Wednesday, May 14, 2008 The Becoming of G-d: What the Trinitarian nature of God has to do with Church and a deep Spirituality for the Twenty First Century

I am pleased to say, that at last, the book is available for purchase at £9.95 through YTC Press. This, my second book, seeks to explore the theology behind groups like Moot, Emerging & Fresh Expressions of Church. It looks at the whole issue of knowing G-d through experience, and that the concept of the Trinity, formulated through the Cappadocian Mothers & Fathers, is a best guess understanding of the nature of God, which though partially revealed in Christ, remains mystically out of reach. However, the Western church, through the differences of latin and greek texts, never fully understood the concept of the Trinity, which has distorted its theology and practice.

I explore the importance of this understanding of God in the context of our postmodern culture driven under the logic of consumption and information technology, which drives a new form of cultural mysticism. In this brave new world, the importance of church reflecting the Trinitarian nature of God as 'mystical communion or community' becomes an imperative. Finally, I explore the difficult challenge of building community in a culture which is loosing its interpersonal skills to the cult of the individual.

So it should be a good read!!

To Order A Copy
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Christian Spirituality, belief & Madness

Last night, I watched a really interesting programme on the whole issue of Christian Spirituality, belief & Madness led by a Clinical Psychologist. It was very good, to hear it listen here

Prayer Development Day | 25th October | St Saviours Priory

Pleased to say we have finally got our act together regarding a prayer development day. So on Sat 25th October Ian Adams will lead an experiential prayer development day at the beautiful surroundings of St Saviour's Priory to explore contemplative approaches to prayer to enrich our own spiritual life. For more information or to book places, click here.

It is a common problem for us all to struggle with a personal spiritual life. Many of us struggle to find approaches to personal prayer that feel authentic and resourcing. The resulting danger is then created, where we carry a faith in our head with an inner desert in our heart. In our Rhythm of Life, we acknowledge the need for a sustaining spiritual rhythm that seeks God to resource us, over and above an approach to faith which is dependent on theories, theology and the stuff in our head. This is the great impoverishment of a an overly rational or postmodern approach to spirituality.

It is a great pleasure to have Ian Adams facilitate this day, who is an incredible resource in this who area. See event pages for more information.

God & our Work - Gareth Powell

Last night was a bit of a little reunion. Gareth Powell came back to the Moot Eucharist to give the homily addressing the issue of God and Work. It was extremely good, and has been made available for podcast. If you have not subscribed to moot podcasts and want to hear it, click here
If you want to subscribe to Moot podcasts and hear it, then click here.
Personally I was challenged by Gareth's thoughts about vocation and work, and then thinking about work in the context of our Rhythm of Life. At last we have started to have live music, Dorethe and Trine led some Taize chants using the new piano - horraahh. Now we just need to sort out visuals! Good to see you Gareth, don't leave it too long before we see you again.

Speaking Tour 2008 in US & Canada

Pleased to say that the Speaking Tour is coming together, with stops now in New York, Montreal, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Vancouver and Seattle, with the possibility of a few others. So check out my blog of information for what and where here.

The second book is coming out very soon, so will post information on how to order it if you are interested. In my second book, I go into a lot more of own personal reflection regarding the implications of a Trinitarian God, and what it has to say about out Ancient:Future focus. The Second book is being published by YTC Press.

Poem - The Godhead by Peter Thomas

There’s no triumvirate, nor trinity
No triune divinity
(No spirit, father, son all three)
In me, that oversee, that hold sway;
That prick delay and harness haste
And govern all my ways
From morose to delirious
Not three, but two:
Doctrine and experience.

These bedfellows with twin thrones
In my head and heart and bones
Are rulers over me
And when there’s peace
There’s sobriety
When they agree
There’s harmony
When they make love
They begat bliss
No matter how painful
The issue is.

