Coffee Theology

Wake up in Premier Inn somewhere around Peterborough. Drink first coffee in six weeks (inferior to Oasis coffee, natch, but still good). Drive to Spalding, attend baptism of a 10-year-old friend of mine.  Amazing. (She thinks I am awesome at Candy Crush, which isn't true, but nice to hear). Eat enormous pub meal. Drive three hours home to Southend. Print an entire ream of quiz sheets in church office (note to self: don't tell finance administrator how much colour copying you did). Run chocolate-themed quiz night in pub next door to church.   Annoy a team of ministers (including line manager) who play their joker on the 'Easter story' round, only  to discover that the questions have only the most tenuous links to Easter story.  (So as not to give the church teams an advantage.  Clearly.) Lose voice. Raise £200 for food bank and suspended meals. Collapse in bed. Remember I am supposed to be blogging today. A good day.

The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp.  The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour.  ‘Where is God?  Where is he?’ someone asked behind me.  As the youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, ‘Where is God now?’  And I heard a voice in myself answer: ‘Where is he?  He is here.  He is hanging there on the gallows.’ In his memoir, Night , Elie Wiesel describes his experiences in Auschwitz.  He writes: Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed… Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I for...

I'm now up to chapter 57 in Eat, pray, love  and I'm finally getting a feel for Liz Gilbert's understanding of her faith in God.  During her time in Rome she explored pleasure, specifically good food; at her ashram in India she is exploring devotion.  This is her view of religious practice: Every religion in the world operates on the same common understandings of what it means to be a good disciple - get up early and pray to your God, hone your virtues, be a good neighbour, respect yourself and others, master your cravings.  We all agree that it would be easier to sleep in, and many of us do, but for millennia there have been others who choose instead to get up before the sun and wash their faces and go to their prayers.  And then fiercely try to hold on to their devotional convictions throughout the lunacy of another day. She then goes on to comment on the nature of faith: If faith were rational, it wouldn't be - by definition - faith.  Faith is belie...

Our church sanctuary has been transformed overnight.  Instead of a conventional worship space with rows of comfortable chairs, the space is criss-crossed with anti-climb heras fencing and barbed wire.  Fixed to the fencing are beautiful black and white images of migrants from refugee camps in Calais and Lebanon.  The photographer has sought to re-create the stations of the cross through images of the people he met in these camps. The photographs were commissioned by Premier Christianity: www.premierchristianity.com  .  Their website explains: The Stations is an artistic re-interpretation of the traditional 'stations of the cross' through the images and stories of today's refugees. Creative director Marksteen Adamson met and made friends with many of the refugees he photographed in Lebanon, Calais and the UK. I've walked through the exhibition once and I'm planning to go again - there's just so much to take in.  This mo...

One of the things that has frustrated me about Eat, pray, love is that I have got nearly halfway through the book before there has been any mention of which religion Liz Gilbert is following.  She talks about yoga, ashrams and gurus, but a quick Google search tells me that these are not restricted to Hinduism.  I wonder whether the fact that there is no mention early on is the answer to my question; Gilbert, like many westerners exploring spirituality, does not feel the need to categorise her spiritual search in this way.  She is not subscribing to a religion but exploring spiritual practices.  She explains that, at the ashram in India which she visits for several weeks, there are Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians and Muslims.  She would probably agree with the sentiment expressed by George Harrison, who embraced the Hare Krishna tradition: "It does not matter what you call Him, just as long as you call." I am finding Gilbert's descriptions of meditation q...

This is a selfie taken, I think, in Damascus.  I went on a month-long trip to Beirut, Lebanon to visit a wonderful missionary family in February 2008.  While I was there, I had the opportunity to go on a day trip to Damascus.  I am so grateful to have had this opportunity - who knows when tourists will return to beautiful Syria? Reading Eat, pray, love  has made me reflect on my own experiences of travelling solo.  The first time was probably when I was 20; I went travelling in China with a friend, but she had to leave a week early.  I spent a week in Beijing on my own.  I was nervous, but it was fantastic.  During that week I managed to leave a bag containing my debit card on a bus, leave my passport in a department store, and run out of Chinese currency, the nearest place I could change money being a bus ride away.  I had to look in every pocket for coins to scrape together for the bus fare.  But, you know, if I had been with someone e...

