used to often observe - we shouldn't be so heavenly minded that we're no earthly good.   

Making Space

It's that time of year when the nights are closing in and the temperature begins to drop a few degrees, when we need to make sure that everything is ready to withstand the winter and whatever bad weather it throws at us.  The trees are shedding their leaves and it's time to trim back, get rid of dead flowers and branches and generally tidy up and sort out in the garden.  For me, part of that preparation for winter has been to give the garden sheds and fence their annual top-up coat of paint/creosote.  This year I've been doing some sorting out in the sheds.  Oh dear, how we accumulate 'stuff', a lot of which I really don't know why it's there. It's so easy to just take something we don't really use much and shove it in the shed, out of sight, out of the way.  At the bottom of our garden we have a very old brick bunker/shelter, possibly used during the war for a family to keep safe(r) during air raids.  When we moved into the house 5 years ago, the shelter had quite a few old doors, wooden posts and other bits and pieces in it.  A couple of weeks ago a very good friend and neighbour from down the street (Pete Davies for those who know him) and his teenage son (Ben) cleared it all out for me .  So that set me off to clear out our other sheds and declutter.


It's amazing just what you find when you have a clearout.  I discovered a small garden hand fork that I had totally forgotten about.  It had been a gift from a friend when we moved in here and was part of a set with secateurs and small trowel.  It was special for me as after years of living in an upstairs flat, where on opening the door to go out, you saw stairs, now I could open the door and see a garden.  I use the secateurs and trowel but can't remember the last time I used the fork - years probably.  The truth is that some things that we think are lost are not really lost at all, they are just abandoned and forgotten underneath a pile of clutter.  When we begin to move things and get rid of all the carefully kept rubbish that we have accumulated, we can come across something we thought had gone forever but all the time it was just waiting there for us to rediscover its whereabouts.

What a difference a declutter makes!

On property programmes they often tell clients that it is best to declutter if they want to sell their homes more quickly.  The truth is that potential buyers want to see the house and not the present owner's personal clutter or family history depicted in photos.  They want to visualize how they would fit in and how they would adapt it to their own needs.  On a spiritual level. many people express that same thought when they say that they want God/Jesus but not the church.  Just like the potential house buyer, they are really not interested in all our personal religious add-ons of our particular preferred expression of faith.  Just like in the bible verse when some people approached one of the disciples saying, 'We would see Jesus'.  Really people just want God and not have to accept all the other bits that some religious people seem to think is a part of God.  They present the gospel as a package deal, you can't have God without all the extra do's and don'ts.  And frankly, they're not buying. 

Over the past few years I have had much spiritual clutter that I have got rid of in order to see God more clearly.  Some people like to live in clutter.  That's not necessarily wrong but it can often cover something that we need or have been looking for.  Much of the spiritual stuff that we accumulate is actually other peoples stuff that is not necessarily what I need or want. and I need to see God for myself, not through the eyes of someone else.  If my relationship with Him is personal as we all claim it to be, then it must be my relationship and not just a copy or cloned duplicate of how someone else tells me it should be.  And so I continue to declutter my life and rediscover treasures.  Less is more - less religious 'clutter' and more God.  We have much to consider and learn from creation and on a regular basis 'declutter' the bits that no longer serve the purpose, discard them and make way for new growth in a new season.