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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

We hear news that King Charles will be admitted to hospital next week for a routine surgical procedure on an enlarged prostate. And at the same time there is word that Catherine, Princess of Wales and future queen, has already undergone surgery for an abdominal problem. We wonder about the timing of these treatments. Can it be that both just happened to come to the top of the NHS waiting lists at the same time? Unlikely. The Princess is recovering in the London Clinic. It is an exclusive private clinic with exceptionally good facilities and staff. No NHS waiting list to navigate there. It is one of the perks of unelected privilege. The King will have surgery in an as yet unidentified location just a week after the check-up which identified the problem. Meanwhile thousands of men with the same condition will continue to suffer weeks or probably months of discomfort and maybe pain waiting for the letter announcing an appointment drops through the letter box. Do we object to the King and Princess receiving exceptional preferential treatment? Not at all. We wish them both well in their recovery. We are simply underlining the inequities deeply embedded in our social system. The news of these British royals comes in the same week as the announcement of the abdication of Queen Margrethe II of Denmark after 52 years on the throne in favour of her son Crown Prince - now King – Frederik X. She cited the fact that after surgery on her back last year she concluded that she could no longer cope with the rigours of service which her office imposed. Meanwhile this week leaders of the would-be elected variety have been jousting for power in the Iowa primaries, the first taste of hostilities in this American presidential year. And in a court room elsewhere, the former and campaigning president produced an unedifying spectacle trying to vindicate himself over miscellaneous charges with more to come. It all makes you wonder about different ways of holding power and what sort of people are best holding power. If you look elsewhere in the media there are endless stories of deathly struggles for power in all parts of the world. Alongside Putin’s aggression in Ukraine the most notable this week has been in Yemen and still, of course, in Gaza. As always, there are many examples in Africa, besides North Korea, China, Pakistan and Iran…the list is endless. And depressing. These days, kings and queens owe their power and privilege to their blood line. Dictators owe it to the shed blood of their followers. You cannot but ask why such faulty systems of distributing power hold sway. Two quotations from Winston Churchill in the House of Commons are pertinent. In 1947: Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.… Toward the end of WWII Churchill said: At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man,(sic) walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper—no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point. (31 October 1944). If we are honest, we must admit that royals and politicians for good or ill are not as different from ourselves as we might like to think.  As we approach important elections in this country and in many other places, perhaps we should keep our common humanity in mind rather than resorting to the cheap shot about politicians being ‘all the same’. If we turn away our heads from power and politics, is it sometimes perhaps because we wish to avoid looking into the mirror?

In our local supermarket before Christmas, Helen and another shopper were searching for gluten free mince pies. Finally an assistant told them, ‘You’re not the only ones searching. We’ve had a lot of requests but the stock is just not there. But,’ she added conspiratorially, ‘you should see the shelves and shelves of regular mince pies in the stockroom. They’ll be reducing them after Christmas, you see!’ Sure enough, this week, we found a virtual wall of mince pie boxes. 15p for a box of six!‘Someone’ had badly miscalculated supply and demand. A friend of our daughter works in a charity which receives and circulates supermarket surplus. They receive obscene amounts of fresh food sometimes surplus even to the needs of the people they are helping. Public demand is probably fairly fickle and retail must often be a fairly hit and miss business but it seems fairly clear that those oft-mentioned but little understood algorithms -a method a computer uses to solve a problem- have a lot to do with it.  