tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83037560162431208282012-01-28T13:24:07.099-08:00Unearthing the deeper structures of the human conditionSimon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.comBlogger351100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-12685400012990097062011-12-01T06:48:00.001-08:002011-12-31T00:50:27.347-08:00

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

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-76468095697877554432011-12-01T06:46:00.001-08:002011-12-29T10:07:10.830-08:00

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

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-82605193315805810892011-12-01T06:44:00.001-08:002011-12-18T14:41:42.340-08:00

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

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-50946571629004358232011-12-01T06:42:00.001-08:002011-12-14T11:30:28.361-08:00

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

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-16382008637811519682011-12-01T06:41:00.001-08:002011-12-12T14:36:54.939-08:00

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

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-80596121447163309842011-12-01T06:39:00.001-08:002011-12-09T09:00:37.542-08:00

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

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-64600885138751690752011-12-01T06:36:00.001-08:002011-12-06T14:55:38.814-08:00

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

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-59896645397605230472011-12-01T06:32:00.001-08:002011-12-06T14:58:04.284-08:00

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

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-84473660922256378182011-12-01T05:58:00.001-08:002011-12-01T06:06:25.169-08:00

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

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-9415243986762033722011-12-01T03:36:00.001-08:002011-12-02T12:24:53.314-08:00

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

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-75466532370260589452011-09-22T06:40:00.000-07:002011-09-22T06:40:02.393-07:00

If you caught the MOOT podcast I gave to Ian Mobsby below, you might be interested to read the interview I gave to Kay Parris at Reform magazine, which she has entitled "Simon Walker on the Path to Attentive Openness." This came out on Monday.

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-86162980478694768192011-09-18T10:28:00.000-07:002011-09-20T08:03:36.819-07:00

Few of us will be unaware that the times we are entering promise greater instability than perhaps at any point since the nineteen thirties. The final year of that decade marked the ultimate military facture, in the geopolitical landscape, of the creaking alliances tested in a decade of economic strain preceding it. That economic strain itself was itself an outworking of the collapse in market and

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-37617332359002541742011-09-18T10:18:00.000-07:002011-09-18T10:18:06.713-07:00

The American bail out costs now currently at $1 trillion up from the $700 billion stated here, and with more QE on the cards. The second of my conclusions from 2008 (that the financially prudent will be rewarded as the deck/debt of cards collapses) has, sadly, proved wrong. Those with solid foundations are, criminally, being now punished further by the value of their holdings being eroded by

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-9296191175528488182011-09-12T01:59:00.000-07:002011-09-12T01:59:56.584-07:00

September 2011 If you read the UK government’s forecasts for our ‘recovery’ you will see just how mendacious our leaders are being. Their predictions of our growth in GDP are based upon a renewed increase in personal borrowing. Borrowers such as you or I have collectively reduced our loans from 180% of total GDP to 160% of GDP over the past two years. However, the government is banking on us

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-9746191654967347542011-09-08T08:44:00.000-07:002011-09-08T08:44:47.855-07:00

Back in 2008 I wrote a series of published articles about the unfolding financial crisis. The events of the summer indicate it might be time to revisit some of my forecasts. I'm going to republish extracts with contemporary comments alongside over the coming days. The Leadership Community Newsletter September 18th 2008 It seems clear now that parts of Europe and the US are going to tip into a

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-56789319165796685062011-09-08T08:41:00.000-07:002011-09-08T08:41:30.579-07:00

Ian Mobsby, who leads Moot, a New Monastic Community based in London, asked if I was up for a podcast around living an undefended life. We recorded a conversation in August and this is appearing, in three parts, on the Moot web site. Moot is one of a number of very interesting explorations of spiritual life within the Christian tradition that have sprung up in the UK. Others that have stood the

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-62068460962403339102011-03-26T08:32:00.000-07:002011-05-10T01:45:06.654-07:00

