Category Archives: Walls to Dust

A letter to the dust

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Dear friends on the way,

I have been rummaging through the digital equivalent of my attic lately, and I found something that stung. Sixteen years ago, I sat down to write out of a sense of profound frustration at the limitations of my own and our ecclesiastical vocabulary. (see HERE) Looking back at that post now, I recognise the voice of someone sensing a widening chasm between the language we were speaking and the life we were actually inhabiting.

We spoke then, as we still do now, with a polished, professional confidence. We talked then and now of mission, renewal, strategy, and “participation in the missio Dei.” Yet, beneath the surface there is the low hum of a quiet, desperate anxiety. We feared then and now that if we stop talking long enough to truly listen, the entire edifice would reveal itself to be less secure than we had imagined.

But as I read my own words from 2010, I realise I was hiding and complict. I was critiquing the “Church” while exempting myself. I was using sophisticated theology to mask a simple, ugly truth: I, too, am seduced by power. I am addicted to the feeling of being “right,” of having a “strategy,” and of belonging to an institution that still matters.

This post has sat in my drafts for months. I needed the blunt, prophetic nudges of two amazing women pioneers one Anglican from the south, one Methodist from the north, to finally pull this into the light. Our conversations about the nature of power forced me to write not just about my own complicity but to call for light to be cast more fully on all our complicity in the fallacy that we are in control.

What I could only dimly perceive sixteen years ago, I can now see with the terrifying clarity of an ending. The unease was apocalyptic in the truest sense: an unveiling. The walls we trusted, our social standing, our institutional weight, our assumed right to be heard, were already beginning to crumble. This became a recurring theme and even a category of posts (walls to dust) and 16 years on have we really changed.

The category arose not because God had abandoned the Church, but because God refuses to be contained by the structures we mistake for faithfulness. But for sixteen years, I have watched us (and I include myself in this “us”) try to reinforce those walls. We have drafted vision documents, commissioned reviews, and rebranded decline as “strategic repositioning.” We have spent a fortune on scaffolding while the foundations were returning to dust.

Consequently, we have failed to ask the most vital question: Is the Spirit actually the one reducing these walls to powder? And if so, why are we so desperate to rebuild them?

There is a profound difference between reform and relinquishment. Reform assumes the architecture is sound but needs a new boiler. Relinquishment recognises that some structures were provisional all along, and instead of taking these temporary cultural accommodations we baptised them as though they were the Gospel itself.

In Susan Howatch’s Starbridge novels, we see this played out in the clerical ego. Whether it’s the “Practical” ambition of Neville Aysgarth or the “Mystical” pride of Jon Darrow, the temptation is always the same: to use God to secure one’s own place in the world. After 10 years serving the Diocese of Carlisle, I have to face the fact that the “middle way” has often been more a “a way of retaining power”, a way of maintaining a seat at the table of the establishment under the guise of “influence.”

Now, as the cultural conditions that sustained that influence dissolve, we oscillate between nostalgia and panic. We act as though the erosion of our social privilege is equivalent to the erosion of God. It is not. What is being exposed is not the weakness of the Gospel, but the fragility of our frameworks and the depth of our own vanity.

For too long, we have operated with industrial metaphors that have shaped our very souls. We speak of “pipelines” of discipleship and “measurable outputs” of growth, as though the Kingdom of God were a production line and the Church its managerial arm. We have trained leaders to optimise systems rather than to discern seasons.

In doing so, we have absorbed a mechanistic imagination that is fundamentally at odds with the organic, interdependent, and cruciform life revealed in Christ. This is not just a strategic error; it is an ecological disaster of the spirit. We have lost the sense that the Church exists within a living, breathing web of relationships, with culture, with place, and with the “more-than-human” creation.

Ecosystems do not survive through self-perpetuation. They survive through mutuality, adaptation, decay, and regeneration. They survive because nothing lives unto itself. If we want to live, we have to learn how to die.

“Remember that you are dust” is not just an Ash Wednesday sentiment; it is a reorientation of the will. It reminds us that we are creatures, not curators of eternity; participants, not proprietors.