In the case of supermarkets it must a problem which is, by definition, insoluble – trying to match supply and demand as precisely as possible. Clearly in the case of our supermarket’s mince pies, it was wildly inaccurate. Increasingly not just our food but every aspect of our lives is being managed by mechanical devices and algorithms which turn us into units – more often than not, economic units, units valued only for our ability to produce, buy or trade. And the people who can manipulate the complex world of algorithms and artificial intelligence of all kinds are the masters and mistresses of significant parts of our lives. How much control do we still have? We  - the little people  – the vast majority of the population who are increasingly dependent on and influenced by an electronic language we haven’t the skills to understand or access? The BBC drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, screened early in the New Year narrated what has been described as the largest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. It told the story of over 500 ‘little people’ hardworking postmasters, wrongfully accused at least of mismanagement and at worst of fraud and criminal activity. The reasons for the postmasters’ failure to get justice for their cause are complex. But central to the case was human refusal to recognise (the charitable view) and then to admit (the more likely view) the costly failures within computerised systems. The Post Office refused to acknowledge that there were dangerous glitches with Horizon, their computerized system. Fujitsu, the makers of the system declared likewise. Computer ‘truth’ was valued above human ‘truth’. Artificial intelligence was trusted and valued above human intelligence. Human lives and the mental health of individuals were lost as a result. Livelihoods and families damaged or destroyed. Justice for the postmasters is still a long way off. Compensation can probably never be fully made. The story and the process of learning its lessons is a long way from over. But those who care about freedom and human values must pay attention to this loud warning about the need for legal accountability and safeguarding in the electronic world. It is chillingly obvious that our freedom is at risk unless we build more accountability into our society, into those who operate our computer systems and our legal systems. It is a warning against allowing our lives to be governed by ghosts in machines. It is a salutary lesson as we move into the age of AI. Thank you, Mr Bates!

That blank calendar stares us in the face with all its various possibilities. It can be an exciting prospect. It can be rather daunting. ‘We could do a, b or c. We could go to x, y or z....’ There are choices to be made. Plans to be set. Determination to be mobilised. The whole business of New Year’s resolutions is based on the seductive idea of individual freedom. Good in itself, but it can deny the fact that we are all at the mercy of forces beyond our control – heredity, the environment, the government, the weather, other people’s needs and expectations. And as we get older, our levels of money, energy, physical capacity. All raise their restraining voices on our freedom as we plot our course through 2024. It is unrealistic to deny their power but fatalistic to attribute an undue amount of control to them all. More dauntingly perhaps, there’s a different kind of resolve: ‘we could become...’ It is easy to think that the older we get the more settled our personal identity becomes so that, as we approach retirement, we are pretty much fixed in who we are. What our values are. What our instinctive reactions are. What our goals are now. Leopards not changing spots and all that. But we are still naïve enough to believe that when you stop seeking to grow, something in you dies. Public philosopher Alain de Botton is perhaps on to something when he says, ’If you’re not embarrassed by the person you were last year, are you really growing?’ Embarrassment is probably the wrong word but it does point us in the direction of a way of thinking which might help us exceed the limits of our story so far. At the very least thinking about the possibility of growth is an antidote to that most destructive of responses: cynicism. So – if you’re entirely satisfied with who you were last year, you need read no further. But if expanding your metaphorical lungs matters to you, if you want to breathe in some fresh air, if you want to grow and you believe it’s still possible, then consider this. A resolution is most unlikely to lead to a revolution. It’s not impossible but it’s rare. Modest aspirations and small gains are more likely to be significant in the long run. Let’s not set ourselves up to fail. A YouGov survey at the end of 2022 found that 28% of people managed to stick to all their resolutions that year. We were surprised it was that high. It’s very important to work with the grain of our lives. Anything else would be a denial of who we have become so far. Habits take a long time to become ingrained. Let’s not allow ourselves to be overcome with a sense of failure by the end of January. It’s often a good idea to share our ideas for personal growth BUT our choice of confidant(e) is important. The wrong person could puncture our resolve with a sentence of incomprehension or cynicism(again! It’s the great enemy!) about the whole idea of personal growth. The best confidantes are those who take their own growth seriously and recognise the best in us as well as our flaws. The ancient religious philosopher Augustine famously prayed: ‘Make me pure, Oh Lord, but not yet’. There’s some raw honesty in that prayer. So maybe our resolution should aim not for a revolution but for an evolution towards a truer self. We are not leopards.