The Undefended Life was launched on 8th April at the Oxford Literary Festival. Copies can be ordered below. We're happy to arrange a discount for bulk purchases if you contact us. Thank you for Subscribing and we very much hope you enjoy the book. Simon and the Team BUY THE BOOK at http://simonpwalker.com/#/undefended-life-2for1 (c) Simon P Walker 2010 The Content of The Undefended Life,

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-12906377027134885262011-03-05T13:25:00.000-08:002011-03-21T14:51:50.738-07:00

It's the moment followers have been waiting for.... The Undefended Life is about to be published in paperback format. On Friday April 8th Simon Walker will launch the book at the Oxford Literary Festival on a talk focusing on the freedom from fear that lies at the heart of the Christian message. A.S Byatt, Joanne Harris and Melvyn Bragg are also on the line up for the day and this promises to be

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-40855526353546097672010-07-13T02:10:00.000-07:002010-07-13T02:38:18.162-07:00

God, then is present always, in every situation, ‘in hope’. He is the insertion of hope in all the textures of our lives- including the apparently dull, boring, repetitive, unsensational and the apparently hopeless. The spirituality of the undefended life has room for repetition, and, indeed, values traditions where patterns of worship are ritualised and where the present moment is sublimated

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-66307757353623630922010-07-13T02:03:00.000-07:002010-07-13T03:17:17.787-07:00

I am often asked what kind of spirituality flows from an undefended life. Are there specific spiritual practices which are consistent with and flow out from this kind of undefended life? Such practices will of course, also not simply reflect but also nurture and sustain this kind of life. My first instinct is to say ‘the old ones’. I do not regard this language of being undefended as being some

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-62487522934045066262010-07-12T13:59:00.000-07:002010-07-12T13:59:36.917-07:00

To live an undefended life is to join in with the eternal movements of God. One’s own movements become fundamentally only responsive gestures to the primary movement of Father, Son and Spirit. This is the life that Jesus himself describes when he speaks of the Son only doing what he sees his Father in heaven doing. What does it actually mean in practice? Attentiveness to the movements around

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-87835030161236220332010-07-05T08:20:00.000-07:002010-07-05T08:53:55.145-07:00

How can God be vulnerable? Western thought owes its origins to classical Greek philosophy. I have already depicted the view of time and timelessness the Greeks, through Plato, understood. This led the Greeks to assume that absolute being i.e. true reality was outside time. It existed in an ideal state, as a type, or form. God, if he was to be God, must the also be conceived as outside time -

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-92154320416861480352010-06-29T01:21:00.000-07:002010-07-13T02:20:36.573-07:00

The Central Dynamic: Stillness and Movement Jesus was free enough to risk his life. Jesus was free enough to act boldly, decisively in confrontation, to protect that which was sacred. It was not the only strategy he chose to use but it was the one that was right at that moment in time. It was right because Jesus, as we need to now consider, lived his life in a state of attentiveness to the

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-61764686616011064072010-06-04T09:55:00.000-07:002010-06-29T01:21:25.065-07:00

In the previous blog release, I wrote about some of the charactertistics of the Undefended Life and I am continuing that here.... Freedom Jesus says that ‘If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” This freedom, we imagine is much more than the simple, though wonderful, freedom from guilt and condemnation of a future judgement. I want to suggest at least five different freedoms which

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-61999743740295128772010-05-25T04:24:00.000-07:002010-06-04T09:37:08.546-07:00

What does it look like to abandon the fear narrative and to embrace the freedom of our divine Father? What kind of experience of life does it open up? How does the world look different? In what ways do one’s daily activities change? In other words, what are the characteristics, or the phenomena, of living the undefended life - the life in the Spirit? Four central characteristics of this new

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-49571161254518306612010-05-17T11:58:00.000-07:002010-07-13T02:22:56.276-07:00

Living in the Spirit is only and is always life and peace. It offers no other experience of self and the world. It transfigures all reality, be that suffering, loss, pain, joy, success or failure or any other experience into an experience of ‘gift’ in which we encounter the love of the divine Father for us. It renders all power, which can come against us, as impotent - be that bankruptcy,

