The Campfire Church Ministry of the Word 31 10 21

I suppose there has always been a great deal wrong in human society. We can be compassionate and imaginative and heroic, but also cruel and greedy and violent beyond belief. 

If you read about the way King Leopold of Belgium treated the African slaves in the rubber plantations, or the tortures inflicted to extract religious confessions in the Middle Ages, or simply enquire into the treatment of pigs in meat plants and slaughterhouses, and the preparation of bulls for bullfights, I’ll hazard a guess the horror will never entirely leave you; it will be stamped on your soul like a brand burnt into slaves and domestic cattle.

We can look back on plagues and tortures, on slave ships and footage of shell-shocked soldiers, and be abjectly grateful for our boringly comfortable lives.

And yet we know, the stakes are even higher today. The greed and consumerism of the human race is in process of destroying our actual entire world. And in their hubris and cunning stupidity, governments and corporations seem to imagine greenwash is all that’s required.

And of course the miseries of the vivisection laboratory and the factory farm, the slave labour and the sweatshop, the predatory sexuality that snuffs out the happiness of childhood, the gross inequalities that require masses to live with despair so that the privileged few can wallow in obscene levels of wealth, the corrupt politics obtaining power through oppression and deception — not to mention the wife-beating and the gay-bashing and now the new feminist sport of persecuting trans women — these never end.

We are in a peculiar time of intensification, because the old order is dying — but tightening its grip because it is against its nature to let go. We are in a time of heightening authoritarianism challenged by grassroots rebellion, all around the world. The edifices of power are crumbling, and life in the rubble is uncomfortable. The opposite poles of government and governed are increasing characterised not by support and respect, producing harmony and peace, but jealousy and opportunism and antagonism. We are at war with ourselves.

Our proposed solutions to all that ails us are also polarised. In his budget this week, the UK chancellor announced with satisfaction that growth and employment is increasing while debt is shrinking: “Let there be no doubt, our plan is working,” he said.

Looking at the people living in vans outside the row houses of our urban streets, the people begging on doorsteps in every town, the increasing number dependent on food banks, the gradual starvation of our education system, our utilities, our transport infrastructure, our police, the discharge of raw sewage into the sea all around the coastline of our island nation, the disruption to food supplies and the the collapse of so many businesses under Brexit, I had to wonder what planet he is on.

But it intrigues me that the Brexit vote, and the vote between the political left and right, display — again — polarity. An almost even split.

So we are living in days of unrest when there is much to concern us, when a response seems to be required of us, when people are marching in the streets and crying out for support — and yet the clamour is not unified but polarised. The placards and flags of one  challenge those of the opposing side. Where there is no vision the people perish, but where the vision is present but intensely antagonist, there is ugliness, war, and dissension. Together, we stand. Divided, we fall. But we cannot unite when we see things so differently. And all the while, behind the scenes, opportunists turn circumstances of chaos and disaster to personal gain. But with climate change upon us, they have nothing to crow about. They too sail on this ship that is sinking.

What to do?

I put it to you that never was there a time when personal holiness was so absolutely required of us — to live with transparent authenticity and integrity the Gospel of Christ. By this, he said, will people know that you are my disciples; that you love one another. If you aren’t a hundred per cent sure what love is (there are, after all, many definitions of it) I suggest that it is effectually indistinguishable from kindness.

The Gospel of Christ, therefore, by his own definition, is not about being right but being kind. Christ calls us to love one another, and it’s an odd thing, but true, that we love most not those who have been kind to us, but those to whom we have been kind. That’s right. Being kind fosters love. Even if you don’t love someone much in the first place, you will love them more if you are kind to them, and less if you are not. It always works that way.

The way of the Spirit is not a matter of moral or theological rectitude — correctness — it’s about the authenticity and integrity that allows the mystery of the great I Am to shine through; being who you really are, living with such transparency, such simplicity that the light of your being — the flame of the Spirit in the sanctum of your heart — can be seen.

This is a time when we are required to hold our light steady, to keep our footing, to resist the whirl and spin, the cross-currents created by polar opposites. 

Now is a time when we do well to live so humbly and quietly, to become so lowly and so small, that we walk beneath the thunderclaps and clashes of the Titans, and make with our own feet a network of tracks of peace at the grassroots level. This is a time to live below the radar, to stay centred and keep radiating peace. Neither the practice nor the vocabulary of war is helpful in these days. Stay back from antagonism, from demonising others and calling them evil. Refuse to be drawn.

