Normal Human Behaviour

I've always been fascinated by the Space Race (I'd weep at episodes of From the Earth to the Moon, and not just at Tom Hanks' hangdog face.) And because rooting for the underdog is a big part of our culture (FA Cup giant killers, voting Lib-Dem) I always felt a bit sorry for the Soviets. They started so well, but their kit wasn't as snazzy as the pesky capitalist Americans. Still, first satellite in space: Soviet. First dog in space: Soviet. First woman in space: Soviet (I learnt that during my encyclopaedic primary years, and although I probably can't spell Valentina Tereshcova without googling it, it's a fact that's never left me. I think it was from one of those card-mounted coin collections from the Esso garage.)

So, with all this cosmonautical respect going round, you can imagine I was pretty chuffed to meet Gagarin during my visit to Hungary in February.

OK, so not Yuri Gagarin, but the next best thing. A guy who carries his (nick)name for generations to come.

There's probably a video clip about how I met this other Gagarin over on the project blog at www.kolontark.blogspot.com (scroll down to clips 4 and 5, I reckon.) I've got to admit, as so often happens with me, there's an initial feeling, tempered by the Holy Spirit kicking in and saying: "hang on a sec, let's think about this, let's see what God's got to say about it." Because when I first saw him, he was on a cigarette break, and I guess the regular clean-living PSHE  part of me had its radar up and triggered the thought "these cigarette breaks are not that occasional, are they? This guy chains it. And if the red sludge particles don't kill me, probably the nicotine exposure will."

But Gagarin was the only person I met who gave me somewhere to stay. It was his automatic response. Which was a whole lot different to mine. And he and his girlfriend Marianna took me out to that late lunch/supper thing. (Gagarin had a very liquid lunch, but there I go again, focusing on the differences.) And shared their story. And he translated on the spur of the moment, and looked after my rucksack, and researched train and bus timetables, and treated me to bizarrely delicious fruit syrup cordials and biscuits, and didn't mind being interrupted again with my last-ditch negociations with the Hungarian Red Cross.

It's like in the Old Testament, when David's brothers are being checked out for their kingship potential. Samuel himself thinks it must come down to their physical toughness (it was a bit like the NFL scouting combine: in his mind he's imagining how fast they sprint, what their vertical leap is.)

But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” [1 Samuel 16:7]

He was the man of peace God showed me, the one I should stay with, who opened his home to me. He identified with travelling, squatting, being a citizen of the world. After all, he'd driven the tour van for the Hungarian Vegetarian Anti-Drug Punk Band that Marianne had been the lead singer for. He'd driven that van all the way to Birmingham. I wish I'd been there first time around.

I said a lot of "thank yous" to Gagarin during my few hours with him, but each time he shrugged it off with this phrase:

"Not thank you. Just normal human behaviour."

Generosity. Open-heartedness. Flexibility. Spur of the moment kindness. Support. Involvement. Hospitality.

Normal human behaviour? Did anyone just hear the clunk of a gauntlet being thrown down?

Relentless

What's the distance on a computer keyboard between the "9" and the "0"? A finger width? A gnat's crotchet? About a centimetre?

I make it 13,512 miles and still measuring.

I make snap judgements sometimes. Like last Christmas, when I saw that my sister had bought me a DVD. Track record suggests it'll be some tv nostalgia, my heart sinks a little as I'm not feeling that nostalgic these days. Putting away childish things and all that. But how wrong I was. Hugely so. Because it was a DVD of a live Stomp show. And we all got engrossed, and energised. We're pretty much full-time domestic percussionists now: not just pots and pans, but waiting at train stations, in the woods. And I've unleashed a bit of Stomp at school too, which can make it tricky for them to keep still in assembly.

Anyway, back in March I emailed someone at the Stomp UK office to say:

Hi there

I hope you'll be able to help.

I live in Rugby, England, and my kids Miriam (5) and Theo (3) have been going crazy for Stomp since we got the Stomp Live dvd for Christmas (I know we're a bit behind the times, but we're slowly catching up...) We just got the Pulse dvd too, and they were glad to see a familiar face in Keith (who they have nicknamed "Dreadlocks")

Anyway, Miriam's drawn a picture for him, and I said I'd try to find the best place to post it to him.

(Keith's their main favourite performer. He looks like this:)

Anyway, they emailed back and said we should try...

