You hate it, of course, contacting someone with the news that that thing you were going to do for them, you are no longer going to do. And yet I’ve come to believe that letting people down is a tool in our social armoury, a key to a happy life, and a secret to reducing our pace.
Illness years ago opened my eyes to it. There’s nothing like a stay in hospital for revealing that (a) you can cancel everything and the world continues to spin and (b) the really important things are loving relationships and the things you do best and you love and give you life. Other things must be fitted in around these.
You can’t be a person who never lets anyone down. The only choice you have is whom you let down; in a sense, whom or what you serve. If you stretch yourself to be at every important meeting at work, you have decided to stick the boot into your spouse and your kids. You can let them down again and again while you achieve stuff. But who or what are you serving? So–a challenge– let someone down this week, someone who isn’t as important as those you love.
PS: Hope I’m not letting you down too badly… but this blog is taking August off, while we go on holiday…
This is a post is about ‘Christian problems’ so it may not be relevant to you, but it is relevant to the theme of ‘slow mission’ or ‘patient revolution’, because the Christian faith is the very essence of a slow-burning, profound revolution in thought and life. (Even allowing for Christianity’s zany twists and turns throught its long history.)
I can’t count how many times I have been encouraged from talks in churches to do the following:
Pray more
Read my Bible more
Introduce others to Jesus and church.
Occasionally there’s a radical addition like
4. Volunteer for things in church
While this is at one level right, at another level it is completely wrong. The really big deal about the Christian faith is the transformed relationships. That is what the letters in the New Testament are mostly concerned with. That’s what the Beatitudes are about, and when Jesus is asked to summarize the law and the prophets, he comes up with love the Lord your God with everything you have and love your neighbour with the same vehemence that you defend, justify and serve yourself.
In other words, if you had a highlights reel of the New Testament, it’s about transforming our relationships.
Marriage ceases to be a power struggle (well, ideally) and become, s a place where each partner denies their natural power-seeking instincts in order to lovingly to make the other partner thrive.
Child rearing becomes a matter of unconditional love rather than performance-related benefits
Employees’ work becomes devotion to Jesus.
Employers have to recognize we’re all the same before God and treat their employees as fellow humans rather than machinery.
This sense of love and equality then spreads out to the poor and sick
In the story of how the Church has got on with this task over the 50 generations since the apostles, you have to edit out quite a lot of stuff, but (I argue) you are still left with a basic framework which is that this happened. The parts of the world tainted by the Christian faith are seriously different from the (diminishing) parts that aren’t. Even a nation like India (less than 5% Christian officially) has been seriously changed by an encounter with Christian thinking. Despite thousands of years of history and an evanescence of philosophical systems, it was only after a brush with Christianity that Dalits were treated as human beings rather than animals, I believe, for example.
And we wouldn’t have modern-sounding and secular-sounding things like human rights without the virus of Christianity having becoming endemic among us. (That is still why some nations see ‘human rights’ as just another way the West is trying to get one over them; they recognize how alien it is.)
So all the more impoverishing, if that’s a word, when Christian devotion is reduced to a few performance-management variables like how much Bible you read each day. I suppose it’s true that Bible reading gets you exposed to the important stuff, but we mustn’t miss the inportant stuff itself. In a world of spin and hype, and a coming world perhaps of AI-fakery, transformed relationships sound through the Universe like a great bell.
The team I am part of took time out this week to talk about rest, stopping, putting work aside–and silence.
One of the things to come out of this for me was that there is a silence where God isn’t–like you are battering on the door but as (C S Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed) all you hear is the further sound of doors beyond being shut and locked. (If you even hear that.)
But there’s also a silence where God is. You might be wanting him to speak. You may have lots of questions. And there’s silence. But it’s a silence where God is, just is, just is here with you. Here with you.
You can jump off from this into further thoughts, all helpful for the patient revolutionary. Perhaps the main one is this: the world doesn’t stop when I stop. Even, my world doesn’t stop when I stop. I can go do something else, or I can do nothing, or whatever I want. I can take delight in things. I can spend time in companiable silence.
