For me, it’s official. The final scene in Toy Story 3 is one of the most moving ever made. As Bonnie inherits Andy’s favourite toys and they play together for the last time, we are faced with the inevitable passing of the generations. It’s art that moves and talks, musing on our own vulnerabilities when faced with loss and departure and moving on. And it points subtly toward the inevitable event of death, both yours and mine. In fact Toy Story 3 is all about death;  from the blackness of claustrophobic bin bags, the demonic screechings of gate-keeper monkey to  the inferno of a twisting fiery doom.  Just don’t tell the person sitting next to you! Don’t even mention the ‘D’ word.

I’m surprised that no one on the Fireplace has expressed their feelings having heard Father’s recent speech in Korea. I watched it live from our computer and I felt something quite mysterious in the atmosphere especially as it appeared that the crowds there were above the clouds. Most significant for me is how Father spoke about death.  ‘It is a time for celebration’. He went on to tear down the fearful walls mankind has built that have left us cowering, unprepared to face this most unique event of all our lives. Father’s own death must occupy some of his thoughts  as he knows his time here is quite limited now. His passing may be the ultimate bridge for all of us.

We visited the British Museum last week and in the Egyptian and Greek rooms I could see clearly that all we have here is their collective preparations for their passage (or not) into the next (possible) world. Animalistic symbols, beautiful ‘perfect’ figures, the cold stone representing something far more permanent than wrinkly old skin. After thousands of years of their culture, all we have left of them is their dreams about death.

Both my parents approach their mid-eighties due to good health and some good luck too, I guess. Do I dare broach the subject of their impending end (or new beginning)? They give off many signs that they are more happy to ‘get busy’ because it is not a topic with a clear ‘instruction manual’ or a conclusive outcome.  Most others would suggest that I am ‘needlessly distressing’ them if I bring up the issue of ‘you know what’. In a way, we’re all in denial because any spiritual discipline seems to require our daily concentration,  that we don’t forget the eternal  quality that lies behind each passing moment and opportunity.  Father says that  ‘ the moment of death should be a time of greater excitement than that of a newlywed bride going to her groom’s home for the first time.’  Should we be excited about death? We carry the burden of knowing ourselves too well,  that we probably shouldn’t expect too much happiness on ‘the other side’.

It’s also possibly a massive historically mistaken assumption that the’ God’ mankind has believed in, the ‘God’ in our collective religious supra-culture has used fear of unknown punishment after death to  keep us ‘in line’. What if a kind of ‘karmic amnesty’ was presented to you? Would it become an excuse to live shamelessly? I don’t think so. At least , not if we can understand the message of July 8th. Why make ourselves and others unhappy?

Has the time finally arrived where God knows that this  ultimate ‘Good News’ will encourage us to be even more genuine in our motivation? Perhaps our True Parents have simply (not easily!) cleared the way for us to become like we have never been before.  Maybe  now all our lives can have a happy ending/ beginning! Oh well, we’re off to summer camp now! And enjoy that movie!

And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago-

It’s late and I should go to bed. But I’m hooked. This World Cup has become a fascination for me.  As France implodes and our England mega-stars sleep-walk through a whole match, South Africa is hosting an absolutely brilliant event. Someone in our family is even learning Afrikaans!  I should care about our progression into the knockout stages but y’know I cried enough over England in the Seventies as a kid. They can’t hurt me anymore.

When Italia ’90 began, we were living in Wembley with the lovely Robertson family. Hamish and Chantal were so sweet and their little tribe were the cutest.  They had their little arguments (in French) and I never let on that my French isn’t so bad actually…… Anyway, that World Cup was amazing. We looked to be going home early but something began to happen and the team played some of their best games ever. Paul Gascoigne was on fire. His yellow card tears were ours as we were about to make it to the final. The Cup was almost in our grasp.  Ah, the disaster of penalties!  But also we know in our own ‘Sporting Life’, the very unpredictable nature of the future means we can only ‘play well’ and say sorry for not doing more.  We lost but really there was no shame because the lads done good. They gave it their best shots.

Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering-

Wimbledon begins but I’m not that interested  this year because my heart lies in team sports. This little Island has invented all of the most important games you can play. We have taught the world the culture of coming together to give each other a good thrashing and still be able to shake hands afterwards. It is a work of peace building, to compete fairly and seek after mutual  self-improvement. Bruises in place of mortal wounds.

We have given New Zealand their rugby. We have given the Aussies cricket. We gave them something to be proud of. We gave Brazil football, but only briefly.  And yes, America,  we played rounders long before it had its name changed to baseball. We have taught the world the very Christian notion of allowing others to succeed before ourselves.  We’re like parents trying to think up games for our children to play on a wet day. We wrote the rules that rewired the synapses of the human relational psyche. Because they were bored and wouldn’t get on with each other. Wouldn’t listen. Couldn’t share. We gave the world of men a chance to prove themselves worthy without bloodshed.

And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase-

So much goodness has emanated from this fair isle although we may not have played fairly all the time. And thats the other quality this nation has- the honesty to look at our own shortcomings, re-evaluate and then progress. The boos aren’t neccesary. The process is in-built. We cannot be proud of ourselves but we can be proud of who we represent. The generations have come and gone through the vast millennia of history and we stand here together today. The coach stoops down beside me with a wet sponge as I am gasping for breath. He speaks in English for the world to understand and says there is only one generation now, not  the older or the younger. One team, one family and obviously one set of Parents. Duh!  And that is how it will be forever.  Goooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllllll!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And her ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are Peace.

Oh, and can we have our ball back please?

SOUTH LONDON’S GOT TALENT!

Saturday, June 5 th 2010 will see a unique fund-raising event being staged at the Peace Embassy in Thornton Heath. We are holding a talent competition which will kick off 5.30pm for 6.00pm start.  It’s  open to everybody with TALENT! We need your participation (but you will need to audition or send a link to your performance on youtube). I am planning an audition evening in LG and possibly one in the Embassy too.  Whether you sing, dance solo or in a group, play the Hawaiian nasal flute, balance a tiger on your head or simply have a really big head, we need your TALENT! You can come from anywhere in Britain. Just be good! This will be a public event with prizes and votes from the audience along with a panel of ‘judges’  decide who wins on the night. If anybody would like to participate, be a judge, help with lights or sound, then please call me, Toby on 07960074477 to discuss. We plan to make this a really exciting evening so come along and bring all your friends too. Tickets are £5 each or £20 will get you five tickets. Did I mention we need your  TALENT?!

Our home has recently become a hot-house for political debate from Franco’s dictatorship to Mugabe’s growing insanity. We’ve looked at historic  empires and how the Cold War was won (if it’s over?). Forced to look at my own inadequate understanding, I also see that what we are daily spoon-fed is a diet set out for small children. One of my favourite books is Orwells ‘1984′ and I regularly use the word ‘prole’ to describe how the ordinary man in the street is treated. But it goes deeper than that and connects to a movie that I return to because I love its hidden depths.  Peter Weir’s ‘The Truman Show’ is wonderful because it tells us to look out for clues that all is not well in our lives and won’t fit. If we ignore the signs, then we drop the ‘key to love and fear’ or miss it altogether. You’d better watch that if you’ve never seen it! It’s a tale of almost theosophical proportions as the show’s creator is a lucifer character, raising a child to profit from his malaise and then trying to kill him as the child/star finally seeks to find the truth.  People don’t know what they are missing but they suspect something isn’t quite right.

I would feel like a prole too if it wasn’t for a weird kind of feeling I always had with me since my earliest memories that I wasn’t quite part of this. I sensed there was more to life and I couldn’t really articulate it. That ‘inner feeling’, for want of a better description gave me a calm meaning and also many dark lonely nights.