They are fewer these days. But there are still some Christmas cards that are particularly precious because Christmas is the only time we hear from the non-social-media senders! One of those usually comes from J, a good friend of Helen’s at university. They’ve kept in touch and  met up now and then. Helen always looks for J’s Christmas card because it comes with a few words of update. Then, last year, J said she was enjoying our blog...amazing from a woman always interested in existential matters but agnostic verging on atheist. Christmas came but no card. Helen was planning a phone call yesterday but J’s husband phoned first. J, he said, had hoped to make it to Christmas but she had passed away on 19th December with bone cancer. All very fast. A 50+ year-old friendship ended – just like that.  One of Helen’s few links with her university days and an important part of the jigsaw of her - and therefore our  - life. Now – a missing piece. And it was the same with another west country friend a few weeks ago. This time an unexpected Facebook message from her daughter carried the sad news. Not long before there had been the sudden death of Mike’s closest colleague for nearly thirty years. We’re sharing these experiences not to make everyone miserable but because we know we’re not alone in having them or reflecting on them. We’re not alone in remembering the significant love and support that these friends offered – not necessarily in massive ways. Simply in the sharing of formative experiences and values at crucial times in life. People who contributed significant colours and shapes in the jigsaw of our lives. And we’re sure we’re not alone in asking ourselves, ‘Did they know what they meant to us?’ Last week’s blog on Christmas in Bethlehem brought some similar reflections. It attracted a larger than usual number of views and ‘likes’. Among the ‘likes’ came names from various stages in our lives. Friendships lasting half a century. Some much more recent. And it was heart-warming to see them jostling together in no particular order. A motley crowd of ‘our’ people - the gold, frankincense and myrrh of Christmas. Of our lives. Here were people who had supported us through difficult times. Old, some very old, friends. Colleagues, students, neighbours. People who had made us laugh. People who shared our love of words. People who had had their children at roughly the same time as we did and with whom we had gone through the ups and downs of parenthood. Some of them ‘very-long-time-no-see’! Some who once figured prominently in our lives but now live at great distances. Without many of these people we would have made so much less of our lives. Some we are only in touch with via this blog. So as 2023 recedes into the distance, we choose to give thanks for friends - absent and present. Their support, their values, their companionship. It’s time to say thank-you to all who have walked – and still walk - with us along paths broad and narrow. Whether you have offered colour or quirkiness or contrast,  whether you have been a corner or an edge piece in the jig-saw of our lives - or even if you have found our picture of the world a bit strange but kept in touch anyway – thank you!  Thanks to you if you just read what we say and go away but don't give up on us! Thank you for being there and staying in touch via these posts. Thank you and Happy New Year! Photo: Asun Olivan

There’s plenty of room in Bethlehem hotels this year. The usual hordes of visitors are staying away - nervous about travelling to the Holy Land. There’s no traditional Christmas tree in Manger Square in Bethlehem this year. No parades. No pilgrims. Tensions are running very high between Palestinians and Israeli Jews. One spark and serious trouble could flare. Rev Dr Munther Ishaq, pastor of an Evangelical Lutheran church in the occupied West Bank, explained to Al Jazeera that all celebrations are off this Christmas. How can they celebrate when their brothers and sisters are caught in the savage crossfire between the Israeli Defence Force and Hamas fighters? How can they celebrate when 18 people were killed and many injured when sheltering in the oldest active church in Gaza City, the Greek Orthodox St Porphyrius? And so instead of the traditional Nativity scene in front of their church he and his congregation have placed a figurine of a baby lying amidst fallen masonry. A baby in the rubble. Swaddled in a Palestinian chequered headdress. They wanted to find some way of showing solidarity with their fellows who are suffering so terribly in Gaza. This unique nativity scene is not so far from