Roll on, the eclipse

The great American preacher Mike Yaconelli once told the story of how he finally met his all-time hero Henri Nouwen. He had been so excited about actually meeting the great man that he got lost on the way there and arrived late. When the door opened Nouwen greeted him with a bad-tempered peevish rant about a spoiled dinner and a wasted evening.

It's hard when your hero lets you down.

There was an episode of the 1980s cartoon series Brave Starr on this theme. As his one-time hero is led away in handcuffs, Brave Starr asks: "How could you? You were my hero." To which Jingles simply snarls back: "I never asked to be your hero".

And there's the rub. It's our fault for putting someone on a pedestal if they eventually fall off. The drama is entirely of our own creation.

I like people. I really like people. I see the best in everyone. I want it that way. That's my problem. It's my fault that for me, everyone must be good if I'm going to like them. As soon as they seem to me slightly less than perfect I can like them no more. To my credit I will continue seeing only good for as long as I possibly can, but I have my limits. Then a trap door opens and they are gone out of my life for good. Behind me the street is lined with metaphorical corpses. Undoubtedly this is a bad attitude, and my punishment is to stagger from one disappointment to the next.

Well, they say the eclipse is a time of renewal. Roll on!

I comb the rubble of a shattered world to find the bright face of an angel
And say again and say again that I have written this - this is for you.

(Clive James)

Life Goes On

© Clifford Smith 2014

Life goes on, you know.

I woke up early again today

so I got up, had a cup of tea,

sat by the window where I could see

the blue-tits round the feeder

pecking away

I always try to catch Thought For The Day

on Radio 2. It was a buddhist this time, nice man,

talking about the weather

Did a bit of tidying up in the kitchen

It gets so dirty! While I was at it I polished the kettle.

It looks like new

The house looks lovely you know. I got some

new sheets and pillow cases in the week.

So fresh and comfy

You would have liked it. You were always

on about getting new sheets.

Well, now I have.

Yes, life goes on all right without you

my love. It was hard at first I must admit,

but I got over it

And then I noticed something strange.

You were dead and gone all right

no doubt about that

But death can't take away my love

for you. And though I cannot hold you in my arms,

You're still safe inside my heart

where you always were. So nothing's changed,

really. And any world that gave someone like you to me

can't be all bad, can it?

You are HERE...

This is a diagram showing where we are in relation to everything.

Our civilised daily lives are built on the foundation of our religions, laws and customs. These in turn are derived from our shared sense of values, which arise out of our still evolving mythology. And this was born out of our connectedness with Nature, the seasons, life and death.

If we start undermining our religions and laws, if we trash our values for quick profit, if we fail to understand or recognise our own mythology, if we lose our connection with the Earth, then the whole edifice will collapse.

This system is only held in place by a transcendent sense of the divine, the timeless, the ineffable, or as Wordsworth put it, the "sense of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air and in the mind of man."

No Fear

What a celebrant does

You are a child of the Universe,
No less than the trees and the stars,
You have a right to be here.
       (Desiderata, Max Ehrmann)

When the Ancients lay on the cool ground at night, looking up at the stars, which encrusted the heavens like an unfolding glittering white cloth, they liked to imagine patterns like the join-the-dots pictures you may have drawn when you were a child. Some of these they named after animals – the Great Bear, the Swan, the Scorpion; some were characters from story – Hercules, Cassiopeia, Cepheus.

In reality these are not groups of stars at all. They just look that way from Earth. But we could equally group them in different ways if we wanted. We could have the Fork-lift Truck, the Harley Davidson, Tower Bridge. Seeing patterns in things comes easily to us. This is how we make sense of the world, of history, of our own lives.

As with the stars, we don't have just one story to tell. When we write a job application we will include everything about our education, our relevant experience and our positions of responsibility. But we probably won't include the way we struggled with bullying at school, or the dedication and love of our parents. We won't include the one we love, and the day we first met. Yet these things also have their story, and they are more a part of us than our position at work.

While our mundane life plods on from education to qualification to position to promotion to retirement to death, inside we are super-heros on a great adventure. We face danger, injury and disease; we see friends and family through life and death; we witness the miracle of birth; we struggle with our weakness as much as with our greatness. Against all the odds we triumph.

This is our brilliant human existence. It is a story written in the stars, waiting to be told. Who will tell our story? Or will it be buried with our bones? The skill of a celebrant is to recognise you as a child of the Universe, no less than the trees and the stars, your life unfolding like a cloth of silver.