The inescapable reality for me in  San Francisco, 1979 when confronted with the ‘Word’ expressed in the Divine Principle was that God is here now, alive!  I vaguely thought He did His stuff 2000 years earlier and left us all guessing as to when the world would end (and I wasn’t holding my breath). Now Charles Kamins’ comment on Simon Cooper’s report from Germany really struck me and he together with Bay Area members in California has been doing some serious thinking. Please have a look at what he says.

You know leaflets are a form of graffiti. I quite like some thoughtful graffiti. But the difference between being handed a leaflet and a person talking honestly to me is vast. Politicians love words but their motives are unclear and usually self-serving.  The message we have to share with others is the kindest, most helpful and liberating one of all time.   Shall we only leave the message pasted on ’subway walls and tenement halls’?

(Here we go again!) “Let’s all stand and sing……..A NEW SONG WE’VE NEVER SUNG BEFORE! “ (IN YOUR DREAMS!!!!) What in the name of praise is going to happen? As we sing together at our regular service, there are some Hymns that rightly seem timeless in their meaning and the spirit they convey. But there are others that we’ve been singing for over thirty years that need a good long rest together with midi skirts and The New Seekers. (Who the…?)

We need some NEW songs. ANYONE OUT THERE! Yes, you! Have you written one? No, not you oldies  with hair loss! Oh yeah, and all you guys with a ‘reputation’ who play and do a ‘nice’ CD once a year- the words out- you didn’t come up with anything we can actually SING TOGETHER! What have you been doing?

Yes, a new young expression of our faith, love, with a fresh breeze of praise and hope. Young musos! Your church needs YOU! Plug in to the cosmic itune in your mind and a song may come in your dreams, record it when you wake up on your phone. Keep it simple. All the best songs are. Make it a tune we can sing and quickly learn- a happy song, a reflective song, a ‘deep’ song  preferably  with  words!  Probably best with chorus/ verses and a ‘hook’, then go put it up on youtube and tell the Fireplace where it is. But just a word of caution- if your ego is too big and only YOU can sing it right then it doesn’t fit the job description-sorry. If you can’t sing/play then get someone else to do that-collaborate! I know there’s talent out there. Don’t hide it now.  I promise I won’t let anything other than encouragement come your way. If it’s good enough it could travel around the world, I can assure you. We don’t have much time because a lot of new people are coming looking for inspiration soon ………. are you still reading this?!  GO CREATE!

Oh, and something else which is not related to the aforementioned call for help which may surprise  my two readers. It’s just that……I can’t stand contemporary popular music anymore. And I think I know why.

I was lucky enough to grow up on a diet of some classic music from the likes of David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd and Peter Frampton to name a few, but having revisited all their stuff on CD I realise I just cant listen to it anymore! It’s because it was never designed or written to be listened to forever! Back in the days before music was recorded, people considered it quite an event to hear an orchestra or a talented singer at their best. It happened only rarely and was long remembered by the audience. Problem is its all on tap today, gushing out from every aural orifice you can find and the long wait for happiness has ended. It’s instantly there- endlessly there! On and on and on and over and over and…….CLICK.

I switched it off.  Time to clear my mind for something new.

I had assumed I would write a light piece to see out the old year but I find more solemn thoughts loop through my mind at this time. Mari said something to me the other day about how a persons life can be changed forever in a moment (she was thinking possibly of a man involved in an accident). These thoughts came to her, I believe after a year of incredible difficulty wherein her own life nearly ended. I mention this only to give context as I don’t want to digress. And we spoke about how transitory and fragile is our daily life. So I might reflect on fifty years passing. This lined face, a twenty-year-old daughter and four more children, a hint of arthritis in my left hand. Here is where the poet earns his place, not me. The Irish poet W.B. Yeats died seventy years ago. I think that not many young people of this generation will have even heard of him. Auden wrote a lovely poem on his death. (You know who he was, right?) ? ? ? Mind the gap.