The ecological crisis of our planet has made this painfully visible, yet we often respond as though the “environment” were a peripheral ethical concern rather than a theological revelation. The groaning of creation is the drama of redemption. To persist with a spirituality that floats above the soil, detached from the material conditions of life, is to preach a diminished and false gospel.

For the Church, and for me, to undergo an “ecological conversion” means relinquishing the fantasy of control. It means accepting that some of our cherished institutions must die. Not because they were evil, but because their season is over. We must trust that in the ecology of God, nothing offered in faith is wasted, but becomes the compost for future growth.

The future Church will not be secured by better branding or more sophisticated leadership pipelines. It will emerge, if at all, from communities willing to be small, local, porous, and attentive to pain. It will be led by women and men who understand that authority in the Kingdom is inseparable from surrender. It will be a Church that measures fruit not in numbers, but in reconciliation, in ecological responsibility, and in justice enacted from the ground up, certainly not merely proclaimed from the House of Lords.

Sixteen years on, I am less convinced that the Church needs “rescuing” and more convinced that we need releasing form our addition to power and control and so be

  • Released from the burden of pretending the church or we are the centre of gravity.

  • Released from the anxiety that equates contraction with failure.

  • Released from the toxic need to be “useful” to the state.

What is required of us is not more frantic activity, and alignment of the existing active with the true nature of servanthood and courageous relinquishment. If the walls fall to dust, let them fall. The God who formed humanity from dust has never required masonry to accomplish divine purposes. Our task is not to preserve every structure we have inherited, but to discern what the Spirit is animating in this season and to align ourselves with that movement, however unsettling it may be for our careers or our egos. The question is not whether we can rebuild what has been lost, but whether we are willing to be re-formed by the One who makes all things new. Starting with me.

Grace and peace on the journey,

Richard

What I’m learning from the rocks

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On the day the day the rock was rolled away here’s what I’m learning from the stones. In the previous post, on the universal suffrage of creation and us. I explored the idea that our ache for the wild isn’t just an aesthetic preference, it’s a memory and deeply inbuilt into our being. We are not separate from the soil, stone and the stars; we are a part of a living whole, and our restlessness and desire for the wild is the symptom of a severed communion.

But if we are to move towards “participation” as a way of being, we have to change the way we speak, be, and listen shifting our approach to enter into dialogue. When we stand before an ancient oak or a rock, we are standing before witnesses. They operate within a different kind of time, and a different kind of memory written in rings that differentiate years of drought, seasons of fire, the slow, patient accumulation of carbon. Rocks remembers the weather of a centuries or more, a deeper stillness that predates our languages and our empires. These trees, rocks and soil is not a backdrop for a play we watch like an audience but something more, something deeper and something connected. If we want to find our way back to the integration Pascal hinted at, we have to stop treating these beings as scenery and instead enter into dialogue that may start with words but a dialogue that also moves beyond where deep calls to deep.

My experiences with Mountain Pilgrims and hanging out with people seeking a deeper connection have led me to tentatively experiment with different ways to connect. Trying to describe this dialogue with a non-human world sounds like madness, pantheism or like I have lost the plot. But what Ive been reaching for in this dialogue is essentially an exchange of presence and I’m starting to find the words to share what I’m discovering. Here’s what I’ve found to be important so far:

  1. Relinquishing the Monologue: Most of our “nature walks” are actually monologues. We carry our podcasts, our internal to-do lists, and our human-centric anxieties into the woods. To be in dialogue, we must first connect. We have to let all that recede, recognise we are made of soil and share the air so real connected presence can emerge.
  2. Asking the Questions of the Land: Instead of asking, “What can this place do for my mental health today?” we might ask, “What has this tree seen?” or “What is this rock holding?” This isn’t about literal voices in our heads; it’s about a shift in attention. It is a holy curiosity that acknowledges the “otherness” of creation.
  3. The Response in the Body: Because our bodies are made of the same materials as the earth, we need to be open to the big book of creation speaking to us through sensation and connections.
  4. Deep to Deep: The way your breath slows under a canopy, the “knowing” that comes when you sit still long enough for the birds to forget you are there, these are the responses. Going deep enough so the memory of the trees begins to resonate with the memory in your own cells.

In the “Universal Suffrage of Creation,” every leaf and stone has a vote. They are petitioning for our return, not as masters, but as kin.