But when they’re at odds
Like feuding gods
When they’re unstable
A Cain and Abel
Fisticuffs
Hostility
O when they both do disagree, they thrash and cut and shout
And when they bleed they both bleed doubt.

Thus one must have the final say
Yes one must oversee , hold sway
So at twenty paces on a misty dawn
They turn and fire so that decision’s born.

Experience and doctrine thus settle the matter
And mostly it’s the former, not the latter
That emerges intact
And that my friend is that.

For as I’m told someone once said
That put the thought first in my head
(So that my heart O damn near burst)
“I’ll toast the pope, but conscience first”

Peter Thomas

Visit to St Andrew's Holborn Circus & The Archdeacon of Hackney

To remind the community, we are planning to go to St Andrew's Church Holborn Circus in the City, at 6.45pm on Weds 14th May. If you plan on coming and have not told us, then please add your name on the link below:

Attending/Not Attending

Map

We will be attending an alternative worship service followed by food and chat.

Affluenza & Addicted to Love

Without deliberately wanting to embarrass Mike & Clare, I just wanted to point out that I think Moot is entering a new phase when we again consider the question "How should we live?" which we entered when we created our Rhythm of Life drawing on the wisdom of the Monastics. This requires us to consider how we live in contemporary culture but not of the darker sides of culture. Or put another way, where are we called to affirm the good things within culture and where are we called to be counter-cultural about the things that impair healthy living and being.

One of the important areas of being counter-cultural - is the whole issue of naming addiction that arises out of a life strategy dependent on consumption and the desire for affluence. Both Clare's book, and the book Mike has recommended us to read as a community in June, not only name these addictions, but taken together, challenge us to face our Rhythm of Life elements of Balance and Presence for a start, and then into all the other elements. Clare's book 'Addicted to Love' tells her story, and the place of Moot within it. She names the patterns of addiction she has experienced alongside God's grace in loving her and not shaming her towards her own human becoming. Affluenza, the book Mike has suggested, takes this further, and re-evaluates the pressures on us in Western postmodern culture, and names how affluence when gained, does little more than create more stress and unhappiness.

So if you are in Moot, do consider getting both these books, and we will be reading Affluenza together for June. If you have not got a copy yet, click here and Moot get's some money against every sale. Personally, I am very grateful for the input Mike & Clare bring to our community, which is at one level very challenging and at another, incredibly encouraging and loving - with a sense of humour!! Our community would be severely impoverished without either of them.

So we will be discussing this together in the new term, and the implications not only for ourselves, but for the health of our community. See the website for the term May to Aug 08.

Animat rescores The Straight Story

Some of you may have heard about Animat rescoring the soundtrack of Belleville Rendez-vous and playing it live at the Big Chill and touring cinemas across the UK. Well they're back again but this time they've rescored the Straight Story. Which is interestingly about a man's journey across America on a lawnmower!

I'm heading to a performance of it in York tomorrow night but it's touring right round the country and is in Civilisation aka London on the 15th May at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton and Notting Hill Gate Picturehouse on the 18th May.

Well worth checking out if you're into your ambient down tempo etc

Animat

Picturehouse Cinemas

Spirituality for the Twenty First Century

I had the good fortune to catch up with my good friend Barry Taylor today in London as he passed through. He has always inspired me, ever since we met at an event at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. This time in our explorations over a coffee, we explored the issue of spirituality coming out of a digital and technological age. Some know that I am considering starting a PhD in this area, and I was really encouraged to hear that others are pashed up about it as well. In fact, Barry, who is always miles ahead of my thinking, has already written a book on it, which I have ordered - which looks at the whole issue of spirituality being driven by deep things within contemporary culture. It is called Entertainment Theology. I am still reflecting on the conversation, how spirituality has become the new religion, and yet, we don't really know yet what people mean by spirituality. It is still emerging.

I am hoping that in my book tour of the States and Canada in June, that I will be dropping in to LA to do some work with Barry, as it is always a pleasure

Helping an old frien

This blog is a rather unusual one from me: I'm posting it to help out a very old friend.