the truth. Recently a baby was found alive in the rubble in Gaza. Semi-lifeless but alive. The baby had survived several weeks since the rocket strike destroyed the house where all other family members perished. Some have objected that this is a politicization of the Christmas story. But listen to the traditional readings carefully, and it is clear that the gospel accounts themselves carry political baggage. We cannot escape them. All forms of action and inaction are in some way political. We live in societies and communities. We are political animals. The last word goes to Rev Ishaq who by his work in a dangerous place, in Bethlehem, has surely earned the right to speak: ‘Christmas is the solidarity of God with those who are oppressed…And if Jesus is to be born again… this year, he will be born in Gaza under the rubble…Our hope is in our faith. Our hope is in our resilience. So while Christmas celebrations are cancelled, Christmas prayers are not cancelled. And when we look at the image of Jesus under the rubble, we see a light of hope and life coming out of the destruction, light coming out of death’. So if you are at a carol service this Christmas, remember to say one for Rev Ishaq and his congregation, and so many others like them, In Bethlehem. It is a dangerous place.... again. Photo: Al Jazeera

The Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Well probably not. But according to legend, in July of 64 CE while fire ravaged Rome for six days destroying much of the city and leaving half of the population homeless, Nero looked on and played his violin. Nero blamed the obscure sect called ‘Christians’ for starting the fire and executed many of them. Others rumoured that this was a part of Nero’s land clearance scheme for his new palace gone wrong. Or maybe it was high summer, and the fire may just have been one of those infernos which sometimes still sweep through Mediterranean countries. The legend has passed into our language and come to mean doing something trivial and irresponsible amid an emergency. You have to wonder whether COP28, the great climate gathering in Dubai this week, has been any more than that. The deal wants to signal a transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems. At least, for the first time in an official statement, it identifies the role of fossil fuel emissions in driving up temperatures. But what is that to us? We carefully recycle our plastic and paper while the industrial giants continue to belch toxins into the atmosphere at an alarming rate. What’s the point? Is the agreement worth the paper it is written on? Can this week’s summit give us reason for hope? Maybe. First, this week’s Dubai deal was only achieved after a great deal of argument, negotiation and compromise. Small Pacific island communities wanted very different things from oil producing countries. The drowning island nations worry about their very existence while oil-producers are simply anxious about their flagging economies. Hard work to get them to talk together! But in Dubai they managed, after a great deal of impassioned debate, to find some agreement. Far from perfect but an agreement nevertheless. Second, some of the big oil producers were willing to accept for the first time that there needed to be a ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels. That signals some movement at least. Maybe not enough but maybe some tectonic plates are shifting. Third, there was apparently a broad consensus in the room that the pressure on fossil fuels is growing as the cost of renewable sources of energy comes down. Maybe some nations see a certain long-term political dividend in greening their credentials. Observing all this, the campaigning journalist George Monbiot resisted any temptation to be complacent. He urged us all to keep up the pressure even in our own small ways. He wrote that we should be ‘expanding and defending islands of resistance’. We do this certainly as consumers by selecting only those products which are environmentally friendly. And as consumers we can affect producers and retailers where it hurts. But just as important, our daily casual conversations can slowly change local attitudes towards the urgency of the moment. Our own ‘islands of resistance' may be threatened as much by a general apathy as by the vested interests of the big suppliers. But while our individual efforts may seem trivial, together they do help to strengthen a resistance movement. If we allow our own islands of resistance to be submerged, real islands, family homes, will soon be submerged too. We dare not fiddle while home burns.