But that doesn’t mean doing nothing. Part of the strength of humilis, the lowly, unseen, simple life, is that it gives back to you the time and space to observe and notice and think and wisely choose.

If you live small and quiet and slow, if you hold fast to humility and peace, if you choose gentleness and kindness, if you stop to listen and have time to see, then you will be part of the generation of the new dawn that is surely coming. Your choice will, in and of itself, determine the world in which you live. 

And if we all do it, it’ll be a movement, and that is the way we change the world.

Anxiety, pressure, and hurry, are behind many of the poor choices we make. Ill-considered decisions made while we had too much going on to think straight — too many demands and commitments; fear of what others might think of us or do to us; self-imposed deadlines and targets.

In these days when the polarities are churning up the ground, make of it a ploughed field where you sow the seeds of peace. 

It doesn’t have to be anything important or big, it can just be about feeding the wild birds, or walking slowly enough for the little legs of the child whose hand you are holding, or choosing to buy milk from the farm where the cows are allowed to keep their calves, or sharing a cup of tea and cheerful conversation with someone whose political views are the opposite of your own, or putting a tin of baked beans in the food bank basket at the supermarket, or planting a tree, or giving your sleeping bag to Care4Calais, or buying your bread and vegetables loose instead of wrapped up in plastic, or washing your fleece in a special bag to keep the microfibres out of the ocean, or smiling to your neighbour and stopping to say hello. One foot in front of the other, one deliberate decision at a time. This is how we build the kingdom, this is the only way we have to change the world.

When I was a young woman, we had a rusty old van that had to be nurtured along. In the winter, it wouldn’t start, but under the bonnet was fixed a crank handle. You could take it out and fit it to a hole low down at the front, and use it to turn the engine manually. It was the only way to get it going in the cold.

Our small acts of faithfulness, practised every day in a lowly and authentic life, are our crank handle to restart the engine of this rusty old world and make it go a little further down the road.

And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? [Micah 6.8]

I love this song.

"Fuss" and "fancy" funerals.

This may be just a UK thing.

I am seeing a lot of funeral related ads on TV at the present time. 

It might be because of Covid, or because I watch TV in the afternoon rather than the evening — like other elderly people I enjoy programmes about home renovations and the ambulance service, and mostly avoid dramas that can be described as either gritty or steamy. 

The ads about funerals jostling for space along with pleas from charities and recommendations for home/life insurance and equity release, are trending in the direction of what you might call "simple cremations".

The idea is that when you die the company will collect your body, take it away and cremate it. That's it. I don't know what they do with the ashes. You pre-pay this plan, so that there are no costs for your family to cover.

Having had a lot of experience with bereaved and dying people, and with officiating at funerals, I offer for your consideration a few comments.

The ads in question all show people saying when they die they don't want "all that fuss". A "no-fuss" funeral is what they want. 

Apart from "fuss" another word that features in most of the ads is "fancy". They don't want a "fancy funeral" with a fancy hearse. They want a simple cremation so their family is free to remember them and celebrate their life in whatever way they choose, without the worry of the financial burden a funeral would place upon them.

Let me say at the outset that, since my family are experienced at crafting religious ceremony, had I known of a firm that offered this option back when I pre-paid my funeral, it is probably what I would have chosen. So I am not against this form of dealing with the disposal of a body.

Apart from that, almost all else I have to say advises caution.

There is no need for you to leave a financial burden that will be a problem to your family, because you can pre-pay any funeral, not just a simple cremation that has no funeral service. My own funeral is pre-paid with Golden Charter — a belt-and-braces option, because Golden Charter works with independent family funeral directors, so if Golden Charter goes bust your chosen funeral director has to do the funeral anyway, and if the funeral director goes bust then Golden Charter must fulfil your pre-paid requirements through another funeral service.

Funerals are expensive, which is why pre-paying them makes sense — you peg the cost; but they are not, as some ads make out, "ripping off the public".

