maggi dawn

Beginnings and Endings

My new book is just about to be published. Beginnings and Endings (and what happens in between) looks at the big themes of Advent. The book is laid out as short chapters, one for each day from 1 December to 6 January, to last from Advent to Epiphany. But you can just read it in one go if you'd rather.

Beginnings are important because Advent anticipates the coming of Christ into the world; because candles in the Advent wreath represent the signs of new beginnings through the salvation story - the journey of the Patriarchs, the promises of the Prophets, the announcement of John the Baptist and the conception of Christ. As well as writing about these themes, I also look at the way each of the four gospel writers begins their gospel. In literary terms, what does their starting point tell us about the way they are telling the story?

Advent is also about Endings, because it anticipates the second coming of Christ, and the end of the world as we know it. That's an idea shrouded in mystery, but it reminds us that every new beginning implies an end of something else.

Most of our lives, of course, are lived in between, with dozens of small scale beginnings and endings going on in and around our daily lives. Births and marriages, deaths and funerals, promotions, redundancies, retirements, graduations... all these milestones lead us through endings and beginnings. The characters in the story of salvation also lived through these, and we can trace through their stories some wisdom as we live through our own.

This book was a labour of love; lots of stories close to my own heart, lots of ideas I have carried around in my head that never had an outlet. It was fun to write (though Kathryn, David, Jason and Caroline, who read and critiqued the drafts for me will no doubt remind me of the moments when I said "why did I ever say yes to this???). I hope you'll enjoy reading it.   

available on amazon stateside from 21 september

greenbelt - see you there?

I'll be:

speaking on "Angels and Announcements - how do we listen to God?" on Saturday morning around 11 am-ish.

Signing the copies of my new book, which you will be buying... :) sometime on Sunday afternoon

Singing with Dave Perry in the acoustic venue on Sunday evening at 8 pm. Dave is a highly talented singer, guitarist and songwriter. Don't miss it. 

on a panel about spirituality at 10 am on Monday morning.

I hope, as always, to meet a few more blog-readers in real life! Do come and say hello.

Greenbelt

One of the themes in my book Beginnings and Endings is how we listen to God.  God doesn't have a "voice" in the usual sense of the word (you need a body to have a voice) but Christians always talk about God in human language - God's hands, God's mind, God's voice...

At Greenbelt I'm going to pick up and develop some of the themes about how we listen, intuit, perceive, what we think of as God's calling and guiding; how we pick our way between wisdom and and self-deception; how we embrace imagination without living in a world of fantasy. Come along and join in. It's around 11 am on Saturday morning.

The first copies of the book will also be available on pre-publication release at Greenbelt.

greenbelt

It's taken me this long to get around to writing down the best moments of Greenbelt, even though I listed them in my head on the drive home. After Greenbelt my son and I spent the following week on holiday with friends, and then back to school and work... well, you know, how your feet don't touch the ground sometimes.

We arrived at Greenbelt via the home of some good friends, who kept us going with spare bed and endless cups of tea over the weekend. The first thing that happened was the gob-smacking amazement of realising what a long way we have come in a year. A lot of things have happened in their family and ours in twelve months, and it was immensely cheering to realise that we are in a much, much better place than a year ago.

Seeing the people I only see once a year is always a highlight of Greenbelt for me, and this year was no exception. Tea with Serena and Alastair, ice cream with Robin, chats here and there with Tom H., Steve, Sarah, Jonny, Gareth, Dan, Sally... and lots more.  Seeing people at a distance but only getting to wave at them, or smile across a sea of faces - that's more than a shade frustrating.

My son had a crack at the YMCA climbing wall - didn't get very far up it actually, but we might try and find another one near home and have another go. Then I stopped in a little tent nearby and had a Thai massage. I cannot tell you. This was possibly the highlight of the weekend.

