Coffee Theology

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash     When I was 15 years old there was a particularly unpleasant murder which was splashed all over the news. The culprits were identified, given long prison sentences and, many years later, new identities upon their release. I remember watching news footage of the defendants being brought to trial in a prison van, angry crowds screaming abuse as it drove past. My mother's perspective on this was interesting. "We all have darkness inside us," she explained. "It's easier to scream at it in someone else than to face our own." Today is All Hallows' Eve: for the past week, pumpkins, skeletons, witches and ghosts have loomed at us out of shop windows, from supermarket shelves and strung up as decorations outside homes. Tonight it reaches its peak as many of us, adults and children, dress up in the things we most fear. Axe murderers, which come to mind whenever we're alone in the house and hear a creak on the stai...

In recent years I have become more and more intrigued by Halloween as it has become more and more prominent a phenomenon in the UK. I don’t remember Halloween being a big deal when I was little, but over the last few years trick or treating seems to have become more and more common - interestingly, among quite young children. On 31st October there are frequent rings on my door as small witches, wizards and zombies ask me for sweets, their parents usually hovering in the background. I love it. Yes, I love Halloween, for three reasons. Firstly, I love the community atmosphere. I live in the suburbs, and suburban people are notoriously bad at getting to know their neighbours, particularly in areas like the one where I live, where a large proportion of the population are commuters. Halloween is the one day in the year when people are out on the streets knocking on their neighbours’ doors. We Brits have a tendency to social awkwardness (read Watching the English  by Kate Fox if you...

Photo by  Oliver Sjöström  on  Unsplash I’ve recently been watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s documentary ‘Britain’s Fat Fight’ on BBC iPlayer - it’s a great programme which I’d highly recommend. Since joining Slimming World two and a half years ago I have become very passionate about healthy eating, having struggled to control my weight for most of my life so far. There is much that is really helpful, informative and inspiring in the documentary. I was most struck, however, by what celebrity chef Hugh says about shame. I guess it's been said before, but it struck me as a fresh insight: it's really hard for us to talk about our weight. There is a lot of shame bound up with food, weight and body image. Even GPs (this bit really surprised me) apparently find it difficult to talk with their patients about their weight. Hugh talks with a group of GPs in Bristol who say that their patients already know they're overweight, so their doctors find it hard to bring up th...

Photo by Claudia Soraya on Unsplash   A woman in the crowd had suffered for twelve years with constant bleeding. She had suffered a great deal from many doctors, and over the years she had spent everything she had to pay them, but she had gotten no better. In fact, she had gotten worse. She had heard about Jesus, so she came up behind him through the crowd and touched his robe. For she thought to herself, “If I can just touch his robe, I will be healed.” Immediately the bleeding stopped, and she could feel in her body that she had been healed of her terrible condition. Jesus realized at once that healing power had gone out from him, so he turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my robe?” His disciples said to him, “Look at this crowd pressing around you. How can you ask, ‘Who touched me?’”  But he kept on looking around to see who had done it. Then the frightened woman, trembling at the realization of what had happened to her, came and fell ...

Mental health affects everyone, just as physical health affects everyone. We all have a mind and we all have a body. Our thoughts affect our physical sensations, and our body influences our mental state. When we're tired, hungry, have a headache, we are irritable. When we're scared our stomach churns and we break out in a cold sweat. We are, each of us, a whole person, body, mind and spirit - and these cannot easily be separated. We all have good days and bad days. We all 'feel depressed' sometimes - by which we probably mean sad, blue, downhearted. We all feel anxious at times - it's a natural reaction to stressors. We all have to find ways of dealing with our moods, whether it's by thinking things through, distracting ourselves, talking to a good friend or simply getting some sleep. Sometimes we struggle to manage our moods and our emotions get out of control. We feel sad all the time; we feel frightened of situations that aren't dangerous; we stop ...

Over the six episodes of Broken Father Michael meets several people going through terrible struggles. One of the saddest is the case of Roz, a lapsed Irish Catholic woman who comes to confession and tells Michael her secret. Roz is holding down a responsible job and living in a nice house with her three teenage children; she is an attractive woman and comes across as successful and capable. But Roz has stolen over £230,000 from her employer over the past eight years in order to fund her gambling addiction. She knows her days of keeping this quiet are numbered: soon her employer will find out and therefore she is planning to end her life. She won't be able to live with the shame, she explains. She can't stand the thought of all her neighbours and friends knowing what she's done and, as she puts it, "wetting themselves"  with glee. Michael tries hard to dissuade Roz from her terrible decision. He's done much worse things than she has, he confesses, and shar...

A new drama series by Jimmy McGovern finished a couple of weeks ago on the BBC. Broken  tells the story of Roman Catholic priest Father Michael Kerrigan, a broken person ministering to other broken people in an unnamed northern city. It's still available on BBC iPlayer and I would encourage you to watch it - only be prepared for a few grim hours. I'll try to avoid spoilers here. Michael has a problem: whenever he celebrates Mass (which I think in the Roman Catholic Church is every day), he has flashbacks. At the moment of consecration - the point at which, Catholics believe, the bread and wine physically become for us the body and blood of Christ - he remembers every shameful thing he's ever done, and every shameful thing that has been done to him. We see his mother screaming at him that he's a dirty, filthy little boy; young women crying because he has treated them badly; mistakes he has made as a priest; people he has let down. His voice falters and he struggles ...