Almost stopping for Christmas

Parcels for posting and Christmas reading

Well I did not write last night but then I finally got my tradition chapter of my thesis sent off to my supervisor close on midnight. Now I am not expecting him to read it until probably late January at the earliest, maybe February. However, I wanted to get it out of my in tray so that when I get back from Christmas I can have a good go at getting the flows chapter into final form.

Even with finishing so late it took a lot of effort to get there. I started using Pomodoro technique on Saturday to increase my production rate as Christmas and remains of cold had hit it the previous weekend. I also wanted to go to a party on Saturday night. A friend M holds a fantastic Christmas party every year. It includes elements of young person's birthday party as her son's birthday is around then, get together of families to share a meal (chilli made in huge quantities and served with rice) and Bohemian drinks party. Finishing with an intimate group of friends who sit around the table and chat sociably until the small hours of the morning. It is very inclusive and very relaxed. The late night sociability with friends is something I have rarely done since I came to Sheffield twenty years ago and felt good.

So I started, and I got to the stage where there was just one section that needed working on. So I went to the party, stayed later than intended. My decision was to sleep out and then get on as best I could. So I was rather surprised to get up after five hours sleep and find myself ready to work on my thesis.

However, yesterday was a long haul. It took me to lunch time to finish the section, and then I had to check the Grammar and do the bibliography. I have not found a good way to move references between Scrivener and Word. So what I do is to put in Scrivener enough detail (normally authors surname and date plus page) to hopefully find reference in  Mendeley and then when I switch to Word I go through and check it all through very thoroughly and put in the references.

This was hard going for the chapter on tradition as there are at least twice as many references as their are for any other chapter. This is because the autoethnography has been done by me interacting with the texts from and on the tradition. Actually this chapter is still very clearly work in progress. If I get to getting it published it will definitely be one chapter that needs a lot of work. Actually it will need to break into at least two chapters just to deal with the stuff that is in their. Did you know Calvinist/Puritans/Reformed used to view science as a spiritual discipline and an act of devotion to God? Just one of the odd facts I pulled up yesterday while reading up on Dissenting Academies. They taught science because that is how they understood it, not because of commercial applications. If you wanted a commercial education there were plenty of other schools offering that, and they were cheaper too.

Oh I also have cheated, I tend to use Wikipedia not as a source of information but as a place to say "this is not just me".  That is things I know, but I can not document where I know them from. My father was employed there, and while he was there I picked up in general conversation this fact, really is not reference. My supervisor does not like Wikipedia in academic work, so he suggested I took a reference from Wikipedia. Well yesterday I found myself with no other alternative to Wikipedia but to take it reference, fortunately to a source which I a pretty sure does actually give the information given.

I have a big question, why has the Reformed tradition lost confidence in its spirituality. The more I read both historical books in the tradition and also accounts of the tradition it seems that we had what many would say was a well developed spiritual industry about a century and a half ago. Since then we have been persuaded that we do not have one! It is rubbish, when people put the Reformed tradition down for being "anti" then I nearly always can be sure that far from being anti, we have been particularly pro.

Anyway largely stopping for the next few days as Christmas is upon me. I have parcels to post, family to visit and other things to be doing. I will be back writing next weekend so I am taking a couple of books hoping that if I read some of them this week then I will save time afterwards.

Back After a Meeting on Exploring Reformed Spiritualities

View from my bedroom Window

I am back from a Meeting called Exploring Reformed Spiritualities. This was held at Westminster College Cambridge and organised by the United Reformed Church Retreat Network. Yes in any other denomination they would have the badge the spirituality network but lets be honest Reformed folk don't do spirituality at least it fits into the same taboo box as "evangelism" and " Christian Education", so to actually have a meeting discussing it was pretty risky. To give you some idea from the whole of the URC exactly 21 people signed up and at least three of those could not make the whole meeting.

The other thing is I have called it a "Meeting", there is really no other word for it. It was not a conference, there were papers given, exactly two in three days. It was not a retreat, maybe an "Exploration" would be better but it was an exploration of the spiritualities we ourselves owned, the spiritualities of Reformed Christians, done by getting a group of willing volunteers into a room and trying to encourage them to talk about it. Lets say this was not easy. About possibly abour four or five of us would have started this exploration for themselves prior to the meeting, the rest were made up of two groups: those who were URC members and spiritual directors and those who were intrigued by the title.

