The Socio-Political Challenge of the Lord’s Prayer

I have been sharing a number of theological papers that I have written. This is a copy of an article I wrote for Cambria Nostra, a publication that engaged with society’s relationship with culture, politics, history, and religion.

In recent years, the number of those people who define themselves as Christian has fallen dramatically in the UK. To a generation brought up on social media and globalization, the Christian faith seems like an archaic quirk from a long-forgotten age, with little, if anything, to contribute to the big societal questions of our time. Not that churches always help – all too often they are torn apart by certain doctrinal or ethical issues that leave non-church-attenders bewildered or even amused. As a result, Christians are sometimes accused of being unworldly, sometimes even anti-worldly.

Yet those of us who are working on the coalface of Christian ministry, with communities that are groaning for restoration and renewal, know a different story. We know all too well how hope, compassion, and transformation can flow from spiritual beliefs. The prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, now known as “The Lord’s Prayer”, is a manifesto of the hope that the Christian faith can offer. It is not a prayer that allows Christians to hide away in churches or to remain passively on our knees, but is a rallying call for us to reach out to others. It demands that Christians stand alongside the poor, defend the defenceless, liberate the persecuted, offer justice to the oppressed, campaign for environmental issues, and speak for those with no voice.

The fact that Russell Brand’s book Revolution dedicated a whole chapter to this radical, revolutionary prayer, shows something of how this prayer can also speak powerfully to those who do not define themselves as “Christian”. All of us, from an early age, are sold a particular worldview. We are taught and told how we should act and what we should value. In the contemporary world, this is often a worldview that glorifies the individual, places wealth and prosperity as the ultimate attainment, and views competition and success as defining our very being. We are led, often in subtle ways, to the lie that greed is absolutely necessary for so-called “progress”, that inequality is essential for the flourishing of society, and that “survival of the fittest” is not simply a scientific truth, but a way-of-life that defines our species.

The Lord’s Prayer challenges us to re-evaluate this prevailing worldview – a worldview that champions wealth, consumerism, and materialism. “No one can serve two masters”, Jesus asserts in the verses following the Lord’s Prayer, “either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other” (Matthew 6:24). Yet, we have been conditioned from the cradle to believe that we are helpless to change the huge inequality between poor and rich in society, as it is the natural order of things. We are told that our own meagre efforts to care for the environment will do nothing in the large scheme of things. We are told that we can placate ourselves by becoming happy and fulfilled through obtaining more money in our banks, owning more objects, upsizing to bigger houses, or becoming more successful and popular. The Lord’s Prayer explodes this myth, allowing an open and realistic confrontation of the real and pressing issues of our time – poverty, welfare cuts, economic debt, political corruption, asylum seekers, international aid, inequality, peace and reconciliation, sexual harassment and abuse, economic greed, ethically-blind business, and climate change.

In John Carpenter’s cult classic film They Live [1988], the protagonist discovers a pair of magical sunglasses that allow him to view “reality”. By wearing the glasses, propaganda and lies are revealed all around. Instead of advertisements, billboards suddenly spell “buy” or “obey”. Instead of the usual pictures on money, “this is our God” is printed on the notes. Like these sunglasses, the Lord’s Prayer can help open our eyes to the falsehoods that have been propagated since we were young. It can help clear the fog of modern living to reveal reality and truth. This is what the Christian faith can gift to our society – ways of helping us recognise the reality of existence and ways of inspiring us to transform situations. This is the radical call of Christ, who speaks to all of us, whether we are Christian or not, in the same way as he spoke to those around him – urging us to shed our complacency and hypocrisy, and to live out compassion and justice in our daily lives.

Those who do not define themselves as “religious” will see from the Lord’s Prayer that spirituality does not simply bring comfort, ease, and security to those with faith. Prayer is not about personal and private satisfaction. Ultimately, that would lead us to a tame and arid apathy obsessed with personal, petty concerns. As Homer Simpson philosophises in The Simpsons: “What’s the point of going out – we’re just going to wind up back here anyway”.

The revolution of Christ, as shown in the Lord’s Prayer and in the life of Jesus himself, instead calls for an outward-looking and radical way of living, which champions resurrection, hope, love and compassion for all. It calls for individuals to live out communal lives focused on the plight of the other. It calls for us to reach out to others, however different they are to us, as brothers and sisters (“Our Father in heaven”), to reflect God’s nature by standing alongside the marginalised and oppressed (“hallowed be your name”), to usher in a society of justice and compassion (“your kingdom come”), to fight poverty and inequality (“give us today our daily bread”), to model truth and reconciliation (“as we forgive those who sin against us”), to recognise and transform our inclination to egotism and self-interest (“lead us not into temptation”), and to oppose powers of corruption and greed (“for the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours”). As such, the Lord’s Prayer is as contemporary and relevant as it was two thousand years ago. “This prayer cries out for justice, bread, forgiveness and deliverance;” concludes theologian Tom Wright, “if anyone thinks those are irrelevant in today’s world, let them read the newspaper and think again”.

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come,

your will be done,

on earth as in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

Forgive us our sins

as we forgive those who sin against us.

Lead us not into temptation

but deliver us from evil.

For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours

now and for ever. Amen.

My book Living the Prayer: The Everyday Challenge of the Lord’s Prayer (BRF, Abingdon 2017) further explores the radical and revolutionary socio-political challenge of the Lord’s Prayer. Available from Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/Living-Prayer-Everyday-Challenge-Lords/dp/0857466232/ ) and all other good booksellers.

Miracles: What are they and do they happen?

I have been sharing a number of theological papers that I have written. This is a copy of my notes for a discussion that I took part in recently on the award-winning BBC radio programme ‘All Things Considered’.

What is a miracle?