Keith Middleton

Stomp New York

720 7th Avenue 12th Fl

New York, NY 10019

USA

But a couple of weeks later the letter came back, return to sender. So I googled the street address, and from my research I thought maybe the Zip Code was wrong. Tried again with a fresh envelope (this time with an Aslan stamp, 97p's worth of pure Narnian allegory in the top right corner, so it wasn't a tame stamp.) But on Wednesday this second effort plonked on our porch again, return to sender.

By this stage I'm wondering how much nouse the standard New York postman or postwoman has got. I mean, how big can the office blocks on 7th Avenue be? But there's me getting all nostalgic about English postmen in the 1970s who, working from a rain-soaked smudge of an elderly person's spider crawl could somehow work out how to deliver the nephew's birthday card in the middle of a teeming metropolis with a wink and a spring in his step.

A bit more research and I try a different approach - the stateside artiste representatives. They fire back an email pretty much straightaway (shouldn't they be glued to the NFL draft or Will and Kate's wedding highlights or something? I mean, it pinged back in two minutes, having been forwarded internally to some, err, interns.) And the address they give is:

Keith Middleton

Stomp New York

c/o Frankel Green Theatrical Management

729 7th Avenue 12th Fl

New York, NY 10019

USA

At first glance, looking pretty similar. But, check out the third digit of the building number, Sherlock. So it should have been 729 instead of 720. (Clutch head with palm.)

I hold the correspondence in my hand, kind of half hitch as if to launch them like some paper aeroplane. And in my mind I'm picturing how this drawing and letter, the curious atoms that compose them, have flown across the Atlantic Ocean and back. Twice. They've crossed the Atlantic more times than I have. And they're still no closer to Keith Middleton's percussive, stompy hands.

But, in a moment of pure personification, I recognise they're a relentless bunch of stationery. They refuse to give up the pursuit. They simply must fulfil their mission, by any means necessary. (And as their author, I guess I'm being pretty relentless too. But hey, this is for my kids!) For the first couple of return to senders we kept it quiet, but now Miriam and Theo know that it's not proving quite so straightforward, so we're modelling some perseverance and hope being the stuff we've not seen happen yet.

But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.[Romans 8:24-5]

Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. [James 1:4]

Only 3378 miles to go. Hopefully.



[p.s. I first posted this in the morning. And in the afternoon Theo and I wandered off for an explore while Miriam had some friends round, and we discovered the playing fields at Ashlawn High School were open, so we had a good old run around and Theo was so honest when we played a game he calls Monsters and Acrobetics Persons (sort of Hide and Seek) i.e. no peeking, that he headed off to the school car park and freaked himself out when he felt so alone, even though I was doing my signature distress call from behind a tree. And as we headed back, I noticed a bench with a perspex chart screwed to it. It had Ashlawn School as the centre, and directions and bearings zooming off to different cities. And whattayaknow, it turns out New York is 3378 miles away on a bearing of 286 degrees, a bearing that, when I followed it back towards the road, towards New York itself, seemed to pass straight through our house. God sets these things up, he truly does.]

Bind

We were sitting around the kitchen table the other morning (the kitchen table is like our HQ, it's the restaurant, the office, the workshop, artist's studio, it's anything we want it to be...) and Miriam was doing the most amazingly neat sewing, and as far as I know it was the first time in her life she'd picked up a needle, and she stitched this white thread along three sides of a blue oblong of felt and said it was a door to a house.

And Theo got messing with whatever he could find in the curious cube that is mummy's sewing box and next thing I know he's wrapped his arms up in ribbons, and the first thing it makes me think of is the tefillin that some Jews bind around their arm and forehead during prayer. I guess the whole tefillin thing comes down to interpretation - did Moses' instructions in the Torah literally mean strap the words to your body (the Pharisees thought so) or figuratively (like the Saducees did.)

Love God, your God, with your whole heart: love him with all that's in you, love him with all you've got! Write these commandments that I've given you today on your hearts. Get them inside of you and then get them inside your children. Talk about them wherever you are, sitting at home or walking in the street; talk about them from the time you get up in the morning to when you fall into bed at night. Tie them on your hands and foreheads as a reminder; inscribe them on the doorposts of your homes and on your city gates. [Deuteronomy 6:5-9, Message translation]

I'm going for figuratively, myself, but the point is, how seriously are we about getting God's word into our lives, and into the lives of our children, from morning to night?

