Search Results

On our recent trip to Hereford, we came across a beautiful side chapel in the Cathedral with two pairs of fabulous modern stained glass windows by the stained glass artist and painter Thomas Denny. They commemorate the 17th century Herefordshire poet and cleric Thomas Traherne who made a life work of seeking ‘Felicity’. He wrote these words: “You never Enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your Veins. Till you are clothed with the Heavens, and Crowned with the Stars”. “Love…whispers in every Gale of Wind, and speaks aloud in Thunder…It…drops down upon us in Every Shower”. I wish I had remembered the second quotation this week when I was moaning during a zoom call to a friend in the USA: ‘It’s been raining since Christmas’. But it is not true. On this damp, grey April day it just seemed like that but as I write the sun is shining and there are large patches of blue sky. On our recent week away, we saw quite a lot of the sun and it really did not rain much at all though the clouds did often race across the skies. In February I was actually able to sit outside reading in a sunny sheltered spot on several days. Most days we have been able to go for our daily walks without getting caught in a shower. Of course, those of us who are retired do have the luxury of picking our moments while those who are limited by work hours or family obligations do not. And it is also true that we have had exceptionally high levels of rainfall so far this year so that some areas of the country have suffered severe flooding. But why did I say such a thing? The countryside looks wonderfully full of life just now. From my window I can see at least a dozen different shades of green. In the garden the plants have taken advantage of such a full supply of moisture and are full of promise for the coming months. So why did I take refuge in this gloomy generalisation? I suppose very often we pick our generalisations to fit our moods. And often we generalise in defiance of the evidence. So what might I learn from this convenient and lazy lie to myself? Something that the process of ageing and the ups and downs of life teach you every day you are alive. And that is to live in the moment. ‘Carpe diem’. Seize the day. Savour the moment, see the shape of the day, find the peculiar texture of the day…and it may be a rough texture sometimes. It is very easy to get caught up in nostalgia - a wistful yearning for a time which was never quite as good as it seems in our memories. It is just as easy to get caught up in the future, in planning – and often worrying about – a future which so often turns out differently from what we envisage. It can waste so much emotional energy. It sounds easy enough but is remarkably difficult to live. It has something to do with paying attention. Attention to this truly breathtaking natural world in which we live and take for granted. Attention to shapes and shades and textures and sounds and scents. For so many years I rushed past these on some errand which seemed important then. Attention also to people in all their infinite variety. Their gifts, their needs, their eccentricities. It is very easy to create a caricature – which is in the same family as generalisations – and rush past their unique self. It is worth wondering whether beneath these facades there is a gift on offer to us, if only we have eyes to identify it. Traherne was right when he said: “Maturity consists in not losing the past while fully living in the present with a prudent awareness of the possibilities of the future.” So now I am going for a walk…in the sunshine! The quotations are from Centuries of Meditations and The Kingdom of God

We’re just back from a brief jaunt to Great Malvern. The journey itself was one of the treats of the trip. ‘O to be in England now that April’s there...’ Herefordshire and Worcestershire are Heart of England territory. So green, so full of springtime, so bursting, so...so...English. The inspiration for Elgar’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ with lyrics by A. C. Benson spread out before us. As we got nearer we found various signposts to ‘The Elgar Trail’. More by accident than design in most cases, we followed in some of the footsteps of the great composer. We discovered a reminder of the great man in the Hereford Cathedral Close and his burial place not far from where we stayed. We learned some of the secrets of his genius on a visit to his birthplace in a tiny country cottage in the village of Upper Broadheath about two miles from Worcester. We arrived a couple of hours before closing time hoping just to catch the spirit of this genius who claimed that, all his life, deep within him was still that child who had sat by the River Severn ‘with a sheet of paper trying to fix the sounds and longing for something very great....’ We did discover that his ambitions were clearly about more than the music in which he was self-taught. He told his adoring mother, ‘I will not rest until I have received a letter from abroad addressed, “Edward Elgar, England”! In the tiny birthplace cottage with its traditional black coal-fired stove downstairs, we viewed a fairly random collection of Victorian artefacts associated with the great man. The rest of the exhibition offered further suggestions that genius rarely thrives in a vacuum. Elgar had many friends of both genders whom he often named in connection with his works. As a man, he seemed to inspire great devotion and self-sacrifice in women – even those, like his daughter Carice, whom one observer thought paid a price for her father’s success! We learned that Carice’s schoolteacher was troubled by the repressed daughter of genius in her class. The Elgar child, the teacher eventually discovered, was under orders to stay silent at home so as not to interrupt her father’s composing work. Her father’s idea that there was ‘music in the air’ of which we ‘simply take as much as we require’ seemed not always to include the music of his daughter’s voice! There was a great deal of evidence that this limitation on her childhood seemed not to have spoilt Carice’s affection and admiration for her father with whom she was a regular, devoted correspondent. Many of the artefacts in the cottage offered evidence of her commitment to establishing and conserving his archive and reputation by appealing publicly for Elgar mementoes and working with Worcester council to fulfil his dying wish that he should be remembered at the cottage. Elgar’s wife, Alice, was ‘a published author and poet in her own right’.  She came from ‘semi-aristocratic Anglican stock’ and was disinherited when she became a Roman Catholic to marry the shopkeeper’s son Elgar - eight years her junior. He described her as ‘the immovable rock of his life’ during their 31 year marriage. To us, perhaps the greatest evidence of her support was displayed in one of the museum showcases – a five-pronged pointed tool called a ‘rastrum’ used to draw musical lines on paper that had not been pre-ruled. She ruled the paper. He wrote the musical notes. ‘The care of a genius,’ said Alice, ‘is enough of a life work for any woman!’ Whether they are male or female, every genius, and probably each of us in our own small way, needs someone to ‘rule the paper’! If we did that for each other not just England but the world might be a place of 'hope and glory'.

This week we attended the inaugural memorial lecture* for the former Chief Rabbi, Lionel Sacks who died in 2020. It was given by his friend, Gordon Brown, former UK Prime Minister. Brown is the son of a Church of Scotland minister whose Christian faith is probably less well known than his reputation as an economic genius who was widely credited with a leading contribution to dragging the world out of recession when he was chairman of the G20 in 2009. The two men were friends for many years, united by their interest in what both saw as ‘The Politics of Hope. The event programme quoted Sacks: ‘The good society is one that offers its members equal access to hope’.  Brown acknowledged 'Jonathan taught me the importance of civic society…’. The two leaders from two different faiths shared what sometimes sounded Utopian - the belief that hope is best nurtured in a country where we build a common inclusive home. A home for everyone, not a common hotel, not a common business contract but a home where a covenant is built on a set of beliefs and values shared between diverse people. Sacks’ daughter, Gila spoke of the Jewish word for faith as something which means faithful action, not necessarily belief only. We were tempted to ask – is this sort of hope, a dream shared by two powerful white male leaders  – one of them dead and the other in his 70s just outdated pie in the sky? It is certainly a tall order! But these two leaders ‘from the past’ are not the only ones concerned about building community. Since 2018 Britain has a Minister for Loneliness, appointed following a report from the Jo Cox commission on loneliness. As recently as last Sunday,  Observer journalist, Kenan Malik wrote about our contemporary society as a place  where: ‘People are ‘seeking relief from the burden of selfhood’. They are ‘yearning for contact and intimacy with others, yet fearful of the pain of engagement’. And that fear may lead to hopeless detachment and isolation – and loneliness. Malik reported a study of middle-aged people, published last week. It showed that the middle-aged in Britain were more likely to experience loneliness than in the other 12 European countries which figured in the research. The findings suggested that as members of the public become more disconnected and alienated, individuals focus on their own narrow concerns and tend toward narcissism. Communal bonds become eroded and society is fractured. Loneliness, so often framed as a personal problem (you need to get out more, join a club, society...etc.) seems to be a social and political problem as much as it may be a personal one. Would we admit to experiencing loneliness ourselves? Now and again! For much of our lives we were fortunate enough to live and work an international educational institution now much reduced. Many of the good friends we made are scattered around the globe. Some we meet virtually but they are no longer part of our face-to-face community. Fewer chats over a cup of coffee. Sometimes we miss the sort of live connections which breed hope. At Easter, Christians commemorate and celebrate the source of their hope in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The gospels describe him as both solitary and social at different times.  His life illustrates, to use Malik’s words, the ultimate ‘ pain of engagement’ with men and women of all kinds. His crucifixion after thirty-three years of life was the result of misunderstanding, hatred, and betrayal – and narrow-mindedness of all kinds. The story of Easter is that, in the end, the pleasures and pains of wide engagement bring not only community, but life and meaning to individuals and groups. Communities sustain us. Shared life, hope and meaning is the only way to sustain community not just for Christians but for all people of good will. A lonely planet is a dangerous planet. *https://rabbisacks.org/annual-memorial-lecture-2024/