The real difficulty in considering the possibility of miracles occurring is the difficulty of defining precisely what they are. The philosopher David Hume famously defined miracles as an event that breaks the laws of nature. But more things are possible and more things occur than our present understanding of the regularities of nature allows. After all, our experience of the laws of nature are regularly being revised. Developments in quantum physics, for example, have brought this sharply to mind. Quantum physics is showing scientists a world that is more unusual, indeterminate, and organic. It has even been argued that quantum physics is revealing a world that is more spiritual than we previously realised.

So, instead of breaking the laws of nature, perhaps we could define a miracle as something remarkable or spectacular. Some liberal theologians, such as Marcus Borg, actually refuse to use the word miracles and simply talk about “the spectacular”. Borg rejects supernatural interventions by God who is “out there” and instead talks about the God at the heart of spectacular in the world. The problem with that, though, is that there are many occurrences that we wouldn’t define as miracles, but they are still remarkable and spectacular – the birth of a child, medical procedures (like radiotherapy), and the sun rising up each morning.

So, defining what is a miracle is not as simple as it may first appear, and philosophers, theologians, and biblical scholars have long recognised the complexity of that seemingly basic question.

What about the miracles in the Bible?

The biblical world was a time when accounts of the remarkable and miraculous were far more common than they are today and many things that would have been considered miracles in the past may no longer seen that way today. But we certainly can’t dismiss or explain away the numerous miracles in the Bible by asserting that fact.

A number of the Old Testament miracles hold their own particular problems and difficulties in that they call into question God’s own character. For example, in the book of Exodus the great miracle known as the parting of the Red Sea– why would God perform a miracle that meant the drowning hundreds of Egyptian people? In response to such miracles, some theologians talk about “divine consistency”, a phrase made famous by Jean Dominic Crossan. Divine consistency affirms that we can only accept miracles if it is consistent with God’s loving nature.

In the New Testament, the gospels record 37 miracles of Jesus. Of these, 28 of them are miracles of healing, with God making people whole in mind and body. These miracles flow from Jesus’s compassion and love. Many theologians, whether liberal or more traditional, have little problem accepting that Jesus performed paranormal healings. He was certainly known as a great healer and exorcist, and so his healing cannot simply be explained in psychosomatic terms. But nine miracles involved Jesus has power over nature. So, what about walking on the water? Or silencing the storm? Or multiplying loaves and fish? Or changing water into the wine? It is not as easy to decide on the historicity of these miracles.

Some theologians would suggest that the miracle stories are metaphorical or symbolic. Even Jesus himself, of course, would have recognised that his miraculous deeds were symbolic – John’s gospel even refers to miracles as “signs”. In other words, there is deep meaning in the stories of Jesus’s miracles. So, the water into wine at the beginning of his ministry is symbolic of the new life he brings, while the calming of the storm is symbolic of God’s power over the waters of chaos and how he can calm the storms of our lives. The reality is, though, that we don’t know whether the nature miracles are literal or purely symbolic – or indeed a combination of both. What we do know, though, is that God’s power was recognised as present in Jesus in remarkable ways and God’s presence was identified in both his words and actions.

What about the miracles of St David, the Patron Saint of Wales?

St David lived in the sixth century, but most of the stories of his life or taken from Buchedd Dewi, written by Rhygafarch in the 11th century. So, that’s over 500 years after David’s death. It would be as if I was writing a history of Henry VIII with nothing but word-of-mouth and a few dusty documents found in a Cathedral archive. Many modern historians believe Rhygafarch exaggerated many of his stories, as he was trying to argue for some independence for the Welsh church.

The best known miracle of St David was when he was preaching in the middle of a crowd in the village of Llandewi Brefi. The ground beneath his feet rose up as he preached, allowing everyone to hear him, and a white dove flew down onto his shoulder. Perhaps this may have happened exactly as it was recorded, but perhaps people 1500 years ago simply had a very different way of describing things. Perhaps they were so inspired by this saintly man’s words that those present were saying things like “and it was as if the ground rose up beneath him and his words touched my soul and it was as if God settled on this man like a white dove”. Over the centuries that may have become “the ground did rise up beneath him and a white dove did land on his shoulder”. Either way, such descriptions are actually saying are that David was an inspirational and spiritual man, whether the miracle happened literally or not, and so our belief in the historicity of the miracle shouldn’t take away from what this remarkable man represents to us as Christians today or, indeed, as a nation.

Do miracles still occur?

The question of whether miracles still occur today brings us back to the question of what a miracle actually is. The theologian Keith Ward offers a useful definition of a miracle: “an extraordinary manifestation of spiritual power”. The reality is that unusual and extraordinary occurrences do happen in our world and there are sometimes no scientific explanation for those. If, as Christians, we believe in the Holy Spirit, then it follows that the Spirit can exert some influence on the world. After all, God is a personal reality to Christians and so he manifests himself in unique and distinctly personal ways.

So, Keith Ward suggests that we don’t view the universe as a machine, but rather we view it more like a body. Bodies, after all, do have reliable regularities, but we can also make decisions to do things and thus bodies are subject to personal action. Following this reasoning, the universe also has rigid definite laws, but, for reasons often unknown to us, God’s personal actions break into our world in some way or other. In other words, spectacular and extraordinary events can occur and, when they do, there are times when we may have to revise our understanding of the laws of nature. Miracles, then, could be seen as redefinitions of the laws of nature, rather than transgressions of it.

Is it possible or desirable to prove miracles?