When we engage in dialogue with a specific tree or a familiar outcrop of rock, we begin to “thicken” the world. The concrete and the digital screens that thin out our reality start to lose their grip. We begin to see that we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses that have been waiting for us to stop talking and start participating.

The way back to the Creator is not a disembodied leap into the heavens. It is a slow, grounding conversation with the things the Beloved has made.

The Prayer of the In-Betweeners

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Way back in the 1990s I wrote a liturgy based on the idea that we were an in-between people. More recently I have discovered more about Bridget of Kildare or St Bridget and I loved how some people see her as someone who inhabited the inbetween spaces. This resonated a lot because of how I have been thinking about the Fresh Expressions strategy and inhabiting the living middle/the ecotone.

So as part of our Leadership Community gathering last week I wrote this reflection/prayer which I called the Prayer of the Inbetween.

God of doorways and crossroads,
of fading embers and kindled flame,
you meet us in the in between spaces,
between the known and the new,
between the gathered church
and the searching world.

We remember Brigid of Kildare,
born on the threshold of a door,
who wove a cross from rushes
and made the ordinary a shelter of grace.

They say that where she walked
through the cold fields of winter,
white snowdrops rose in her footsteps, small lanterns of hope
breaking through frozen ground.

Teach us to walk the in-between places,
between tradition and tomorrow,
between doubt and faith,
between the church doors
and the open road.

let hope rise quietly behind us,
like snowdrops in late winter,
Help us weave signs that point to new life
and notice everyday grace.

Make our hands generous,
our tables wide,
our communities warm as a hearth-fire.

And where we go
in streets, cafés, homes, and thresholds
may your Spirit leave small flowers of grace
growing in the wake of love.

Through Christ,
who walks every road with us.

Amen.

 

The Universal Suffrage of Creation and Us

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There is something embarrassing about our obsession with happiness. We chase it like desperate of addicts but with the optimism of gamblers. We rename it wellbeing,  flourishing, fulfilment, but maybe it’s the same. The saying goes “happiness is fleeting” and the weird thing is not that happiness is fleeting but that we continue to search for it as if we could readily achieve it.

Blaise Pascal suggested that this longing is not foolish our search is rooted in something deeper than the memory of fleeting times of happiness. We search for happiness because we once experienced it. Not in fragments or weekend bursts as a whole way of being, an atmosphere pat of our origin story. In his Pensées, he proposes that the human heart carries the trace of a joy it can no longer access. We are not inventing desire. We are remembering it.

But if happiness is so fleeting now why should we continue the search? Why not conclude that happiness is simply a neurological trick, a temporary spike in dopamine that evolution wired into us to keep the species moving?

Pascal refuses that reduction. He says that the very persistence of the search is evidence of something far bigger. We would not hunger for what had never nourished us. We would not ache for a fullness we had never tasted. The restlessness is a clue, and the craving is an echo from the deep.

In trying to make sense of my growing sense nd desire for nature connection I wonder what if Pascal was right about happiness but also what if that explains the desire for creation.  What if the search for happiness was not just rooted in an abstract idea about our need to return to the creator where we experienced true happiness but also to return to the place we experienced it the creation. The fracture we feel is not just vertical but horizontal it’s as much heavenward as earthward?

Because our longing is not only for transcendence. It is for soil, sea air, trees older than our politics and rocks that stood the test of time. Like well-being we speak too casually about “getting into nature” as if it were a hobby, but the relief we feel is rooted in something deep inside us unfurl when we stand under a warm sun?

It is too easy to sentimentalise this and perhaps we do this as a kind of coping mechanism because if we really sat with it we would have to confront something far deeper. The ache to be in creation is not merely aesthetic preference. It is visceral because runs deep in our souls beneath our consciousness whether we recognise it or not. Even those who rarely step beyond concrete still carry it, surfacing as restlessness, as low-grade anxiety, with the suspicion that life is thinner than it should be.