With each turn of life there is a death and a rebirth. When we are born, the waiting is over, the period of pregnancy ends. It is a joyful beginning, but there is also a sense of loss; ask any mother. We cross a threshold into the unknown. And so at each new stage of life: starting school, starting secondary school, leaving home, starting work, giving vows, - right through to retirement, each milestone a new beginning.

A celebration can be seen as a snapshot pasted up onto the storyboard of our life, recording each stage as we go through. But there is more to it than just this. Imagine for a moment that you finally worked out for yourself how space and time was really structured, an understanding that would end a hundred years of speculation. Naturally you would want to tell the world. Why? Because until you do, to all intents and purposes, it hasn't happened. Unless you share it, it is just something in your head. Likewise a ceremony actualises reality – it makes reality happen.

In the Jewish tradition, a statement can occur on three levels: the first is a thought – even a thought is an action; the next is the spoken word, which is more powerful than just a thought; the most potent of all is the deed. In business, a handshake, or in previous times a kiss, seals a deal. Wearing the ring seals the marriage. A ceremony binds an idea into fact.

A qualified celebrant can work with you to make a ceremony that is right for you where you are in your life, that says what you want to say, that has the right feel. It can combine words, music, light, colour, costume - plus doves, balloons, fireworks, anything! Or just a few well-chosen words in a solemn setting. It's your call. You matter.

Boyhood

Last week I went to see Richard Linklater's epic film Boyhood. If you like action adventures, don't go. I loved it to bits.

Nathaniel, writing in TheFilmExperience.net says this:

Boyhood is less about its narrative than the experience of making one's own story through living, romanticizing, examining and sometimes confronting life itself.

Making ones own story. We can find ourselves wasting our lives trying to get a walk-on part in someone else's story when in reality we are starring in our own show right now, just like Truman in The Truman Show. We are real, but only when we are not playing a part.

We should be celebrating at every twist and turn because this is our life. We are not waiting for it to start, we cannot disown the bits we don't like, they are all what we are.

There is a beautiful scene in Boyhood, where the boy Mason's Mum casually advises an immigrant labourer to go to evening classes and learn English because he deserves better in life. Years later she is served by him in the restaurant he now manages, having gone to class and made good. She is struck speechless. She realises that in her preoccupation with her career and her relationships, much of her life has gone by unnoticed.

"You know what I'm realising? My life is just going to go. Like that. This series of milestones. Getting married. Having kids. Getting divorced. The time that we thought you were dyslexic. When I taught you how to ride a bike. Getting divorced... again. Getting my masters degree. Finally getting the job I wanted. Sending Samantha off to college. Sending you off to college. You know what's next? Huh? It's my fucking funeral!"

It has been said that life is what happens while you are making your plans.

We should all celebrate the life we have. It may not be exactly what we wanted, or what we were expecting, but it is ours and it is precious. One day our story will end. May it be a good story. May it have a happy ending.

What's happening to me?

Guardian Spirit Quickremix by dj4star

A year ago I finally turned my back on my career in Social Housing. I had been trying to make my way within an organisation that was trying to reinvent itself, but actually tearing itself apart. This was a painful and bruising experience for me, and I wondered how on earth I had ever got involved with it in the first place.

I had decided to dedicate myself to Social Housing as a way of doing something worthwhile with my life after 20 years of writing computer programs. There were good times working with wonderful caring people to help make life better for some of the less fortunate in the social mix. This made it worth the grind and the knocks, but only just. Being used for target practice by interdepartmental snipers was not a part of my ideal.

But it's an ill wind, etc., and this kicking gave me the impetus finally to cut my ties to Housing and to follow my bliss, and so I got my life back on track. I sold the boat I had bought when the computer work dried up, and enrolled on celebrant training with Green Fuse.

Cut back to the present. I've changed. I'm still changing. As my course work progresses I find myself being drawn into increasingly spiritual realms. I have been watching old interviews with Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung and Alan Watts. Poetry, prayers and songs weave patterns of meaning in my head, and I resonate with the rhythms of the stars. I walk on holy ground. Sometimes it feels almost as if I could stretch out my arms and take flight. What's happening to me?

In my head I hear Abba:

I believe in angels
Something good in everything I see
I believe in angels
When I know the time is right for me
I'll cross the stream
I have a dream

...or Spirits Having Flown by the BeeGees:

I'd like to take you where my spirit flies
Through the empty skies we go alone
Never before having flown".

I think of the prayer attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh:

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show Your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.
We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.