I’ve always loved mystery. As a child I was obsessed with a book I had which detailed great unsolved mysteries such as the Loch Ness monster, the Bermuda triangle, the yeti, and UFOs. When I was a child, I thought like a child, but when I grew up, I left the mystery of conspiracy theories behind. I’m now more interested in the general mystery and miracle of life. In the breath-taking world in which we live we understand some things so well, but other things completely elude us. I’m not talking about the God of the gaps, as Fredrich Nietzche put it, where God is inserted wherever we don’t understand things. I’m talking about something far more spectacular and mysterious than that – questions of existence, wonder, sacrifice, truth, beauty, and love. And, however we define miracles, it is here where the miraculous resides – the spectacular, the extraordinary, the spiritual. As such, proving miracles is less important than welcoming the great mystery of life and showing openness and gratitude for how God’s power works in the everyday and ultimately transforms lives.

How do you respond to those who doubt miracles?

From a theological point of view, Christians do not regard God as a controlling, dictatorial superbeing, who makes arbitrary decisions about when and where not to intervene in our affairs. But neither do we hold that he is detached from humankind or dispassionate about our suffering. Rather, he is involved with the world and is able to transform it powerfully.

How God transforms the world, though, is a question that theologians have discussed for many centuries. For me, God transforms the world subtly – he leads, coaxes, inspires, persuades, and cajoles. This means his miracles happen every day in all sorts of ways. It’s not always huge spectacular things – sometimes it’s simply a smile or a kind word that lifts someone’s heart and sometimes it’s that deep sense of hope and peace that breaks into our troubled lives. As Jewish theologian Harold Kushner put it: “God’s job is not to make sick people healthy – that’s the doctor’s job. God’s job is to make sick people brave”.

And so God is not some dictator or superman who imposes his will from outside the world, but God is already in the world, inhabiting every atom of the universe, interacting into mingling with the laws and patterns of nature.

What about when people pray for miracles that don’t occur?

In the film Lourdes [2009], a wheelchair-bound young woman experiences a magnificent healing at Lourdes, a place famous for its miracles. She worships God and celebrates with joy. The problem is that all the other people with disabilities who are on the same pilgrimage question why this happened to her and not them. This starts to cause all kinds of difficulties and arguments within the group. Why did my miracle not occur? Why did her miracle occur because she’s clearly less pious and devout than I am?

At the centre of the Christian response to this is the great unknown. When we face the great unknown, then we have to really think about what we do know. Do we know God is in a healing miracle? Not for certain, but with God all things are possible, so possibly. Do we know God is in the suffering? Absolutely. After all, miracles aren’t God’s superpower. Love is God’s superpower. God’s love is far more powerful for transformation than random supernatural interventions. I’ve seen evidence of God’s love completely transforming people, events, and circumstances. That, in itself, could be seen as miraculous.

And so I have an open mind about supernatural, unexplained events, and I have an open mind about God’s involvement in those happenings. But what I do know that I have seen the miraculous happen in people’s lives through love, compassion, care, justice, peace, and hope. God is fully immersed in this world and, because we know he knows what it’s like to suffer on the cross, he’s also fully immersed in our pains and suffering. He breathes hope, life, and light into the most awful and traumatic situations. As one of my favourite sayings puts it: “sometimes God calms the storm, sometimes God calms the sailor”.

Thought for the Day: Hanging out with God

In the style of my Lent Book Opening our Lives and Advent Book Real God in the Real World, I will be sharing occasional “thoughts for the day” on various subjects on this blog. Hope you enjoy. The following was originally written for St Padarn’s Institute in Cardiff, Wales, where I am Tutor in Applied Theology. My role at St Padarn’s is as programme leader for the Durham University-validated MA (Theology, Ministry, & Mission).

If someone had told me a few years back that we would be in a pandemic when most of us would be at home for the majority of our time, I would have thought “well, at least it will give us plenty of time for prayer”! As it happens, for so many of us, that hasn’t necessarily been the case. Homeschooling, endless zoom calls, and family duties, not to mention the worry and stress of what we are going through, has meant finding “God time” in our lockdown lives has not always been easy.

The comedian Frank Skinner, in his latest book A Comedian’s Prayer Book, writes about fostering our relationship with God and the need for us to sit or walk, often in silence, with Him. He talks about how Johnny Cash and his best friend Bob Dylan were so close that they would sit fishing, side-by-side, for many hours without speaking and would still feel comfortable with, and uplifted in, each other’s presence. Skinner then prays to God by saying: “I’d like to think you and I are at least as close as Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan”!

Finding moments just “to be” with God is so important for our relationship with Him, whether we are sitting quietly in our living room, chopping vegetables while preparing our dinner, taking a stroll in our local park, waiting for a bus or train to arrive, or simply having our daily shower. Eric Clapton once sung how he had finally found a way to live life to all its fullness – by living “in the presence of the Lord”. Centuries earlier, the seventeenth-century monk Brother Lawrence said a similar thing in urging Christians to “practice the presence of God” in their everyday lives.

Why do we do this? This was a question I faced as I was putting my seven-year-old to bed last week: “what’s the point of praying, daddy?” There’s nothing like a small child to challenge your theology at the end of a long day! I then remembered what Archbishop Desmond Tutu had said about prayer. Spending time with God, I told my son, is like sitting next to a fire on a cold day. We feel the warmth and we take on the attributes of the fire – we become warm. Similarly, when we put ourselves in God’s presence, we somehow take on his attributes. God is love, so we become more like him – less judgemental and more loving. On hearing this, my son snuggled down, wrapped his duvet around himself, thought for a while, and said “hmmm, yes, hanging out with God just makes sense”.

So, this week, I want to encourage you to find some time, in whatever way you can, simply to be with God. Feel close to him. Practice his presence. Rest in the warmth. Embrace his love. Why? Well, because, you know, hanging out with God just makes sense.

Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word – An Appeal to White Majority Churches

This is a tale of two photos. Two photos that show the difference between what following Jesus has too often become and what following Jesus should be. One a photo of the so-called “leader of the Free World”, after having ordered tear gas on peaceful protesters, holding the bible aloft in front of a church. The other a photo of tearful white Christians kneeling in front of grieving black Christians in the hometown of the murdered George Floyd, asking for forgiveness for many decades of bigotry and racism. One a photo that encapsulates dominance, force, abuse of power, arrogance, and injustice. The other a photo of humility, contrition, equality, compassion, and love.

The world has recognised the photo of the US President for what it is – a shameless and shameful hijacking of the spiritual. The other photograph is taken from a video of a prayer service that was shared widely on social media. It has been described by Piers Morgan as the one powerful moment during the past few days that gives us hope that the present situation differs from many past protests. Not that all commentators have viewed the incident so positively. A British journalist in Russia Today, who also writes for The Sun newspaper, describes the moment as a “cringeworthy and ostentatious display of self-flagellation”. The article even quotes from the Bible (Deuteronomy 24:16) in criticising this group for apologising for the sins of the past. “They will not help heal racial divisions,” the author concludes, “they only serve to heighten them”.

As a church leader in a white majority church in the UK, though, I believe apology and contrition is the only place we must start in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd and to the racism and bigotry that still blights our world. Make no mistake about it, the burden of guilt is on all our shoulders. Speaking out against arrogant politicians or corrupt law keepers is imperative, but this must not hide our own culpability or blind us from our own propensity to bigotry, prejudice, and hatred. Not that our contrition should incarcerate us in self-reproach and shame. It must be, instead, a step towards recognising our common humanity with all and towards the promise of new beginnings and new life.

Rather than contradicting Scripture, as the Russia Today journalist maintains, this is what our faith demands of us. It is not by accident that Jesus taught us to pray ‘forgive us our sins’. Sin is not merely a personal and private problem. There is corporality and communality in our transgressions. In Romans 3:23, St Paul maintains that “all have sinned and fall short”, using a Greek aorist tense which implies everybody’s cumulative past and employing a Greek phrase (‘fall short’) which suggests a continuing present. In other words, our personal wrongdoings are linked to the entirety of humankind’s sinful history, and so we are called to confession and repentance for the deafening silence of both our country and our church on so many atrocities and hurts, as well as for the hate-filled and dehumanizing rhetoric that groups of innocent people have faced, whether those of a different race, faith, sexuality, gender, physical ability, or nationality.

However, when it comes to acknowledging our complicity in acts of exploitation, injustice, hatred, and cruelty, sorry seems to be the hardest word. It is costly and painful for us to look at the perpetrators of historical crimes and see our own faces reflecting back. Our history, though, is littered with the evils of our ancestors. Our compatriots have been involved in dreadful atrocities, and our faith has so much for which to be remorseful. Humility, empathy, and compassion lead us to confess our own part in driving the nail into Christ’s hand, thrusting the sword into the so-called ‘infidel’ in the crusades, screaming for death to young girls accused of witchcraft, fervently applauding the charismatic Führer of the Third Reich, burning crosses on lawns in 1960s Alabama, preaching hate against our gay neighbours, and signing contracts to destroy swathes of rain forest.

But contrition alone is not enough. Asking for forgiveness for the past holds pressing implications on both the present and the future. Repentance is not simply a case of saying sorry – we need to act out our sorry. In the Old Testament, Nehemiah did not simply confess the sins of his ancestors, he committed himself to rectifying those transgressions. By saying sorry for the sins of the past, we commit ourselves to standing alongside the oppressed, to repairing relationships, to giving voice to the hurting voiceless, to championing love, service, and justice in our own lives, and to imploring God to keep us from descending again into prejudice, hatred, or abuse.

So, we ask for forgiveness for years of mistreatment of his wonderful creation and we shed tears for the treatment of numerous groups of people in the past and present – black people, women, the disabled, gay people, transgender people, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, aboriginal people, native Americans, and many other groups. By repenting of the transgressions of all people at all times, we enter a place of healing, hope, and new life. In this place, we commit to identifying where prejudice, inequality, violence, exploitation, greed and abuse still occur in our communities, society, and world, and we commit to playing our part in birthing a future of equality, compassion, and love. And it all starts with standing with those in George Floyd’s hometown and, with our tears mingling with those running down the cheeks of both black and white, repeating the prayer that they prayed:

“Father God, we humble ourselves before you and we ask for forgiveness from our black brothers and sisters for years and years of systematic racism, of bigotry, of hate. We pray for our white, black and brown brothers and sisters who have had the courage to expose the blatant racism in our own hearts. We pray that black men and women be free from fear and hopelessness. We take a knee as a sign that we honour them, we love them; as a sign that You love them. In Jesus’s name, Amen”

Our Challenge this Christmas – Prophet not Profit

This is my first guest blogger on the “Finding Hope, Meaning, Faith, and Compassion” blog. The writer, Gareth Erlandson, is a young Masters student who is training for Anglican ordained ministry. I heard him give the talk below last week and I was personally moved and inspired by it (and not, rest assured, because it namechecks me!). I, therefore, asked him to adapt it into a blog post for publication on this blog. I hope it also inspires you in these weeks running up to Christmas:

When I started teaching about twelve years ago, I shared a house with an old school mate who would drink coffee from a mug emblazoned with the words “Jesus is Coming – Look Busy!” I often think of that mug during Advent – the four weeks running-up to Christmas. We tend to be so busy this time of year, as we supposedly wait in hopeful anticipation for Jesus’ coming – racing around buying presents, eating ourselves to bursting at Christmas meals, rushing from concert to concert. Last week I lost three hours driving around Cardiff on the hunt for the perfect Christmas tree, only for it not to fit in our lounge after all that!