Jane's story has appeared in the local newspaper near were I grew up. Please take the time to read the full story here. It's a sad tale of neglect, bad funding and downright abuse that could really do with the oxygen of publicity.

I'm posting it because I hope that it will shame people responsible into doing something about it - it may be that some mental health professional, politician or bureaucrat reading this may be in a position to help sort things out.

If you can digg/stumble upon/delicious the article for me, that would be really helpful. The article can be found here.

technorati tags:social justice, tabi, jane cockerton, dissociative identity disorder, lilacs, south west london and st.george's mental health trust, lilacs, swlsg, did, tolworth hospital

Lot's Wife

I've been meaning to blog this poem for a while.

I came across it in The Times newspaper in London, as they have a regular Monday poem slot, and it struck me (and continues to strike me) as a curious poem that has given me plenty to think about. I was also very struck by the commentary that was written by Frieda Hughes, which I would urge you to read here.

by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) (Akhmatova, translated by D.M. Thomas, Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)





And the just man trailed God's messenger,
His huge, light shape devoured the black hill.
But uneasiness shadowed his wife and spoke to her:
“It's not too late, you can look back still

At the red towers of Sodom, the place that bore you,
The square in which you sang, the spinning-shed,
At the empty windows of that upper storey
Where children blessed your happy marriage-bed.”

Her eyes that were still turning when a bolt
Of pain shot through them, were instantly blind;
Her body turned into transparent salt,
And her swift legs were rooted to the ground.

Who mourns one woman in a holocaust?
Surely her death has no significance?
Yet in my heart she never will be lost,
She who gave up her life to steal one glance.

technorati tags:pome, poem, poetry, anna akhmatova, poet, frieda hughes, lot's wife, salt, lot

You Dig the Tunnel, I'll Hide the Soil

This morning I had the good fortune to be invited to the White Cube Gallery to hear an introduction of the current exhibition (as above) by the Director of the Gallery.

They currently have a group exhibition in the gallery and the new basement of Shoreditch Town Hall. The exhbition draws on the work of Edgar Poe - who I remember from my teens. His writings are very dark, drawing on mythic imagery of the shadow-side of life.

The Gallery exhibition had this to say....

Poe is now recognised as an artist far ahead of his time, particularly for the charged psychological facets of his work, which seemed to foretell psychoanalysis, pre-dating Freud by more than half a century. His famous detective, Dupin, became the blueprint for many future detectives, including Sherlock Holmes, Poirot and Miss Marple, and he is also a pioneer of what we now know as science fiction, influencing such writers as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. However, Miller felt that Poe had become synonymous with whatever is merely gothic or dark, a misconception that he wanted to address by curating this exhibition. ‘There’s a real distinction here’, says Miller. ‘It was really telling when we’d approach people and they’d say, “Oh yeah, I’ve got this painting which is nearly all black!” That was really disappointing.’ Miller sought to address this glib association by selecting a dozen of Poe’s stories that seemed to lend themselves most to a more contemporary interpretation. Wherever he noticed a connection to an artist’s existing work, life or practice, he approached them to read the stories and asked them to respond in any manner they saw fit and to interpret the story with a new work.

This exhibition has got me thinking, and I love the new labyrinth rooms in the town hall.

Read All about it

Just to let you know, our very own Clare Catford is in the Daily Mail today.

There's a link to the article online here.

Don't forget her new book "Addicted to Love" is also out, which you can buy from Amazon through the search facility on the right of this page.

technorati tags:clare catford, darton longman todd, addiction, addicted to love, 12 steps, love addiction

Family, Community and Friends

"You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family." Yet we are far more intensely close to our family than to our friends. So where does community fit, in this three-way balance?

You might think that community is like friends. We are not (usually) born into a community; we join one. It has to have something to it that attracts us, or we would not begin to get involved.

