Advent means to await a coming. It is a looking ahead to another time, another season. To be in advent is to accept that this current season, this current life, is not fully whole- there is another, more full life to come. We are travelling toward it, bidding it toward us.
What is this other life?
It is the life in which we are fully at home. There is much in our current life that is dislocated and alien. I am misunderstood, few if any know of what I long for. I accept this disappointment and make do anyway. Yet deep down, I desire Christmas; for Christmas speaks to us of being fully at home.
Christmas is arrival, the coming of a new child. It is of the birthing of a new home, the welcome of a baby into the arms of his mother. It is the renewal of the potential for each of us to be embraced, welcomed and loved fully. It is the end of the Advent wait.
The Christ child is a real baby, physical, flesh and blood, born in Palestine two millennia ago. But perhaps the Christ child is not only a real baby in history. Perhaps we also are that child. Perhaps we too, each year, are offered the gift of being born again. Perhaps that gift is to be fully found, by the One who made us. To accept it is to allow ourselves to be discovered. To risk the openness of being found. To receive the gift is to choose to believe that, beyond the fear of rejection, is the hope of acceptance. It is to believe that there is one to whom your boundaries are sacred; there is one who will tread with care around your perimeter, whose foot prints will mark out your borders and whose presence will defend you.
If this were true, then each year we make a choice to accept this gift or to reject it.
To allow that child to be born in us today.
May you find faith and hope to make this accept this gift on the eve of this new year.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
Thursday, 1 December 2011
Eighth Lesson: Tree
There existed in the garden a tree. Its fruit had no particular qualities but in order to ensure that the man and the woman would not fall out of his gaze and cease to be, the God defined the boundaries of their safety, he defined the fruit of the tree as forbidden fruit. “You shall not eat of the fruit of this tree,” he declared, “for if you do so you shall surely die.” Man and woman knew that within the gaze, they were loved, they existed. However, the God did not seek a relationship coercion but mutual acceptance, choice and vulnerability. The God knew that in order for the man and the woman to love him freely, they must choose to love. And to choose to love, they must also be able to choose not to love. The tree existed in the garden in order that the man and woman might freely choose to love. The tree existed as a doorway also into a death. For outside the gaze there was no life. To choose to eat of the fruit of the tree freely, to step beyond the gaze willingly, to turn aside from the embrace, was to choose to suffocate themselves. He understood that to turn from the gaze was to seal oneself into self-reference, to turn one gaze only upon oneself, to cease to be seen and known. It was to commit oneself to a locked room, sealed of access to love and embrace, to slowly asphyxiate.
The man and the woman took the fruit and bit into its flesh. And their eyes were immediately open to their nakedness. They looked at each other now, outside the gaze; they looked at each other in unease; they looked at the folds and curves hiding within each other; they looked at the difference that spoke of the unknown, the unbidden, the strange. They looked, and felt fear, outside the gaze. Not held, not safe.
They must manage alone.
So they clothed themselves.
The clothes hid them. The clothes deflected gaze, concealed the person within. The clothes offered protection in vulnerable world. They substituted the protection of loving gaze for protection of fabric, deception of pattern, deflection of costume. They provoked the endless enactment of persona that was to follow, scene after scene. Down history, the enactment of self. Act after act, drama after drama, character after character, created and performed on the stage of history.
In what ways will we perform ourselves today? Will we sit in the tradition of Eve and Adam enacting ourselves as an mask of concealment? Or will we risk starting a new tradition? Theatre in the round, not theatre behind a curtain.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
The man and the woman took the fruit and bit into its flesh. And their eyes were immediately open to their nakedness. They looked at each other now, outside the gaze; they looked at each other in unease; they looked at the folds and curves hiding within each other; they looked at the difference that spoke of the unknown, the unbidden, the strange. They looked, and felt fear, outside the gaze. Not held, not safe.
They must manage alone.
So they clothed themselves.