Yesterday was the first day of Spring. But more joyful for our family, it was the 21st March – World Down Syndrome Day. And that falls two days before an even more joyful event - the birthday of a very special member of our family! To celebrate we are going to do something on our blog that we have never done before – share some music....It’s at the end! Readers of our blog two years ago just might remember our anxiety around the birth of our fourth grandchild who has Down syndrome. At birth, Dominic had multiple health problems which gave us all anxious days and sleepless nights. But it slowly became clear to us that he was a little survivor! With brave, tireless, relentless and thoughtful support from our son and daughter-in-law, Dominic weathered a kidney operation in the first week of his life, a heart operation about four months later and has endured further multiple medical interventions since then. These days he’s up and out and about! He’s still connected to oxygen 24/7 but mainly as a means to protect his growing lungs against infection during the winter. He is beginning to say words, he reaches out and calls to us on Facetime chats. Our son even alleges he ‘says’ a particular sound when he sees us. We would love to believe that! But whether or not it’s the case, a phone call with Dominic where we can sing, wave, make signs and talk gibberish together can make our day! Even through the phone screen, Dominic has the ability to connect, communicate and transmit so much love and joy! This weekend we will celebrate his continued thriving as his 2nd birthday arrives. 21st March was chosen for World Down Syndrome day because people with Down syndrome have three copies of the 21st chromosome. Socks were chosen they say, because Downs chromosomes have a karyotype similar to mismatched socks. We don’t really know what a karyotype is! Long before Dominic was born we believed in the importance of remembering that we don’t all need to be the same! The biggest irony of all this is that when we see Dominic, we rarely think about the ‘different’ label because he is just so much of a person in his own right. When our other three grandchildren were born, we didn’t expect them to be all the same – and they certainly aren’t. Dominic has followed suit. We like what one of the posters says, ‘Love doesn’t count chromosomes’. And it’s true! As his mum reminds us in a celebratory Facebook post with a picture of Dominic: ....’You overflow with humanity. I hope for a humanity that sees and values you and your gentle ways.’ One of the best expressions of how the families of children with Down syndrome feel about them is the song written by Chris Read, a comedian and father of Theo. It was played in April 2023 on a Thought for the Day on Radio 4 by Chris’s comedy partner, Harry Baker. As far as we’re concerned – Chris says it all! Every atom of you is perfect....'

Idealism has to operate in lives which are far from straightforward. Lives which do not follow the script. This week we have had contact with three different idealists whose lives have taken different forms – some predictable, some less so. For fifteen years, (1982-1997) Owen, as everyone called him, was the Rector in the village of Binfield where we lived for a few years and worked for many more. We have also worshipped in that village throughout our lives but only very rarely in what was Owen’s church. That did not stop him taking a personal interest in us and our teenage children - and everyone else he met. Full of ecumenical faith, one time he invited Helen to lead a meditation service in his church – people from both congregations attended. Owen was there to circulate and greet us all, his conversations spiced with a wry and sometimes naughty sense of humour!  He was not one to labour theological questions but he didn't avoid them either. Owen left the village to retire in Cornwall in the late 1990s and died just before Christmas 2023. Last Saturday afternoon we went to one of ‘his’ parish churches for a service of memorial, and expected a small and elderly turn out. We could not have been more mistaken! There must have been over two hundred people there. The five speakers remembering him talked about his always amusing and down to earth ministry to children(now grown with children of their own!) in the local Anglican school, his generosity with his time and his availability to his parishioners in a crisis – he once interrupted an Evensong he was conducting to minister to a parishioner whose father had died suddenly. People came in their numbers to remember him quite simply because his attention and his laughter, some said, had kept them ‘in the faith’.  He would talk with conviction about faith but gently and always with laughter. Yesterday we had a visit from another old friend who has lived a life of service and is just coming to the end of a long career at high levels in development work. His most recent assignment was in Jordan where he has been involved in aid issues arising from the current conflict in Gaza. He has travelled extensively, often working in many of the hell-holes in the world and living in cramped quarters sometimes on limited or repetitive diets. He has been up close to man’s inhumanity to man in its many forms. He often knows what is going on behind the western media headlines.  