This is the season of ‘no room’. Mary had to give birth to Jesus in makeshift accommodation in the stable. In modern terms, there was no room in the hostel, so she had to make do with a tent for protection. So the ancient story goes. It has modern resonances. The Salvation Army has recently reported that this Christmas local councils in the UK will turn away one in four people who turn to them for help. Those who are classed as having ‘priority need’ – pregnant women, children, those with a disability, those at risk of domestic abuse – will be accommodated but the rest will have to fend for themselves. There simply is not the capacity. There’s no room. In today’s ‘Holy Land’ there is no room either. No room in Gaza for tens of thousands because their homes have been smashed to smithereens. No room in the territory itself because several million have been forced into the very confined and supposedly ‘safe’ space of southern Gaza. No room it seems in Israel-Palestine for two peoples to live more or less peaceably together in the same space. It seems the Israeli government ultimately wants to drive out all Palestinians from the territory. No room for such ‘lowlife’. Maybe a more personal experience for many of us is ‘no room’ in terms of ‘headspace’? Space not in territory but in our inner landscape. In mental and emotional capacity. It’s not unusual to hear people, juggling their many responsibilities, to say something like ‘I don’t have headspace for that at the moment’. So what do we have headspace for this Christmas? Helen was at a performance of ‘Messiah’ this week. In the interval she wondered aloud to the woman next to her whether the very engaging and seemingly passionate soloists were believers or just good actors and actresses. The woman suggested that maybe the soloists were like her. ‘I’m not a believer, ‘she said, ‘but I am while they are singing!’. Emily Dickinson, the American poet, once wrote: 'We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.' She probably speaks for many of us. We might hope for ourselves that we will be honest enough to acknowledge that we move in and out of belief more often than we might care to admit. So the important thing may be to keep our minds nimble – able to make space for ideas that are new, different, difficult maybe. Dickinson is surely right when she says that all believing, religious, social, political, must be ‘nimble’ if we are to live in a healthy and more peaceful world. Making space for new ideas takes energy and courage and....that most rare of commodities: time! Making space for what is new and different doesn’t have to be a dramatic move. Cambridge professor, Sarah Coakley, says it is no stretch to translate early descriptions of Jesus as the ‘Gentle Space Maker’. Christmas is a time to be a space maker.

One afternoon this week, I went to visit an old friend who lives down a country lane with no street lights. When I came out of her house, I couldn’t see a thing. For a few moments there was something exciting and dramatic about the absolute darkness. But there was also danger. I knew there was a step somewhere outside the house but I couldn’t quite remember where. I was glad to have a torch on my phone! There is something about the lack of light at this time of year that delights my imagination. As the hours of darkness get longer and longer, I ponder what it must have been like for the ancient British tribes gathered around their bonfires. Away from those fires and without candles or tapers, the world must have been a very dark place, especially when the moon was new. As they staggered along in the dark trying to remember where the landmarks were, wondering which of their senses to trust, nervous about where to put the next foot, they must have experienced a level of anxiety rare in our 21st century western experience. On such occasions both then and now, none of us has any option but to turn to the guiding light within: memories, instincts, senses other than sight. This time yesterday, the name Foy Vance, meant nothing to me. Then someone sent me a YouTube link to a song he found meaningful at this time of year. As I clicked on the link, the lyrics on the screen with changing light shapes behind them were sung by a gravelly Leonard Cohen kind of voice. I like Leonard Cohen in small doses but I wasn’t at all sure this was for me. But, I do like ‘gravelly’ and thought maybe I should give it a chance. So I listened to the end. And I liked it more. Then, off I went down a YouTube rabbit hole of clips about the (20-year old!) song, ‘Guiding Light’ and the singer Foy Vance, with Elton John and Ed Sheeran and Keith Urban. One of the clips I found showed Foy singing to a large group of young people in a music hall - the Belfast Empire. The young people were singing along with a level of intensity and joy I associate with church. 