We are longing not just for creation out there. We are longing for something that is deeply within us, because we are not separate from it. Our bodies are made of what the earth is made of. Our breath is shared air. The iron in our blood was forged in stars. The boundary between “us” and “environment” is far more porous than our philosophies admit. So perhaps when we long for forests and oceans and mountains, we are not craving escape. We are craving integration. We are sensing that we once knew ourselves as part of a living whole. That happiness, the deep, steady, unfractured kind was not a feeling but participation.

If Pascal is right that we search for happiness because we experienced it once as part of communion with God, then perhaps that communion was never disembodied. Perhaps the joy of origin was not a private mystical glow but a harmony, Creator, created and creature in right relation. A real belonging, severed but with the possibility of a way back by being saturated in nature and confronting our loss honestly.

We have become the species that can refuse its own embeddedness. We can pave, extract, dominate, and still imagine ourselves autonomous. We have convinced ourselves that we stand over creation rather than within it. But time and time again our bodies betray us, we burn out we feel the need to numb ourselves. We seek stimulation because we have lost saturation in nature.

In older language, suffrage did not mean ballots and polling stations. It meant prayer. Petition. Intercession. A cry rising on behalf of another. I suspect, a universal suffrage is taking place. Creation itself is petitioning for wholeness. The groaning of forests stripped bare, the warming seas, the displaced creatures, these are not only data points. They are lament. But the suffrage is not one-sided our bodies are petitioning too. But we are looking in the wrong places, endless scrolling, compulsive productivity, hunger for experiences, these are distorted prayers.

The tragedy is not that happiness is fleeting. The tragedy is that we have mistaken the flickers for the fire. The brief highs for the home we lost. And so we keep searching, because somewhere beneath our cynicism we know the search is justified.

The universal suffrage of creation and us is a shared petition and we need to wake up to the fact that just earth strains toward renewal so do we.

The environmental crisis is not merely a technical problem it’s also a theological one. Our exploitation of the earth mirrors our exploitation of ourselves. We treat land as resource, and we treat our souls the same way. We optimise, mine, leverage the land and sea because we are too afraid to to sit, to confront the reality of our longing and so we are destroying the thing that could save us.

To find the happiness we once knew is not to escape from creation but through a perfect immersion in it, held within its love and the love of its Maker.

To places we have never been before

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Paul Bradbury’s recent reflection on moving beyond empire reminds us how deeply Western mission has been entangled with universalising instincts, the drive to export methods, models, or mindsets far beyond where they first belonged. His question, “How might we save the world without conquering it?” pushes us toward a more humble, localised, and participatory understanding of mission. It’s a call that echoes strongly with what I argued in my previous post what works, works because it is contextual.

If empire seeks control of space, then contextual mission seeks communion IN space. In other words, mission faithful to the gospel begins not with scale but with soil. It roots itself in place but years of contextual mission,following the missio dei and the incarnation has taught us place needs to be understood broadly. Contextually shaped mission is about both “communities of place” and “communities of interest”, and in both these, space matters or perhaps more precisely the space between matters.

Space as the Ground of Context

For communities of place, context is pretty straight forward it’s bounded by postcodes, pavements, local histories, and particular faces. Here, “listening to context” means walking the streets, dwelling among, noticing the patterns of belonging and exclusion, paying attention to how the Spirit stirs through daily life. The missional question is spatial: How is God already at work here?

But the same is true for communities of interest those gathered by vocation, affinity, digital connection, or shared passion. These are not disembodied spaces; they are differently embodied. They occupy networked space, an online forum, a workplace, a music scene, a shared narrative world. These spaces, too, have boundaries, cultures, and ecologies of meaning that also require listening, care, and presence.

To be contextual here means learning the topography of these less tangible places the rituals that shape belonging, the language that signals trust, the injustices and hopes that animate people. This too is place work. Contextual mission is not about being “place-based” versus “network-based”; it is about recognising that space and particularly the space in between is the texture of all context.

The Space Between: From Ownership to Participation

Empire’s imagination is to fill space to occupy, to own, to organise territory. Contextual imagination leaves space, space for others to speak, for grace to emerge, for co-creation. This is not the space of empire, this is the space of incarnation: God dwelling, not dominating; participating, not possessing. 

In our current moment, where both geography and culture feel unsettled, perhaps the task is not to create new models of church or even parish, but to nurture new ecologies of space, perhaps even Brave Spaces of Community and Conversation, porous enough to hold the complexity of both rooted neighbourhoods and fluid networks of meaning.