The clothes hid them. The clothes deflected gaze, concealed the person within. The clothes offered protection in vulnerable world. They substituted the protection of loving gaze for protection of fabric, deception of pattern, deflection of costume. They provoked the endless enactment of persona that was to follow, scene after scene. Down history, the enactment of self. Act after act, drama after drama, character after character, created and performed on the stage of history.
In what ways will we perform ourselves today? Will we sit in the tradition of Eve and Adam enacting ourselves as an mask of concealment? Or will we risk starting a new tradition? Theatre in the round, not theatre behind a curtain.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
Seventh Lesson: Gaze
There is an old story in a sacred book in which a God forms a garden. Within this beautiful space he calls into being animals and plants of all kinds of varieties. He fashions waters and dry lands, he sets lights to govern the day and the night. He makes everything fitting for its place. Finally, he crafts mankind: a man and a woman, made in his own image, male and female. He breathes his breath into the lungs of the man and the woman and they come alive, animated by his Spirit. The man and the woman are naked and they know no fear or shame.
This God would walk in the garden in the cool of the day, with the man and the woman, enjoying the heavy scent of the ground returning the sun’s heat in the evening air. Having opened this space within himself, the God would delight to open himself into the space, disclosing his mind, embracing that which he had created. The Spirit of the God danced among the trees, calling forth the waters to play and the birds to sing. The Word of the God anointed the animals with name and blessing, calling forth laughter. The Father in this God embraced all that had flowed out of him, declaring it good.
The God would walk in the garden in the cool of the day, naked with the man and the woman, naked. The day would settle and end in stillness and shalom, a deep peace of all things settled in their right rhythm, fitting place, loved gaze. The world existed within and through that gaze. And there was no shame and there was no fear.
If you gaze unstintingly into the eyes of a young baby, they will turn their head aside, avert their gaze. The reason is that the sensations stimulated by having such attention paid, within the baby’s brain, are too strong, too intense. Dazzling in their emotional intensity. A flood of neurochemical love.
To be fully seen is to be held in such a gaze. The gaze literally creates us in our early months. Many of us never learn to hold that gaze. Many of us grow up as adults still unable to tolerate attention being paid to us. We avert our gaze, we distract with humour, deflect attention away. We are unable to tolerate being seen. If we are to grow more full, then we need to discover how to hold such a gaze offered by those who love us. It is the beginnings of the pathway to healing and renovation.
John O’Donohue asks in his Benedictus who, ‘during this day has seen us?’
Who indeed, has seen me today?
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
This God would walk in the garden in the cool of the day, with the man and the woman, enjoying the heavy scent of the ground returning the sun’s heat in the evening air. Having opened this space within himself, the God would delight to open himself into the space, disclosing his mind, embracing that which he had created. The Spirit of the God danced among the trees, calling forth the waters to play and the birds to sing. The Word of the God anointed the animals with name and blessing, calling forth laughter. The Father in this God embraced all that had flowed out of him, declaring it good.
The God would walk in the garden in the cool of the day, naked with the man and the woman, naked. The day would settle and end in stillness and shalom, a deep peace of all things settled in their right rhythm, fitting place, loved gaze. The world existed within and through that gaze. And there was no shame and there was no fear.
If you gaze unstintingly into the eyes of a young baby, they will turn their head aside, avert their gaze. The reason is that the sensations stimulated by having such attention paid, within the baby’s brain, are too strong, too intense. Dazzling in their emotional intensity. A flood of neurochemical love.
To be fully seen is to be held in such a gaze. The gaze literally creates us in our early months. Many of us never learn to hold that gaze. Many of us grow up as adults still unable to tolerate attention being paid to us. We avert our gaze, we distract with humour, deflect attention away. We are unable to tolerate being seen. If we are to grow more full, then we need to discover how to hold such a gaze offered by those who love us. It is the beginnings of the pathway to healing and renovation.