We do not have friends we dislike - indeed, we only have friends we like. If we find someone a pain, we do not stay friends long. If they become a drain on us, if they irritate or depress us, that friendship ends. Friends strike a chord, fill a gap, meet a need, in us.

And at the start that's a fair analogy with a community. Yet as time goes by a true community entails more than just meeting our needs. If it is truly a community, our membership of it not only brings us benefits but also incurs for us obligations. We find that within the community are people we don't like, or tasks we don't want, or duties we resent. A community that never imposes on us is likely to be pretty transient.

If that's right, we should expect a community to be more like a family - we're in it, and though we can always walk away it has deep bonds and entails inconvenient commitments. We accept them because of the ties, the shared-ness, and the core that we all hold on to. Something like "a dog is for life, not just for Christmas"?

Augustine originally thought that a wise man would live alone with his mind. He learnt that we are not like that; we exist in community. Indeed, God is in community from the beginning of time. There are truths we can only discover, depths of our inmost spirit that we can only reach, in community; in communal worship, in communal debate, in communal obligation.

So perhaps the core of our search in moot for Christian community in the city is a search for what makes us ready to incur those obligations, ready to meet the inconvenient commitments, ready to discharge the resentable duties. I suspect it's in the shared journey, the learning together in prayer, the collective exploration of the life of the Companion Spirit.

Nest step, I guess, is to work out how as moot we can be that for one another ...

Spirituality for MissionSpirituality for Mission

Its not very often that you find a gathering for practitioners of Emerging & Fresh Expressions of Church, who are particularly interested in seeking an authentic spirituality behind mission in the Twenty First Century. For those who know me, I consider this to be a very key issue. All to often, churches are unaware of how many in our culture are on a spiritual search for meaning, enchantment and substance, but not through traditional routes, or through the logic of modernity.

This 48 hour retreat is for practitioners who feel that this need connects with something of a calling to mission through an authentic spirituality. I am pleased to see it is being facilitated by Nick Helm of Soul Sparks and Colin Brown of Fresh Expressions & Arts as mission.

For more info, click here

Australian "Sorry" comes to London

I've an old frind called Bond, initial J.
His phone number was 701 007.

It's all true, and he's speaking in London on Tuesday 15 May. But it's not about Her Majesty's Secret Service. It's about something much more radical.

John was one of those who launched the National Sorry Day campaign in Australia. This sought to repaid the damage from the "Stolen Generation" - remember the film Rabbit-Proof Fence? This year the new Prime Minister apologised publicly on behalf of all Australians for the pain caused to so many.

A fascinating chance to to explore what it has meant for one person to relate his faith to a challenging aspect of national culture. You'll need to book; e-mail reception@london.iofc.org as places are limited.

24 Greencoat Place (where moot meets on one Wednesday each month); light refreshments from 18:30. See you there.

Peter

Panama Kings

Hello Moot.

My brother's band, Panama Kings are coming to London this weekend!


Come along and join the party:

Saturday 26th, The Windmill, Brixton, 8pm.

"God save the Panama Kings. Long may they deliver their tremendously twisted songs. Sometimes you're thinking of Modest Mouse and their intense ways. Elsewhere there's a joyful discord that recalls Wayne Coyne...There are celebrations on many levels and a sense that we can happily bow before the new regents of alternative quirk-soul."

Stuart Bailie, BBC ATL

i've met my match....

Ahoy there! well i'm back in Britain. A proper blog will follow about what i learned on my trip to seattle and can bring back to enrich the Moot community etc. But first the important story of Patrick the cat whisperer and Bucky one of his six rescue cats! What you cannot quite see in the photo is that Patrick is wearing a hat with ears! This might be the secret of his powers, as he can get Bucky to give him Hi Fives, and other tricks. I met Patrick and Bucky on my last day in Seattle down at Pike Place Market; and where as i felt i learned lots from Karen and the Cota community etc etc, really i wonder if my time would have been better spent hanging out with Patrick learning how to Hi Five cats? just a thought....
(last animal related blog from me i promise ;))

Affluenza

I've just hit page 47, and there was something really good on most pages so far. I would recommend this book to anyone. In my opinion is should be read on a nice sunny morning in your back garden with a massive cup of tea and a pack of chocolate digestives, listening to the sound of dutch birds singing and neighbours chatting over the fence to each other.