For those of us with a Christian bent, this is an expression of faith. The voices that call us to activity, to taking responsibility, are so strident. It’s a statement of faith to say to them, bad luck, I’m not responsible for the Universe, it’s in good hands. I’m checking out, I’m delighting in what I already have. And if just now that’s companiable silence, good.
Those of us who read the Bible in a year are probably deep into the Pentateuch by now, or just emerging from it. I’m not currently on a Bible-in-a-year scheme but I do now and again listen to our the audio one-year Bible that we downloaded from Audible, one of the better bargains on the site.
The passage I listened to recently was about the Israelites constructing the tabernacle in the desert. What struck me was the project scope and the ambition:
The cost, all that gold, acacia wood and other precious metals and materials.
The artistry, those carved cherubim above the Ark
The craftsmanship: tongs, shovels, forks, basins, altars, tent-poles, curtains.
It was a national investment, costly in materials and time, built beautiful, and built to last. And it was the best they were capable of.
Every profession and trade that I can think of can be subject to loving, careful craftsmanship. Every profession and trade contains people whom other people in the same trade respect as excellent at their job.
This excellence is an option for all of us, I think. Even constrained by budgets and deadlines we can lavish craftsmanship into whatever it is we do. Even the traditional cry of newspaper journalism– I don’t want it good, I want it by 4:30— didn’t prevent journos from journalistic excellence.
Some things do get in the way of craftsmanship: bad management, for instance; repeated changes in project scope; a certain disrespect for the final customer; perhaps relentless cost-cutting; perhaps the sheer impossibility of doing a job to be proud of within the time and costs available; perhaps the pointlessness of the thing attempted. All of these things make for a mush of shoddy, of half-baked, of poorly constructed and badly finished products that we find ourselves swimming through every day.
Then we come across things that sit comfortably in the hand, that do their job perfectly, that take our breath away with their elegance, things done with great skill, and we think… beautiful.
And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God … The glory and honour of the nations will be brought into it (Revelation 21:10, 26 NIVUK).
The slow philosophy is not about doing everything in tortoise mode. It’s less about the speed and more about investing the right amount of time and attention in the problem so that you can solve it. Carl Honoré
My wife pointed this quote to me, which reminded me I’d read Carl Honoré’s book In Praise of Slow many years ago. I’d forgotten; but it surely influenced me a lot.
I also found this interview with him, which I think is public domain, and indeed used in publicity for his book. So I hope it’s OK to reproduce it here.
Q&A with Carl
What is In Praise of Slow about?
It examines our compulsion to hurry and chronicles a global trend toward putting on the brakes. It is the unofficial handbook and bible of the Slow Movement. It is published in more than 30 languages and has been a bestseller in many countries. It was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and the inaugural choice for the Huffington Post Book Club. It also featured in a British TV sitcom, Argentina’s version of Big Brother and a TV commercial for the Motorola tablet. The Financial Times said In Praise of Slow is “to the Slow Movement what Das Kapital is to communism.”
Is the Slow Movement anti-speed?
Of course not! I’m not an extremist of slowness. I love speed. But faster is not always better. Being Slow means doing everything at the correct speed: quickly, slowly or whatever pace works best. Slow means being present, living each moment fully, putting quality before quantity in everything from work and sex to food and parenting.
Has our obsession with speed has gone too far?
It’s reached the point of absurdity. You can now do courses in Speed Yoga or attend a Drive Thru Funeral. A magazine in Britain even published an article recently on how to bring about an orgasm in 30 seconds! So even in the bedroom it’s, “On your marks, get set, go!” Our speedaholism is out of control, and we all know it.
What inspired you to embrace Slow?
A personal wake-up call. When I caught myself admiring a book of one-minute bedtime stories (Snow White in 60 seconds!), I suddenly realised I was racing through my life instead of living it.
But if we slow down, surely life will pass us by?
On the contrary. Life is what’s happening right here, right now – and only by slowing down can you live it to the full. If you are always rushing, you only skim the surface of things.
How has slowing down changed your life?
Every moment of my day used to be a race against the clock. Now I never feel rushed any more. I do fewer things but I do them better and enjoy them more. I am healthier and have more energy. At work, I am much more productive and creative. I also have time for those little moments that bring meaning and joy to life – reading to my children, sharing a glass of wine with my wife, chatting with a friend, pausing to gaze at a beautiful sunset. I feel so much more alive now.