Until this year I've always taken care to make sure my son is entertained and having fun of his own while I get on with my speaking/singing stuff at events like this. I hate the idea of trailing children around adult stuff and expecting them just to put up with it. This year I decided he could come with me to God's iPod (see left sidebar for the links). En route from Martyn Joseph on the big stage to me on a little stage my son suddenly began to register that his mum was going to talk and sing - on a stage - in front of lots of people. It was like a light went on inside his head. He couldn't quite put his mum and "that stuff" together. I settled him down at the front (gameboy in his pocket just in case he needed diversion) and he watched intrigued while I tuned up and soundchecked. A few minutes later he grabbed my elbow, and whispered in my ear, "Mum, don't be nervous, OK? It will be fine." Sweet.

The weekend began and ended for me with two excellent musical moments. Friday evening I caught a bit of Martyn Joseph's set on mainstage - I love that man. Such an excellent performer, and such a nice man. And later I got Andy Thornton's new(ish) album and played it all the way home. Go and buy. The first track alone is worth the cover price.

God's iPod 8 - Joni Mitchell

I said earlier in this set of posts that music can be almost like a sacrament. And there's a strong theme of sacrament on one album that I consider a classic - Blue, by Joni Mitchell. I've written about Blue before, about its theme of longing and travelling, about the way that songs (like tatooes) get under your skin, about how every song is about being in one place and wanting to be somewhere esle.

The theme of sacrament is present, in its broadest sense, meaning that physical things are both representative of, and at the same time part of, some deeper meaning that they convey. Late in the album, Joni sings "a Case of You", which is, like many of her songs, lyrically extraordianry, capturing in a few neat phrases some truth about life that everyone recognises. The idea of symbol and sacrament are hinted at in the way she begins weaving together everyday and throwaway things, and places, and people, and the investment of the heart, captured in lines like this:  "On the back of a cartoon coaster, in the blue TV screen light,  I drew a map of Canada, with your face sketched on it twice".  (Blue - count the times it appears incidentally in the album of the same name.) But she then deliberately emplys the idea of sacrament to describe human love - "you are in my blood like holy wine, you taste so bitter, but so sweet, oh I could drink a case of you, and I would still be on my feet."  I like this, not just because it's clever, but because it is profoudly true that we discover and experience the love of God more powerfully through the love of fellow human beings than through any doctrine or spiritual exercise. There is something sacramental about the way human love refuses to be divided up into physical and spiritual, about eating together, about a friend who will cry or laugh with you, or just be there when words run out, or about someone who will hold you - body and soul - in complete acceptance. I can already hear the commenters beginning to type about how this idea is open to abuse - and yes, it is. But in a sense it is  precisely the fragility of the medium that makes it work as a sacrament. Bread has a tendency to fall into crumbs too, and wine is undoubtedly a double-edged sword. Love, like bread and wine, is not completely dependable, not the same from day to day, and sometimes falls to crumbs instead of giving nourishment. But when it does work, it connects you to the Holy like nothing else.

God's iPod - what I left out

One of the interesting things about thinking my way all through my music collection before Greenbelt was noticing things about the collection that I'd never seen before. I was acutely aware of gaps on the shelves where things have been lost or broken and not replaced. I even went and bought a couple of replacement CD's to compensate. I noticed themes that crossed over between albums by the same artist, or by albums from different artists in the same era. I noticed that there is very little on my shelves that you would call "Christian" music,  and a friend pointed out that a disproportionate amount of my collection is by Canadian artists - although given the strong association of Canada with the singer-songwriter (that's how I used to earn my living before I was a priest), perhaps that isn't so surprising. 

If I was really organising God's iPod for him, I wouldn't allow him to miss out on Daniel Lanois (his own stuff, rather than what he's produced for others, good though that is), or Jeff Buckley, or Bach's Cello Suites, or the complete works of Bruce Cockburn (and a couple of gigs to go with it). Annie Lennox would have to figure because her voice is so lovely, and  Christine Collister, Teddy Thompson, Sarah McLachlan and Rufus Wainwright for the same reason. Neil Young, Richard Thompson, James Taylor, Peter Gabriel, for their writing talents; Stephane Grapelli for his brilliance and sheer good fun.