I was struck recently by a comment in a book I was reading which talking about sixteenth century Reformed Worship, where they said Zwingli was probably the finest musician of the the Reformer. Now regardless of how poor the competition was, the thing that is noticeable about worship in Zurich under Zwingli is the complete absence of music. Something that Calvin in Genevan does not do. David Martin talks about an ambiguity towards the aesthetic, but this is stronger, this is almost a deliberate turning away from the aesthetic, a denial of the passions of the self, a fear of them running in ways that you can't control. The Reformed God is wild, and our relationship to him/her is only ever talkable about in the most distance of language/form. To approach more closely is to invite escastasy that is beyond what we are capable of containing. We are a plain folk who talk about plain things not because the fire is not there, but because that is what we can talk about, the rest is beyond. To start to explore spirituality is therefore risky and difficult.

The leader was led by Mark Argent(I suspect that website is dated) and his style of leading it was very much about consensus and mutuality in decision process. In some ways I was prepared for it I think better than some as I had followed the development of group theory from Bion, it uses the group itself as a method to explore group dynamics.This knowledge gave me enough space to trust the process and to engage with it, but it was not a comfortable process for many/any who were there. The sessions people seemed at most at ease in were the two led by David Cornick and Sarah Moore. The delving into ourselves and trying to give voice to the visceral is not something the Reformed normally do readily, I suspect for the reason given above.

I in a sense did not have problems with getting in touch with them, they were all too evident on the surface. I simply had in someways been under prepared emotionally. Over a decade ago I did TLS at Westminster, I was both in an emotionally difficult place and I also was coping with a huge stressor at the time. A critical support during this time was Rev David A L Jenkins who was at the time the director of TLS. I think he was the one person I talked with at depth about the situation that was not intimately connected with it. That says a huge amount about the sense I felt of his trustworthiness. There were so many layers of distrust that I was struggling to handle, that the fact I openned to anyone is somewhat surprising. What I had not expected was that I must have "left" quite a bit of emotion behind from the conversations we had. That emotion was reconnected by my return to Westminster College.

I do not know whether the fact I went too deeply into silence in the first session was related to this. I suspect it was highly likely I would have done anyway after being quite tired before I set out and then having quite an involved journey. I am aware that many people don't think you can go "too deeply into silence". By "too deeply" I mean that I had entered the silence to the extent I could not participate or sustain a normal conversation for the rest of the evening. It may have sounded like tiredness, but the pull of silence was so strong I found that in order to participate in even the simplest of exchanges I had to make a deliberate effort to focus my attention within the physical. Silence had become a drug that distanced me from the present reality, I think technically it was disassociative. I tackled this the only way I could do at the time (I had left some of the tools for this grounding at home) and started drawing during sessions. The drawings were all based on irregular but repetitive shapes. The repetition being as important as the actual presentation. As a rule they were not abstract except the last which was actually the only one I was trying to represent something. However I think this meant I started to respond creatively to the situation.


At another level I was ever the ethnographer, my brain was connecting observation with theory and other situations. Some I shared, others I need to process more deeply. I wonder how much the acceptance of the approach initially depended on people not wanting to disagree and be isolated especially with a group that did not know each other and with the feeling that as Mark was leading that we should be open to his suggestions. How much some of the irritated response was down to personality and the preference for formal structure. Why no-one picked up Mark's suggestion of Lectio Divina, which is not actually totally alien to the Reformed tradition, as I believe that the very slow reading of the Bible where a single verse or verses were dwelt on was quite a popular religious practice amongst Welsh Chapels. Why was the reading of whole chapters of John's gospel so much appreciated as part of worship? Was it solely a dissent Reformed spirituality or did it have a dominant form. However I am pretty sure that when I come to write my own autoethnography it will be recognisably a Reformed Piety.

Another oddity was how easily I went to the pub with people. This is unusual for me, the only other group I can think of that I have naturally done it with is Pilgrim Adventure (now Journeyings) and there everyone did, partly to stay warm in an evening so as to be able to get to sleep in a tent. This time only a minority did and yet I was part of that minority. No idea but it happened almost by accident.

I think as you can see I have a lot of stuff to think about and digest, both at a personal level and also for thesis.