Context is not an afterthought, It isthe space where the gospel takes shape. So maybe the better question isn’t simply “What works?” but “Where does mission dwell?” Because where mission dwells, (whether a community of place or interest)  determines how God’s story is spoken and heard, and when we listen and join in we go to a new place we have been before. 

Why What Works, Works: Contextual Mission and the Shape of Faithful Innovation

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We know, at least intuitively, that some things work in mission and some don’t. We can point to Bubble Church, Messy Church, particular church plants, fresh expressions that have taken root and borne fruit. The temptation is to move too quickly from that observation to replication: this works, therefore let’s do more of it. But that instinct, while understandable, misses the deeper truth. What works, works because at its heart is contextual mission.

The truth is to be effective it has to be about contextual mission. A basic understanding of systems evens backs this up for Worship First church planting models.  This is something I have reflected on before using the Cynefin framework. In the bottom right-hand corner of Cynefin, the simple domain, we are dealing with contexts where cause and effect can readily understood, so worship first large scale plants can work, because you know the soil (context) they need to be planted in. Ie Resource Churches is areas with high student numbers, where the employees suit the context.  You cannot impose a solution from elsewhere and expect predictable results in the Complicated Zone, here you need contextual adaption eg worship first church plants in a market town may need a families worker instead of a student worker.  Then in the Complex and Chaotic Zones context comes even more to the fore, you probe, sense, and respond. You listen. You pay attention. You act humbly and experimentally and so Listening or Community Church planting, at its best, lives precisely here. 

This all works not because any of it follows a universal template, but because it all begins with a level contextual awareness. The plant knows where it is, who it is among, and what the Spirit might already be doing there. That attentiveness to context is not incidental; it is the very reason fruitfulness becomes possible.

At the heart of the things that work in mission is not a model but a posture: listening to the Missio Dei and the context. 

Take Bubble Church as an example. One could argue quite clearly that Bubble Church works because it is contextual mission. It is not magic, nor is it universally transferable. It works because local vicars and clergy have listened carefully to their context, often noticing young families on the fringes of church life, parents seeking connection, children needing space to be themselves, and have identified Bubble Church as a resource that fits. The model is then brought in not as a franchise, but as a contextual response. The same can be said of Messy Church. Its effectiveness lies not in crayons and craft tables per se, but in the way it emerged from listening: to families, to patterns of time poverty, to the desire for intergenerational belonging that does not rely on cultural fluency with inherited church. Messy Church is context-first mission that happened to crystallise into a recognisable form.

Even in church planting circles that talk about being “worship first,” the same dynamic is at play, whether or not it is always acknowledged. Worship-first plants do not appear randomly (or if they do they tend to fail). They are often planted into areas with high student populations, or significant numbers of young adults, or cultures where music and gathering carry particular social weight. The decision to centre worship is might itself be more the result of contextual listening than many assume. 

This is why fresh expressions remain so important. Fresh expressions are not primarily about novelty, nor about ecclesial experimentation for its own sake. They are about starting with context. They are about taking seriously the conviction that there is no such thing as a generic mission field, and therefore no such thing as a one-size-fits-all church.

I have argued that mission takes place within complex, adaptive systems, that culture is semiotic. Therefore, Churches, neighbourhoods, cultures, and networks are not machines to be engineered but living systems to be engaged. Within that framing, More recently I have suggested that faithful mission involves thinking carefully about how we scale: not just out, but deep and up as well.

Scaling out: replicating a model in new places, can be fruitful, but only when accompanied by contextual discernment. Scaling deep is about embedding practices, values, and theological depth within a particular place, allowing mission to become part of the local ecology rather than an imported programme. Scaling up involves influencing wider systems, structures, and cultures, enabling learning and resources to flow without flattening difference.

The common thread running through all of this is about taking context seriously. The danger comes when we adopt a consumerist logic: identifying a successful model and attempting to roll it out indiscriminately. Scaling Bubble Church simply because Bubble Church “works” risks misunderstanding why it worked in the first place. Without the right context, without listening, without local ownership, the model becomes hollow. It may look right, but it will lack life and longevity. 