John O’Donohue asks in his Benedictus who, ‘during this day has seen us?’
Who indeed, has seen me today?
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
Sixth Lesson: Digging
Imagine taking a spade and beginning to dig. As you slide the sharp blade into the soil you are conscious of slicing through the thin visible limits of your life. Quickly, the blade passes through the web of thin roots sustaining the perennials and recent plantings. The root masses are well connected, slightly dry, tracing fine fingerlets across the surfaces, drawing efficiently water and nutrients. It peels away easily, that layer. You place the blade again into the earth, press down, deeper. As you do so, you notice the change in texture- it is darker, the material heavier. It has aroma. You kneel and place your hands into the earth, rub it between your fingers; it is dark, clog and stains your fingers.
As you dig on, the spade catches on stones, buried fragments of brick; you prise them out, they are old, unknown, forgotten. Why are they there? How did they get there? You dig on, the blade stabbing into a black mass. It does not give; you have struck a block. You feel it with your fingers- it stretches out, bifurcating, branching; you dig round it then prise at it with the spade. It won’t budge. Where you have struck it, the flesh is white, tuberous, fibrous. It oozes. Where is it drawing its life from, unseen as it is from the sun? In these depths what does it feed on? What keeps it alive? And what is it? Can it grow?
It is old, unfamiliar to you, a gnarled tuber belonging to your history. Or was it there in the land before you? How deep does it go? Is it one, or one of many? How far does it spread? Does it reach out, connecting, fusing, spreading, underpinning the soil above it? What would happen if it were removed? Would the surface collapse? Have you been walking over it all these years, resting on it, relying on it? Does it support or compete with what you plant over its surface? Is it drawing nutrients away, down, into the depths, sucking, draining away moisture? Is it parasitic? Does it speak of health or disease? Is it even mine or has it transgressed, migrated, spread from other lands? What name do you give it? It will survive long after the plants on the surface go. Long after the vivid displays decline, grow tired and faded, this tuberous life will continue, growing, breathing, pressing outward. When you are spent, when your land is barren, will this be all that is left? Is this what constitutes you? Is this what you find at my core? Does all your life come from this?
You are afraid and wonderfully unsettled by what you are discovering. You shiver. You feel like you are walking on land that is alive. Most of your life is hidden from you. Most of your life is yet to be uncovered.
You are yet to be uncovered.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
As you dig on, the spade catches on stones, buried fragments of brick; you prise them out, they are old, unknown, forgotten. Why are they there? How did they get there? You dig on, the blade stabbing into a black mass. It does not give; you have struck a block. You feel it with your fingers- it stretches out, bifurcating, branching; you dig round it then prise at it with the spade. It won’t budge. Where you have struck it, the flesh is white, tuberous, fibrous. It oozes. Where is it drawing its life from, unseen as it is from the sun? In these depths what does it feed on? What keeps it alive? And what is it? Can it grow?
It is old, unfamiliar to you, a gnarled tuber belonging to your history. Or was it there in the land before you? How deep does it go? Is it one, or one of many? How far does it spread? Does it reach out, connecting, fusing, spreading, underpinning the soil above it? What would happen if it were removed? Would the surface collapse? Have you been walking over it all these years, resting on it, relying on it? Does it support or compete with what you plant over its surface? Is it drawing nutrients away, down, into the depths, sucking, draining away moisture? Is it parasitic? Does it speak of health or disease? Is it even mine or has it transgressed, migrated, spread from other lands? What name do you give it? It will survive long after the plants on the surface go. Long after the vivid displays decline, grow tired and faded, this tuberous life will continue, growing, breathing, pressing outward. When you are spent, when your land is barren, will this be all that is left? Is this what constitutes you? Is this what you find at my core? Does all your life come from this?
You are afraid and wonderfully unsettled by what you are discovering. You shiver. You feel like you are walking on land that is alive. Most of your life is hidden from you. Most of your life is yet to be uncovered.