I'm blessed by school holidays, and all the extra chances to be with Miriam and Theo. Bright sunshine in their bedroom and their body clocks mean that, during holidays, they still come in at 7.02 am. Theo checks with Miriam that it's officially "morning time" and then in they romp. Theo's right eye is almost always closed in a permanent wink. Over the years I seem to have subconsciously developed ways of protecting vital parts of my body even though my central nervous system is on some kind of shut down at that point, and my left eye seems to be getting gammier and more rheumy (out of symmetrical sympathy with Theo's, maybe? Probably more to do with screen glare.) Sometimes my head gets trodden on when they squirm and swap places. And there's always the chance that we all need the loo simultaneously (not so bad in the summer, but noone fancies the coalshed one in Winter, those tiles are too chilly.)

But every now and then, something one of the children will say, maybe something they dreamt about, or anything really, just seems to prompt a God story. Like yesterday morning, when Miriam was saying that Jesus was in everyone's heart, and we gently talked about how not everyone knows Jesus, even though he wants to know everyone (and we're praying that they invite him in) because some people have said no to him. And the story of the Prodigal Son just tumbled out, improvised and with vague echoes of acting it out at a youth club in Mostar, Bosnia a few years back, only now it was the Bleary Eyed Theatre Company retelling. And it flowed, and it helped us later on talk about saying sorry and being forgiven, and it was about passing something on, and it must have been the Holy Spirit helping to bring it alive, because my body was still mostly asleep.

And for me, that's a bit of tefillin right there.

ps. it was only in writing this that I noticed that Miriam had been stitching a door, and how that was linked into the Bible verses without my even realising it at the time.

Eyes front

I finished reading the last chapter of John's gospel yesterday. I've been using Tom Wright's John for Everyone book to help me through, a chunk at a time. It's been over a year to work through both volumes, so I've clearly not managed to get into God's word everyday, but for the most part I've enjoyed tagging along with Tom and getting closer to Jesus' words, in the hope of getting them more in my heart and head and having the Holy Spirit bring them alive for me, now, in the stuff I've got to do.

And he makes the point that, in the last chapter, the one that seems to be tagged on the end a little bit later on, the gospel writer is clarifying the rumour that was going round that Jesus would come back to earth before John himself died. And maybe because John was getting old (really old) the writer added a little bonus track to explain what Jesus had actually meant when he said "If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?" (which is a sassy kind of thing for Jesus to say). And what Jesus was getting at was that it wasn't any of Peter's business (or anyone else's) what John got up to after Jesus went up to heaven. Because Peter had been given his instructions: to be a shepherd for the flock ("Feed my lambs", "take care of my sheep"), and to be ready to die the same kind of death Jesus died.


So, as for Peter & John, so with us. It's not about comparing ourselves with other Christians and what God's asked them to do. We've got plenty to get stuck into, and if someone's got other fish to fry, what of it? (hopefully, on a charcoal grill, like the bit earlier in the Peter and Jesus restoration story, which Tom Wright points out would've been a powerful smell/memory trigger for Peter, taking him back to the charcoal brazier the people were warming themselves around the night he let Jesus down so badly.)

So, comparisons are unhelpful and unhealthy, and they go against the grain of that incredible uniqueness God's given us. Which is why I really want Kate to add to this blog, and to be able to do it in her own way and for it not to be just my thing (because for years, let's face it, blogging's been my thing.)

Bulls of Bashan

Many bulls surround me; strong bulls of Bashan encircle me. [Psalm 22:12]

Ok, so not exactly bulls. There was just one. And his name was Ross. And a more docile bull you'd struggle to find. He just sat there, plonked in his meadow on a hot spring afternoon, surrounded by his hairy harem of Highland cattle, Dexter and Aberdeen Angus crosses. Actually, I lost track of the lines of parentage, it was all very complicated, but suffice to say he'd not be short of cards on a bovine Father's Day. And then again, I did feel a teeny bit responsible for the six under 6s in the field at the time, keeping hands off barbed wire fencing, sandals out of cow pats, and a beady eye on Myrtle, who was bellowing and moving shiftily closer, like a minotaur advancing on the battlefield in the first Narnia movie.


True enough, Ross the bull didn't quite encircle me either. Because there was a fence between us and him. And our friend and host at Church Leyes Farm, Napton-on-the-Hill, radical organic farmer and cow whisperer Bob Crick, was keeping things calm and letting the cattle and sheep know that the gaggle of young life that was currently sharing their quarters posed no threat.