But then so many have died who have left no words to say they were here at all. That is how it is.

Yeats’s later poems dealt with themes like the crisis of culture as the world was on the brink of another disastrous war, his own decline and love. T.S. Eliot also grappled with similar themes in ‘The Wasteland’ although his fragmentary style pointed toward the insanity which was to grip modern art (and still does today) as the whole world went mad in the twentieth century. Yeats held on to more traditional forms. Try and read some of their stuff- it won’t hurt!

In ‘Lapis Lazuli’, written in 1936 he compares great tragic characters of the stage with symbolic carved figures in stone who reflect with wisdom on life with ‘their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, their ancient glittering eyes…’. Yeats was the old man, granted a kind of wisdom that naturally occurs with a healthy mind long-lived, foreseeing his own death but ready for it with hope. The mystic in Yeats had led him to pursue many kinds of esoteric thought. He sensed that the age in which he lived was the time for a ‘Second Coming’ and his poem of that name makes for interesting reading.

So I find these themes- love and death- constantly in my mind these last months. Someone will say I am being morbid or depressive. Possibly. But a greater danger lies in ignoring friends I know who live with their own fragility constantly pressing in upon them. I am not separate. Time is too short or too long all at once. One shock of Facebook is the rediscovery of an old friend whom you remember from thirty years ago who now bald, smiles rather unrecognisably from a recent photo with his arm around his little fat wife who you know was once a stunning beauty. But their life-love-life binds them still as their secret. The snapshot is not their real history.

That is how it is. Without love this is all quite unbearable. Love is and so we are. We should not really teach that the purpose of life is joy. What an inadequate word!
‘The purpose of creation……is to inherit the divinity of God. It is to inherit True love.’

Until that day, art like Love must hope. Together with you, Mari –Angeles, and all my very extended family (YOU!) in 2010.

Seems like everyone and his aunt has an opinion of what’s right for me these days. And you know how quickly someone will chip in with their view on what I’m doing. “Oh yes, that song reminds me a little of that song by Kings of Convenience”. Thank you. I’ll take that on board. Its a clever way of saying since you can’t do anything original then I wont need to do anything myself. Opinions about everything and everyone. The politics of thinking. Sounds like a blog. They’re dangerous things. You probably heard about Stephen Fry’s conundrum. He found out that a ‘tweet’ or two can get you into lots of arguments. Usually over nothing more important than being boring! Ouch!

But we don’t want to be so small-minded, do we? The Family Fireplace is warm and friendly. We love each other and respect everyone’s opinions. God tolerates our silly opinions as any wise old person should. In fact, some of our opinions are outrageously stupid! A good friend once tried to convince me that there was a secret civilization living in the South Pole, biding their time until the world learnt to live in peace. You know who you are! It’s not true….right? Or that angels posing as scientists were pushing forward our technologies especially in the high tech industries. Ha! I daren’t tell you who told me that one. I suppose it’s possible. They live in Colorado or Oregon. Actually I met one once but he wasn’t a tech angel but a body guard angel. Sent to look out for us since we were doing dangerous PR. He told me. Yes, I can’t really explain that one away. Hmmm.

I try to keep track of my thoughts. But opinions? Well, they seem to pop right in there as a kind of self preservation instinct. As if my minds ‘filing cabinet’ needs to get some order. Trouble is those drawers have some pretty old labels on them with the brown selotape coming off. What if I left a few opinions on the table? Don’t put them away yet. ‘I can’t make up my mind yet on that one!’ Yes, my opinion will be to not have an opinion on some things. Let the truth of the matter filter through slowly. The critics are out there. They have their answers. Merciful God, let my mind be open and fresh to see things in a new way. Thank you for having a sense of humour.