The prophets of the Bible knew what it meant to look forward with hopeful anticipation. In light of their message, we can view the busy run-up to Christmas in a very different way. Rather than preparing materially for Christmas, we can try to take time to prepare ourselves. By doing so, Jesus can challenge us – challenge us to make the old new, to fix the broken, to dispel darkness with light.

But what does it mean to be prophetic? Well, it is certainly nothing to do with crystal balls, wizards, or seeing into the future. Rather, the words and actions of both the Old Testament prophets and John the Baptist in the New Testament encourage us to get right personally with God as we await for his arrival, and a large part of that includes our actions. In other words, there is a political and social edge to our call to be prophetic. After all, being a prophet is to call out against everything that is broken in the world. This can be brokenness within ourselves, in our relationships with others, in the community and wider society, and of the environment. The Bible encourages us to recognise this prophetic voice within us (Rom. 12:6) and tells us that, when we use our spiritual gifts to strengthen, encourage, and comfort others (1 Cor. 14:3), we are doing God’s work (1 Pet. 4:10).

I recently heard blogger and author, Trystan Owain Hughes, challenge a group with these “Questions of Love”:

“How do we share God’s love with people?”

“How are we compassionate and kind to the suffering?”

“Are we at peace with others?”

“How do we care for the environment?”

These, to me, could be summarized in one question: “Do we take our political and social responsibilities seriously?” Asking such a question is the start of prophecy, but we also need to listen for God’s answers and this demands time and space. John the Baptist himself is referred to as one “calling in the wilderness”. He takes time out of the hustle and bustle of everyday living to listen to God’s voice and, by doing so, it is God’s message that he proclaims.

Similarly, for us, we must listen out for God’s voice and then proclaim it. Some Christian traditions refer to five basic signs that God is speaking – through scripture, pictures, emotions, physical reactions, or everyday “words of wisdom”. Such signs can appear in our “mind’s eye” but can equally crop up in our everyday lives. But time and space is needed to recognise these signs. We need, in other words, to follow John the Baptist’s example by stepping back from the humdrum in order to hear God’s voice. In doing so, though, we also need to be careful. We only truly know if we’re hearing from God if what we perceive is compatible with God as revealed in Scripture. In other words, are the messages we are hearing leading us to loving actions? After all, “God is love” (1 John 4:16).

We can see numerous examples of prophetic responses to God’s call. One fictional example is in a book of which many of us will be watching filmic versions over the next few weeks. Scrooge’s ghostly visitors in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol act as prophets, leading the miserable miser to transform his own relationships and the lives of the poorest in his society. A more recent and real life example is that of my wife, who was disturbed on a shopping trip by the increasing number of homeless people sleeping on the streets of Cardiff (Wales, UK). Taking some time to reflect on this experience, three words of wisdom came to her – “Greggs the Bakers”. On her next trip into town, Greggs was her first port of call, where she bought a stack of gift cards which she now distributes to the rough sleepers in the city whenever she pops in for a bit of Christmas shopping.

Advent is certainly a time we should be getting excited for Christmas and so that naturally means we are busy – don’t feel guilty about that! But we could also commit to taking just a few extra moments each day to ask God to show us where and how the broken world needs healing. Then, we can take time and space to listen as he answers us. This is how we, like the prophets of the Bible, can help bring light into the world, just as Jesus did 2000 years ago at the first Christmas.

Advent and the Weight for Christmas

At the moment, I’m fascinated in books about words, and letters and languages. I’m finding out all sorts of intriguing facts – did you know, for example, that sixteenth-century printers used to keep their capital letters in one case and the other letters in another case, which is why letters became known as Upper Case and Lower Case?! I’ve also discovered all about homophones – words that sound the same but have no relation whatsoever to one another. Take, for example, the word “weight”, meaning a heaviness or a heavy load or object, and the word “wait”, meaning an inactivity until a future expectation happens. Clearly they are very different words.

Advent is a time of “waiting” for that future expectation – waiting for the birth of Christ, waiting for the celebration of Christmas Day. Most of us don’t enjoy having to wait for things, and, in our instantaneous and speedy world, we have all sorts of ways of hurrying things up. As the comedian Steve Wright quipped, ‘I put my instant coffee in my microwave oven and almost went back in time’!

With this is mind, perhaps the word “wait” is not so different to its homophone-partner “weight”. Someone sent me an email this week that described how a teacher picked up a glass of water and asked a group of students how heavy it was. All sorts of answers were called out, ranging from 5 ounces to 30 ounces. The teacher then informed them that the absolute weight has no bearing on our own experience of the weight: “The weight depends on how long I hold it. If I hold it for a minute, it’s no problem at all. If I hold it for an hour, I’ll have a slight ache in my arm. If I hold it for a day, then my whole arm will start to feel numb and paralyzed. In each case, the weight of the glass doesn’t change, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes”.

Sometimes, when we are waiting for something or someone, it can be rather frustrating and wearisome, like an ache in the arm. It can be a somewhat unpleasant experience when we are waiting in a queue in a supermarket or we’re waiting for a friend who’s late once again. But waiting can also be far more serious and severe. Ultimately, waiting can weigh us down. It can be like carrying a heavy load for a long period. It can numb us and paralyze us when we are waiting for recovery from illness, waiting for depression to lift, waiting for light to break through grief, waiting for test results, or waiting for the hurt of broken relationships to heal.

Nothing can completely take away the darkness of some of our waiting. But in all our waiting, Christ can make a difference. To use another homophone, he can make the darkness lighter and he can make the heavy load lighter. In this sense, waiting doesn’t have to always be so frustrating or painful. After all, there are two times of waiting in church calendar – advent and lent – and both have something in common. Both end in new life and joy. It is, therefore, no surprise that almost all the verses in the Bible that mention “waiting” do not relate it to heaviness, pain, and oppression. Instead, they imply that we have a choice to view our waiting in a different way – as a gift where we are invited to treasure each moment. As Isaiah 40:31 puts it: “but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint”.