You are yet to be uncovered.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
Fifth Lesson: Roots and Tubers
Our soil is a world of as yet undiscovered fertility. Planting as we tend to, near the surface, for rapid growth and homogeneity, we should be unsurprised by the repetitive, apparently unremarkable yields our soil produces. It will suffice in the main, for the life and work which we find ourselves involved in. Our aspirations have fallen.
Take a moment to remember back to your imagination as a child. In those days your mind was able to reach for a thousand different possible futures and identities. Happy afternoons were spent exploring the landscape of commanders, nurses, fire fighters, kings and queens, mothers and fathers, teachers and dancers. These tubers of thought and possibility have been left discarded. The energy and life which funded their genesis however, remains; indeed, within their contwined masses lie a genetic legacy, a potency of gift, a tangled ball of history and experience, a layered bulb enfolding tender dreams.
Over time, you have gathered together your thoughts, organising them into a small corner of yourself where they can be aligned and configured with one, or perhaps two, narrow purposes and identities. This narrowing, driven as it was by often harsh necessities, leaves most of our land unexplored. Soil has depth and, beneath the surface, beyond the thin layer of productive topsoil, lies a darker richer loam. Interestingly, this hidden structure is very much older and more basic to our identity and being than the layer which sustains the growth we consciously present on a day to day basis.
Where does it come from? It is simply given to us. The deep blessing of the human life is that it is unbidden. The abundant generosity of this creation is a great mystery; that each buds, bulges, swells and breaks out onto the topography of human history from nowhere.
We find that, within our soil, there is already a rich fecundity of ideas, invention, love and agency. More than we ever imagined or deserved.
Unbidden, we are invited out into a bigger world, a bigger self.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
Take a moment to remember back to your imagination as a child. In those days your mind was able to reach for a thousand different possible futures and identities. Happy afternoons were spent exploring the landscape of commanders, nurses, fire fighters, kings and queens, mothers and fathers, teachers and dancers. These tubers of thought and possibility have been left discarded. The energy and life which funded their genesis however, remains; indeed, within their contwined masses lie a genetic legacy, a potency of gift, a tangled ball of history and experience, a layered bulb enfolding tender dreams.
Over time, you have gathered together your thoughts, organising them into a small corner of yourself where they can be aligned and configured with one, or perhaps two, narrow purposes and identities. This narrowing, driven as it was by often harsh necessities, leaves most of our land unexplored. Soil has depth and, beneath the surface, beyond the thin layer of productive topsoil, lies a darker richer loam. Interestingly, this hidden structure is very much older and more basic to our identity and being than the layer which sustains the growth we consciously present on a day to day basis.
Where does it come from? It is simply given to us. The deep blessing of the human life is that it is unbidden. The abundant generosity of this creation is a great mystery; that each buds, bulges, swells and breaks out onto the topography of human history from nowhere.
We find that, within our soil, there is already a rich fecundity of ideas, invention, love and agency. More than we ever imagined or deserved.
Unbidden, we are invited out into a bigger world, a bigger self.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
Fourth Lesson: The Dark Season's Growth
Most of what we are and might become is buried beyond our sight. Our time and attention is spent, largely, upon the surfaces of our lives. The inordinate busyness and pace of the surrounding world requires almost total concentration if we are to hang on to the features and objects we attempt to retain and arrange on the harassed landscape of our lives. Pegging our insecure job down which threatens to blow away leaving us entirely exposed to the elements; or preventing the wind catching the corners of a fraying relationship and tearing it across the middle; or hacking our way through the thick undergrowth of overgrown bills; or hurling a bit of unloved water upon the shoots of the other plants growing at our fringes- a holiday plan, a charity we are involved in, an elderly parent needing care.
