What is sin in the current day? Does the bible and its commandments speak to us about something real we experience in the now? When we have so much choice and so many possible paths we can take in life, how do we choose which way to act? Is there a right and a wrong choice? Very few actions seem  unpermissible, but is everything advisable? From a liberal perspective, do we know what is right and wrong any more?

Begin with Eden bible reading and welcome. Read some conflicting bible readings on sin: 1 corinthians 10:23 vs strict food laws in leviticus. Talk about the dilemma over sin. Kalil Gabhrin reading about wisdom rather than rules governing our actions. Everyone writes what they think of as a sin on a piece of paper and we display them in the middle…

“Wasting time – watching TV. We have only one life-time to learn, to love & be loved.”

“Badmouthing people. Lying.”

“Trying to control people/others for your own ends.”

“Laziness???”

“Judging others without allowing for circumstances.”

“Harming ourselves/Harming others/Turning away from life.”

“Gossip + speaking badly of others. Justifying myself (why do I need to?). Not caring about…”

“Not caring for the environment.”

“Dishonesty when honesty is needed/Being hurtful in the name of being truthful.”

“Sin is false piety.”

“Not showing love & grace to others.”

“To keep fit at home.”

“Sin is simply the exercise of free will to do something that deviates from our best ideals/Sin is an objective fact of daily existence – murder, theft, betrayal, lack of care for others, apathy, neglect/Sin is time-wasting and not making the most of your opportunities to do good and do your best/Sin is born within us, not present in us before our birth/Guilt is the existential dealing of all of these things, with God.”

“Disobedience – when you know you shouldn’t say it, but you do anyway.”

“Oblique anger makes me feel guilty because it makes the subject hurt + bewildered and at the same time I can not recognise how angry I am.”

“Hurting other people with the things I say/don’t say. Not doing the good I ought to do.”

Get into groups and have a brief discussion about whether the concept of sin plays a role in our lives. Everyone is given an apple and has time to reflect whilst eating it. We come to communion to repent of our sins. A prayer is said to close.

Is life controllable or are we like leaves in the wind?

Star Wars chess drama, Pink Floyd, writing plans in the sand and Haiti prayers.

The second littleservice of 2010 was a compline based service on the theme of snow and cold. It included Moomins, AA Gill’s reflections on isolation in the arctic and spine-tingling music. Here are some highlights…

“There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep — then they appear.”

A snowy Reflection

AA Gill travelled to the Arctic circle  to view Polar Bears in 2008, and these are extracts from his meditations on snow, cold, and polar bears…

Cold. We spend our lives getting out of it, away from it; our whole human history has been spent avoiding it, wrapping up against it, fighting and escaping it. Cold shoulders, cold stares; vengeance is cold, corpses are cold. As cold as rejection, as cold as infidelity, as cold as loneliness.  Who wants to be cold? Hot is good: hot bodies, hot dinners, hot sex and holidays. Hot or cold is no sort of choice, except for some, the contrary, chilly few for whom the very, very cold has a clear and harsh allure. The cold places of the world have a siren call; they give us goose pimples, those frozen lands, the keening of the north wind.  The thing about extreme cold is everything is fine until it’s not. You walk along and it’s okay, but lose a glove and you’ll lose your hand. There are a lot of suicides here in Svarlbad: the absence of light, the relentless weather.      Aerden the Norwegian mentions that he skied across Greenland. Even by Arctic endurance standards, that’s impressive: Greenland has four time zones. “What was it like?” We settle down for a saga. “It’s flat, it’s white. On the 17th day, a small bird came to my tent. I fed it. It flew away, and I went on.” That’s it? That, apparently, was it. -finally Gill sees the elusive bear –“Polar bears are the most solitary animals on Earth. These males are shunned by all living things, including their own kind. They seek no solace in company, no warmth in togetherness. Mary Shelley sent Frankenstein’s misbegotten monster to this distant vastness. This bear is the parable at the end of the world. Lord of the bleak, haunting, sighing silence, listening to the loneliness.”

Schubert composed his Winterreise lieder on the great poem cycle by Muller.   It’s a dramatic monologue by an increasingly aging unrequited lover as he wanders through a landscape of fire, snow and ice, where his tears scald and then freeze. He encounters various people and things along the way which form the subject of the successive songs. His journey through the cold, dark and barren winter landscape mirror the journey taken by his heart.  At the end of the cycle  he finds an old barefoot hurdy-gurdy man, winding away his tunes.

Moomintroll is either lonely, miserable, angry or scared in Trollvinter the fifth in the series of Tove Jansson’s Moomins books, published in 1957- the result of being forced to survive in a world to which he feels he does not belong.  While the rest of the Moomin family hibernates, Moomintroll finds himself awake and unable to get back to sleep.  He discovers a world unknown to him, where the sun does not rise and the ground is covered with cold, white, wet powder. His only companion from the “real world,” as he insists on calling summertime, is Little My. She embraces the world of winter with adventurous pragmatism: “borrowing” freely from the Moomin house in order to have more fun; a silver tray turns into a sled with Moomintroll’s sun tent attached for a sail.

Meanwhile, Moomintroll is stomping around, miserably remembering warm summer days and hating winter more and more every day. He even makes up songs about how much he hates this dark, cold season, and bellows them out at the top of his lungs, hoping to frighten winter away and draws endless pictures of the world in summer, in case he forgets what it looks like Moominland is suddenly a scary, dark, lonely place and the sun doesn’t shine. Strange creatures have taken residence in the once-familiar places. Something grumpy lives under the sink, The Lady Of  The Cold passes by endangering everyone’s lives and the Groke takes away every last trace of warmth by sitting on it.  However, Moomintroll learns valuable lessons about the circle of life, death, overcoming fear and loneliness by living in the moment: building fires, making ice horses and drinking hot coffee, and seeing that strange things can be beautiful. He finally realizes that sometimes it’s best “if things aren’t so easy”.

Happy New Year!

The first littleservice of 2010  was conducted on a very cold night. The streets of Bristol were slippery with frozen rain on frozen pavement.

Opening with a Jeff Buckley song “New Year’s Prayer”, service leader R paused to recite this poem by Turlough O’Carolan…

How beautiful the turning of the year!
A moment artificial yet profound:
Point upon an arbitrary chart
Passing like a breath upon the heart,
Yearning with anticipation wound,
New hope new harbored in old-fashioned cheer.
Even when the boundary line is clear,
We recognize the oneness of the ground.
Years, like circles, do not end or start
Except we lay across their truth our art,
Adjusting dates as they go round and round
Revolving to a tune long sung and dear.

Three readers read different versions of Philippians 3:13-14 (followed by Revelation 21 – “behold, I make all things new!”). The Message version reads like so:

Friends, don’t get me wrong: By no means do I count myself an expert in all of this, but I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back.

There was then a short spoken address in which R related what the title “12 Minutes” referred to – he was born on New Years’ Day at 12.12am and thus always wonders at this time of year about what was happening in that hospital ward in those 12 minutes, and how if he could go back in time, that’s where he’d go.

A film clip was then shown of Back To The Future (1989) in which Doc Brown explains to Marty McFly the ways in which the actions of one person can change the entire course of (local) history. This is illustrated by the first clip in this YouTube video.

R then invited everyone to partake in 12 minutes of silence (in a sort of Quaker style) to think further on time, choices, seeing the new year as an opportunity and so on.

Then, the gathered Foundationers partook in some joyful, if curious millennium liturgy, which can be read here (under “Words Of Welcome And Call To Worship”).

The congregation was then invited to choose a photographic image from a selection to take home as symbolic of their new year’s resolution, prayer, hope or promise.