Category: peace

by on

Learning to look on the world around us, and the things to happen to us with a sense of gratitude is a powerful thing. The link between gratitude and happiness or ‘subjective well being’ is well documented by researchers, (see example studies here: 1, 2, 3) who have found that, no matter how young or old someone may be, developing a grateful attitude is likely to make a person feel happier.

Older man smiling: image from morguefile.com

Being grateful also changes the way we interact with others, we respond to them differently, with more positivity and patience. That’s why gratitude is often called a strength. One theory about why this works is that being grateful helps us to feel like things in our lives have meaning, and meaningfulness seems to make us happy. It certainly does feel good to think that what you’re doing has some greater purpose, as David Graeber’s book ‘Bullshit Jobs‘ points out, there’s little as tediously grim as doing something utterly pointless all day long.

So how can we develop a more grateful attitude in, and to, the world around us?

Maybe you were taught to ‘count your blessings’ as a child, and certainly what is sometimes known as ‘grateful recounting’ can be a helpful thing to do. But grateful recounting relies quite heavily on the person doing the recounting to feel like they have good things in their life. It also relies on them to enjoy the process of doing the recounting, once it starts to feel like a chore, they are likely to pack it in.

A simple gratitude practise that doesn’t rely on all being right with the world, and having to rehearse the same old lists over and over again is as follows:

Think of one person who you are really glad exists.

Concentrate and think about that person for a while, think about the reasons that you are glad of them, think about the things you like about them. Think about the reasons they came to mind in the first place; the time you spent with them; the memories you have.

If you are able to, think about the sensations that you associate with them, the textures, the smells, and the sounds, as well as the things you can see. If it’s someone you don’t know well or have never even met, then think about the way that you found out about them.

Spend five minutes thinking about that person, smile, then come back into the present moment.

If you are able to, try to make this a regular practice – daily perhaps, or every few days. make sure it’s an enjoyable experience, something you’re going to want to do again. Sit in a comfy chair perhaps, or just somewhere quiet. Let it become a habit.

Let gratitude for people become a habit, and the science tells us that you are likely to feel happier, more content and more able to be deal with difficult people and situations.

If you want to take this a step further, then why not begin to let people know about your gratitude for them. If you are grateful someone exists, why not let them know? A short email, a postcard, a text message or phone call… you can even do it anonymously if you like (not the phone call, that would be creepy). Pass on that sense of gratitude to others, and help make the world a more positive place.

by on

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.51533The Christmas stories in the Bible have a message – and it is neither the commodified story of contemporary culture, nor is is the cutesy baby in a stable nativity scene. It’s a story of political subversion and social reversal, set in a particular time and place.

Humans are excellent pattern recognisers. Generally speaking.

It helps though, when we have a cue letting us know what sort of pattern to expect. Many patterns are cultural, they use recognisable signs and signifiers which make sense to those immersed in the culture they are developed in. Looking at unfamiliar signs is difficult when we aren’t immersed in a culture.

When we are overfamiliar with dumbed down versions of stories we have a double problem: we feel as though we know the story, but our knowledge is entirely out of context.

One of the key and most obvious patterns in the gospels, is that of reversals. And this is firmly established in the Christmas narratives: the virgin is pregnant, the night sky invades the day time, the king is a pauper, God is a human baby, the outcasts are welcome. The writers of these stories made these reversals deliberately, pointedly, to overturn expectations and set off a narrative of an upside down way of seeing the world.

To understand the meaning (or one of the meanings) of this pattern, we have to consider the culture of the time in which they were written. What would it mean for things to be upside down?

These stories are set at a particular time, a really important time. It was in 6 CE that Judea, Samaria and Edom became the Roman province of Judea. Roman Judea was substantially larger than it’s predecessor state had been, with an eastern border which stretched as far as contemporary Jordan and even encompassed Damascus (hence Saul/Paul and his dual citizenship). It was an important part of the Roman Empire, and its good governance was key to Roman security.

One of the key groups in maintaining this order, were a cadre of Jewish leaders known as the Pharisees. When people talk of the Pharisees in churches, they will often make much of a particular type of ancient Jewish theology, and set Jesus up in opposition to that. This way of thinking misses the obvious: the Pharisees were effectively working for the Romans. They were crushing dissent and trouble because of a political need. The theology of the Pharisees is relevant, but its particular relevance is that it was far more in line with Roman theology than their rivals the Sadducees, not that they were stuck up or full of their own self importance.