I would also insist (and I have plenty of practice at this, as I have a son with a Gameboy) that every now and then when God had been listening to his iPod a bit too long, that he TURN IT OFF!!! and come out and see a couple of art galleries, play in the sunshine, drink some tea at an outdoor cafe, and then go to a proper gig. Or a Verdi opera. Or a night at CB2. Or, of course, Greenbelt Festival...

God' iPod - not to my taste

Among the things I almost included in my list of 8 choices for God's iPod, but left out for the lack of space and time, was a track that I don't like at all. What could that have been? I like a vast range of music, and even stuff I don't immediately warm to can be interesting if you listen hard enough to what's going on. But of course there is stuff that leaves me cold. A bland, soundalike boy-band cover of a memorable classic always seems like a pointless travesty to me.  Bjork, whose creative inventiveness I admire immensely, I dislike for the simple reason that I cannot stand her voice.  Or Dido's stuff I find bland and manufactured. Wagner - no thanks. Or some of that bland, West-Coast romantic worship music, complete with airbrushed beauties and Disney voices? eukk. Not for me.

The point of including something on God's iPod that I particularly dislike is this: if God had an iPod, and if he was making his own choices reflecting his own nature, than it would certainly contain music that I do not like at all!! God will, inevitably, find something to redeem in stuff that I hate; he will like the music of people that I do not understand; he will love the people, and the music, who live so far out of my zone that I just don't get it. God's iPod would be like God's Kingdom - it wouldn't be my (or your) favourite playlist, but would include people and styles and tastes that I find out of date, dull, alien, too sophisticated, or even bad taste. Some of what God would download would wind you up and make you wish you'd never heard of Christianity. And that's worth remembering.

God's iPod - Keep Music Live

I certainly would not offer a piece of my own music for God on the basis that it's the "best" in critical terms. I'm not that out of touch with reality. But as I said at the beginning of this set of posts, choosing music for God's iPod is neither giving him my list of critical top 8, nor choosing the music of "my life". I imagine this as choosing music that illustrates things that are important when you think about the world theologically.

One of the things that I hope God would feel bothered about, faced with an iPod, is whether we  are gradually ceasing to make music, and only listening to other people's. It seems to me that fewer and fewer kids seem to take music lessons, play in ensembles, sing in choirs, and so on. (Or do I have rose-coloured spectacles on?) But if the "God's iPod" exercise was asking "what music might be important to God?" I hope that one of the loudest answers would be "LIVE music!!" It would of course be irreverent to imagine myself telling God to turn off the damn machine and rejoin the human race... but I trust that the Almighty would already be ten steps ahead of us on that one.

So for my 7th offering for Greenbelt's "God's iPod", I did shut off the technology, got out my guitar  and played a song. One of my own, because that's what I know. Keep it live. At least some of the time.

God's iPod - radiohead

There is a feeling that every music lover knows - that feeling when, after everything has gone dull for a bit, you hear a new album or single or band, and suddenly it's like the grass is a shade greener, the sun a little brighter and the sky a bit bluer than it was before. A piece of music can make you feel as free and as reckless and as unnerved as if you've just jumped out of an aeroplane; it can affect you as dramatically as when Truman Burbank opened the door at the back of his movie set. That feeling of newness, of the world lighting up in a fresh way, is something that commentators on aesthetics have puzzled over for centuries, and tried to rationalise and explain (not always very successfully). Heidegger, a philosopher of the 20th century, once commented that the whole purpose of art was to make the viewer see the world in a fresh light, as they had never seen it before.  It's interesting that a whole slice of the Christian world (mostly a Protestant slice) has shied away from all things aesthetic, and even forbidden Christians from dabbling in the arts. This fear that the arts are inevitably immoral is a sad defect in Christianity as some of us have known it. The truth is that the capacity for the aesthetic to split open the soul to see the world in a new way is a God-given gift. Like Truman living within the artificial limitations of his film-set world, when that capacity is denied our lives become too small.

I can well remember a number of instances when that soul-splitting feeling of brilliant freshness came over me on hearing a piece of music for the first time. Bach's Double Violin concerto when I was about 7.  La Boheme when I was 9 (my Dad let me stay up late specially to hear it broadcast live from the Opera house). James Taylor when I was 12 or 13. The Beatles Revolver in my mid teens, and not long afterwards, the third movement of Beethoven's 7th symphony; his 8th in its entirety as it was the first one I even played in. K T Tunstall's "Eye" was the last time it happened.

