....planned this week-end as recovery from gb.....free ...and so glad. Need some head space.Got it. Need more.
Good debate going on on the gb 'forum' at the mo re our Communion sevice. I like the thoughts and comments.I like the positives and the negatives.Both vital so we can build on the strengths and try to kick the weaknesses until they bleed daylight. Good thing about the forum is you generally feel that there is someone out there.....uncertain with the blog!!!.........is this like faith ?
You don't always get come back on the forum and some exchanges I will scan very quickly but,festival wise there is some good comments....always balanced of course by the ones from ymca residents and our international team.
Got a big week this week so need to be fresh and up and at 'em...........still need some brain showering and input from the 12 books I am reading at the moment............John Smith is helping too.....I am going through the tapes as I drive daily.....good stuff...............
bless......and remember that finger tip of yours.....it is the tip of a beautiful human person
bhp
pip@pipwilson.com
Back, just, from a good few days break after the festival. My first instinct was to go and blog - is that worrying or good, do you think?? Glad GB Blog 24/7 is still alive 'n' kicking. The festival leaves us so much to sort out in our lives, our loins, our hearts, our heads, it's as well there's a year inbetween to sift it all through.
Today I most want (a) to be as honest as Cole Moreton about my struggles in faith; and (b) to be simply grace-full or full-filled, thankful for the simple gifts of God rather than caught up in the restless spirit of the age which John Bell described in one of his talks, and which I felt myself slipping into on an impatient speed-trip up the M6, home. Having arrived, I now want my bags to unpack themselves, clothes to wash themselves and stack of letters on my kitchen table to disappear. It won't happen. Maybe grace will, instead.
......Thursday night,Friday really.
Had a busy day at the ymca..........still lots of gb conversations,references,inspiration from so so many.
Been a day of meetings and catch up with backlogs.....as always I can be out of my office and within 10 seconds I am interacting with many and that is what inspires me. Beautiful humans who I just feel like hugging......staff,residents,volunteers,members,big ones,tiny ones.......wonderful the wee contact with people .....time and time again until a new relationship of some meaning and feeling is established.
See the website www.romfordymca.org for picture....movie of our Japanese volunteer who was at greenbelt and here seen teaching the local kids a Japanese song.......love it............see also the stills of the gang who did the big' kiss' on mainstage/communion.............love it....love them.
I am tired and by the signs of failing bloggers....so is everyone else
stay beautiful.................................................................................bhp
It's only 3 days since the end of Greenbelt yet what did seem alien on returning home, now seems like normality again. I'm confused, which is more real, Greenbelt or non-Greenbelt. There are certainly a lot or things that I come into contact at Greenbelt which seem more real. Maybe it's me?
Stage 2 (for 'tis that which I run) was a tremendous success. I'd like to be smug and say it was down to my (and the GB office's - of course) fantastic planning! But somehow I think we had a crop of extra good bands this year. Some of the things we got wrong last year were righted. Much better sound. Secret Archives of The Vatican returned with a much more satisfying show. Kosher rocked da house and were our long lost brothers. How can things be so different, were we not holy enough last year?
Although I have mixed emotions about every Greenbelt, more than ever this year, I am already thinking about GB30. Must try not to, I have to live in "the other world" for another 12 months yet.
What did I do at GB29? Family things: bouncy castle, tiny tea tent, stalls selling balloons, make bubbles. Work things: Everything to do with stage 2. Ligging things: Chat with John Smith (yes pip, he don't half talk a lot), pass Rowan a few times and marvel that "those" eyebrows will be the next eyebrows of Canterbury, tea with Phil Beer (without speaking!). Friendships: catch up with friends too numerous to mention, fringe friends, workers, fire crew, stewards, Gaynor (thanks for the you know what!). Marvel: At what Greenbelt has become.
AH, the real world. it's not so bad really. A year of constant Greenbelt might be too much to handle.
See the post fest trim website and you will see no blog click ........so it is only us small existing humans who will pick this up. So,not knowing,as usual who I am ranting with...............here goes.
Today I didn,t wake up till 1pm and I had been at work for four hours and held two meetings.It was hard to kick in.Think my mind was a filled sponge and, after the stimulation of Greenbelt, I was just coming down down down.............not sad...............just brain dead. I had to kick in the afternoon to get out 'the wrap' a wrap around tabloid size sheet of newsprint which is wrapped around a freebee newspaper and goes to 50000 homes to tell of the good news of the ymca in Dagenham and Romford
In the dining room I bumped into loads of our people and caught their first reflections on Greenbelt.....many loved the service as their number one. I will send you more details when I get over my morning sickness (the way I felt this morning is still with me )........so go to bed pip and dream of reaching out and touching my fingertip to yours..................doing it right now.............................feel it ?
bhp
Since leaving Greenbelt on Tuesday, after a Soul Space meeting around the Pitville breakfast tables, I have visited three churches. They were, in order, the Parish Church of Odell, Bedfordshire, The Church of the Good Shepherd, Arbury, Cambridge, and St Matthew's Church, Soham. Bit of a raggedy pilgrimage, which I'm writing up now in a Cambridge internet cafe.
