Coffee Theology

I described anxiety before as a many-headed beast.  For a long time I was virtually free of symptoms, but then they came back in a totally unexpected way. I've always been someone who was confident in situations that made other people nervous - it's just the way I am.  I've been doing public speaking since I was 11; I always rather enjoyed things like exams and interviews; I'm not intimidated by walking into a room full of people I don't know.  But in my final year of ministerial formation, when I was going through the unsettling process whereby ministers are matched with churches, I started to find that things which had been easy for me before began to be very, very difficult. I remember sitting in a Christmas service at my sending church in Chelmsford waiting to do a Bible reading.  This was a church full of people who knew and loved me, and I'd been asked to do one simple reading in a Christmas service - not a tall order for a trainee minister.  But I was fre...

Many of us talking about 'being a bit OCD' when we like things a certain way - pens lined up on a desk, bottles lined up on a shelf etc.  I imagine all of us at times go home to check if we've left the gas on or the back door unlocked.  I suppose all of us can have OCD moments.  But people who suffer with the disorder take it to a new level. I can literally stand there looking at our cooker, which has a gas hob, and I can see that all the knobs are turned to zero, and while I'm looking at them I'm still wondering if they're really off.  There's a thought: "what if I left the cooker on?" and that thought brings with it anxiety: "it's really dangerous to leave the cooker on - it could start a fire."  The thought is an obsessive one - it won't go away - it just goes round and round and round your head.  So then comes the compulsion - to go downstairs and check the cooker is off.  Which you do... but it only brings temporary relief.  ...

One of my all-time favourite films is As Good As It Gets, starring Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt.  Nicholson plays Melvin Udall, a talented and famous novelist who suffers from severe obsessive compulsive disorder and hates leaving his apartment.  He also has a highly unpleasant personality and is extremely rude (and hence very funny to watch).  Helen Hunt plays Carol, the waitress who patiently serves Melvin exactly the same breakfast every morning at the same table in the same restaurant, which he eats with a plastic knife and fork he brings himself, carefully sealed in a plastic pocket.  Melvin is terrified of germs, which means he hates being touched or touching anything outside his apartment, and has to wash his hands with very hot water and many bars of soap.  Because, of course, once you've touched the soap, it's dirty, right?  He also has routines around locking his front door; turning light switches on and off a certain number of times; touching th...

Rise, like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you: Ye are many - they are few! Extract from Shelley's The Masque of Anarchy Last week I saw Amir Amirani's documentary We Are Many,  which tells the story of the global resistance to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by British and American forces.  It charts the unfolding reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attack in the US in 2001 and the decision by George W. Bush and Tony Blair to take their countries to war, purportedly to find the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein could deploy within 45 minutes.   The high point of the film is the global anti-war demonstration on 15th February 2003, when marches against the Iraq war took place in over 600 countries across the world, and London saw the biggest demonstration in British history, with an estimated 2 million people on the streets of the capital.  The documentary features in...

Some of my friends have been inspired by the recent general election (and surprise outcome) to join a political party.  I've been thinking about it too, but I have a dilemma. There are two large parties which are the only two real contenders for forming a government in our first past the post system.  I naturally lean toward one of them and that is probably the party I would join.  It doesn't entirely represent my political views and has done things in government which I have violently disagreed with.  But what's the alternative?  Joining a party which has no hope of forming a government, or even a coalition, given the tiny number of seats currently held by the smaller parties. And then I pause, and I ask myself, why do you have to join a powerful party?  Why join a party which has to develop policies to win votes rather than because they're the right policies for the country?  I sound naive even to myself when I ask that question.  It's not about...

The dark days of Good Friday and Easter Saturday are over.  It all changes on Easter Sunday. Of course, the difficult situation you're dealing with may not have changed yet.  But on Easter Sunday we see a ray of hope - a promise of resurrection.  On Easter Sunday Christians celebrate the amazing fact that when the women went to the tomb two days after Jesus' death, they found it empty.  I'd like to share with you another great piece of art from the clever folks that brought us www.icons-on-sea.org.uk  .  This can be viewed in person at the end of Southend pier:   We see a bunch of flowers taped to a traffic sign, a poignant reminder that someone died there, perhaps not long ago.  They're taped to a 'dead end' sign, which seems to indicate the sad fact that the person commemorated by the flowers has reached a dead end.  But the empty tomb of Easter Sunday shows us that the grave is not ...

On Good Friday Christians remember the day Jesus died.  An innocent, holy man unjustly executed in a most painful way.  The immortal Son of God submitting himself to a shameful death.  On Good Friday, goodness and mercy and justice and peace are put to death.  Evil wins. And on Easter Saturday, nothing happens. Goodness has died, and life goes on. When something terrible happens to someone else, we may try to comfort them.  Or we may avoid them, because we don't know what to say.  If we do have a conversation with them, we may come out with statements which attempt to minimise the person's suffering or provide an explanation for it.  At least he didn't suffer.  You still have your health.  Worse things happen at sea.  Everything happens for a reason.  Your prayers were answered, just not in the way you wanted.  Never mind, life goes on. We find these painful times so uncomfortable.  What we absolutely hate to do is to sit ...