And somewhere in between, The Bends lit up my world after several years of not really hearing anything startling or new. There is something both raw and sophisticated about Radiohead - they comp[ose almost on a symphonic scale, they employ the dirtiest, grungiest guitar sounds, and weave it all together with exquisite, sweet melodies, which often belie (or project in irony?) the cynicism of the lyric. Nice Dream was one track that has all these elements, so I chose this for God's iPod.

God's iPod - Graceland

I know, I know - I've already had a track by Paul Simon. And sure enough, there are hundreds of fantastic tracks by other artists I could include here (in fact I might post about that too) but Graceland I have chosen for a particular reason - that it was the first album I evere heard on CD.

Back in the late 80's, when CD was first rumoured, and then brand new, and then (for a while) prohibitively expensive before it settled in and everyone had it, I made an album of my own. I recorded it late in 1986, in a studio miles from home, and one night we went to the studio manager's flat for supper. The discussion de jour soon began as to whether CD was, in fact, so clinical and clean in sound that it removed all the human feeling from the music, or whether the digital clarity was a good thing.

"Listen for yourselves," said our host, as he unveiled his very own CD player, and put in Graceland (which had been out about 6 months). I was an instant convert. The clarity and punch and brilliance was fantastic, and IMHO didn't mask the warmth and vibrancy of the music at all.

Another question, however, was not so easily resolved for me. The composition of an album had, up until then, taken aas one of its contstraints the length of time it was realistically possible to record onto 12" vinyl, and how to handle the turnover between side 1 and side 2. The last track on side 1 essentially had to be the "record turner" - the listener had to be motivated enough to want more. With a CD, there was, technically speaking, almost limitless possiblity in terms of length of album, and there was no "turnover" moment. So not only the perception by the listener, but the composition of the album would be affected by a change in technology.

The same, of course, is true of the iPod. A new technology is neither good nor bad, but it does affect the perception and the creation of music. The album as a concept - and especially as a "thing" - begins to break down with the iPod, as the listener can choose whether to accept all of an album, or only some selections, whether to listen to them in the order of composition or whether to rearrange them, splice them together with other music. The listener become sthe DJ, and the power is shifted between artist and listener. In some instances - like albums with two good tracks and piles of filler - this is perhaps a good thing. But if I were the DJ for Go'd iPod, I would insist that the listener take some whole albums on board, and make themselves listen to the whole. The artist shouldn't have all the power, it's true, any more than the publisher. But the tendency to cut and paste everything is not always beneficial to the listener either.

God's iPod - Craig Armstrong

I was torn here between Craig Armstrong, Ennio Morricone and Jocelyn Pook. Partly because I'm fascinated with the relationship between music and other art forms (like film, for instance) and partly because, while I'm no Luddite when it comes to technology, I like technology to be used for its own sake, not as a convenient way of replacing something we had before. That is to say, why try to produce a violin sound on a synthesiser? Play a violin, dammit. But computers/synthesisers can create sound that acoustic instruments can't, and when the two mediums are mixed together, some really interesting stuff emerges. Brian Eno, of course, must be added to the list of innovators here. Other names too. But in the end I picked Craig Armstrong from the list of luminaries, partly because I find I turn to him more than most, and partly because of a really fab worship service we did last year in my College Chapel, not only using Armstrong's  music, which is already a masterpiece in its own right, but using some of his music as an introit to Gesualdo's Tenebrae responses. The track I chose from Armstrong ended in the same key that the Gesualdo began, and the slide from 21st recorded music to 16th century live choral music was practically seamless. It's a kind of appropriation of the idea of "mixing" that still engages with "real" or live music, something I think we should pursue much more than we do.

Anything by Craig Armstrong would do me on God' s iPod, but Ruthless Gravity, the first track from As If to Nothing is one of my favourites.