Every funeral needs the following people: 

• two people to pick up the dead body at any time of day or night
• a funeral director who meets with the family, implements your wishes and organises everything and takes care of you on the day 
• a hearse driver 
• bearers (four or six depending on the size of the deceased person)
• a driver for any limousine you need (crematoria are usually on the edge of town and can be hard to get to for non-drivers, which many elderly people are, even if they used to drive once)
• the receptionist at the funeral service who will take your initial call, make your appointment, look after you if you go to view the body, receive any flowers for the coffin etc, and be on hand if you need to call again.
• the mortician
• the crematorium office staff 
• the person at the crematorium who looks after everything on the day — tidies the chapel, makes sure things run on time, clears the body at the end, looks after the electronics for music and monitors the chapel space
• the people who actually move and cremate the body, or dig the grave (if it is a burial) and come back to fill it in when you've gone
• an organist if you want to sing hymns — a live musician is infinitely preferable to singing along to a recorded backing track, and can provide any other occasional music with sensitivity 
• the officiant, who will (should, anyway) also meet with you beforehand to carefully talk through exactly what you want for the ceremony, and help you to find any readings, music etc that you may be unsure about, and can guide and advise you about what will flow well and what may be best avoided (and why), and then will craft the ceremony for you, and officiate on the day
• the priest/minister and verger and any other church staff (organist, flower-arranger, grave-digger, maintenance crew for the grounds, cleaners etc), if you are not going to the crematorium but only having a burial at a church

All these people are involved in a funeral, and all of them have to heat their homes and pay their mortgages and feed their families — and that's why funerals are expensive, not because funeral directors are ripping off the public. The rising cost of living means every single one of these disbursements rises every year, and that's why funeral costs rise all the time, and by quite a lot. Nobody is being ripped off, and if there are some things you don't want — a limousine, an organist, an officiant — you don't have to have them and if you don't have them you won't have to pay for them. Furthermore, all funeral directors take their share of what are sometimes called "paupers' funerals", where the deceased has no money and no relatives or friends — the bearers stand in as congregation, and the prayers and music and readings are carried out with as much care as if it were the funeral of the Queen. It's also traditionally the case that everyone provides their services free for the funeral of an infant.

Moving on, then, to what the ads say about "a fancy funeral" and "fuss".

This is, frankly, disingenuous marketing nonsense. 

Funerals are not fancy and there is no fuss.

A funeral can be quiet, simple and plain; dignified but not complicated. 

Life is changing all the time, but it remains true that most people feel the need to mark the passing of someone they love by laying that person to rest in a way that includes:

• prayers or reflections in keeping with their spiritual outlook
• sharing of tender and happy memories, skilfully expressed in some form of address, and also as family tributes
• meaningful readings (poetry/scriptures etc)
• music
• silence
• gathering
• beauty
• the solemnity of a ceremony in an appropriate space
• a form of words to commend the deceased to burial or cremation, and to commend their soul to whatever is in keeping with the spiritual outlook of the deceased and the mourners

This is what the ads are calling "fancy" and "fuss", and in my experience these elements are helpful and supportive to bereaved people, and are a significant step toward healing the pain of grief and the ache of deep loss. Gathering with friends and family to commend a beloved partner or child or friend into the hands of God (or whatever is your belief), and remember the person they were and all that they meant to you is not making a fuss, for goodness sake. And to take their last earthly remains to the chapel in a coffin covered with flowers in the back of a hearse (rather than to the cremators in a body bag in the works van) is not "fancy".

The simple cremation ads suggest that if you dispense with all this fancy fuss, your family can remember you in the way they wish — and the ads usually show people larking about on a beach or drinking wine at a party. 

Really? That's an adequate farewell for someone whose death leaves you feeling as though half of you has died as well? Letting off a firework and drinking a glass of beer covers all you want to do or say if your adult child has committed suicide or died in a car crash? Are you sure?

If you, personally, do decide the most appropriate way forward for you is one of these advertised simple cremations, I still think you would do well to leave in place some kind of arrangement for a ceremony to mark your passing. 

The last chapter of my book Spiritual Care of Dying and Bereaved People (second, re-written edition with BRF, not the first edition with SPCK) gives detailed templates for funeral ceremonies to help you craft your own. That book is out of print now, and available only secondhand — Amazon seems to be more or less out of it, but there are some copies on eBay — but if you want a copy and can't get hold of one I can send you a PDF of the text.

A "simple" cremation may be the right thing for you, but think carefully before deciding — if there is anyone who loves you in this world, they will probably be comforted and helped at a time of painful loss by a thoughtful, appropriate, well-prepared funeral ceremony reflecting the spiritual outlook of the deceased and those close to them. The financial burden is indeed significant, so either pre-paying your funeral or simple cremation, or taking out life insurance (which should, but may not, cover it), is a responsible step that, in my opinion, everyone should consider.