At the heart of all good mission is context. Not context as a box to be ticked in a planning document, but context as a theological commitment: the belief that God has taken the particular (be that place or interest) seriously enough to become incarnate, and therefore we must do the same. Contextual mission is not a strategy; it is a way of seeing.

If we want to be faithful rather than fashionable, fruitful rather than frantic, then the task before us is not to find the next thing that works and copy it. It is to cultivate communities that know how to listen to God, to place, to people and have the courage to respond in ways that may look very different from one context to another. That, ultimately, is why what works, works.

Round and round we go

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I grew up in a little village not far from Exmoor and the coast. The air was different not close enough to smell the salt but with plenty of room to roam. I would wander the lanes with friends, kicking about with nothing in particular to do. Every now and then a car would pull up visitors or Grockals as they are known in Devon, the days before phones and sat nav they came with maps half-folded, asking the way to somewhere or other.

And we, being kids, thought we were hilarious. We’d send them on “the scenic route,” which was really a long circle of narrow lanes that led eventually back to where they’d started. Fifteen minutes later we’d be leaning against the gatepost, waving as they reappeared looking slightly more puzzled, slightly less polite. We didn’t mean harm, just mischief. Even as write it now I chuckle at the memory, I’m fascinated by the circularity of it, the traveller earnestly trying to get somewhere while being guided by someone who didn’t really know where they were heading in the bigger scheme of life either.It strikes me that this is how the church sometimes behaves. We’re asked for direction, to meaning, to community, to hope in a tangled world, but too often we send people down the same old lanes. We wave cheerfully, even triumphantly, when they come back round to where they started. All the while the scenery may shift a little, but the map the assumptions, the systems, the stories we cling to stays the same. Our other favourite thing to say to these earnest travellers is “well I wouldn’t start from here”.

In *Hospicing?Modernity*, Vanessa?Machado?de?Oliveira talks about tending to a dying way of knowing the world. She says we need to hospice not fix or glorify, what can no longer sustain life. Perhaps that’s what we’re called to now in the church: to stop waving from the gatepost, pretending we know the route. Recognise that realistically we shouldn’t be starting from here, not really understanding how modernity has bought us here anyway. Instead we need to attend, with love and honesty, to the dying illusions of control and certainty we’ve been peddling.

Maybe our task is not to keep the old roads open, but to walk with people into the woods, where the maps fall apart and new ways of seeing might take root. To recognise that transformation won’t come from clever shortcuts but from learning to grieve what’s ending, to compost our worn-out certainties, and to listen again to the land and to each other.

If we do that, if we dare to step off the loop, then perhaps the next time someone stops to ask for direction, we’ll point not down the lane but toward a horizon and travel there together.

 

if you’re interested in a Tricksters approach to systems and want to break out of the same old circles check out https://alchemyedge.co.uk/#what-we-offer-individuals

Pioneer Breath Prayers

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I really like Cole Arthur Riley’s writing and in particular the Inhale and Exhale breath prayers.  This one stuck me for this current time. I think her work is great but understand it’s an approach to prayer that has been around a long time. In the fx advent series we used the breath prayer approach but it also made me wonder what pioneer breath prayers might look like as I particularly like the balance so played with these as some possibilities.

inhale – possibility is within you

exhale – another world is possible

inhale – the kindom is now

exhale – the kindom is not yet

inhale – we journey to the edge spaces

exhale – we find kinship along the way

inhale – from dust we came

exhale – we call the walls to dust

 

 

 

The Catch Limit: Casting Positivity and hope onto the water

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I’m after a new hobby that has space and an outcome, so I found myself musing about fishing as a possibility. As an activist, a lover of river banks, piers, beaches and sea, it felt like a good fit. As someone who’s spent more hours wrestling with books than bait, there I was, speaking with a mate about the possibility of giving fishing a go. His response has lingered: “If I was to guess your next hobby, fishing would never have even made the list.” And I could see his point. Yet what really struck me was the gentle admiration he voiced, not so much for my angling nous, but for my optimism that I might catch more than the permitted two salmon per season.

Two salmon. It’s a paltry number, really. Yet, for me, my instinct and reflex, is to look for the glimmers of possibility where others might see scarcity. I wonder why is it I approach things like this, glass brimming with hope, an assumption of success even when the river is running thin?