I love where I work, and how God's brought me into contact with local farmers who are happy to share some insights into what their life is like. Even these brief glimpses are like living parables, bringing to life Jesus' words. It's inescapable, when you spend time with Bob, or Frank Eadon last week with the newborn lambs on his farm further down the road, this talking and reassuring, sensitivity and trust.

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. [John 10:27-8]


Like when we first met a newborn calf, and Bob had to get between it and its mother. She was agitated, but he just soothed it with his voice and an outstretched comb.

We were doing this thing in the car on the way back, asking everyone for a highlight. Toasting marshmallows. Building dens for animal finger puppets. And for me, it was just stepping back (avoiding cowpats) and seeing how God's been bringing us together with other people since we moved down here.

That word that we've had since the Autumn: gathering.

Being part of a bunch of folk strolling across a field, mums and kids, just enjoying the adventure of it and thinking to myself this is why I don't want to be just a nuclear family, this is why I want the right balance of time for us and time where we're part of a bigger "us", an extended family, where my children know and feel what being Jesus' brothers and sisters is about, and I get to too. Always looking to gather, bring together, and for it to just flow out of everyday adventures.

Because I'm pretty pants at making friends, and I need all the practice I can get.

Hanging out at Bob's farm, it just flows from the work I do and how God's brought me to this neck of the woods, and what I enjoy doing, for me, for my own kids, for whoever's up for joining in. So, it's a bit crazy to toast marshmallows in broad daylight when it's baking hot. But autumn's too far off to miss the chance to give a twelve year old a pop at showing how he can start a fire that benefits everyone.

No flyers. No logos. No asking someone else for the go ahead.

But, as far as I can tell, we were just being church.

Good Friday Agreement

Kate beat me to it.

I've got this Jamie Oliver cookbook, it's over 10 years old now (The Return of the Naked Chef) but I still haven't cooked half the recipes in it. And maybe it's the just turning 40 thing, but I'm a bit goal-focused at the moment. Stuff like kayaking, or getting back into running (and saying to myself "I'll run a quicker 10K in five years time than I did five years ago", because that would buck the trend of gradually decaying), or thinking I've got to act on stage and learn lines from Shakespeare for the sheer joy and challenge of it (this often happens when I've been to the RSC, which I did, last weekend, for a birthday treat, because something about seeing actors at the very top of their game brings out the struggling little shadow of a non-actor in me, and I go all dappy improvising blank verse while walking near the Avon.) So I said, out loud, in a sort of gauntlet-being-thrown-down voice, "I'm going to cook every recipe in this book by the end of the year." And that'll include things with pomegranates in them, which is a very big deal for me indeed, because I can't think of a faffier fruit. All that fiddling about with a pin. And for what payoff?

But by lunchtime today Kate had already knocked out some Moroccan chickpea flatbreads from p. 235, although I got some credit for galvanising and inspiring variety. Pukka tasty they were too. So I'll have to choose something different now. Maybe, it being Easter, I'll attempt Mary's Saturday Soup and Dumplings [p.86].


So we're chowing down, all four of us, and I started chatting about the events around what's come to be known as Good Friday, just finding out what Miriam (5) and Theo (so nearly 4, only a couple of sleeps to go) already know, and trying to pass on the story in a way they, we, can understand (which is quite a discipline, keeping it jargon free.) And something Miriam said, precisely what is lost in the actual shuddering beauty of the moment, prompted us to get some grape juice and just weave (jargon warning!) communion into it, which involved stitching together some other things Jesus talked about, stuff like him being the Bread of Life, as well as what he meant by his body being broken (not quite so hard for Theo to identify with Roman brutality at the moment, he's morphed into quite a bloodthirsty phase, all role plays revolving around Giant-killing and setting fire to Giants and stabbing Giants in the eye...) and what he meant when he said at the Last Supper "do this in remembrance of me."

And it all just flowed, with our two children talking about how God lives in their heart and howJesus died so that they can say sorry to God and it all be OK, and it was just how I want all of my Christian life to be: a natural conversation, nothing awkward or ceremonial about it, and with a clear sense of God being in the room with us, not far off.

[Sure, a half hour later our two are squabbling over something or other on the climbing frame and swapping insults, but then there's grace and forgiveness enacted in miniature and it's all restored.]