God's iPod 3 - Crowded House

I'm not going to heaven (wherever that is) if there's no Crowded House. Neil Finn is, without question, one of the finest songwriters of his generation. It's hard to choose one track when you love a handful of albums... Into Temptation might have made an interesting reflection on the clash between human desire and social rules, longing and promise. "into temptation, knowing full well the earth will rebel; into temptation, into the wide open arms of hell..." a sample of his brilliance

But in the end, Together Alone (From the album of the same name) made it to my list of songs that I would recommend to God, or think might reflect something of what GOd is like. WHy? Because a) it is a beautiful piece of music, brilliantly fusing Maori drummers with western melodic rock, and b) a song about friendship between lovers. The moment of passion may ebb, but the friendship is there forever, is the underlying theme of the song. He describes a love so sweet, so deeply reaching into two souls, that it must last forever in some form, whatever else happens.

I have been through the usual ups and downs that any thinking person would about the existence of God, the relevance (or not) of various doctrines and practices of the CHurch. But ultimately the love of God is made real via the love we experience through people - the lovers and friends who look right into your soul and love what they find. As Joni Mitchell once put it, "love is touching souls". Together Alone nails that important truth (often lost on the Church)  that love - both human and divine - is not just about rules or social contracts; it is wild and a little unpredictable, and not altogether easy to manage. But in the end, it is what makes us thoroughly human.

God's iPod - Mozart in the absence of Bach

My original selection included Bach's Double Concerto in dMinor for two violins. There is something sublime about Bach; I cannot imagine supplying music for God and not including Bach. However, it became apparent that Bach is not available on iTunes. Should God become involved in the great iPod experiment, I feel sure that he would do something about this. However, once I arrived at Greenbelt and found that Bach was off the menu, I did, happily, have with me a CD of Kiri Te Kanawa singing Mozart's vespers, so that is what GOd was offered next.

Kiri is one of those voices of a generation. Perfect tuning, immaculate delivery,  almost miraculous control. To hear her deliver hugely lengthy lines, perfectly and smoothly produced, would seem to require four lungs-ful of breath, not two.

Mozart's Vespers is a beautiful piece, and the 60 seconds I isolated for God's iPod was the opening of Laudate Dominum, a setting of Psalm 116. "Praise God, all the nations of the world. For he has shown us his mercy" is an approximate summary of the translation.

Martin Wroe was my interviewer on God's iPod, and he asked me whether you need to know what the words mean in order to gain spiritual benefit from the music. I think that knowing what it means certainly adds a level of possibility to the music. But music where you can't hear the words (no, not just loud young people's music, but opera and vast tracts of ecclesiastical choral music too) has its own value, as does music without any words at all, and can open up the human heart to spiritual understanding at least as much as the words can, perhaps more. It technically stretches the categories to say that music is a sacrament, but I do think that music has the capacity to penetrate the soul in a way that intellectual reason can not.

Go find Kiri singing the Vespers. It will do your heart good.

God's iPod - Tenderness

Tenderness

I promised my selections for God's iPod - an evening event at the New Forms Cafe at Greenbelt, which was kind of twist on desert island discs. Choosing for God's iPod, I thought, was quite a different proposition from choosing MY desert island discs. What songs do I think God might find representative of his thoughts on music, spirituality and life? What songs would I like to recommend to God? WHat might the music of heaven sound like? What might the music of heaven-on-earth sound like?

Paul Simon is outstanding among musicians in his generation; from decade to decade he has developed his writing, his own style being constantly reinvented as he interacted with diffferent kinds of music while always producing his own unmistakeable sound. One of his landmark albums (IMHO) was There Goes Rhymin' Simon. But which track to choose?

Were I in the fantasy situation of supplying advice to God on what to download onto an iPod, I would first recommend that with an album such as this one the whole album should be taken, in order, and played as an album rather than rearranging individual tracks. A really good album (as opposed to a an album that is merely couple of hits padded out with a lot of filler) is an act of composition in itself, and the placing of one song next to another is deliberate and worth preserving. A Greatest Hits is a commercial, not an artistic concern, and to use an iPod merely to collect isolated tracks is like selling out to listening to nothing but Greatest Hits.