Whatever kind of waiting we are experiencing, then, we can choose to actively appreciate and cherish. Sometimes our waiting is looking forward in anticipation to a good event. This should be fun and fulfilling, but it can also lead us to live our lives in the future, rather than enjoy the gift of waiting. Over the past year, I have found myself sitting with my one-year-old son and thinking how much I’m looking forward to the next stage of his development – at first it was when he crawls, then when he walks, then when he talks. I was looking at photos of him recently and I realised how much I had missed of the stages he was at by looking to the future. I now challenge myself to appreciate where he is now – you could call it “the waiting for the next stage” – rather than wishing the next stage would come quickly.

There are other times, though, when our waiting is not to do with anticipation, but rather we are forced to wait, due to illness or to a traumatic event. Again, while it may well be difficult, we can wait actively in these moments. During the intense period of my own back injury, before my operation, I had almost 12 months where I was laid up in bed for most of the day. I would venture out for very short daily strolls. But I taught myself to truly appreciate those walks – the beauty of nature, the conversation of friends who visited to walk with me, the silence when I walked alone, the uplifting music when I took my ipod. This was all God at work, and, in spite of my continuing pain, I could not help but celebrate His wonderful, mysterious, and holy gift of life.

‘Active waiting’ is about finding God’s light in your journeys, however long and difficult your wait, however heavy and burdensome your weight. The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson asked the question: “how much of human life is lost in waiting?” And he’s right – how much of life is wasted, waiting for the future to happen? Our time is precious, and active waiting helps us to connect with God and appreciate our time fully. In the words of the author Sharlande Sledge, it helps us to “transform our in-the-meantime into God’s time”.

Sharlande Sledge: Prayer on Waiting

Look upon us gently, Lord, for waiting is not our forte. So many things are… things like moving ahead, fixing what is wrong, planning what is next, diagnosing the problem, cramming more into one day than one person can possibly do before the sun goes down.

But waiting… when we are waiting for the light to shine, when we are waiting for the Word, when we are waiting for a wound to heal, nothing in all the world is harder than waiting.

So in your mercy, Lord, wait with us.

Be very present in waiting.  Heal our frenzy. Calm our fears. Comfort those who at this very minute are with every anxious breath and thought waiting for they know-not-what.

Transform our in-the-meantime into your time, while we wait with each other, sit with each other, pray each other into hope, surrounded by your presence, even in the darkness. Especially in the darkness. Amen

 See also:

Unto us a Child is Born: A new baby at Christmas

Things-with-wings: A Christmas Reflection

Are you sitting comfortably? Christmas and the wonder of story

‘The path of peace’ (Luke 1:79): Can our faith help us when we face depression, anxiety, and stress?

Today is World Mental Health Day. As I was leaving St Mary’s, Ealing, London last weekend, having given a talk on finding hope and meaning in suffering, another group were coming in to use the church. This was a group for contemplation and prayer, and many of them had come early to hear my talk before their service. On chatting to them, they asked what I believe prayer and contemplation could offer to those of us who suffer depression, anxiety, and stress. I was able to answer them in detail, as my Masters dissertation at Oxford University was on that topic. The following article, which is adapted from an article I wrote a number of years back for the wonderful website Mind and Soul: Exploring Christianity and Mental Health, summarises my work at Oxford.

In 2006 a report on happiness in our society, written by Nick Spencer at the Theos think tank, noted that, while the British are richer than ever before, own more than ever before, and live longer and healthier lives than in the past, all the evidence suggests that people are no happier than they were thirty years ago. In fact, some studies indicate that most people are considerably less happy. Certainly, personal psychological ill-health has risen notably over the past few decades. Depression, anxiety, and stress are widespread in the UK, with the NHS spending many millions of pounds on treatments and therapy.

In recent years, a number of psychologists and psychiatrists have posited mindfulness as a tool for managing mood problems. Originating in Buddhism, mindfulness can be summarised as having a compassionate, non-judgemental awareness of the present moment. In being aware of the reality around us, we become fully alert to the sensations in our bodies, the flow of our thoughts, and the sights and sounds around us. When combined with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), research has shown that mindfulness can significantly transform a person suffering from a mood disorder. This research, led by scientist-practitioners such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, Marsha Lineham, Steven C. Hayes, and Williams/Teasdale/Segal, has become known as the third-wave of CBT.

It is, however, rarely appreciated that our own Christian tradition has much to offer in this sphere. The ancient practice of contemplative prayer is sometimes called ‘Christian meditation’, but is not to be confused with the more widespread Christian practice of discursive meditation. Contemplative prayer has had a long history in Christian tradition, and in the late twentieth-century it underwent a revival, largely led by the Roman Catholic religious orders but also promoted by a number of prominent Anglicans, Quakers, and Protestant evangelicals. Contemplation holds many similarities with mindfulness, and so a Christianised form of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy could potentially be created and developed.

Those cognitive therapies that utilise mindfulness as part of treatment for mood disorders are built around three aspects of mindfulness – meditation, non-judgemental awareness, and acceptance. It is striking that Christianity has long-advocated similar principles to these three mindfulness principles, not least within the contemplative tradition of the church.

Christian meditation has been varied and diverse down the centuries. It is those techniques that bear resemblance to mindfulness meditation that could be adapted and utilised most successfully for combating mental ill-health. Many of these forms of prayer are centuries old, but have recently been developed by such contemplatives as Anthony De Mello (body-awareness prayer), Thomas Keating (centring prayer), James Finley (Christian meditation), or Thomas Ryan (prayer of heart and body). Protestant contemplatives, such as Richard Foster, Joyce Huggett, Liz Babbs, and James W. Goll, have championed similar forms of prayer. ‘Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears;’ wrote C.S. Lewis, ‘take in what there is and give no thought to what might have been there or what is somewhere else’. Just as meditation can lead to mindfulness, contemplative prayer can lead us to live contemplatively. In other words, it can help us to recognise, in the words of Jean Pierre de Caussade in the eighteenth-century, the ‘sanctity of the present moment’, and can, therefore, help us to observe our thoughts and feelings in that moment.