Behind all of this was a corrupt priesthood – run by a figure called Annas, who was high priest in Jerusalem between 6 and 15 CE until he was deposed, but whose family continued in the role. Think: mafia. Think: contemporary despotic regime of your choice.

So this is the context – the time that was being written about, and the time in which it was being written. A puppet state, run by a corrupted priesthood, enforced by violence. And what are the writers talking about? Reversal. Reversal of everything. And if I were to ascribe a ‘meaning’ to Christmas, perhaps that would be it. It is a scene setter for the ‘ministry of reversal’ that the Jesus movement comes to embody. Tables are literally turned. The dead are brought back to life (we must talk about Lazarus some other time).

And in the midst of this – a whole host of reversed rituals, baptism, the reversal of the Roman military Sacramentum, and the core Christian rite, the shared meal: a subversion of the Roman banquet. Everything is overturned, everything is lampooned. Its incredibly subversive – social and political dynamite.

Perhaps the point is that the only way this all makes sense, is if you stand it on it’s head. Which is why I’m so keen, on an #alternativeadvent.

 

 

by on

Every year people ask me why I wear a white poppy. The post below is something I wrote a few years ago for my old blog, it goes somewhere towards explaining why.

Wearing the White Poppy

un-gunIt’s been quite a few years since I last wore a red poppy.

Instead, because I think that remembrance is important, I wear a white one, which I buy from the Peace Pledge Union.

It’s not an act of betrayal, nor is it a denial of the genuine human sacrifice made by human beings who were motivated to offer up their bodies because of love or duty.

Both of my grandfathers fought in WW2, they did what they thought they should do, what they believed was right. They were brave men, they emerged alive from that dreadful conflict, but not unscathed.

I do not wear a white poppy as some kind of denial of the sacrifice that millions made.

I wear a white poppy because I believe in remembering all who died.

I wear a white poppy because I don’t want to see any more wars.

I wear a white poppy because death doesn’t win.

I respect the right of everyone to wear a poppy, or not, according to their conscience. I don’t think you should wear one just because that’s the ‘done thing’. I choose not to wear a red poppy, and I do so for the same basic reasons as I choose to wear a white one.

In the UK the red poppy has come to be almost totally synonymous with the remembrance of dead service personnel, specifically dead British soldiers, sailors and airmen and women. I have no problem with remembering dead servicemen and women, of any sort. But I want to go further, I believe we should remember all who die in war. The innocent victims, the enemy combatants, the conscripts, the deserters, the shell shocked, the courageous and the cowards. The children, the women, the young, the old, the pregnant, the unborn, the confused, the disturbed, the traumatised and the tricked. Those who did what they were told, and those who did what they believed in, those who weren’t sure, and those who were overconfident.

The red poppy has come to be synonymous with the aftermath of international conflicts, it’s as if those conflicts are an inevitability. They aren’t. The more we consider war and its causes, the more we see that there are other ways of dealing with conflict. War is not inevitable, and shouldn’t be seen as such. We should be working together to bring an end to war.

“Last years British Legion Young Professionals’ Poppy Rocks was sponsored by Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest arms company. Lockheed Martin also manufactures the Trident missile. Each of Britain’s missile submarines is capable of carrying 16 missiles. Each of these missiles can kill far in excess of the 888,000 dead represented by the red poppies at the Tower of London.” PPU.

The red poppy, with its blood stain shape and colour is a reminder of the bitter truth that in war, blood is shed, real, hot, red, human blood. That is the horrific reality of war. The myth of war is that if enough blood is shed, we can triumph. The myth is that good can overcome evil, if only there is enough death. It’s not true. Perhaps the only real inevitability is that wars lead to more wars.

The white poppy with its simple, central, bold message of ‘peace’ calls us to reconsider, to stand back from our allegiance to death and the myth of redemptive violence and remember the dead.

What is called the utopian dream of pacifism is in fact a practical policy – indeed the only practical, the only realistic policy that there is.
Aldous Huxley

Advertisements