'When I need to get home, You're my guiding light, You're my guiding light’. Others talked about all the people who had been guiding lights at dark times in their lives. At my age, I wondered, who are my guiding lights now? Most of those who used to be have passed on. Although the voices of my own former guiding lights are still very real in my head, I often wonder what they might say these days. Many of the familiar landmarks sometimes seem to have disappeared and many of us feel as if we are walking in the dark. As Yeats said in ‘The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ What would 'my guiding lights' say about the darkness in which our world finds itself right now, on the verge at the very least, of catastrophe and at the worst of extinction. Which of the traditional ‘guiding’ lights are still flickering but likely to go out and which ones will prove reliable? As the season of Advent begins, some of you will expect me to talk about the reliability of the Guiding Light whose coming into the World we are about to celebrate. And of course I couldn’t conclude without a mention of that Light. But I can’t leave it there. In which direction is that light shining in 2023? Who is reflecting that Light? As the physical darkness continues to deepen for the next three weeks, the question ‘who are my guiding lights’ seems to be an important one. Photo: Rolling Stone

So yesterday was Thanksgiving. Americans feasted on turkey and cranberry sauce and pecan and pumpkin pies and reminded themselves of the importance of gratitude in their lives. As a counterpoint, what used to be known as Black Friday sales now extend for days and days. Westerners dither over whether to click finally on that online bargain in clothing or new phones or laptops or TVs or fridges. And all the while, a family in Jabalia in the north of Gaza shiver with anxiety as they pick over the ruins of their home after the Israeli Defence Force struck the area with rockets earlier in the conflict. Their home is no longer habitable. What of their previous life can they salvage? At one end of the spectrum there is so much wealth that we are overwhelmed by choice and can easily convince ourselves that we need what we can well do without. At the other end of the spectrum people struggle for food and warmth – and most of all for security. It all makes us wonder about the difference between surviving and thriving and how to find a healthy balance between the two. Amazing stories of survivors on minimal rations in war zones or death camps or explorers’ expeditions enduring extreme natural circumstances may inspire us but they are minimally useful in this discussion. Shakespeare's King Lear reminds his daughters that talking only about his ‘needs’ falls short of real care. It makes ‘man's life's as cheap as beast's.’ We are not animals who can flourish purely on food and shelter. Shakespeare recognised that to thrive we need so much more – and that ‘so much more’ is what makes us human. But what is that ‘so much more’? It may be that we really do need a new fridge, and if we can get it at a good price, that’s just good economy. But the signpost pointing us to accumulate more ‘goods’ as the path to fulfilled humanity can be an illusion. Beneath all the talk about ‘maintaining and improving living standards’ lurks the question about where those standards come from and who sets the levels for them. It is a political fantasy that if our living standards are not everlastingly rising trouble is on the horizon. Wherever we are on the wealth spectrum, maybe it’s also useful to wonder about what makes us happy. For us it may be a fridge which works properly. In southern Israel and Gaza it may simply be four walls left standing or some treasured remnants of life before the war. Sometimes the words of the sage are correct: ‘To be happy is not to have what you want but to want what you have’. And, we might add, to know that our sisters and brothers elsewhere do too. Whoever and wherever we are most of us recognise that it is not just consumer goods but special people among family and friends whose love makes us happy. Or winter sunlight. Or the taste of tomatoes which you grew yourself. Or something which you have made yourself. Or a familiar line of a song. So whether or not we ate turkey and pumpkin pie yesterday, and whatever Black Friday decisions we make, a moment of thanksgiving makes sense – and helps us all to be a bit more human!