Christian traditions are also well-versed in the concept of non-judgemental awareness. It is by resting in the ‘sacrament of the present moment’ that we begin to see our prejudices and distorted thinking from an objective viewpoint – in a sense, from God’s perspective. Our false emotional programs for happiness can be dismantled, and, while we might still be encountering the same depressive thoughts and unhelpful feelings, we are able to recognise those thoughts and feelings as distorted and dangerous. Thomas Keating refers to such thoughts, memories, and feelings as the ‘false self’, while other writers have referred to them as our ‘self-will’ (Catherine of Genoa and Teresa of Avila), ‘desires’ (John of the Cross), ‘egomania’ (Richard Foster), ‘empire of self’ (James W. Goll), or ‘ego consciousness’ (James Finley). These are our attachments to security, control, affection, and esteem. In the context of a Christianised mindfulness cognitive therapy, these are our core-beliefs that have developed through reaction and habit. As a result of noticing and analysing our thoughts and feelings, these core beliefs can be purged, rejected, or adapted.

Within many Christian traditions, not least the contemplative movement, the acceptance of God’s providence is prevalent. The ‘sacrament of the present moment’ awakens us to recognise God in each and every moment of our lives, which includes times of pain and suffering, as well as more joyful and happy times. This leads to what Jean-Pierre de Caussade describes as ‘self-abandonment to divine providence’. Through recognising God’s loving purpose, even in the midst of trials and tribulation, we can joyfully surrender ourselves to God’s will in our lives. This is all part of the ‘letting go’, which many mystics have placed at the heart of happiness, contentment, and peace. If we have the courage to trust God and to submit ourselves to Him, we will not only learn to accept unfolding events, but also ‘to embrace and bless them’. This will then help us change our relationship with the negative aspects of our being and situation, and the unhelpful and distorted feelings within us will cease to control us. This ‘courage to be’ (Paul Tillich), to affirm being, in the face of our anxieties about life and about the future, is at the heart of Christian acceptance.

A number of factors would need to be in place if a contemplative programme of treatment for depression, stress, and anxiety was to be developed and sustained. Firstly, the education of laity and clergy needs to be a priority. This will counter prejudice against and misunderstanding of contemplative prayer, but also bring relationship of Christianity with mental health issues to the fore. Secondly, the training of clergy and other spiritual advisors needs to be a priority – both in traditions of contemplative prayer and in the relationship of contemplation to emotional well-being. Thirdly, the relationship between Church and mental health professionals needs to be further fostered. Both need to know about, understand, and be able to support a contemplative/meditative approach to healing. Finally, contemplative prayer groups need to be established, and ecumenical groups should be encouraged, making the groups more viable and diverse. If groups are already running, they need to be advertised more clearly and widely. Indeed, if these factors were developed and put in place, then contemplative theology could certainly hold the key to developing a Christian mindfulness, and this could significantly help those Christians suffering mental ill-health.

How Great Thou Art: Elvis Presley and his Faith

A few months back I wrote a post about pop music and faith, and I have been astounded by its popularity – the post still has regular traffic from across the world. This has led me to post the following article that I wrote ten years ago, when I was based one summer in Washington DC, for a website that has long since disappeared. The article has a special significance this week, as it was exactly sixty years ago that an unknown 19-year-old recorded his first record. That single was “That’s All Right (Mama)” and it wasn’t long before Elvis Aaron Presley was being dubbed “The King of Rock’n’Roll”.

Only a few hours before Elvis’s death, his close friend Rick Stanley heard him reciting a Christian prayer of repentance. ‘Dear Lord,’ he prayed, ‘please show me a way. I’m tired and confused and I need your help.’ Elvis may well be remembered for shooting televisions, pain-killer addiction, and womanising, but the King of Rock’n’Roll should also be remembered for another side to him. Elvis was, of course, also a deeply religious individual, and his faith was central to his life. Like all of us, he had a flawed personality, but his intentions were clear to all his friends. ‘He was a deeply spiritual man;’ noted Ray Walker of The Jordanaires, the legendary quartet that sang with Elvis for many years, ‘he was more spiritual than anyone around him’.

The Pentecostal faith of Elvis’s childhood certainly shaped his music. Not only did his secular rock’n’roll records borrow from the musical experiences of his Southern church upbringing, but he also recorded gospel songs throughout his life. In fact, Jerry Schilling, one of the Memphis Mafia, Elvis’s closest confidents, claims that Elvis would enjoy nothing more than escaping the mansion and going to the piano at his little gym. There he would sing gospel songs and old spirituals for hours on end. His recorded gospel songs proved remarkably popular, from “Peace in the Valley” and “Run On” in the 50s and 60s to “I Got Confidence” and “Amazing Grace” in the 70s. The record “How Great Thou Art” earned Elvis his first Grammy Award, and he would win two more Grammy Awards for his gospel recordings. ‘I know practically every religious song that’s ever been written’, he once boasted.

It seems, however, that faith was not merely a musical journey for Elvis. His friends have claimed that he knew the Bible better than most ministers do, and in his periods of self-loathing he was said to rely for comfort and grace on the Scriptures. When away from his Bible, his friends recall that he would leave it open on Corinthians 13, St Paul’s great ode to love. Likewise, prayer was central to his life. Before every concert he would insist that his band prayed with him, and, during his 70s concerts especially, he would interject thoughts of inspiration and passage readings from the Bible. His faith also inspired him in practical and humanitarian ways, as he spent time with friends who needed comfort and gave generously to charities. ‘He wasn’t faking it, and people can tell that,’ notes Jason Freeman of the Legendary Sun Studio in Memphis. ‘He was very spiritual, and that attracted a lot of people to him.’