We suffer from a culture which rewards the productive, well maintained exterior. We frantically attempt to maintain the surfaces of our land. We attempt to produce ever greater yields of productivity by becoming busier, more efficient, better prepared. We buy technologies to compress time, speeding communication, gathering data to keep us ahead of the game. And in so doing, we lie permanently stunted, prevented from stretching and reaching out, underneath, to the possible depths of our roots.
Gardeners understand that the barren seasons of the year are those from which fertility springs. The reason for this is simple. What ultimately sprouts forth from the surface is nourished, sustained and dependent upon the nexus of roots threaded beneath the surface. It is the dark months, the hidden growth which sustains the beauty of the next season’s flowering.
Advent is a dark season. Little grows. Fallen fruit from last year's harvest lies rotting. The naked branches of pruned shrubs are ugly. It is such times that our roots reach out for sources of nourishment if we linger and allow them to. Now is a day for noticing loss; welcoming apprehension; absorbing failure and disappointment; tolerating incompleteness. No fallen fruit is wasted; it becomes the nutrient from which the fruit of next year will grow.
Next year may not yet be upon us. Success may be tomorrow's harvest. For now, accept the rhythm that invites you to wait and trust, growing stronger in your capacity to desire without fulfilment. Whilst you wait, do not lose your confidence in this ground you are in. Trust that the soil contains good things, and await the discovery of your scale that is yet to come.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
Third Lesson: Love
Your end is my beginning. Yet where are my edges? Who set them? Are they fixed in eternity or even in time?
This dialogue will preoccupy us for the rest of our life. It is a quest upon which almost all of our action in the world will be based. For instance, the ones we love will be bonded to us because their presence completes us; we sense completeness, we sense our borders being properly established as we inhabit our landscape. Our sense of peace and safety in our landscape emerges as our definition is clarified; we are confirmed, validated. I am more me with them. I am defined through their presence and my landscape takes form.
Love defines our limits and describes our texture. We cannot describe ourselves by mere self-reflection. The mirror which is given to us is the view offered back to us from the people gathered around the edges of our landscape. Their sight describes us; their vision of us is spoken over us and we absorb it. It settles like rain over the surface of our land. From its irrigation, that which is as yet hidden, mere potential, will grow. Or not. The land cannot grow without rain, spoken rain. Felt touch. Fingers reach out and tend our soil, tease out its surface. Feet fall on our earth, leaving their footprint, pressing their form into our folds. Love defines our shape.
This is sacred work- an agency given to form another’s personhood. It is not always work done well. Some to whom it is given, parents and carers alike, lack the wisdom and sensitivity to enfold another’s being through their own posture. Some lack the stability to offer a consistent presence, a reliable reflection, a held gaze. Some lack the care to tread deftly, instead they hurry, rush, careless of the crushing force of their feet where they trample. Some are distracted, absent, diverted, unavailable- their gaze is elsewhere, their words attending to and affirming a landscape elsewhere. Some are heavy handed, cajoling and fingering, pressing and forcing out a growth made more in their own image; a revision of their own mistakes and aspirations.
The legacy of this work, whether well done or otherwise, will live with us. Our land is malleable, in these early years. Later, its folds will become less pliable, more resistant, stiff, fixed into that pressed form. We will find our contours owe their origins to historic influence and we must learn to navigate over them as best we can. However, the sacred task remains our preoccupation; to find our ending. To know the land that we have been given in the world- its dimensions, extent, texture and form.
