abbotsford.org.uk

Children's Laureate

The great Julia Donaldson is the new Children's Laureate. This is good. Got me thinking about doing a few bible stories in the same way. What about Moses and the 10 plagues or Jonah in the fish or David and Goliath? Anyone up for being part of an online version of one of these stories?

When I find my daughters version of the Gruffalo, and remember how it starts (In a deep dark wood, if I remember correctly) and I'll start it off, and you can add a few lines as you feel inspired.

And perhaps after the four years of Julia's reign, one of us might take Laureate-ship.

Dry Bones

Been away on holiday and now struggling with a dry imagination to bring a contemporary slant to the idea of dry bones. One contemporary reading, at the moment, is non-existent.

How do you bring bones to life? How do you let the spirit animate what is dust?

Could you hocus pocus them to life aka Harry Potter or is there a simpler and more ubiquitous spell? And what would that be... a contemporary reading is beginning to form perhaps... or perhaps not.

Anyone any ideas out there that enables us to live at a tangent with the reading and speak creatively into who we are and hope to be?

Lenten Top Ten

I have this image of Jesus (wrongly perhaps) of setting out to Jerusalem with his iPod charged up and his own soundscape playing as he encounters people and places along the way.

• Bethany and the two sisters of Lazarus
• The temple as a table-turner
• The city on the back of a donkey
• The shadows of the temple where the money exchange happens
• Looking at the city from a nearby hill weaping over it
• The perfume anointing

What would Jesus choose?

Better than cotton wool

What part of Clydebank or the church would you like to wrap in wool, that is of the knitted variety. It would be such a cool thing to iconize (Sp?) pieces of God's furniture.

This idea was given to me by a good colleague who remembers some of the knitting things we did over various summer projects that was always so popular. The image below is from this website who do urban stuff. Let's evolve that with some woolly theology. It would be such a good thing to take that knitting one step further... so where do you suggest we begin to knit something for the Almighty?

LIght Festival Blessing

We had our light festival tonight. Feedback always welcome along with ideas for next time. But I think it went well. Good atmposphere; the lanterns were fabulous; the light pool worked; people were busy or lazy as they saw fit; the light corridor was fabulous and hopefully we'll get some photos for the website. Good cake and food and stories. Here's the blessing at the shortest festival in hiostory, just one and a half hours long but packed with goodness...

I wish you could see
the light that lives in you
that shines from your eyes
and glows in your smile

I wish I could show you
when you are tired or afraid
the amazing light
of your own being

I wish others to know
about the light you release
that scatters all shadows
when you are around

I wish you the universe
born of light
to be your guardian
child of stardust

May the light gifted to you
shine into this world
for it holds the story
of the prince of light

I wish you the journey of light
that scatters all your fears
that moves you from story to Word
born in us, among us, for us

 

Txt-ing the Nativity

There is a twitter thing going on at the moment offering the whole Nativity story as a tweet, or series of tweets. I wondered if there was a txt-ed nativity out there. I'm sort of hoping there isn't (though I know there will be) and we can write our own here, or with our own suggested tweets. So if you are up for it, this years nativity project is to tweet or txt the whole thing. If it works, then it will be used in our Carol Service on the 19th. I'm starting early trying to think of something to do because I have a rather blank sheet at the moment for this service and as everyone keeps saying how atmospheric it is then I tend to panic early as well.

So let's go for it: txt or tweet the story. The idea of txt and tweeting, of course is to make it concise but feel free to be a little more expansive so it can take up some space in the service!

Light Festival

We're beginning a new tradition for us and that's finding a whole community way of celebrating the seasons. We're taking the big general theme of a season and turning it into a mini-festival and using image and sound and sacred space adn food and community building things and craft to explore it and celebrate it.

We're beginning with Advent and holding a festival of light. We're planning to redesign the colours on the tower lighting, having different organisations create lanterns we'll make into a light wall, a lacuna pool of floating light, a chillout zone of Hubble photographs and music, stories of light, a light quiz, a sheet of coloured light made from acrylic squares and backlit and a whole host of other things.