In her book Eat, pray, love , Liz Gilbert explains how her understanding of prayer is challenged.  During her gruelling divorce she prays often, but doesn't feel it right to ask God to change her situation. Her thinking is that, if she is going through difficult times, maybe God wants her to go through them, in order to learn something.  Praying for God to change the circumstances seems like a weakness of faith.  Instead, she prays that God would give her the strength to cope with whatever life throws at her. A friend tells Liz that this is stupid - that it is fine for her to ask God for specific things she needs.  Liz describes a bizarre conversation she has in the car with this friend, where Liz actually writes a 'petition' to God in her notebook, asking him to get her husband to sign the divorce papers.  The very painful process of separating from each other has dragged on for eighteen months by this point, and if the papers are not signed they will have...

Eat, pray, love has been accused of having a shallow spirituality, but as I continue to read I am finding more and more points of interest. Liz Gilbert plans a year of travel: four months in Italy, four months in India, four months in Bali.  Her thinking is that in Italy, she will explore the art of pleasure, specifically amazing Italian food.  In India, she will visit her guru's ashram and devote herself to prayer.  In Bali, she will go back to visit an elderly medicine man she met on a work trip, hoping that he will teach her how to balance pleasure and prayer.  Gilbert explains that she does not want to become like a monk, renouncing the world of material pleasures, but she does want to draw close to God.  She wants to live in the world and enjoy its delights as well as to connect with the spiritual world. I found this really interesting.  Sometimes we can get the impression that truly religious people are ones who never watch TV, eat ice cream or hang o...

I was surreptitiously watching the film of Eat, Pray, Love this week on Netflix.  I'm often suspicious of bestsellers, and wasn't too impressed when I watched the film first time around a few months ago.  However, Javier Bardem is the male lead.  Ladies, need I say more? Anyway, watching it for the second time, really just for some mindless entertainment, I found myself fascinated by the insight into the spirituality of someone who begins to talk to God for the very first time.  So fascinated, in fact, that I have downloaded the book (the advantage of the Kindle app being that no one knows what you're reading. Except I've just told you all.  Whoops).  Liz Gilbert describes sitting on her bathroom floor at 3am, sobbing because she is so unhappy in her marriage.  She has a good job, a nice house (two, actually) and everyone expects her to settle down and have babies.  She describes how every month that she realises she is not pregnant is a reprieve....

This is the time book.  I've had it since I was tiny.  Apparently, where other little girls would cuddle up with teddy bears, I used to take the time book to bed with me.   I've moved about so many times in the last fifteen years that I have all sorts of boxes of random stuff which I never got around to sorting.  They ended up in my parents' garage until I got my own place, whereupon I shoved them in my garage.  Now, finally, I am sorting them out.  Today I got down to the deepest layer and it was a treasure trove. Along with the time book, I found the bunny my gran knitted for me when I was born: we have a photo of me on the sofa with bunny and she is bigger than I am.  There were also letters from grandparents who have since died; postcards my friends wrote to me when we were teenagers; letters from the penpals I had as a child.  I found a birthday card my grown-up cousin made for me when she was five.  Lots of letters my mum wrote to me wh...

Yesterday I answered the door in my dressing gown.  Yes it was late morning, but in my defence, a) it was my day off and b) I had a cold.  I was greeted by an older gentleman holding out a Watchtower and asking if I would like to talk about God?  I smiled, said I was a Christian, but bless him for coming. He thanked me for answering the door. My response to him was purely instinctive rather than thought through.  Usually I hate being interrupted by cold callers (who doesn't?), especially when I am ill and in my pyjamas.  And should I be 'blessing' him for his evangelising efforts?  Jehovah's Witnesses believe a version of Christianity with, I would argue, the important bit taken out: they don't believe Jesus Christ is God.  So while I will happily worship alongside Catholics, Methodists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Quakers and so on, it would not be appropriate for me to worship with JWs because we are not worshipping the same person. As an...