His conversation is peppered with stories and full of fascinating insights. Yesterday he told us how dispirited so many of the workers in Gaza are at the apparently hopeless nature of the conflict there. We asked him about the state of the ideals with which he began his career. ‘Do you ever ask yourself what on earth you are doing in these situations?’ He told us that he and his colleagues often discuss exactly that. ‘The answer we usually come up with,’ he said, ‘is that we are just hopeless idealists!’ A third encounter this week put us in touch with someone we’d never met before. It was a conversation about faith and what he calls, ‘the hard questions’: God and human freedom, the twists and turns of religious faith. Asking hard questions is an activity often discouraged by those religious people for whom faith is an expression of ideas which protect rather than challenge. Our new friend is not one of them! He quoted the Spanish-American thinker George Santayana: “Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer:” Questioning the idealism of your community can bring a certain purity. We’re thankful for these variously idealistic companions on our journey whose words and lives both exemplify and question the demands of faith.

Let’s give our headline a makeover. On this International Women’s Day this seems like a good thing to do. So let me speak in praise of an ordinary woman. She was a philosophy lecturer of mine, a Latvian woman, who believed in my academic potential when I was an undergraduate even when I did not. My studies lacked direction and purpose. She opened up to me the world of philosophy in a very engaging way. In retrospect her influence was pivotal. I will speak in praise of Dr Kate Nahapiet who effectively changed the trajectory of my whole life by giving me time, attention and direction. I owe her a great deal. The campaign theme for this year’s Women’s Day is ‘#InspireInclusion’ while the UN has chosen ‘Invest in women: accelerate progress’. The UN no doubt has in mind substantial projects which will improve girls’ and women’s access to education and training, act against discrimination and abuse in the workplace, and so on. But what about the local situation? Yesterday evening our neighbour popped in to collect a parcel left with us during the working day. A senior finance man in his company, he has just returned from meetings in Australia. He will soon be off on business to Florida. (Somebody’s got to do it, he might say!) Meanwhile his wife combines her own full-time work as a lawyer with the care of their two sons under 10. They are excellent neighbours who seem to manage to juggle their double professional life pretty well but his regular global travel must inevitably bring its strains, and the principal responsibility for keeping the show on the road during his absences often falls on her, her mother and the other women in the family. They are typical of millions of families in this country in which the wife / partner / mother is the glue which keeps the family together: nurturer and carer for young and old. All too often In many parts of the world beyond the West, it is the women who not only keep the family together but are small entrepreneurs and principal wage-earners too. Aid organisations know that the role and condition of women is key to a society’s thriving: when women suffer in times of civil strife, the national economy soon follows. On Wednesday, our daughter, Emma took Helen to LettersLive - an event at the Royal Albert Hall for International Women's Day. It was organised by the publishers Canongate with Benedict Cumberbatch and other world-class actors and celebrities volunteering their time to read funny, dramatic and poignant letters. The show ’inspired inclusion’ by giving all the money raised to the Women's Prize Trust, which aims to change society by improving access to women's writing. What can the rest of us do to ‘invest in women to accelerate progress’? How can we ‘inspire inclusion’? It is perhaps the men among our readers who particularly need to take note at this point. Regrettably few of us have the charisma of Benedict Cumberbatch! But we do find ourselves in social situations in which various subtle forms of male supremacism still surface, often in verbal form. Often jokey. Various gender stereotypes slip into conversation. Even the most ‘enlightened’ of us are guilty sometimes. We can challenge that when it surfaces. We can be more careful too about our spoken and unspoken gender expectations. We will not show resistance when women occupy positions of leadership. And there’s also perhaps the division of labour in our own homes. Expressions of gratitude rather than taking things for granted. This is all small stuff. And maybe, knowing many of our readers, I am ‘preaching to the choir’. But women have been excluded for so many centuries. These messages have to be repeated many times, and in many places, before they become commonplaces. And more than that, ‘inspire inclusion’ suggests something rather creative. That requires a little imagination and effort. So often where there is recognition for and inclusion of women, we men benefit more than we expect. So let us take a moment to praise those ‘ordinary’ women in our lives. Many of them are in fact extraordinary.