 

Can we have both?

I really enjoy playing Spider Solitaire. I find it has metaphors for life in it, and helps me think creatively and strategically.

I was playing it this morning, and early in the game I saw there were two red aces. One was sitting on a red five and the other one was sitting on a red three. There was a red two available to move so I could move one of the aces, but which one? I wanted to free up both the three and the five for future moves. Dilemma! But then I saw, further along the row, another red two I'd overlooked. I could have both! I could move both aces, and free up both cards, and the game could proceed in peace, more satisfactorily. It was just a question of looking until I'd assimilated the whole picture, standing back enough to see all the possibilities, taking the time and care to absorb all the options. But even though I could have both, I still had to do one first — I could move only one card at a time.

And of course, sometimes in Spider Solitaire you move a card (or a stack of cards) with the intention of moving them back again later — you have to see what will be freed up by what move. It's kind of similar to a dance weaving in and out, moving forward and back.

I came to my game of Spider Solitaire from a while spent on Facebook — I went there interested to see if had recovered for the moment from its global outrage, and yes it had; well done those people! So I spent a few minutes on Facebook, where a friend had posted a memory shared from a group for men's rights, pointing out that social conventions impose constraints on men as they do upon women, and that consequently sometimes it is who  men are subject to domestic violence. 

This reminded me of the Black Lives Matter movement, countered by Far Right groups taking up the alternative slogan, All Lives Matter.

Of course it is true that all lives matter, not just black lives and indeed not just human lives. It is true that some men suffer from domestic violence and men must have human rights as well as women. 

But, just as in Spider Solitaire, you move one card as at a time. Sometimes, you have to take this card over here to make that card free. You have to work with what is presenting and available. But the objective is never to move just one card, it's to win the whole game.

In the Black Lives Matter movement, the objective was to move one card, to move away the racial injustice of white supremacy to free up the black people trapped under it. The white people had to be moved aside to let the black people breathe. The white people were still in the game, they still mattered; social justice issues that affected them like poverty and gender disparity hadn't ceased to be important — but it was the white people who had to move this time, because they were kneeling on the black people's necks. You can only move one card at a time. Once you've moved that one, you move the next — you look at something like dumping of toxic waste in areas where poor people live, and you move that card to let the poor people breathe, set them free. You can't win the game by just throwing the decks of cards across the room shouting "All Lives Matter!" and letting them land where they will. That doesn't achieve anything.

In the same way, with violence towards women, if that's the card you're moving this time then it's not helpful at that point to start talking about men's rights and how men suffer from violence too. Yes, of course they do, and we can get to that. But we have to get there one step at a time. Acknowledging how unsafe and vulnerable women can be just walking home from work is an important thing to address. We need to lift away the card of violence proceeding from men's sense of entitlement in respect of women (I felt depressed to read that domestic violence towards women goes up significantly in connection with football World Cup matches, and even more when the man's home team loses). We need to set women free from this, lift that oppression away from them. Domestic violence against men is indeed another card in the game, but we can't get to that yet, because other cards are nearer the front.

Sometimes, like me and my red aces, we see that we can have both. Some set-ups make it easy to achieve more — but even so, we have to do it one step at a time. If we say Black Lives Matter, or advocate for the rights of women to live safe from violence, we aren't overlooking or forgetting the suffering of white poor or men trapped in miserable homes with violent women — they, too are hidden face down under the decks of cards, or imprisoned so far back along a stack face-up that we have to work patiently and strategically to reach them. But we'll get there.

Step by step, by slow and patient means, by looking deeply and acting strategically, we join in the work of God for healing the world. Spider Solitaire can be taken up as one of the ways we pray, one of the ways we learn to see.

Freedom and peace and hope for women and men, for white and black — yes, we can have both, but we do it one move at a time. We start with what presents. We make our moves, working with what we can reach, with what we have, with what the presenting picture and the shape of things might be, this time.

Going home early

 My children did not enjoy school, and neither did I.

Both I and they can look back and pick out many aspects for which we were grateful — friends made, facts learned, all the usual funny moments that still make us laugh, interesting life experience, and a heightened awareness of golden September days (the autumn term started in early September after the long summer holiday) — but in general we didn't like it.

On the last day of each term, when school broke up for the holidays, the children were sent home early. This was always a day to be prized. For me, and for my children, it was such a happy thing to miss the last couple of lessons of the day and go home early.