That said, one of the songs on Rhymin' Simon might have a particular appeal to God at the moment. The Anglican Church has been tearing herself to shreds over the last few years over women priests, gay bishops and one or two other issues. The debates themselves are debates that need to be had; the issues are not irrelevant or without their complexzities. But the mode of the debates  as they have happened has been a matter of distress to the majority of those within the Church.

"By this shall the world know that you are my followers," said Jesus, "that you LOVE one another." Not that you agree with one another. God doesn't call us to agree on everything, and he never forbids a good argument. But love one another? That's not what we've been doing lately, not by a long chalk.

"Right and wrong," sings Paul Simon, "oh, right and wrong, they never helped us get along. You don't have to lie to me, just give me some tenderness beneath your honesty."

There's a Jewish proverb that says "To sing is to pray twice". The impact and poignancy of Simon's words is at least doubled if you hear him sing it.

Rhythm of the Saints

edited post:

I almost had to pull out of Greenbelt this week... but happily it's back on again, thanks to some heroic offers of accommodation and on-site babysitting (thank you, you know who you are).

I'll be presenting some music on "God's iPod" on Friday evening in New Forms Cafe, about 9pm.

On Saturday at 4.30 pm in the Sovereign Lounge I'll be talking under the title "Rhythm of the Saints" about the benefits of following the liturgical year - why it makes sense for contemporary spirituality to follow a fairly ancient path through the year   (although some parts of the liturgical year are more ancient than others - nothing stands still! ).

In between whiles I'll be attempting to be Supermum, which usually involves blowing a lot of bubbles and buying chocolate crepes at regular intervals.

Hope to see some of  you there!

Greenbelt reflections (iii)

I did two talks at Greenbelt, one on Relevance hastily re-written (after a techno-disaster) and not nearly as good as the original. I am re-doing it in Cambridge in November, hopefully more polished and  resembling more closely the original and better script.

The second talk, ironically, would have been no different had I lost my notes in cyberspace, since the script was nothing more than a set of notes to recall my stories in the right order. I have, in recent years, become more and more script-bound, as I have developed my skills as a writer, and less and less able simply to stand up and talk. I decided, though, that the best way to tackle my subject on Monday afternoon was to illustrate my 4 points with stories, and stories need to be TOLD, not read out from the page. So I made myself be very brave, and not read off the script. Happily, I did not "dry", and enjoyed no end talking about connecting the dots between traditional and contemporary forms of worship, and working within constraints.

It's my usual practice never to give away my scripts, although I did post edited highlights of last year's talk. But in this case, I really can't. Sorry. But I will aim to post the main points and a couple of stories for those of you who have asked, sometime in the next few weeks.

Greenbelt reflections (ii) - blogging and diares

"I blog, therefore I am" was a panel discussion on blogging. A couple of interesting things remain logged in my head. One was the anomaly of having semeone on the panel who'd only been blogging about 6 weeks, while the Grandfather of blogging, TallSkinnyKiwi, was sat on the back row. Now of course the Kiwi is a mellow man and didn't take it personally. Furthermore, he is a generous and wise man, and is the first to point out that newbies have as much to say as experts. All the same it seemed a bit odd to me, and I had to resist the urge to insist that I swap places with him. Hat tip, TSK.

The other was a theme raised by two comments from the "floor". One commenter issued the challenge that maybe bloggers are insufferably arrogant in thinking that their personal journals are of interest to the wider world. Another asked whether Samuel Pepys would have blogged, had he lived in the 21st century, and if so, would his diary then have been lost forever, given the somewhat transient nature of internet publishing.

These comments both made me think that although blogging has elements of personal diary about them, they are not identical to diaries at all....

I read a pile of stuff about diaries as literary form in the process of reading for my PhD (and, as is the way with these things, ended up with about 2 sentences on the subject in the final copy...) but a private diary is really the only kind of writing that is specifically and deliberately kept without the intention or likelihood of anyone else reading it. In other words, it's a different kind of writing precisely because it is not writeen to be read. Public blogs, however, are written to be read - even if only by a few friends - so they may resemble anything from a newsletter to a book. Brian Eno managed to get a name check in my PhD because he so succinctly described the profound difference int he writing experience when you suddenly begin to write (or edit) a personal journal for the purposes of publication.