Breathing Space St Lukes

Some Mooters will remember that a while ago, I was on placement with St Lukes Church in North London, where I worked with Dave Tomlinson and others, to get their vision going for 'breathing space', for the church space to be used to promote Christian Spirituality.

Both Moot at Breathing Space are trying to address the issue of promoting Christian Spirituality to a post-Christian culture that is interested in spirituality rather than religion. I am really pleased to hear that things are progressing at Breathing Space.

As part of their events, Rob Pepper is running a monthly spirituality and art session as a form of meditation - at the cost of £5. So if you are in North London and around on the 16th April at 7.30pm to 9.30pm, look them up. Mooters please note this clashes with our preparations for the Mind Body & Spirit Festival where we need all hands on deck. I am posting this more for those who read this blog not connected to Moot. For more info on the Drawing Space event click the picture below

one for the Dawgs....

just to balance the pro cat vibe i've initiated. here is a picture of myself and Gunner the 'baby' bull mastif. Gunner's owner Paige sorted me out with some snowboarding on Mount Baker. Thanks to her, Eric, paul and matt! Off to conference tomorrow with Karen, and then Cota in afternoon. Went to Church of The Beloved on Thursday and met their minister Ryan. Really enjoyed the service. So, all good stuff. much love and peace out! Tim

Clare's new book

click on pic to read info...

Sharing Wifi in your neighbourhood through Fon

Not sure if everyone has seen this yet, but Gareth Powell gave the heads up on Fon. If you have wifi, Fon enables you to make it available securely to others in your neighbourhood, and then to be able to use other peoples wifi in other places all around the world.

I like this idea of sharing in a form of global co-operative. Not only does it share resources generously with others, but it also will save you money if you need access to wifi abroad. For some providers - you can subscribe to this and make some money back by charging for people's use. This seems quite stingy to me. If you have a BT broadband service, then you can register through them for Fon, and then people can access your wifi through BT Openzone with no exposure to your wifi settings or security....

I am going to the States and Canada in June, so we will see if it works, I am hoping so....

kurts not dead but punkin probably is....

sooooo…….having a great time. Cota folk are extremely hospitable and fun. Staying in one of their community houses with Matt, Corry and Pete, and they are looking after me admirably, also Karen keeps taking me out for cocktails and food, so no complaints.

Generally I’m just talking to folk about Cota, seeing how they do things, what their struggles are etc. Fremont, where Cota is based, is fantastic. It’s incredibly arty and accepting and Cota compliments the town very well - Providing a ‘Third Space’ with the Abbey for arts and community functions, as well as a church. As an arts venue – they have an event called ‘In The Round’. It was excellent, with last years Slam Poetry Champion – danny (see: myspace.com/metadanny) we need to get him at a cabaret when he makes it over to Britain.

Seattle is a great city. You feel the nearness of the mountains (which occasionally peek through the clouds), and I’ve already seen three eagles! Also it has an Erotic Bakery, so I’ll try and get along there and bring back some snacks for the next community meeting!

Ok. Best go. I want to work on some ‘video ikons’ for the Abbey today. Also I’m buzzing of the coffee I’ve just had. (If I didn’t have an addiction problem with Coffee before, I certainly do now!)

Much love to all.

Tim x

Oh, photo is of the sad story of Punkin the cat. Missing since August. Still missing in March…Personally, I’m not sure he’s coming back, but if you do see him, at least you know what to call him as the owner has helpfully underlined his name!