In our household we talk about death more than most people I know, usually at the instigation of me or Hebe. I'm not entirely sure why. I was closely involved in hospice chaplaincy for several years, and with bereaved people in crafting ceremonies for funerals for many more years after that. And Hebe and I both worked as care assistants in a residential palliative care setting for some time. So our encounters with death have been up close and personal. All my daughters helped me look after my husband Bernard in the time of his dying, but it was Hebe who lived with us, in her little caravan under the spreading oak tree, and travelled with me through the long weeks and months as we saw him safely home. And we have had several other dances with death as family members ended their lives. Finding my father's body in his little cottage, the door left conveniently open. Sitting with my mother-in-law from my first marriage as she breathed her last breaths. Sitting with my father-in-law from that marriage, talking about things that mattered in his final days, singing harvest hymns in close harmony round his bedside. Spending time with my mother during the years of her long, uncertain, reluctant wandering out of this world. One way and another, it's fair to say death has been prominent in our lives.

One of the deepest bereavements for Hebe has been the loss of her beloved cat Ted — valiant ratter, ravishing eyes, a purr like a diesel engine, but also a lame leg and a heart defect. Ted was not an old cat when he died (just as we went into lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic); he was only nine. Ted went home early.

Hebe and Alice often wonder how they will manage their old age. We are not a wealthy family, and we depend heavily on sharing and helping and doing things for ourselves — we live comfortably, but that's because we also live thriftily. Of my five children, only one has (two) children of her own, and one of them has definite fragilities. "Who will look after us?" is a question that lingers in Hebe's and Alice's minds. We know that those five sisters will always be there for one another — but I remember the loneliness of my great-grandmother, once her sisters had gone home ahead of her, and she was the only one left. What then? 

So death and dying is a topic of conversation that comes round for us fairly often. We are intensely interested in the world of light — I have glimpsed it, I can remember it — and in the pathways of the soul that thread their way between this world and the world of light that carries it, surrounds it, over-shines it. We are interested in the light beings who watch over us and help us. We walk along the highway bridging the gap between Earth and Heaven that Jesus opened for us. We look for the signs along the way. We notice the changing landscape as we pass through.

And, in these strange and sorrowful times when so many have died — and the pandemic is only one part of it, there's more to it than that — Hebe has come up with a phrase for the ones (like her Ted) who go before we thought we were ready to say goodbye. She says they got to go home early. 

All of us come here to learn, and to teach, and to make friends and travel along together. Living on Earth is a lot like going to school. 

There are times and seasons – term-times and holidays, hard and hated lessons, and ones we look forward to, with teachers we love and admire and some seriously horrible ones too — but all of us graduate in the end. 

There is leaving home to go to school in the morning, dressed in our strange uniform of skin and bone; there is the experience of meeting the rest of our year group, and searching for friendly faces; there is the awkwardness of playtime and the tensions of finding a partner to go into assembly with us, hand in hand. But the sun begins to sink towards the west, and at last it's home time. And if it's a special day, if you are lucky — perhaps if you have been ill — someone will come to collect you, and you will get to go home early.

Tracks through the forest

 There you are, wandering along, doing nothing in particular, no plan — and then suddenly life picks you up and takes you somewhere unexpected and completely surprising.

In March 2020 when the virus struck, what came to mind first was that people would need accessible online spiritual support. I was so fortunate to have participated in St Pixels online church, and I could see how a Facebook group could be adapted to create something similar.

Most of the worship that emerged online at the beginning of the pandemic (things broadened out as time went on and people got au fait with Zoom) was definitely a spectator sport. Priests essentially posted videos of themselves enacting liturgy, or (in the more house-church end of the spectrum) church music bands posted videos of themselves performing a song, or children's leader put up videos of action songs, or churches posted podcasts and videos of acts of worship (hymns, prayers, bible readings, sermon).

What particularly interested me was the understanding this implied about what happens at an act of worship — what it is.

For my family, a crucial aspect of going to church is the conversation in the pew. Our pew always has an ongoing sotto voce commentary about whatever is happening, augmented by exchanged glances and understood facial expressions. We have all been going to church so long that we have a massive shared memory bank of (mainly hilarious) experiences undergone together.

So, as soon as the hymn "Lo, he comes with clouds descending" is announced on Advent Sunday, everyone in our pew knows this hymn has the "dazzling body bears" in it — second cousins to Gladly the cross-eyed bear, and the cross wee flea, and the image bear, a menagerie found in hymnody and treasured forever. We sing the hymn, we don't say anything, but the person next to you will quietly nudge you with her elbow when that line approaches, or silently point to it on the page.