What must give us courage and hope is the divine thought, which has already sown our land with love and goodness before our origins even began. We are not unimagined. What is within us has been seen and can yet come to be. And it is good. Our space in the world, our place in time and space, the specific, unique, particular and unrepeatable piece of history which is us is real. It is substance. Within the fabric of the world, our space has been woven.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
Second Lesson: Sacred Definition
Sacred Definition- marking the edges
Where you end is my beginning. Discovering our edges, locating the thresholds of our extent in the world is a task which will preoccupy our entire lives. It is the beginning of inhabiting our Eden. It is a task which has not recently begun. Years back, you lay in your cot; your eyes played over the blurred images of shapes and forms around you. Six week old lenses were not yet able to crystallise and resolve the edges of the world around. They roam. They catch the dissolving form of your hand, waving in front of your face and the colourful splash of the cot mobile swinging above your head, placed tenderly by your parents. Your mind does not distinguish between the two. The cot mobile is not perceived ‘other’; you do not for another month perceive it as distinct from you. You are coterminous with the world- you extend, limitlessly, without boundary into space. There is no end to you; there is no you. Experience is simply a rushing stream of sensation, disconnected colour, noise, texture, pain, fear, safety. You fall, free fall, into time, plunging headlong through the deluge of unconnected unmediated, unrecognised experience. You are raw, piecemeal, atomised; you are becoming, you are joining yourself up, knitting the flow of experiences together into some primitive, crude thread. It breaks continually; the links are gone, the world dissolves once more into mere sea.
Slowly, over time, you learn to crystallise perception; your neural pathways recognise something familiar, already experienced. You hold it, relate to it, cling to it. Your world begins to solidify, take form. Slowly, its shape arrives upon you. Yet, you yourself are only arriving; slowly, solidifying, distinguishing, as a primitive narrative emerges from the blur. What difference is there between the blurred hand and the blurred coloured shape swirling in front of you? Only later do you understand one is of you and one is not. Only later, slowly, do you begin to apprehend a limit to that which you come to recognise as self. Only later do You come to mean. You are becoming.
Your end is my beginning. I must discover that I am not infinite. That I have boundaries, limits. Most crimes in the world originate from a failure to live within right limits. The theft of ideas, property or intimacy is a trespass beyond borders. Abuse is the brutal boot trampling down fragile, private buds; rape the coarse unbidden grasping of intimate fruit. Such trespass is not reserved to crude brutality. Casual indifference, careless feet walking over tentative plans or germinating ideas- the everyday acts of rushed people unaware or thoughtless to the foot prints they leave over the landscape.
‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.’
I must learn to limit myself. The world is not mine to take or intrude on. The media must submit themselves to the limits of public space once again. The Facebook generation must be educated as to what they have lost within a decade: the history-long distinction between public and private space. What loss! I must learn what is sacred, what is profound, what is not to be given away.
Becoming undefended can only begin to occur once one becomes rightly defended.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
Where you end is my beginning. Discovering our edges, locating the thresholds of our extent in the world is a task which will preoccupy our entire lives. It is the beginning of inhabiting our Eden. It is a task which has not recently begun. Years back, you lay in your cot; your eyes played over the blurred images of shapes and forms around you. Six week old lenses were not yet able to crystallise and resolve the edges of the world around. They roam. They catch the dissolving form of your hand, waving in front of your face and the colourful splash of the cot mobile swinging above your head, placed tenderly by your parents. Your mind does not distinguish between the two. The cot mobile is not perceived ‘other’; you do not for another month perceive it as distinct from you. You are coterminous with the world- you extend, limitlessly, without boundary into space. There is no end to you; there is no you. Experience is simply a rushing stream of sensation, disconnected colour, noise, texture, pain, fear, safety. You fall, free fall, into time, plunging headlong through the deluge of unconnected unmediated, unrecognised experience. You are raw, piecemeal, atomised; you are becoming, you are joining yourself up, knitting the flow of experiences together into some primitive, crude thread. It breaks continually; the links are gone, the world dissolves once more into mere sea.
Slowly, over time, you learn to crystallise perception; your neural pathways recognise something familiar, already experienced. You hold it, relate to it, cling to it. Your world begins to solidify, take form. Slowly, its shape arrives upon you. Yet, you yourself are only arriving; slowly, solidifying, distinguishing, as a primitive narrative emerges from the blur. What difference is there between the blurred hand and the blurred coloured shape swirling in front of you? Only later do you understand one is of you and one is not. Only later, slowly, do you begin to apprehend a limit to that which you come to recognise as self. Only later do You come to mean. You are becoming.