Why do we live so fast today?
Lots of reasons. Speed is fun, sexy, an adrenaline rush. It’s like a drug and we are addicted. At the same time, the world has become a giant buffet of things to do, consume, experience – and we rush to have it all. The modern workplace also pushes us to work faster and longer while technology encourages us to do everything faster and faster.
What is the main obstacle to slowing down in this fast world?
Fear. Thanks to the powerful taboo against slowness, even just thinking about slowing down makes us feel afraid, guilty or ashamed. Add to that the fear of being alone with our thoughts. Speed is often an instrument of denial, a way of avoiding deeper problems. Instead of facing up to what is going wrong in our lives, we distract ourselves with speed and busyness.
Slowing down can be the antidote to that. It allows us to reflect on the big questions: Who am I? What is my purpose? What sort of life should I be leading? How can I make the world a better place? Such questions can be uncomfortable but confronting them ultimately brings greater depth to our lives.
Is the Slow Movement also gaining ground in the workplace?
Very much so. Forward-thinking companies all over the world are looking for ways to help their staff slow down. By giving them more control over their schedules so they can work at their own pace, accelerating and decelerating when it suits them. By limiting working hours. Or by creating quiet spaces for doing yoga, massage or even take a short nap during the workday. The boom in meditation or mindfulness in the corporate world is another sign that business is waking up to the power and wisdom of slowing down. Not long ago the Economist magazine told its readers: “Forget frantic acceleration. Mastering the clock of business is about choosing when to be fast and when to be slow.” And that’s the Economist singing the praises of slowness in the workplace; it’s not Buddhist Monthly or Acupuncture Weekly!
What are the tell-tale symptoms of living too fast?
When you feel tired all the time and like you’re just going through the motions, getting through the many things on your To-Do list but not engaging with them deeply or enjoying them very much. You don’t remember things as vividly when you rush through them. You feel like you’re racing through your life instead of actually living it. Illnesses are often the body’s way of saying, “Enough already, slow down!”
What is the future of the Slow Movement?
The good news is that the Slow movement is growing fast! And as the world gets faster, the need for a counter-current of slowness will grow too. I feel more optimistic now than I did when In Praise of Slow first came out.
But what do you say to people who claim that the world will inevitably go on speeding up and that a Slow revolution is pie in the sky?
I say look at the history books. Take the rise of feminism. In the 60s, when feminists said the world was unjust and the moment for change had come, the mainstream reaction was: No, the world has always been this way. You can’t change it. Go back to the kitchen! But look at the world today. Obviously there is a long way to go to create a world of perfect gender equality, but a woman today could hardly imagine how severely life was limited for her grandmother. I look at my sister and my grandmother and marvel at the change in just two generations. And the green movement has followed a similar arc: it was dismissed as a plaything for hippies and tree-huggers thirty years ago but today is near the top of the political agenda. The message is that the world can change, if we want it to. For a cultural revolution to occur, you need three factors: the need for change; an awareness of the need for change; and people willing to put that change into practice. We now have all three factors in place for the Slow revolution to push on. I think the Slow movement is at the same point as feminism or green-ism was 30 or 40 years ago. We won’t change the world, or make it Slow, by next year. It will take time. The Slow revolution will be slow. But I believe it will happen.
What will a Slow world look like?
It will be a world that is healthy, happy and humane. But you have to realistic. I am no utopian. I am a skeptic by nature. I don’t believe we will ever create a world where everyone does everything at the right speed and no one ever feels rushed. That’s just a fantasy. The world is too complex and interconnected for that. It’s impossible in a world where we have to interact with others. Impatience is also part of being human. I suspect even the Dalai Lama rushes unnecessarily sometimes! Even I forget to slow down from time to time. I face a barrage of requests to give speeches, do interviews, etc from all over the world every day and it’s hard not to get caught up in the frenzy. But at least our starting point should be to seek the tempo giusto and to expect others to do so too.
What do you hope readers will take away from In Praise of Slow?