Church isn't church without this sub-culture of incessant interaction. So when the UK went into lockdown and chapels closed, I knew this was an aspect of attending church that absolutely had to be incorporated in new online forms.

And you can do it on Facebook.

When we created The Campfire Church, we'd set up an event for Sunday morning — just a designated page on Facebook — that only members could access (to protect privacy and discretion in intercessions and confession etc), and where only hosts could post.

So the posts on the page were like the people who stand at the front in church — the reader, the preacher, the intercession-leader. Some were text based, with an picture to add a visual and imaginative dimension, and some were links out to YouTube videos (for the reading, the sermon, sometimes a different form of prayer). But the comments for each posts enabled full participation.

Our intercessions were always a time of open prayer; the host kicked off with a written starter prayer supported by an appropriate photo, then in the comments section anyone who wanted posted their prayers.

And because of the emoticon reaction function on Facebook, it was possible to feel the affirmation of others in prayer with you — or sometimes others would reply to your prayer specifically with an "Amen" or similar.

And on the posts with the sermons, it worked exactly like church does — as they watched the video of the sermon, people made observations in the comment section of the post — saying if something especially spoke to them, or adding thoughts of their own.

Likewise in the hymns — in the comment section someone might remark on something uplifting or amusing in the video. It was just like being together in church.

Gradually, as vaccinations were rolled out, the churches began to open up once more, and it was possible for everyone to go back to where they were before. Except not everybody wanted to. The pandemic season had exposed and amplified dynamics we had striven to overlook and ignore; and the natural break of lockdown just (for some of us)  . . . extended.

Once it became possible for people to return to their churches, we suspended The Campfire Church — we didn't want to set up a rival organisation. But it became apparent that some of us didn't want to go back, couldn't find a place to settle; we had changed, and also perhaps been obliged to face up to some aspects of our experience of church we'd been trying not to see.

I and Grace (Buzzfloyd here — my daughter) began to look at ways forward for the stragglers; the people who didn't want to go back but couldn't find a way forward. We believe quite strongly in physical meeting, though we aren't over-smitten with institutions, and in the end we've settled on a physical (in the house where I live) meeting on the second Sunday morning of each month. We're calling it the Second Sunday Circle. Whenever there's a fifth Sunday in the month, we'll go back online for The Campfire Church to meet again, on Facebook.

It's been a while since I bore responsibility for a physical church group, and online it's all pictures and videos, ideas and words. 

Our Second Sunday Circle needed resourcing, in the same way as did The Universal Glue Factory, a fresh expression of church I ran about 20 years ago (the glue that holds the universe together is love, btw), and the retreats and quiet days I used to run.

So I set to, putting together the stationery and art/craft/music resources we'll need, as well as seating, coffee mugs, etc.

During the 20 years since the Universal Glue Factory ended (because I got married and moved away), I've lived in shared homes where my personal space was very restricted, so my possessions have been limited to clothes and toiletries and medications, pretty much.

I have been startled to discover such joy, such a sense of play, in getting together the materials for creative expression. It's such fun to come up with ideas, to make things and share ideas.

My idea of church is not about sitting in serried ranks listening, and reading prayers out of a book. My understanding of church is cauldron magic (the nourishment of a sharing circle), not sword magic (top-down authority where one person stands at the front and everyone else sits in rows to watch and listen). 

Some people express their souls best in music, others in prayer and healing, others in words, others in pictures. There should be possibility and entry-points for every different kind of person, and something for even the smallest child to relate to.

And hot drinks and snacks. Grace made the point (talking about café church) that when you go to a friend's house they make you a cup of tea, and it's the signal to sit down together and chat. So when you go to meet up with Jesus and his friends, it makes sense to be offered a hot drink and a snack, and get out your knitting, and sit down together to interact. Our Second Sunday Circle will be that kind of church — with songs and stories and conversation, the sharing of who we really are.

But, when I said at the beginning, "there you are, wandering along, doing nothing in particular, no plan — and then suddenly life picks you up and takes you somewhere unexpected and completely surprising", I was thinking about how surprised I've felt at my own response of excitement and joy at the thought of being allowed to play again — being allowed to have the craft materials, and join in singing, and meet together to share. Oh, my goodness, it's going to be brilliant!