I had only a vague idea that there was a tenuous connection between my family and the Kelloggs of the cornflakes package. But since I got into genealogy, I’ve discovered just how much there is. No blood connections but definite influence. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that my paternal grandfather visited the Caterham Sanitarium about 1901. The neologism ‘sanitarium’ intrigued me.  And I became fascinated not only by the man who coined the word - but also by the long fraternal rivalry behind the cornflakes package! It’s recounted in a page turner by Howard Markel that I’ve just gobbled up like a dish of cornflakes: The Kelloggs - the Battling Brothers of Battle Creek. Dr John Harvey Kellogg,(above right)  claimed that he coined the word ‘sanitarium’ in 1877, one year after he took over the leadership of the ‘Health Reform Institute’ which became the Battle Creek Sanitarium on which Caterham was modelled. With typical chutzpah, Kellogg claimed that by changing two letters, he had modified the more familiar word, ‘sanatorium’ – a health resort for invalid soldiers’ into ‘sanitarium’. His sanitarium, he claimed would be ‘a place where people would cultivate health in every possible way by every means afforded by medical science and by modern hygiene’. But Kellogg, always the idealist, wanted more. He wanted his sanitarium ‘to combine with the institutional advantages of the modern hospital, the luxuries and comforts of the modern hotel and the genial atmosphere, security and freedom of the home’. It was an extremely tall order but John Harvey Kellogg dealt in tall orders – in some areas of his life. In the halcyon years when the ‘San’ as it was called,  treated patients with diet, hydrotherapy and exercise in the day and entertained them with performances and lectures from celebrities in the evening, it came somewhere near Kellogg’s ideal. Of course, not all were quite as interested in the ideal diet he promoted - free from meat, tea and coffee, or in the lifestyle free from alcohol which Kellogg promoted relentlessly.  But the idea of combining the luxuries and comforts of the hotel with the benefits of a hospital and the chance to mix with all sorts of distinguished people, proved attractive to patients from all sorts of backgrounds. (Kellogg sometimes overcharged the wealthy so that he could help the poor!) The San was built on Kellogg’s vision and charisma but it was common knowledge that it could not have thrived as long as it did without the business acumen, the concern for the low paid workers and the dogged attention to financial detail of his younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg.(above left) In the day to day running of the San, Will was the neck on which the institution turned. But John always treated him like a jumped up secretary – and paid him like one too. After twenty years, Will could take the treatment no longer and went into business for himself with some of the products the brothers had developed. He developed his own company making brilliant use of the emerging practice of mass advertising – to sell Kellogg’s cornflakes – the product originally developed for patients in the San. The two brothers could never agree about who invented them. The outcome was a series of angry arguments and successive lawsuits. It's a sad but familiar story of idealists and their shadows - especially relevant in radical communities where there is huge focus on developing good things ‘out there’. To admirable people with huge appetites for excellence, of which there have been many in my family and in the religious community in which I have grown up with the health principles of the Kelloggs, the brothers’ lives present a challenge - not to neglect the development of those most difficult of everyday skills: family relationships. The Battle Creek Sanitarium - before the fire of 1902

We, along with most others, were both shocked at the news of the death of Alexei Navalny, the arch opponent of Putin. We had expected to hear of further charges against him, of declining health. But not this. Not now. It will take time for the whole story to emerge but there seems little doubt that it was a state-authorised murder not ‘natural causes’ as Kremlin sources would have us believe. Navalny simply disappeared slowly into the legal-penal labyrinth. It sounds very much like Kafka. We should not think that this labyrinth is simply a Russian problem. Two cases going through the UK courts here are very different from this, to be sure. But again the labyrinth of officialdom looms. News today that the rejection of the appeal by Shamima Begum against the decision to strip her of her UK citizenship meaning that she will have to remain in Syria where there are threats to her well-being. We also have seen this week the continuing process of Julian Assange’s appeal against extradition to the United States where he would very probably face a lengthy prison sentence. The charge against both is that they are in different ways threats to national security. Both processes have dragged on for years. Human beings caught in huge punishing bureaucratic labyrinths, whatever the right and wrongs of the particular situation. All these cases involve at some level a conflict between the security and well-being of the majority over against the freedom of the individual. ‘The greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people’ has always been a major political issue. Of course that means that difficult minorities may suffer if they get in the way of majority or at least of powerful interests even if they are innocent. As Navalny did. All of this is immeasurably beyond my pay grade. However we can learn something small from these huge stories. We all find ourselves drawn into various