I hope that they will pause and reflect on how they lead their lives and how their lives affect the people and the world around them. I guess what I really want is for readers to grasp the very counter-cultural idea that the best way to survive and thrive in the fast-paced modern world is not to speed up but to slow down. And it seems to be working. Every day I open up my inbox and find a few emails from readers around the world who say the book has changed their lives. It’s exciting, and humbling.
My bookshop
I suspect this is the magnificent Toppings bookshop in Ely, Cambridgeshire, arguably the finest bookshop in the East. (And much better than my online effort.) Thanks to Phil Hearing on Unsplash
I’ve been busy for the last few months moving all my blogs to Substack — slowly, as it happens. Once it’s done I’ll let you know. Part of this involves putting all the books I’ve recommended over the years into my own bookshop at Bookshop.org. This site enables you to buy books by post much as you would through Amazon or someone, but a bit from each purchase goes to support independent bricks-and-mortar bookshops. (And some in theory comes to me.)
Creating your own bookshop with all the books that lit you up and changed how you think, or just were great, is the most enormous fun, like surrounding youself with old friends. My shop is still a work a progress but I thought you might like a sneako peeko.
Hope Valley is a place, in the English Peak District, where our men’s breakfast group held one of our annual walking weekends.
It’s also an emotional space, a rather life-saving one. So much about our world seems never to budge. The wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are in palaces. Lives are snuffed out at a dictator’s whim. Armies clash, soldiers die, loved ones mourn. Shells blow futures to smithereens. Praying people pray and pray and nothing happens.
‘God,’ said Desmond Tutu (I paraphrase), ‘we know you’re on the side of the right, but couldn’t you make it a little more obvious?”The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice,’ famously quoted Martin Luther King.
Perhaps I could be allowed to add: sometimes this arc of history seems very long, longer than scurrying our little human lives can bear. Many lives aren’t long enough to see the good arrive.
Nor does the arc always bend in entirely pleasing ways. Mandela became president of South Africa, a happy geometry. Not long afterwards he was followed by a thief who plundered the country, rather than built it, and then by a good person, but who has, by some accounts, yet to get a grip. So a bad thing was followed by a different bad thing (plunder) and then by another different bad thing (unmended brokenness).
That arc of history has non-linear qualities. It wobbles. Sometimes it veers in the wrong direction.
Which is why you need hope, and why, for now, it’s a valley.
Thanks to hope we can know that the arc will be tamed someday, that symmetry will be restored.
It is intriguing how the Christian faith is revolutionary, but the way it is revolutionary is itself revolutionary.
In Matthew’s gospel, chapter 5, Jesus addresses a crowd and imparts instructions, beginning with “Blessed are:”
The spiritually bankrupt
Those who lament and mourn
Those with the gentleness that humility brings
Those gagging for justice and the right
The kind and tender-hearted
The pure-hearted
The peacemakers
The slandered-because-of-me
Years later, Paul sets out a similar programme for the young church in Galatia:
love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Much could be said about this revolutionary behaviour. It’s extremely hard to stamp out. And — why would you want to? It’s humanizing. Perhaps it’s unstoppable.
In the last dozen years, as government cuts have taken hold, churches have stepped in to provide help to some of the most needy in the country. This has been a widespread, nationally significant movement, and politicians are beginning to notice. If this work continues and develop, it could transform our national life and our politics.
This was the summary of a message we heard from Sir Stephen Timms MP, who spoke at our Christmas Men’s Breakfast in my local church, St Martin’s in Cambridge in December 2023.
Hope made visible
He described a colleague of his (now a life peer on the Labour front bench in the House of Lords), who had become chairman of the Refugee Council.
Her job entailed visiting projects supporting refugees all over the country. The most remarkable ones, often involving sacrificial service by the volunteers, were run by churches.
‘To her complete surprise, she found lives characterized by the fruitfulness that Paul writes about in his epistle to the Galatians.
‘[Maeve Sherlock] decided to find out more about this; she attended church in Islington, then an Alpha course. In 2010 she became a member of the House of Lords; in 2018 was ordained a deacon and from last year became non-stipendiary minister in St Nicholas’ church in central Durham, as well as being on the Labour front bench in the House of Lords.’
