>Now can you see over the wall?

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How we need each other! This celebration of cooperation is enacted in Catalan at various festivals.Besides the people who actually climb, many are also needed to form the the base of the castell. They help sustain the weight and act as a sort of safety net. How about this as a team building exercise for our clergy conference, or something for our all age worship?

Dee Hock agonised over what makes an institution or organisation and has this to say: “Healthy organisations are a mental concept of relationship to which people are drawn by hope, vision, values and meanikng, and liberty to cooperatively pursue them.” (p120) Healthy organisations induce behaviour whereas unhealthy organisations compel behaviour and are destructive. He adds: “Without a deeply held, shared purpose that gives a meaning to their lives …. communities will disintegrate, and organisations become instruments of tyranny.”

“People deprived of self-organisation and self governance are inherently ungovernable.” (p121)

A free image from wikimedia commons

Nature

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The striking of a match is every bit as wonderful as the working of a brain; the union of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen in a molecule of water isevery bit as wonderful as the growth of a child. nature does not class her works in order of merit; everything is just as easy to her as everything else: she puts her wholemind into all that she does … she lives through all life, extends throaugh all extent, spreads undivided, operates unspent.
Stephen Paget

from Dee Hock

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Without an abundance of nonmaterial values and an equal abundance of nonmonetary exchange of material value, no true community ever existed or ever will. … When we attempt to monetise all value, we methodically disconnect people and destroy community.

True community requires proximity; continual, direct contact and interaction between the people, place, and things of which it is composed. Throughout history, the fundamental building block, the quintessential community, has always been the family. It is there that the greatest nonmonetary exchange of value takes place. It is there that the most powerful nonmaterial values are created and exchanged. It is from that community, for better or worse, that all others are formed. The nonmonetary exchange of value is the vary heart and soul of community, and community is the inescapable, essential element of civil society.

Birth of the Chaordic Order – page 43

>Dee Hock

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> A soul-friend discovered, and the launch of a new book prize – Jogger’s Read of the Year with the top prize going to Dee Hock’s “Birth of the Cahordic Age” discovered by me 10 years after its publication.

Dee Hock describes his relationship to insitutions – and it rings an eight bell quarter peel in my mind. he writes of his teenage rebellion:

“My rebellion was persistent, stubborn, at times stupid refusal to accept orthodox ideas, be persuaded by authoritarian means, or seek acceptance by conformity.”

He asks: “what is this chasm between how institutions profess to function and how they actually do; between what they claim to do for people and what they actualy do to them?” (p37) Among them: schools that can’t teach, unhealthy health-care systems, welfare systems in which no one fares well, farming systems that destroy soil and poison food. (p28)

I could ask in similar vein why it is that the church which is supposed to offer life in all its fullness induces such boredom and is seen as a “turn off” instead of a “turn on”, and why it is that the good news of salvation has to be cloaked in disguise in order not to frighten people off (according
to my reading of a recent PCC discussion on our parish magazine.

from R S Thomas

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“It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on;
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you will purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.”(Later Poems: 1983. p35)

>A change of clothes

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> I was wondering what to wear over my fig leaf this morning, when I came across this morning’s reading with Paul telling me to clothe myself with “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience” – I’ve got a lifetime trying to squeeze myself into them. It’s a bit like Trinny and Susanna’s make-overs.

Then I came across a photo of the Vicar of Much Wenlock striding barefoot through his parish because he wants to follow the fashion set by St Francis. He says it puts him in touch with reality – He said: “I’m not suggesting people go around barefoot. The message is about needing to tread more lightly on the earth.” I remember a news report of a visit of a leader of an aborigine community who described how he had to put shoes on for the first time in his life when he came to Europe. He said how uncomfortable he felt and how he lost his sense of freedom.
I’ll try the compassion, kindness and gentleness outfit, but not bother with the matching accessories. I’ll just wear shoes!

>An old friend

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>Friend Jim came by with a quote from the work of Laurens van der Post. I enjoyed his books when I read them. A lovely man, great story-teller and lover of humanity. I particulalry remember reading one of his books on a train journey at a time of bereavement, and remember noticing feeling so much better at the end of the journey. Not many writers can be so inspirational.

The quote:

Jung believed that the unique achievement of Western Europe, particularly Christian Europe, was the creation of the individual who would be sufficiently individual and integrated to take the burdens of his community and the world upon himself, to resist this collectivization of the spirit.- he goes on to say that he felt that it was the failure of this in Germany that allowed Hitler to rise to power unchallenged.

And another one from his intriguing solemn requiem (based on the Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse) by the editor of Feather Fall:

Gradually I have formed the impression, now a certainty, that Laurens van der Post is a member of a vast family which constitutes a community of spirit and heart that has existed throughout our history. Like those wells in the desert that are so difficult to find and so far apart, yet are linked beneath the ground and combine invisibly to quench one’s thirst, this vast and ever growing family of fellow-travellers is the company in which, step by step, century by century, we can all join in the ultimate quest, following the flight of the great white bird of truth, ready in heart and mind for its eventual feather fall.

Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence was a film based on two of Laurens’s books which describe his experience asa japanese prisoner of war where he gained a reputation for building up the morale of people of many different nationalities. here’s the trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/get_player

>Little and Large

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>Size isn’t everything – but it’s important when you’re small fry. We have one parish – two churches – one larger, the other smaller in an unequal partnership. It’s hard for those representing small St Peter’s in any meeting with those representing large St Andrew’s. Attention is invariably focussed on big brother, even though there is a genuine love and regard for little brother.

When big cheese meets small fry, small fry usually feels belittled. But – big BUT -when small fry’s eyes meet God’s s/he wins the prize every time.

So small fry, don’t resent the status of little brother – and big brother BEWARE. “Unless you change and become as a little child, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 18:3) and “Consider your own calling, friends. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God”. There are so many stories in the Bible where the last is first and the greatest is the least.
Look at big brother and little brother in the story of the prodigal son – big brother is the one who is shut out because of his self-righteous jealousy.