Your end is my beginning. I must discover that I am not infinite. That I have boundaries, limits. Most crimes in the world originate from a failure to live within right limits. The theft of ideas, property or intimacy is a trespass beyond borders. Abuse is the brutal boot trampling down fragile, private buds; rape the coarse unbidden grasping of intimate fruit. Such trespass is not reserved to crude brutality. Casual indifference, careless feet walking over tentative plans or germinating ideas- the everyday acts of rushed people unaware or thoughtless to the foot prints they leave over the landscape.
‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.’
I must learn to limit myself. The world is not mine to take or intrude on. The media must submit themselves to the limits of public space once again. The Facebook generation must be educated as to what they have lost within a decade: the history-long distinction between public and private space. What loss! I must learn what is sacred, what is profound, what is not to be given away.
Becoming undefended can only begin to occur once one becomes rightly defended.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
Nine Lessons for Advent
The old tradition of a Service of Nine Lessons and Carols helps us to prepare ourselves for Christmas. In that spirit, I have written Nine Lessons as a contemporary way of opening the door to this season and the message hidden within it.
I will publish a new Lesson every few days over the coming four weeks. If you wish to be notified of their arrival, do sign up on the right.
May you be enriched this Advent Season.
First Lesson: Eden
There is a way of reading the old story of Eden in which the Garden is understood not as state in which the world is created but, rather, as a personal gift. Each person is vested with an Eden as they are birthed into the world. Now this is not an infantile fantasy in which the world is reconfigured around our personal paradise. That would be to render ourselves centres of the universe. Rather, to see ourselves as gifted with an Eden is to understand that each person comes into the world as a landscape, fecund and abundant with potential unique to them alone.
Eden is that space which is fitted for our existence. It is the space within which whose boundaries there is sufficient to meet our needs. To be in Eden is to be fully at home, to be at home in our place and time in the world, with a corresponding sense of ease and confidence. It is also to be in a place of trust that the soil contains sufficient to provide for the needs of those who dwell upon it. To be in Eden is to find our scale in the world; neither reaching beyond ourselves nor shying away from our borders. It is to live a fitting, grounded life and in so doing, to live well. For we live well when we fully inhabit the space that is available for us in the world. Those around us sense our ease, dignity and coherence, our weight and stability.
Our lives are acts of discovery, finding what there is within our Eden. The world awaits the fullness of our space, the world awaits the blessing it can bring to others. This Eden gift remains secure whatever neglect or trespass has taken place. Ultimately, the fecundity that lies within it, is too deep to be dug out and discarded by the careless of any other. We can be confident of that. And that confidence must be the bedrock upon which we live in the world.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
I will publish a new Lesson every few days over the coming four weeks. If you wish to be notified of their arrival, do sign up on the right.
May you be enriched this Advent Season.
First Lesson: Eden
There is a way of reading the old story of Eden in which the Garden is understood not as state in which the world is created but, rather, as a personal gift. Each person is vested with an Eden as they are birthed into the world. Now this is not an infantile fantasy in which the world is reconfigured around our personal paradise. That would be to render ourselves centres of the universe. Rather, to see ourselves as gifted with an Eden is to understand that each person comes into the world as a landscape, fecund and abundant with potential unique to them alone.
Eden is that space which is fitted for our existence. It is the space within which whose boundaries there is sufficient to meet our needs. To be in Eden is to be fully at home, to be at home in our place and time in the world, with a corresponding sense of ease and confidence. It is also to be in a place of trust that the soil contains sufficient to provide for the needs of those who dwell upon it. To be in Eden is to find our scale in the world; neither reaching beyond ourselves nor shying away from our borders. It is to live a fitting, grounded life and in so doing, to live well. For we live well when we fully inhabit the space that is available for us in the world. Those around us sense our ease, dignity and coherence, our weight and stability.