The mandelbrot set (look it up)

Hmmm. Thanks for trying. Remember all that I said about chaos? Well, the hammer in the tray clearly showed a central position had been established. From that point, I could begin to arrange the ‘picture factory’ around a place where I would be standing most of the time. In two hours I had things pretty much where they needed to be and they were kept there for the next two years at least.

Chaos, whether in the mind or in our surroundings can only be avoided when there is a single focus point. So the challenge had been to see that when I could focus all my mind on a task, the rest would fall into place. Zen-man’s skill lay in his ability to show the path, yet allow me to take ownership of my new perceptions. Very cool for 1982 believe me! So remember, if you’re ever confused, stay calm. Look for the hammer of the righteous path, Daniel-san. It’s in there somewhere.

Was having a long conversation with my daughter the other day as we drove down to Bristol for her second year at uni, about our loathsome education system which aims to produce ‘consumers’ and a docile workforce. We all know (don’t we?!) we are encouraged to consume too much of everything which is why panic sets in at times of economic uncertainty. ” What are we going to do with them all if they don’t shop?” What if they start to think???!!!!!

I’d say that living with less makes us more resourceful. Uncluttering our lives helps us to see the bare-bones of our circumstances. Sharp minds and sofas don’t go together. Coming up with our own solutions for life’s problems makes us stronger and smarter- less dependant in a healthy way. And sometimes there’s just too much advice from so many helpful people which makes it hard to filter or replenish ourselves naturally. So perhaps we’re aiming to be inter-dependant independantly (?). It’s a running joke in my family that I love to buy secondhand things and haggling over a price can be fun. Seriously, we only eat Honey Loops cereal when its buy-one-get-one-free! The art of shopping. Somehow this all fits together.

I can remember fixing my friend Detlef’s Sony Walkman (looong ago) by taking apart an identical working machine and noticing a hair-line crack in the circuit board which I jumped with some copper wire. It cost me nothing but time and I was glad I found the solution.

But that was after Zen-man. Read on.

For a few years in the 80’s I was swimming in spiritual chaos ( I know the taste of that water far too well!) just about afloat on unwritten books full of seemingly unanswered prayers. I had nothing but the clothes I was wearing because my suitcase mysteriously vanished in the last place I stayed. The only other things I ‘owned’ were the thoughts in my head and I hated those anyway. But sometimes you need to be down long enough to appreciate coming up.

That was when Zen-man showed me the way.

He gave Toby-rat (how I felt) a job- in charge of a whole picture framing department which I had to organise and run too. Took me to a large space full of mess and gear and left me to sort it out. Zen-man came back four hours later to see me in a large space full of mess and gear. Quietly, on a long work bench in the middle of the confusion he put a hammer in a small wooden tray and said this is your tool box and walked off. And then the answer came to me.

Answers please? Someone will need to come close to mine before I end this story in my next blog. I shall be meditating………

Phil Tufnell’s commentary on Radio 4 in the final test at the Oval, froze time and the wonderful moment for me as Broad clattered another Aussie wicket.
“There’s a special moment for a bowler when the rhythm feels good, the body feels right, the conditions are perfect and you bowl for 1 or 2 hours and everything goes right for you. And you remember that golden hour for the rest of your life.”

I’d take that hour and that memory because it means so much more than the thousands of forgotten hours and days- the art of living intensely.

As another summer has almost passed by, a colder wind looms then in my mind as I mentally prepare for another dreaded winter. For me summer has so many possibilities to create, to ponder deeper things under a deep blue fathomless sky. Summer makes it easy to be busy, not too worried about the future. Just being in the moment. But to some extent I was very preoccupied with many difficult emotional pressures and summer did not work its magic. Such is life and another summer will return with a brighter sun.

So right now, I would take in exchange for the whole year just one hour where everything fits and the ball leaves my hand going right where I want it to. Broad, perfecting the bowler’s art found the perfect line for a moment which left some of the best batsmen in the world flailing around.

To make life a work of art. Get it right for just one hour. Meet God.