Mike had his hair cut last week and the hairdresser, he said, seemed quite shocked that he didn’t know ‘what he was doing for Christmas’. Thirty-seven days and counting, the food is in the shops, the trees are up for sale, the lights are on in town and people are talking about how many presents they have already bought. ‘They’re all bought, wrapped and in the loft,’ said one woman who was in our house this week! Everyone seems so busy. Another friend, a GP with a husband and two teenage children and an ageing mother said to us this week, ‘I try never to say I’m busy. I can’t bear people who say they’re busy or they’ve been busy. It’s just a way of saying, “I’m important. Even saying, “ I’m more important than you because I’m busier.”’ Hmm, we thought, ‘not busy’? In a life like yours? What does that mean? And what does it mean now in the leadup to Christmas - weeks that for some people are the busiest craziest weeks of the year. Basic responsibilities at home and work plus presents to buy, so many people’s needs and wishes to think of, relatives and friends get-togethers to plan, maybe special church activities to organise. Our culture has encouraged us to believe that unless our lives are full to overflowing with activity, there is something wrong with us. And while we were raising families and holding down responsible jobs, not being ‘on the go’ all the time could, at the very least, seemed like a dereliction of duty. Living life to the full and ‘fulfilling your potential’ as we have always been taught, are important values. These days, we notice that younger people find it difficult to imagine how life ‘works’ for us (the word itself is significant!) now that we are, in these mysterious years called ‘retirement’. What do we do with ourselves all day? They are, it seems especially curious about what Mike does with all those hours that he used to fill with work. They readily imagine, it seems, that for Helen, cooking, housework and keeping the family going adequately fill the space which used to be her professional life! If you get any bunch of retired people talking there are various familiar refrains about how they ‘fill’ time, some of them designed to make it clear that while they are no longer working, their lives are not empty, they are still ‘players’. Another friend, when asked some years ago, what he planned to do in retirement, said:’ As little as possible’! In contrast, you hear the voices of those in the throes of bereavement. The days, previously structured around a shared life can seem very long. ‘Oh! I try to keep busy’, they say. And we all know that those words carry a weight of difficulty for a widowed spouse in the throes of building a life suddenly unrecognisable in the shadow of loss. For us, language about ‘busyness’ is always revealing! Do we have a touch of FOMO – fear of missing out? All these are possible! Do we want to impress others? Do we seek to convince ourselves? Maybe this ‘busy’ season offers us all two challenges. The first will be to strike a healthy and quite delicate balance between not becoming so busy that we become agitated, or not being so under-occupied that we become troubled in a different sort of way. The second challenge will be to watch our language knowing that describing out own level of ‘busyness’ can be a highly sensitive matter!

The paradox of celebrating the armistice and praying for peace while two serious wars are raging offers a challenge to thoughtful people. What exactly are we celebrating this weekend? What exactly are we hoping for and committing ourselves to as, in this country at least, people wear their poppies and gather in remembrance in the centre of towns and villages. And perhaps the most significant question for all of us is, ‘What story are we telling ourselves about the previous wars and particularly about the various contemporary conflicts in the world?’ In a recent Church Times article, Paul Vallely suggested that our attitude to various conflicts depends on where we start. In the Middle East, do we start with the history of the Jews or do we go back before then? Jews would claim that they were the original inhabitants of the land. The claim is based on 3000 years of settlement. But the biblical Canaanites might protest that they were there first and in some cases the victims of ethnic cleansing. The Arabs would lay claim to 2000 years of living on the land and their distant desert cousins for ages before that. Today opinions about the cold-blooded Hamas murders of Jewish young people on the one hand, and the continuing ferocious attacks by the Israeli Defence Force on the inhabitants of Gaza on the other, depend to some extent, on what story we are telling ourselves and where it starts. Where we end up depends on where we start in discussing the conflict in Ukraine. Is it a part of mother Russia or a relatively new but now sovereign state? The question of where you start is at the heart of struggles between indigenous peoples and colonisers everywhere, as the recent Australian Indigenous Voice referendum has again shown. The ‘I was here first’ argument seems to have failed to enshrine in the constitution a right to voice in parliament for what we have long called aboriginal peoples. All of this is not only true of territorial and political struggles. Being here first is not just something children quarrel about in the playground. It is often true in adult social groups where people who were ‘here first’ take or are given power and deference which is not given to those with less history in the group. Whenever we need to resolve a conflict, either between children or adults, it can be useful to ask each of the parties where we start our stories. So too when we give our accounts of ourselves to others – or even perhaps just to ourselves. Our edited narratives tend to begin in places which throw the best light on ourselves and are usually attempts to offer some sort of justification either for our behaviour or our situation in life. In the process of conflict resolution, two things are important. The first is to ask ourselves and others where we/they choose to start the story we are telling. The second is to be willing to change it. To ‘re-member’ is in some way to reconstrue. If we can do that on this Armistice Day we shall have done something worthwhile.