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-11962028796538639882010-05-10T08:42:00.000-07:002010-05-17T11:58:33.292-07:00

We have said that the cross is a symbol of our reconciliation with God as Father. That act of reconciliation deals with our fear and brings peace when we first believe and, in our daily lives, as we believe that truth more and more. It is in the daily living that Paul contrasts the person who lives by the flesh and cannot please God with the person ‘controlled by the Spirit, whose life is peace

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-71604105656395564502010-05-03T03:20:00.000-07:002010-07-13T02:21:57.607-07:00

For Paul, the cross is supremely an event of reconciliation. It is the hostility of God that primarily must be dealt with if the curse in the fallen world is to be revoked and healed. Paul’s language of ‘peace’ through the cross has often been heard only through the narrative of guilt. We were guilty, but God’s son took the punishment instead. Because of this sacrifice, the debt has been paid

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-22607461752649696182010-04-28T07:24:00.000-07:002010-07-13T02:22:13.195-07:00

I have suggested that, since the fault line of mistrust in the Genesis 3 story, human beings have experienced the world as basically unsafe. I have also suggested that the condition of fear that flows from this is an outworking of both our relative scale and the reality of time; the future is unknown. Thus, human behaviour is always, to some extent, future orientated. By this I mean that human

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-80706784404259864202010-04-12T10:22:00.000-07:002010-07-13T02:20:20.102-07:00

THIS CHAPTER FORMS THE SECOND OF A PAIR OF CHAPTERS, 4 AND 5, DEALING WITH THE FOUR HUES OUR SELF IDENTITY CAN BECOME WOVEN IN. PLEASE READ THEM TOGETHER. I have been suggesting that it is from the narrative of fear that we knit the fabric of our selves, such that our behaviours, emotions and what we come to call our personality, is bound up with our rebellion against God. Fear is woven

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-11717482550468125492010-04-02T06:54:00.000-07:002010-04-12T10:21:54.015-07:00

The key ingredient that has determined our experience of the world as unsafe is that of trust - broken trust. Adam and Eve chose not to trust that God was for them. As trust broke, the future became uncertain and unsafe. Their, and our behaviours, from then on, become the means of anticipating and avoiding potential threats to secure a favourable response from a potentially threatening audience

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-69023478813848958422010-03-29T13:22:00.000-07:002010-04-05T00:29:57.352-07:00

To understand the centrality of the distinction I am making between repentance as ‘risk’ rather than ‘moral reform’, we need to think a little more deeply about the nature of guilt and of sin. We often think of ‘sin’ as something outside and distinct from ‘us’. We sometimes use the language of sin as stain - we, an unblemished object, have become tainted and stained by sin. Or we think of sin as

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-66455912227464365022010-03-21T15:01:00.000-07:002010-07-13T02:21:43.099-07:00

The New Testament We have tended to conceive of the act of following Jesus as an act of moral reform. Matthew is called away from his tax desk; Zacchaeus gives away half of his wealth and four times what he has defrauded; the man born blind is told to sin no more; the high-minded Nicodemus is humbled; the tax collector at the temple pleads ‘God have mercy on me, a sinner’; the promiscuous and

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-23645078075133926892010-03-09T10:08:00.000-08:002010-07-13T02:23:30.860-07:00

Beginning at the beginning: The archetypal fault line Let us go back to an old story- one of the oldest there is - to the story of creation and the fall in the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis. God creates a world and declares that it is good. In this world, he places Adam and Eve. Fundamentally, they experience this world as safe. It is safe on the basis of two conditions. First,

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8303756016243120828.post-46512863917751240502010-03-09T10:02:00.000-08:002010-03-10T09:09:36.094-08:00

I have written this book in large part as a way of honouring those people who have travelled this journey with me over the past seven years. Specifically, there is a group of some five hundred or so who have participated in some version of The Undefended Leader course. Whilst, ostensibly, we have been exploring leadership, the heart beat of our travels has actually been to find an undefended way

Simon P Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10770512416227838874noreply@blogger.com5