Our lives are acts of discovery, finding what there is within our Eden. The world awaits the fullness of our space, the world awaits the blessing it can bring to others. This Eden gift remains secure whatever neglect or trespass has taken place. Ultimately, the fecundity that lies within it, is too deep to be dug out and discarded by the careless of any other. We can be confident of that. And that confidence must be the bedrock upon which we live in the world.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
All change! Education and Young People
I've written extensively over the past decade about the erosion of the soil of society. This is an erosion of our personal soil, as in a thinness of imagination, depth and spirit. It is also an erosion of our social soil, as in a weakening of our relational ties, historic roots and attachments to place and community. Finally, it is an erosion of our civic soil, as in a fragmentation of our social cohesion, a breaking of our civic contract and a weakening of capacity to heal ourselves as a society in the face of our growing pathologies in the West.
After a decade of speaking extensively to grown ups about this condition, I have come to a decision to focus my work, in this next stage, on the young people who will inherit this barren land my generation will leave behind. I feel profoundly sad about the legacy we are leaving and determined to do what I am able to address it.
To that end, my own attention and work is moving away from adults, toward primary and secondary school education. I am leaving the work with companies and adult leaders largely in the hands of capable others, who I have trained and equipped to use the tools of Human Ecology and the lessons of Undefended Life and Leadership. These include Teleios, the fulfilment partner of The Leadership Community in the corporate sector, as well as trained Undefended Leader course facilitators. I don't plan to leave the arena of adult training completely, but will continue to educate future church and corporate leaders where I can, whilst my priority is toward the education sector.
I am increasingly committed to educating young people and schools about a Human Ecology Approach to personal and social formation. A growing number of schools over the past years have invited my wife, Jo, and I to work with them both in the UK and abroad in partnership. These include Monkton School, Thomas's London Day Schools and Wellington College in the UK. Abroad, we have also worked across schools in South Africa over the past three years and this summer begin a new relationship with the Association of Christian Schools in Australia who have invited us to key note their biannual National conference. We are responding to these invitations as fully as we can and are thrilled at the opportunity to work with fertile minds and abundant soil in schools and colleges.
Over the next few weeks I will be posting a short series of thought pieces about personal development, through the language of 'cultivating our land'. I hope these will be a gift to you in the Advent season.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
After a decade of speaking extensively to grown ups about this condition, I have come to a decision to focus my work, in this next stage, on the young people who will inherit this barren land my generation will leave behind. I feel profoundly sad about the legacy we are leaving and determined to do what I am able to address it.
To that end, my own attention and work is moving away from adults, toward primary and secondary school education. I am leaving the work with companies and adult leaders largely in the hands of capable others, who I have trained and equipped to use the tools of Human Ecology and the lessons of Undefended Life and Leadership. These include Teleios, the fulfilment partner of The Leadership Community in the corporate sector, as well as trained Undefended Leader course facilitators. I don't plan to leave the arena of adult training completely, but will continue to educate future church and corporate leaders where I can, whilst my priority is toward the education sector.
I am increasingly committed to educating young people and schools about a Human Ecology Approach to personal and social formation. A growing number of schools over the past years have invited my wife, Jo, and I to work with them both in the UK and abroad in partnership. These include Monkton School, Thomas's London Day Schools and Wellington College in the UK. Abroad, we have also worked across schools in South Africa over the past three years and this summer begin a new relationship with the Association of Christian Schools in Australia who have invited us to key note their biannual National conference. We are responding to these invitations as fully as we can and are thrilled at the opportunity to work with fertile minds and abundant soil in schools and colleges.
Over the next few weeks I will be posting a short series of thought pieces about personal development, through the language of 'cultivating our land'. I hope these will be a gift to you in the Advent season.
(c) Simon P Walker 2011
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