labyrinths. We will all have felt great frustration at some time when we have reached a dead-end on some helpline which we have found most unhelpful. Getting an appointment with a medic at the local NHS facility can be a problem for most of us at some time. ‘For all other customer enquiries press #4…’. Or ‘this is not our problem, you need to contact the supplier…’ The problem is one of access. Of being blocked. The labyrinth is a concept of ancient origin. And it has endured because being blocked, being thwarted in our plans, is an experience which is as old as the hills. There has been a renewed interest in the idea of labyrinths in recent years. Some cathedrals have them as permanent features in their floors, like Gloucester and the oldest and most famous one in Chartres. And you may well find them painted on the ground in children’s playgrounds. They have lasting appeal because they symbolise the basic human desire and need to find a way out of bewildering situations, and the frustration of not finding it. Navalny paid with his life stuck in an Arctic Siberian penal labyrinth because of his immense courage. But it is widely reported that he was also sustained by an irrepressible humour and hope that his country could be a happier place. He dreamed of a ‘happy Russia’. It remains to be seen if Navalny’s sacrifice will contribute to the realisation of his dream. But his courage and hopefulness are a lesson to us all.

Dry January or Veganuary are commonplace matters of conversation these days. Few people are reluctant to tell you about their diet or health regime.  Drinking more water, eating less sugar and fat, making kale or celery your new best friend, walking ten thousand steps a day, etc, etc. All sorts of surprising people are paying vast sums to one of the many gurus on and offline to guide them in how to care for their guts and other crucial parts of their anatomy. Nobody bats an eyelid when tennis legend Novak Djokovic commits himself to eating food that ‘doesn’t take too much energy to digest’, dairy and gluten-free etc. etc. Detox is a familiar concept as are the numbers of adherents willing to tell you how much good it’s done them! More athletic everyday types are willing to do all this to raise money for good causes. The stringent training exercise and diet that goes with preparation for marathon running or participation in sport is commonplace for people who want to raise money for the charity of their choice – and much admired. And then there’s meditation or mindfulness – also a growing business, so popular that it’s being taught – again by gurus – to stressed business people and also in some primary schools. Taking time to sit quietly and seek inner silence is increasingly popular and ‘cool’ as an antidote to the strains and stresses of modern work and family life. The centuries old value of seeking for spiritual peace through meditation and yoga has been discovered and repackaged in the 21st century. So – the  basic elements of the Christian season of Lent – which started this week - are already with us in so many different guises. When the act of ‘giving up something’ is commonplace, what’s so different about ‘giving something up’ so that so that you can reflect on your life. In other contexts it seems to make sense to people to give up something or take up a particular practice as a means to gaining a clear mind. Why not do it while you reflect on your life  in the light of the Big Questions: ‘Who am I? ‘Why am I here? Where am I going? What matters? So we ask ourselves, why is Lent less attractive as an idea? Probably, we think, because in history the day before Lent was always marked by feasting and ‘carnival’ as people said ‘carne vale’ (goodbye to meat!) and goodbye to enjoying themselves. Even worse, Lent has been associated with a heavy idea of a finger-pointing God who stands waiting to accuse and judge us where we have fallen short – again! This year, St Valentine’s Day fell on the first day of Lent. We were reminded that Lent is not a time for self-accusation but a time to rediscover Love as the most powerful energy in the universe – the sort of ‘quick-eyed love’ the poet George Herbert wrote about which ‘bade me welcome when my soul drew back’. Far from depriving Love’s guests, Love offers a banquet of its own making, ‘You must sit down and taste my meat,’ Love says. Paradoxically, as athletes and detoxers of all kinds can witness, giving up, letting go, of whatever kind, can bring its own brand of feasting! Photo:BBC Food

When the Sunday paper arrives, the back page of the Observer Magazine with Ask Philippa is a good place to start! Celebrity psychotherapist, Philippa Perry, has stripey hair, red glasses and dresses, like her artist husband, Grayson, in bright colours. We rarely disagree with and sometimes learn from her compassionate and down-to-earth response to people’s problems. It keeps us in touch with the world of human problem solving in which we have both worked for so many years in different ways – and miss! So Mike bought Helen (for which read ‘us’ ), Philippa’s latest book for Christmas. It’s called, The Book You Want Everyone You Love* to Read  * and maybe a few you don’t! And it’s dedicated to ‘all the people who are brave enough to write to me at The Observer. One of her basic ideas is that so often, when we are faced with problems, we tend to ask, ‘why?’  Why does x treat me this way? Why do I feel the way I do? Philippa’s approach is to ask a different question, ‘How?’ How do I come to feel the way I do? How you approach life and people in the way you do? Once you understand how, you can make some changes.. One of Philippa’s four ‘how’ sections is concerned with relationships – one of the most popular subjects for people who go into therapy. She calls it ‘how we love’. One of her phrases about marriage puts into words something about successful relationships of all kinds that is rarely expressed so clearly. ‘What sustains a marriage,’ she says, ‘....is honouring bids for attention....Honouring doesn’t necessarily mean doing what the person wants, but it does mean listening and communicating that you’ve understood them’. As we get older, we wonder about all those ‘bids for our attention’ which we have somehow missed and so failed to honour. We were talking recently about Mike’s mum who was a widow for nearly 40 years. In our youthful ignorance, we probably just took her struggles for granted. ‘Don’t get old, Mike, she would sometimes say. ‘I am not planning to’, Mike would jokily respond. ‘It’s not much fun,’ she would say. We wonder now whether her words were a kind of bid for attention. An attempt to engage in some sort of conversation about ageing which she would have liked and needed. She lived till she was 95 and was well acquainted with the ‘aches and pains’ of old age. Now that we have begun to know those ‘aches and pains’ for ourselves, we’re sad that we missed an opportunity to honour someone very dear to us. You can see ‘bids for attention’ playing out on the world’s grander stages – think Gaza and Ukraine and so many other places. Those we can do little about. But we can honour the ‘bid for attention’ when it comes from families and friends. It is no easy thing to offer another person such real attention, attention without an agenda, without a ready riposte or piece of advice in one's own mind just waiting an opening to deliver it. It’s so easy to miss the riches that can be offered in return as we honour the bid for attention. In her poem ‘The Whistler’ about her partner Molly Malone Cook, Mary Oliver recognises how difficult it can be to know even those most familiar to us: I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and ankle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too.And the devotions. And for all that, do we even beginto know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with for thirty years?

I was both horrified and petrified this week when on my FaceBook feed, a BBC news report appeared about Robert Peston, a leading economics journalist and sharp commentator on financial matters. The Bank of England, said the report, was suing Peston because he had revealed the details of an app he was using to make money. Soon, he had said, he wouldn’t need to work because he was slowly putting his money into the account the app represented. Traders were working night and day to invest his money. The Bank of England was suing Peston because people everywhere were withdrawing their savings from regular banks and following Peston's example.. There was a picture of Peston and the man who had interviewed him. And beneath the report comments from people who gave details of how much money they were making by using this app. Gotcha! For a minute or more, I fell for it! I felt a degree of panic before I looked at the website reference and found to my relief that this was not a BBC report at all. The article was well written, the logo was there, corporate colours and style and the whole appearance of a BBC news item. But a BBC news item it was not! Maybe I should take more notice of the daily stream of emails from various sources reminding me to be on my guard against fraud and deception! This experience made me wonder how our climate of fake news, fraud and deception affects communication about religious matters. I’ve been working this week with a couple of people giving feedback on religious communications – early drafts of a sermon and an article.  In both cases the authors are talking about God and various aspects of religious experience. How to speak convincingly about something so ‘abstract’ without fraud or deception? As I looked through both manuscripts, I asked myself yet again, in a world where there is so much fake communication and, let’s face it, a fair amount of fraudulently religious communication going on, is it even possible to say anything credible about God to thinking people? Of course it’s not difficult simply to find and speak to an audience of millions who are ready to trust anyone with letters after their name who stands behind a pulpit or writes in a religious magazine. There are plenty of Reverends or Pastors who are ready to proclaim that even though God is invisible and unquantifiable, they know for certain about “Godly matters” and the rest of us don’t (so just sit still and listen and stop asking questions!)’. That’s a kind of fraud - a benevolent kind of brainwashing...sometimes with less than benevolent results. Think Waco or Jonestown. On the other hand there are the readers and listeners who are suspicious of top-down communication about God, These are people young and old who instinctively mistrust people who proclaim with no evidence of self-questioning that they and their tribe alone know what God is like or what God expects. I believe that the cultivation of trust with people who have many questions, who think for themselves is paradoxically simple in its complexity! With religious communication, where there’s so little empirical evidence, I suspect, the best that can be done by anyone seeking to talk about God and metaphysical matters is simply to ‘bear witness’. To recount their experience, to be transparent about the questions they have asked. Credibility sits with people who make no claims for their own superior knowledge but simply share: ‘ here’s what I have questioned, here’s what I have discovered, here’s what I have learned, here’s what I have discarded, here’s what I believe. Take it or leave it.’ It’s a very vulnerable situation to be in, but, honestly, what else is there?