Obviously the theme is light and I'm really looking forward to it. It's another way to ry and attract people back into church taking the season and experimenting a little. Oh, and there's another things we are doing: experiments that let the light out. We've some cool scientists who are going to take thing that seem to have no light energy in themselves but they will find way of letting the light break out and possibly (hopefully) explode a bit.

Fantastic.

The Equality Trust

There is an interesting and intriguing website calls The Equality Trust that has come from lots of research about how inequality affects societies and especially how the bigger the gap between rich and poor is directly correlated to more social problems, feelings of unhappiness, more people in jail, greater obesity etc for everyone and not just the poor. It's one of those websites you want to be able to absorb straight away without having to read everything! Seems to be just what the Gospel ordered. This from the website:

Until recently, most of the argument about the scale of income inequality in modern societies has been about fairness and unfairness. But it has recently become possible to compare the scale of income differences in different societies and see how the social fabric of society is affected by how much inequality there is. Research using this data carried out since the early 1990s shows that many of the most pressing health and social problems are worse in more unequal societies - often much worse. Societies with bigger income differences between rich and poor seem to suffer more of a very wide range of health and social problems.

We have found that the pattern applies to most of the social problems which, within countries, tend to be concentrated in the most deprived areas and become more common further down the social ladder. Like violence and ill health, they are all much more common in more unequal societies. So far the evidence covers mental illness, drug abuse, teenage births, obesity, the proportion of the population in prison, educational performance of school children, levels of trust and strength of community life, and social mobility.

One of the most striking and important features of these relationships is that the differences in the prevalence of the various social problems are so large. Some are two or three times as common in more unequal societies, but others are as much as ten times as common. The evidence suggests that this is partly because inequality affects the vast majority of the population - not just the poorest.

Because inequality affects so many different outcomes, if you know that a society does badly - for instance - on health, it is likely that it also does badly on a wide range of social problems: it probably has high levels of violence, high teen birth rates, a high prison population, lower levels of trust, more obesity, and a bigger drug problem. It looks as if societies with large income inequalities become socially dysfunctional.

Any thoughts on that?

A week to go...

Not that I'm rushing into Lent or anything but being a good Presbyterian I just can't help myself. I was at Holy City as few weeks ago which is always fabulous. If you are within traveling distance of Glasgow on the last Sunday of the month then you ought to be there, we're expecting you.

One of the workshops I was at someone said that they were getting rid of something out their lives every day. It could be a book, an ornament, a piece of clothing whatever, but everyday they got rid of something to de-clutter and recognise how much stuff we have that we really don't need.

What a fabulous way to live each day and so I'm going to  suggest that for ourselves here, beginning with Lent: 40 days of de-cluttering. Go we have a week to consider it and then next Wednesday it all begins: 1 item a day. You can list what you've thrown away here if you wish (but you've not allowed to swap it with something else someone else has thrown away. that's not de-cluttering). Take it to Oxfam, or recycle in another way but give up something that lightens the journey.

It will take me several years to de-clutter by study let alone some of the rooms I've taken over in the church with the rubbish I forget to put away. Lent will never look the same again.

Looking for Christmas

Each year we tend to have a phrase or theme that travels with us through Advent which appears each week. Last year was 'The breaking in of the light'. Others have been about shoes, stars, also 'when, how, where, why...'

It's a bit early I suppose, but Advent begins a week on Sunday and I haven't a thought about a theme or a phrase or a word that we could hang everything on. So, obviously I turn to all the imaginative and creative people out there to suggest a phrase or image or line from a poem or song that might be interesting to play with. The more ambigious or poetic or questioning it is, the better like 'the snarl of light' rather than 'visitors to the stable'.

A free mince pie to the person who suggests the phrase that is selected. Now I know you won't be able to sleep at night thinking something up or going through all your old The Byrds and Leonard Cohen albums...