Somewhere beneath this buoyant surface is the quiet undertow of whats gone before. The ripples of old stories, the clatter of childhood. I’m no stranger to the terrain of adversity, that stretch of years in my childhood where hardship edged the seasons, and the river of life often flowed murky. The textbooks label these sorts of things “adverse childhood experiences,” and the narratives attach warnings of gloom, fragility, risk. But that reality, that living, breathing, evolving gives me a wonderfully subversive logic.

I’ve come to see that within the chapters marked ‘difficulty’ there can be a strange kind of resource. Resilience as muscle memory for hope. When challenges came and physical flight was not an option, it taught me to scan the horizon not for loss, but for what might yet come into view. The fisherman’s prayer, “Maybe this cast,” echoes something deeper, a conviction that each attempt carries the possibility of a different outcome, even when the books and the bylaws would say otherwise.

It’s not always conscious, this tendency to override the limits and reach for the next best outcome. Sometimes it’s just stubborn curiosity, or an overinflated sense of self, often it’s a refusal to let the story be written in advance. Other times, it’s a conscious act of rebellion against the predisposition of pessimism. Where others see the posted sign, two salmon, part of me assumes success and wonders, “Yes, but what if?” There’s a joy in that question, a wild grace in believing the river may yield something more than it’s supposed to.

My friend’s remark that he admired my positivity was meant kindly, and I think it was recognition of something we don’t always name: hope isn’t just naivety, nor is it denial. Sometimes it’s born from the long, gradual work of braving the years where things were sparse and the nets came up empty. Fishing, then, becomes less about the catch than the casting, a test of faith, a hope for life to surface.

There’s an old saying on rivers: one fishes not for fish, but for restoration but for the me outcome, the catch remains important, so I’m not sure if it will make the new hobby list, but I do like the idea that it might be a way to keep practicing that muscle, stretching hope beyond the limits set by authorities and old stories. Because after all, two salmon is the rule. But possibility and hope like water, can never be wholly contained.

Be more Pete

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Whilst on holiday I watched Timothee Chamalat’s portrayal of Bob Dylan in A complete unknown. My favourite scenes were around the Newport folk festival and contrast between when Dylan played the song “The Times They Are a-Changin” and the crowd loved it because the style was acceptable and then a couple years later the crowd rejected his new electric music even though in few years the album would be widely acclaimed.  Change is the one constant, a reality captured through the film and so powerfully in the lyrics of: “The times they are a-changin’. In that song Dylan calls all the elders, from leaders to mothers and fathers to recognize the shifting landscape, to refuse to block the halls or stand in the doorways of renewal, because “the wheel’s still in spin” and there’s “no tellin’ who that it’s namin’.” Those who hesitate, he warns, “will sink like a stone” in waters that have already risen around us.

The current rising waters are echoing this, calling us to move from gatekeeping beliefs to cultivating new ways of being, that those who have eyes, see this new water springing up like wells all around. This rising tide is nurturing abundant, adaptive life, and to be rooted in Christ is to bear witness to the fruit that whispers of a Kingdom not yet fully seen. Our true telos is not in relentless self-preservation, but in flowing, loving participation in the waters of change.

Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” laments the slow recognition of what’s right (“How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?”) and poses the questions. While “The Times They Are A-Changin’” suggests the answers lie in adapting and warns a failure to so will result in being “drenched to the bone” by the coming tide of change thats happening now, and everyone must decide whether to move with it or be left behind.

Perhaps the key to not being left behind lies in Pete Seeger’s portrayal, even though at one stage he wanted to stop Dylan’s electric music, he relented and made space. I love the hope that Pete holds throughout the film and how the folk scene led to the love revolution. The final scene sees Pete’s hope in action through his servant leadership which shows him putting away the chairs after the festival. Hope as I’ve said before isn’t fragile or passive. It’s a muscle, “sinew and tendon that flexes beneath the skin with every reimagined dream of a better world.” And practically we build hope every time we give space to others to sing and dream, where as elders we refuse to block the halls or stand in the doorways and instead we serve others, put a chair away and wash the dishes.