Odell church was closed but I enjoyed sitting in the gardens, nodding off halfway through my eastward journey. The village which hosted my first-ever Greenbelt is one my friends and I have revisited over the years, usually for a pint and some good home-cooked grub in The Bell, which for a long time (even when GB had shifted sites to Castle Ashby) was our Greenbelt Thursday-evening gathering point. Over this year's GB I was quizzed about Iona as a 'liminal place' by a student researching the Iona Community; I think that island does carry something distinctive, profound, unique in its rocks as they interact with its history. Odell's not like that and I wasn't there to sentimentalise my previous GB experiences. Now it's merely a place to feel some lasting attachment to and to say thanks for beginnings there.
This morning I shared communion with the good folk of Arbury, who were so good to me when I was with them as a ministry student 1998-2000. This was my first visit since leaving for my curate's post back home in Liverpool, all the nicer to drop in on them as a surprise and chat like we'd never been apart.
And then I felt drawn towards Soham, unsure why and halfway there wondering whether I ought to turn back. I was listening to Cole Moreton's excellent GB02 seminar at the time, which meant I was (thankfully) in no mood for sentimentality on this journey either. But as he described he and Rachel's deep pain and struggle in their yearning for a child who would not come, I realised that perhaps part of the reason I wanted to do my homage to Holly and Jessica's place was that I want to affirm the positive in relationships between children and s, wanted to pray specifically there that grown-ups would learn to value and uphold our young ones in all places and in all ways, from Soham to Lakenheath to Iraq. Which is what I did, as well as chatting to the clergyman on duty there, about what do you say to the people passing through the doors and walking the churchyard covered in floral tributes ("You don't, there's nothing to say, you just listen.") As I ate my butties on the green alongside the playground, the mums of Soham were out with their children and, in the midday sun, it seemed like every other country town I've been through on this journey.
...terrible traffic in London and having to pick up'zig' the cat........
Unpacked.......sorted my bag for work tomorrow
Sorted all the papers from gb into 'now and 'later'
The first real meal for a week
late up now (seeing only went to bed at 4).....was that last night?
Really loved it you know. Must reflect on it as I walk the week before me.....even though I have issues already which will take me away fro m Greenbelt heaven too quickly
SOME IMMEDIATE THOUGHTS:-
§ good to meet the bloggers...would have loved to chat.......
§ loved late night chats with
-John Smith almost every night but he do damn talk non stop
-Jim Wallace...a man in a great place and a total gb fan.....started kissing his wife Joy at the festival when they first meet on a panel some years ago......I wonder if he will fall for Rowan seeing they did the panel meeting experience.........!!!!!!
-Paul and Clare.......just fantastic
-the ymca David and Ken,a type of diamond
-Martyn Joseph......two hours after the fantastic gig when he put anger into"one of us....just a slob like one of us....".........,he was still holding those feelings because he does not perform.....he communicates.....he pours his soul.......that feeling/fight/right/commitment to smack injustice is so real and wondrous
-the band (penultimate on Monday stage one?)....I posed them some `BHP/level 5/deep questions about 3am and they responded well......but then they flew to US at 5 am......don't like the fly in fly out bands.......they need to get a bless from geebee not just 'perform'
-Karen and Harry who put the whole programmme together......hmmmmm
-Jana and Martin from Prague
-June and Ivor from Belfast
-Bev and Alan
all late night people and lurrve it
The glory of God is a person fully alive and I feel alive
but I am off to bed and it is first day back tomorrow
bhp
pip@pipwilson.com
Although I'm sure the GB clean-up operation is fairly large, it is important to note that it must pale into insignificance next to the magnitude of the clean-up operation required for The Drew. Thusly, my GB02 Clean-up List.
The hills beyond Cheltenham are grey with evening mist; the campsite is thinning but still looks as full as it did last year (indication of GB02's bumper attendence). Down below me beneath the grandstand steps four guys are frizbee-ing; across the Fishtank venue five blokes with glasses, three teenaged girls, one young woman with a clipboard, and Neil, Greenbelt's blogger-coordinator, all sit at iMacs surfing and blogging away. Me too, a bit weary but blessed once again by being here for a weekend among friends.
There will be life after Greenbelt for us all; and it will be all the richer for having been here. For me, life after Greenbelt will involve waiting for the anger to surface after seeing Don McCullin's photographs of African AIDS victims, and letting the joy of seeing the Archbishop's impromptu dance with a 'belter at the Communion translateinto something substantial. And it will also involve decisions about what I do with my future and ideas about GB03 and the future of this Blog and my own.
It never stops, Greenbelt, really. Saying 'Life after Greenbelt' is like saying 'Life after Monday'. It happens. It's good.
.....................been bobing in the blog fish tank......tanks you guys for the energy and creativity to make the venue buzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Been around the festival a doing butterfly toch with all areas ,feeling the festival .....kissing and being kissed.....people have said they were disturbed and churned during the sunday service which pleases me.....we nee the cracks in our shell.....that's how the light gets in..................the light....the kiss.....as Bruce Cockburn would say.......kick the darkness untill it bleeds daylight.............................loved the anger in Martyn josephs 'one of us' song last night,stage one.He added to the song some considerable contextual feelings of his experience of Africa,aids/hiv and the theme of our festival this year in terms of appeal to the life style and pocket..........the man was still emotional one hour,two hours after the gig so.......he puts gis soul in.....more than a performance eh?.....what do you feel which lasts for two or more hours?
I'm off to festival feedback...........................................................thanx for picking up the blogs....it could catch on !!bhp