Blogs, of course, are a different kind of medium, sometimes using a mix of image, moving image, hypertext etc, as well as straightforward text. So that makes them more like a magazine than a book. And they may also have multiple authors, and will probably have commenters, again making them more magazine-like. Nothing like a diary at all, in fact, with the exception of the day-by-day entries.

As to wether Pepys work would have been lost had he blogged it, I can't say, but (granted that its an ahistorical and imaginative leap) I wouldn't be at all surprised if he would have liked to blog.

Greenbelt reflections (i)

Thanks for all the encouragement re overcoming SPAM. And thanks to Typepad's lovely and efficient helpdesk. I continue to work on the background stuff to close the loopholes. All being well I shall blog on. (Blog on, With hope in my heart... thanks K!)

So, a whole week after I get home from Greenbelt, it's time for some very belated reflections. If anyone still remembers Greenbelt by the first week in September, that is... all the other bloggers in the world are so ahead of me on this...

Actually, it felt to me like Greenbelt lasted over a week, as we drove down a day early and thereafter had 4 days of post-Greenbelt visitors here at the Hotel-Dawn in Cambridge, including Ian from Moot and the lovely Karen Ward, who came to stay a few days.

In personal terms, this year was my happiest and most chilled-out Grenbelt for at least half a dozen years. I put this in part down to the fact that the Festival itself is definitely in a good "mood" at the moment - increased attendance (people are saying 20,000) and budget meant that the site stretched out much further, on a kind of two-village shape reminiscent of the Greenbelt heyday of the 1980's. Of course a big crowd changes the dynamic, and in some respects this makes it a harder place to be - more queues, more overcrowding here and there, more likelihood of non-admission to some of the venues. But it's a price worth paying.

The other thing that made Greenbelt special for me this year was that I organised myself entirely around my 7-yr-old son. One of the commonest cries among Greenbelt parents is that it's a total frustration trying to juggle kids' interests with those of their parents. Some parents leave the kids with grandparents for the weekend; others do the juggling act and try to be everywhere at once. "My kids have stolen my Greenbelt," I heard one friend lament as he queued for ice cream yet again. All parents do this juggling act on and off most of the time; it' goes with the territory! But this year I thought I would just try approaching it differently, to see what happened. So I decided before I even left home to focus most of my energy on giving my son a good Greenbelt. Apart from those times I was actually doing my seminars and talks, whatever we did were his choices. We did Colourscape twice (absolutely showstoppingly brilliant for adults as well as kids), bouncy castles several times (ho hum), Bubble-Inc about twice a day, and a visit to the Groovy Movie (a solar powered mobile movie tent). Most of my catching up with friends took place on the edge of the Tree of Life Maze, which captivated my son. In between whiles we checked out various new kinds of food. Organic sausages were good, but chocolate crepes were the success story of the weekend. We've made some at home since then.

This mode of Greenbelet meant I missed the chance to chat endlessly to loads of people (sorry, Keith, Conrad, Sally, Caroline, Nick... etc, etc... !). And I didn't hear a single complete session apart from my own. But I did enjoy Greenbelt enormously, and came home much more relaxed than usual. When the Vicar asked in Church on Sunday "what's the absolutely best thing that happened to you all Summer?" my son's hand was first in the air - "Greenbelt!" he exclaimed triumphantly, "it was brilliant." I think he should apply for the post of publicity manager. 

Greenbelt

So if the plan goes according to plan (!)... I'll be speaking at Greenbelt at these times:
Slot 1 Friday 6.30-7.30pm
Slot 2 Monday 2pm.

One of them is on the relevance of relevance. The other is on liturgy and worship for the contemporary/emerging church. That's all I'm telling for now.

And Steve is starting up a new round of his Holy Joes late night debates - this time called The Temple Yard. Steve loves controversy and leads a cool debate. So I'm scared... but have said "yep" to his panel invitation...   What on earth is he going to ask me this time??

Hoping to meet up with lots of bloggers this year.