It was more by accident than design that we found ourselves live on BBC Radio 3 for evensong at St Paul’s Cathedral on Wednesday afternoon. On our day out in London we got off the number 15 at St Paul’s at just the right moment to join a service we did not know was going to take place. Nor did we know that it was the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul or the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The size of the congregation – less than 100 people, meant we were able to sit immediately below the dome. The scripture recounted the conversion of St Paul - the fanatical Pharisee Saul on his way to find more Christians to eliminate. It described the blinding light, the voice from heaven and a complete change in the way he perceived the world. The idea of ‘conversion’ has passed into our language to mean a sudden and complete reversal of someone’s thought patterns. Our St Paul’s visit took place at a time when Helen has been exploring the story of her paternal grandfather, Thomas Herbert Cooper, who, about 1903 left his father’s 200 acres of land in deepest rural Cheshire – one of the largest farms in the area – for a holiday which was to change his life. Prior to his departure, two particular events must have been influential in grandfather Cooper’s young life. On 28th October 1893, about two months before Thomas’ 13th birthday, his elder brother, Henry, died aged 22 in Nantwich a few miles away. Six years later, the Boer War broke out and the British Army were sent to assert control in southern Africa. When other men from the area went to war, Thomas, who had failed the army medical test, was left in the village, to continue with the agricultural life so crucial to survival for many in those times.  After trying to cover what he told his children was the work of five men, he was suffering from complete exhaustion when the Boer War finished in 1902. His health condition led him to respond to an advertisement for a two-week holiday at a place called the Caterham Sanitarium over 200 miles away in Surrey.  Nobody knows whether Thomas knew that the Seventh -day Adventist Church had founded the Sanitarium in 1903. We can only surmise what it was that led this young man in his early 20s, christened in the Anglican church, within months of leaving home, to throw in his lot with this fledgling American church. In this ‘conversion’, there was no blinding light. But it was certainly a sudden and complete change of his thought patterns. All we know is that the lifestyle practices at the Sanitarium improved his health. And the family story is that he and his Methodist mother, Kitty, were religiously observant enough to study the Bible in an attempt to prove the Adventists wrong in their teaching that the seventh-day Sabbath observed by Jesus kept should also be observed by his Christian followers. Thomas and Kitty failed to find a satisfactory text and became Sabbath keepers. He and his sister who also joined the church were subsequently thrown out of their home - disowned and disinherited by their outraged father. So sad! Now two generations on, we have no real regrets about his decision. While we may have questions about some of the more obscure teachings of the Adventist church, we have both profited from Sabbath observance and from the Adventist emphasis on a healthy spirit in a healthy body. But it is a matter of some regret to us that our Adventist heritage on both sides has sometimes made us outsiders - not just in society as a whole but also in building bonds with our Christian brothers and sisters wherever they may be. We definitely have more in common with them than not! In St Paul's the priest's prayer 'that we may witness to the visible unity of your Church' elicited a heartfelt Amen! Photo: Wikipedia Thomas Herbert Cooper c.1920