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A review of ‘With my whole heart’, by James Jones
I am spending a lot of time just now in the chemotherapy unit of my local hospital. I go there to accompany my wife, who is undergoing this punishing treatment regime. You might think that a chemotherapy ward, with its mood music of whirring machines and bleeping alarms is the last place to read a book on the Psalms. James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool and author of With my whole heart, might disagree. The book, you see, was born in hospital.
When this usually active and dynamic man was taken into hospital for heart surgery early last year, it was a rude shock. During recovery and convalescence he found himself seeking solace in the Psalms, as generations have done before him. Therein lies the problem, of course, with any book on the Psalms – it has so many predecessors. James Jones, though, has found a unique ‘entry point’ . In his seventy short meditations on the Psalms, he homes in uniquely on verses which mention the heart.
The mediations are a real tonic to the soul – never more than a page long, deeply honest and spiritually applicable. Each concludes with a short prayer, and some even suggest a meditative activity. The writing is simple yet arresting enough that you can concentrate on it in even the most testing of environments, as I can testify from experience. There is a ‘take-home’ value to this content – with gems of wisdom small enough to take away and mull over long after the book is closed:
‘One of the blessings of being laid lies in the scaling down
of one’s expectations and in an ever greater appreciation for the ever smaller things in life.’
Like any medical facility, the chemo ward has its fair share of discarded magazines – from the classy to the sleazy. One particularly glaring example was the glossy magazine in such a place trumpeting its feature on divorce amongst couples where one partner has a serious illness – not the best choice in such a context, surely?
Context is always the key to theological understanding. This is why the persecuted church today understands the New Testament with a clarity which escapes those of us languishing in Western liberty. In the same way, the context of suffering and weakness unlocks the theological treasure house of the Psalms. If you would like to give it a try, then this book could be the key.
With My Whole Heart, by James Jones ISBN 978 0 281 06805 0 – Published by SPCK May 2012
In praise of flash fiction
I am not a big fan of ‘national days’. They flow so thick and fast that I develop a protective shell against them, like calcium round an old boiler pipe. National penguin day, national broccoli day ( I may have made that one up) and national talk-like-a-pirate day (which I did not) leave me cold, and slightly enervated.
A couple of weeks ago, just after I had written a post entitled Which 1000 words I came across the 1000words project. The project encourages people to write a story of between 100 and 1000 words in response to a photographic image. If you have a few moments to spare, why not visit the archive of submissions so far here? This celebration of word and image in powerful and ingenious combination sets all my creative nerves tingling and I hope to contribute once submissions open again soon.
The 1000 words project forms part of the National Flash Diction Day umbrella, whose site you can find here. If you click on the image below, it will take you to an archive of stories, none of them more than 1000 words long. To invest a few moments in reading them may just be the best mental stimulus to start your day. Go on – put down the coffee and pick up a story – who knows where it might lead you? Stories are part of the warp and weft of human civilization. In them we find ourselves, lose ourselves, and occasionally meet ourselves coming back the other way wearing a different hat.
Why not have a look? After all – National Flash Fiction day comes but once a year!
Image:nationalflashfictionday
Comedy for commuters
Today the story has broken that comedy writer Richard Preddy and comic actor Tony Robinson have teamed up with a train company to bring some humour to weary commuters. Humorous announcements will now include:
- ‘Welcome to Marylebone. If you’ve travelled to Londonfor a business meeting later, today’s recommended meaningless phrases are “blue sky thinking,” “moving forward,” and “low-hanging fruit”.’
- ’For any passengers who’ve not visited London before, do please prepare yourselves for the capital’s overwhelmingly calm and relaxing pace of life.’
- ‘You are advised that listening to loud music can annoy other passengers. Other ways to annoy them are to block the exits, push onto the train, or call everyone you meet “Denise”.’
- “I’d like to welcome passengers boarding this 7.33 from Birmingham Moor Street to London Marylebone. If you’ve just bumped into someone who you barely know, you now have one hour and 30 minutes of awkward small talk. Good luck.”
Image; bbc.co.uk
My initial thought on reading this was that these were gems of typically British humour. However, the following are from American airlines:
- Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve reached cruising altitude and will be turning down the cabin lights.This is for your comfort and to enhance the appearance of your flight attendants.”
- We are pleased to have some of the best flight attendants in the industry. Unfortunately, none of them are on this flight.
What makes the Chiltern Railways/ UK TV Gold partnership unusual, I believe, is that it is an official one. These are not an occasional quirky announcement by a bored employee – they will be come part of the railway company’s system.
I hope it brightens many a commuter’s day. Here’s a thought, though.Do you have any suggestions for comic church announcements,or do they sit uneasily with more sombre moments?
Paul and the Guinness advert
Earlier this morning I was speaking in church about ‘the domino effect’ where one thing leads to another, and another and another. For the Apostle Paul this happened when preaching led to arrest, which led to imprisonment, which led to a prison ship, which led to shipwreck, which led to a fire on the beach…which led to a snake bite. At that point the narrative holds its breath as people wait so see ‘if he will swell up and die’. He does not, and the story continues. His is a great example of how to trust God when the dominoes fall.
The short film below is nothing if not memorable. At the time of filming in 2007, the advert below was the most expensive ever made. Filmed high up in the mountains of Argentina, the statistics are amazing:
- A cast of 1000, none of whom had ever been filmed before
- 10,000 books
- 400 tyres
- 75 mirrors
- 50 fridges
- 45 wardrobes
- 6 cars
- 6000 dominoes, which took 3 people 2 days to set up – and 14 seconds to knock down
- 24 hours of film edited to 90 seconds
All this to sell a pint of Guinness? It takes more that that to keep me going when the dominoes start to fall…
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…postcards from Texas
Yesterday I came across this blog post in the New York Times from M.P Mueller on the New York Times blog. In it, Mueller extols the virtue of the handwritten touch in promoting client loyalty. In it she shares the story of a man who was so delighted to receive a handwritten postcard from a local clothing shop that he took pictures of it on his smartphone and shared them online! Print, rather than pixel, has become so counter-cultural that it merits special attention and provokes a special response, it would seem. Commenting on this phenomenon, Mueller says:
Why is a 40-cent postcard so powerful? As technology races forward,
people are increasingly starved for those high-touch extras,
like homemade meals and personalized notes.