By the mid-sixties, Elvis concluded that he was aimed to fulfil two desires in his lifetime. Firstly, he wished to create a music that brought happiness to people; and, secondly, he aimed to perform a higher purpose or service for God.  This higher purpose, he later claimed, would be to show to his fans the truth of Christianity, and the love and peace it brought to him. Certainly his own faith empowered him in so many ways. ‘His religious faith told him “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so”, to quote a popular Southern religious song,’ claims Charles R. Wilson of the University of Mississippi, ‘…so his faith gave him much inspiration’.

It is certainly ironic that an Elvis-religion (sometimes called Elvism, the Presleyterian church, or Presleyanity) is being alluded to by fans and social-critics alike. ‘Fan clubs are churches,’ notes Vernon Chadwick, ‘impersonators are priests, song lyrics are scripture, souvenirs are relics, sightings are Second Comings, and of course Graceland and Memphis are the holy land’. This is surely a far cry from what Elvis himself would have wanted. After all, Elvis’s friend and gospel superstar J.D. Sumner recalls an incident during a concert in Las Vegas. A woman approached the stage carrying a crown on a purple, velvet pillow. ‘It’s for you,’ she said to Elvis, ‘you’re the king’. Without hesitation, Elvis took her by the hand and answered in his kind, drawling voice: ‘No, honey, I’m not the king. Christ is the king. I’m just a singer’.

 

See also: Rock of Ages: Pop music, faith, and the challenge to the Church today

Together we stand: The importance of Christian unity

‘Though the body is made up of many parts, it is still one body’ (1 Cor 12:12). Last night I preached at a big service in Cardiff for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. I started by taking about my family in North Wales. I am from a large family – I have three brothers and one sister. I tease my parents by telling them that they kept trying until they got one they liked! All five of us siblings look quite similar, but we’re actually very different people. We have different personalities (some of us are very firey and others pretty chilled), we have very different jobs (one brother is a headmaster, another trained as a gamekeeper and a plumber, and so on), we have different interests (one brother is a twitcher who travels the country birdwatching, another has STFC tatooed on his arm and travels the country following his favourite football team Shrewsbury Town, another was a finalist in the Welsh version of the X Factor (‘Can i Gymru’), and so on). So we all have same mother and father, we’re all brothers and sisters, but we have our own unique and precious characteristics that I know our parents love and cherish.

It dawned on me this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity how our own families reflect the Church. From the time of the disciples, groups of Christians have thought and acted very differently. The early Christians in the book of Acts, for example, disagreed whether Christians should practice Jewish customs or not. By today, all us churches are very different in the way we worship, in our priorities, and in our theology. But let’s not forget that we are similar in one important way: we all pray ‘Our Father’, rather than ‘My Father’. So we’re all brothers and sisters in Christ, with Paul’s letters even referring to the churches as brothers and sisters. So we’re brothers and sisters who have our own unique and precious characteristics – ones that our Father in heaven loves and cherishes, and ones that we should appreciate in each other.

When the five of us North Wales siblings were younger, we were brought up in beautiful Snowdonia. My Grandparents, who lived in the big smoke of our capital city Cardiff, used to call us the feral mountain children, and I quite often tease my own children by insisting that I was raised by wolves on the slopes of Snowdon. In reality, of course, we had no links with wolves, but I do remember that we all fought like cats and dogs when we were kids! I remember one punch up with my older brother that began with an argument as to who was more famous – Jerry Lee Lewis or Suzanne Vega. Twenty years later, I’m still certain I was correct – I mean, who is Suzanne Vega anyway?! By now, despite all our past fights and despite our differences personalities, we brothers and sister all get on very well, and we so enjoy meeting up with each other.

Again, just as brothers and sisters go through changes in the way they treat each other as they grow-up and mature, so the relationships of churches and denominations have developed. Five hundred years ago we were literally killing each other, and even only 50 years ago, there was so much hatred, bitterness and prejudice on all sides. My first book, Winds of Change, researched church relationships in Wales during the twentieth century, and, as I trawled through old newspapers in dusty archives, I remember being shocked at what I was reading –  local chapel members attacking Catholic priests with stones, Anglican bishops announcing that all other churches in Wales were intruders, and Catholics claiming those outside Rome were not going to heaven. Well, things have certainly changed. We are so used to saying that things have changed for the worse. So we should rejoice and thank God for a change for the better – our churches have grown-up and matured, and we now lovingly recognise each other as brothers and sisters.

We must remember, though, that relationships do not survive without effort. I am close to my brothers and sister because I phone them, we visit each other, we write e-mails to each other, I try to remember their birthdays (although there’s a lot of them!), and so on. Likewise, my relationship with God is alive because I talk to him in prayer, I listen for his voice in life, I recognise him in the people I meet, I study and read his book, and so on. So, in this Week of Christian Unity we might want to make a promise to ourselves that we will nurture our relationship with our brother and sister Christians – not just this week, but throughout the year. We could visit each other’s churches, we could pray for each other, we could support each other in any events organised – coffee mornings, special services, kids events, social nights, and so on. We can let those outside our churches know that, to us, religion is not something that divides, but is something that brings us together. After all, we are all parts of the body of Christ, and, to quote 1 Corinthians, ‘there should be no division in the body, but its parts should have equal concern for each other’. As Psalm 133 announces, ‘how good and how pleasant it is when brothers and sisters dwell in unity!’