Sir Stephen went on:
‘What I want to argue this morning is with things in the country in such a depressing state, and with so many things apparently not working as they should do, more and more people are looking to the churches, and are finding something different there, something better, something more hopeful … we need that fruitfulness to transform our politics.’
Supercharged by the pandemic
He described when he was leader of Newham council, more than twenty five years ago, that they were always polite to churches, but they never worked with them as partners.
The pandemic revealed a different picture than the common picture of church decline. He described getting two emails from constituents saying they had no food; and another email from the current elected mayor of Newham saying that a certain vicar, if contacted before 10am, would get a food parcel delivered before 6pm that day. Stephen tried this at the beginning of the lockdown, Good Friday 2020, and it worked. Many people, with no prior connection to the churches, became dependent on the churches for the basics for living.
The all-party group on faith and society commissioned a report, available on their website, published in Nov 2020, about faith groups and local councils in the pandemic, revealing that all over the country, faith groups were the ones providing help.
This was a surprise. The default for council officers was that working with faith groups was too difficult and complicated; either faith groups would spend any money given on converting people, or they’d favour their own adherents. ‘But come the pandemic lockdown, there wasn’t anybody else …
‘Faith groups uniquely had the premises, the volunteers, and the motivation, and the connection with people needing help that no-one else had.
‘Far from [churches] being “on the way out,” it turned out, in this decade, when the crunch came, communities became completely dependent on their churches.’
Foodbanks
All the Trussel Trust foodbacks are based in churches. Churches were unique in their capacity to help. They exemplified the ‘big society’.
Christians against poverty
Another high-impact Christian initiative is ‘Christians against poverty‘, founded in Bradford. They support people in debt and train church members as debt counsellors. Sir Stephen also mentioned churches providing shelter for the homeless, and welcoming refugees, and facilitating street pastors.
Nationally significant
MPs are noticing these developments. Nowadays the Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast, once desultory, now packs Westminster Hall.
Quoting a historian:
Between 1780 and 1850, the English ceased to be one of the world’s most agressive, rowdy, outspoken, cruel and bloodthirsty nations and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly and goodly-minded …
‘I think that transformation was a really really positive transformation which all of us are continuing to benefit from to this day and how huge were the benefits of that fruitfulness which exploded all over the country, including the transformation of our politics.
‘And I think that the state we are in now requires another awakening on a similar scale and on the same lines. And I am one of those who thinks it could happen and who hopes that it will.’
Not many of the recipients of those services are coming to faith. But people are coming to faith but in a different way. Theos [the thinktank] found that others in the community, seeing what the churches are doing, offer to help out.. and they are the ones who end up coming to faith.
‘Churches are doing the heavy lifting to support their communities in very very difficult times.’
I so loved this book I would save it for when I had an undisturbed half-hour. It’s a lucid, irenic, generous, walking-pace tour of British and Irish church history, stopping off, as it were, at twenty sites, each resonant of a century. Peter Stanford’s writing is longer on church history than on church architecture, which I liked, and like many others, I found it put in order for me the jumble of names –Augustine and Cuthbert and John Knox and Wesley– that had gathered in my head like an untidy sock drawer. Lovely book.
Not that I am personally planning on calling it quits any time soon, but I was wondering recently what ‘healing’ looks like in the context of the end of our lives.
We don’t know if this will be relevant for us, of course. Some friends of mine have been snuffed out without much time to do anything about it. Some apparently didn’t know it was going to happen. But most of my late friends and family had plenty of warning.
One part of healing near the end of life is, of course, that your life doesn’t end, you recover, and go on to see many good days.
But it occurred to me recently there is such thing as a ‘time to die’. However good or bad or complete has been our life, whether its conclusion will be bitterly painful or a blessed relief, our impact on the world is over, our days are winding down, this is it.
I wonder if ‘healing’ in this context isn’t about making peace with that fact; and going on to make peace with as much in your life as you can, and especially with God.
What’s fun about this idea is that it gives you back some agency. You’re in charge again. You have accepted the big fact (you’re mortal) and now you’re free again, to love and conclude things as you see fit, and as best you can.