The whole post, which you can find here, is well worth a read.
I spent last Saturday at a small churches’ convention as part of the Baptist Assembly in London. Most of the churches represented are not big on budget or personnel. Where they excel, I suspect, is precisely in those ‘high-touch extras’ which Mueller describes above. Are we missing a trick here, I wonder? Are we undervaluing the low-cost high-impact of the personal touch and over-estimating the impact of higher cost approaches? This is a genuine question, since I set high store by effective marketing and conscientious use of digital technology.
All the same, this little blog post was a reminder to me about remembering the church’s incarnational roots – where the most powerful medium for the message is one clothed in flesh.
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Lighter moments
No deep thought or theology here today, just two things which caught my eye.
The first is an advert from an Insurance company, forwarded by a Christian media provider, which uses Noah’s Ark as its graphic (see below). Are they suggesting that they would have paid out for an act of God such as the flood? And if so – who would have been left to pay the sum?
In this second ‘ooops’ moment, spare a thought for Greek actress Ino Menegaki. Yesterday she was playing the role of High Priestess at Olympia, lighting the Olympic flame with the rays of the sun before dispatching it on its way to London. Below is the moment, with the eyes of the world upon her, where she realised the flame had gone out. ‘Ooops’ doesn’t even come close:
Image: BBC.co.uk
When humour is cheep
By its very nature, Twitter lends itself to quick-fire humour. 140 characters rise like a soda bubble to the surface of the Twittersphere, have their brief burst, and then are gone. Although they can be logged and tracked by search engines, we tend to think of tweets as ephemeral and therefore we treat them with less discretion than we might other forms of communication. There have been two prime examples of this yesterday and today.
Yesterday card retailer Clinton’s announced that they were going into receivership. The twittersphere was replete with quips about this being ‘on the cards’, and I have to confess that a wry smile crossed my lips. That said, 8000 people woke to a grey recession morning to find that they were likely to lose their jobs. I’m not sure they would have found the tweets quite so funny.
This morning, as is often the case, Twitter was my first port of call for news. It was there that I discovered that 84 year-old hair stylist Vidal Sassoon had died. This was announced with the words “Vidal Sassoon has dyed” followed by another tweet speculating as to whether it was “too Sassoon” to make such a quip? I suspect that his wife ,three children and grandchildren might have felt that it was. Once again, I appreciated the wry humour, but felt uncomfortable with the timing.
Those of us who enjoy micro-blogging love its quick-fire banter and its tolerance of the half-baked rather than the fully formed opinion. Its ephemeral nature is part of its appeal. However, perhaps we should pause once in a while before hitting the send button and ask how it might be read. This is especially so for those who count themselves as #digidisciples, carrying their Christian identity from offline to online. As a tweet might say #justsayin.
Image: cdn0.fiverrcdn.com
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Harnessing diversity
Ever since day one, one of the church’s great assets has been the ability to harness the skills of many into a mission which is greater than any one individual. In the First Century this was one of the secrets which allowed slave and slave-owners, Jews and Gentiles, Romans and Greeks to worship alongside each other. Each felt they were called by God to be part of something greater and more enduring than their differences. From time to time this has been celebrated on this blog, with posts on diversity and colour.
Yesterday the boat ‘Collective Spirit’ was launched by the Boat Project. The boat began her life in February 2011, as over 1000 people came to donate wooden objects to be part of the boat. Every object incorporated in the build has now been grid-referenced, so that their stories can be read. Everything is there, from clothes pegs and wooden spoons to pieces of the Mary Rose and Jimi Hendrix’ guitar. Of course the donation was a one-way street. Once an object was handed over a thin slice of it was taken for incorporation into the hull and the owner can never have it back. Their donations were permanent and irreversible. It is even so with our commitment to the mission of the church, I believe.
There are many spectacular images of the boat, but the one I have selected below is one of the more ordinary ones. Why choose a hairbrush rather than a piece with a more majestic history? There are a number of reasons:
- Like many ministers, I often hear the words ‘ only me’ in church. People say they have ‘nothing special’ to offer, but that they are just ordinary, like the hairbrush.
- Note how the hairbrush is invested with a new kind of beauty when incorporated into the sleek majesty of the whole
- Seeing an ordinary object in an extraordinary setting allows us to see it differently. Maybe churches should be more extraordinary?
Image: achitectsjournal.co.uk
Two cruel words
I have often felt that if and only can be two of the cruellest words in the English Language. Listen to them on the lips of Mary when Jesus arrives after the death of her brother. Listen to them on the lips of those whose loved ones chose to go to work in the Twin Towers on September 11th 2001.
When you have done that, look at them on the top of this early Titanic infographic from April 27th 1912. As Ecclesisates says, ‘there is nothing new under the sun’.
Image:2.bp.blogspot.com
A challenging glimpse from Russia
Earlier this week I was having a conversation with @jamespoulter about the ‘moral culpability’ brought about by social media. Our connectivity means that ignorance of what is going on in the world is neither bliss nor excuse.
Consider, then,this image tweeted from an anti- Putin demonstration in Moscow one hour ago.If a picture is worth 1000 words – what might they be in this case, I wonder?
Image via @storify
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