Paul Chambers

These days
whatever you have to say, leave 
the roots on, let them 
dangle 

And the dirt 

Just to make clear 
where they come from 
- Charles Olson

(Heaven: Canon 30D)

I can’t find any words of my own today – the painful truth is I can’t find a job and my personal life is very fucked up, and the worst bit is that I can’t find a way out, there seems to be no solution. So I have borrowed words that speak of a better time that will hopefully one day come; they were penned by my friend Martin Wroe. He’s a good man and he prays well. Here’s what I mean…

‘So i’m just thinking to myself, right…
I’m thinking that John Lennon said, 
“Imagine there’s no heaven…”
But I’m thinking, “Get lost John – think I
might imagine there is…”

A place where the buses run on time,
and women walk safe after dark.
Where eating chocolate reduces cholesterol,
smoking is relaxing but doesn’t cause cancer,
and you can’t get headaches or hangovers.

I’m thinking of a place where nurses earn as 
much as company chairmen,
policemen are liked but not necessary
and teachers don’t want to be anything else.
Where children run multinationals for fun 
and grown-ups are sent to bed every time 
they’re rude.

A place where you can be busy
if you want to be,
but you can buy extra time when you need it
(from an extra time shop).

A place where you can go to sleep
when you’re tired,
deep, deep sleep so you wake up feeling like
you’ve had a life transfusion
like your life has been heated up.

I’m thinking of a place where nobody notices 
their nakedness
and species aren’t endangered.
Where you’ve got all shapes and sizes…
but no one great or small.
Where people meet you
and don’t even notice your bone structure
or your colour
because they’re so stuck in your soul.
Where they hear your spirit not your accent
and everyone knows that everyone’s only a 
mere immortal.

Of course
this heaven is not just a religious place.
I mean there’ll be no Jehovah’s Witnesses at 
your door (who needs a witness when Jehovah’s
down the road?)
and God won’t be a rumour because he’ll have 
a front door.

You won’t have to pray because you can talk.
There is no need for churches,
mosques or temples.
No one tells you how to live your life
because no one needs to.
There’ll be no streets of gold
or pearly gates or harps,
no big dad god and little boy god
on matching thrones.
No regrets
but a place where every time you bump into a 
‘why’
you can feel a ‘because’.

There will still be bad language.
Words like ‘bomb’ and ‘bullet’ and ‘rape’.
There will even be the odd four-letter word
…’hate’,
for example.
But some words will not be able to be spelled
at all
…fear,
poverty,
pain,
death,
because these words will come from
an ancient language
no longer understood
occasionally studied but never spoken.

I’m imagining a place called heaven.
A place where you can eat chocolate
and fight heart disease,
take a long, slow drag on a fag
to cure someone of cancer,
climb through the air on wings like eagles,
run but never get tired.

(Taken from ‘When You Haven’t Got a Prayer: A journalist talks to God’ by Martin Wroe, Lion Publishing 1997)

(The hope of tomorrow: Canon 100)

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose”
Jim Elliott

I never thought I would ever become anything resembling a ‘thinker’, let alone someone who actually gets paid (beer money) to put those thoughts on to paper (well, keyboards and then ping them off through cyber-space to an editor) – I was thrown out of English Literature for asking too many questions about Mrs Macbeth’s sexual leanings, I became far too animated in my longing to know what she really wanted when she cried, ‘un-sex me!’ – and most people just assumed I would make it as a rubgy or football player (injuries meant neither were an option).

In the end I turned to the only thing I was good at – the arts

And so here I am thinking about some things far too much, and some things not nearly enough…

So, as a friend said in an email yesterday regarding my inability to make it through the nights, “if you have a gauloise between your lips and the distant noise of a siren framing your late-night tapping, it’s an enigmatic image of creativity and cool” (let’s hope so)  during the last couple of hours I have been thinking about heaven@earth.com. Let me explain that one a little. For me the obvious theological centre is the incarnation, and I wonder if this was a kind of hotmail address that Jesus had during his 30 odd years here? Think about it – he’s a long way from home and just maybe he picked up messages using this email? Too far fetched? I’m not so sure…

The Kingdom of God is exactly that – heaven, here now and present. C.S. Lewis alludes to this in his remarkable work, ‘The Great Divorce’ – that heaven is an intensification of life rather than an abstraction from it. If that is so, finding heaven isn’t about waiting until we die for some etheral nirvana, but having our eyes opened to what is already here.

‘Thin places’ (like Iona and Greenbelt) are spots where heaven becomes easier to experience through some sort of warp in the divine force field. God is present everywhere and anywhere – heaven is all around us – even in and through the mundane and dare I say it, the profane.

Faith therefore does not involve an escape or withdrawal from life, but a radical plunge into it and love for it. Because of creation and the incarnation the earth is sacred. It is the womb and the dreaming of the hopes of God, and so it is that we must honour the earth and respect it by the way we tend it. Not only would I say that heaven is in earth but that after the ascension, earth is in heaven: the risen Christ has nail holes in his hands and a scar in his side from a spear – in truth, humanity is now a very real and visible part of the Godhead

I went to see my priest last night and at the end of our conversation he gave me bread and wine. The eucharist is one way of making this visible – the fact that earthly life is suffered with heavenly glory – perhaps we should stop hoping for the end of history when God will call ‘a wrap’, and start working with God in transforming history, here and now – midwives, if you like.

Just maybe we won’t eventually go to live where God is, but rather that God has already moved to where we are and is planning to stick around until earth becomes heaven – heaven@earth.com? Who knows, is that heresy or is it that, maybe, I think too much

Whatever, as we journey we have 3 options
i, to be alive and thirsty
ii, to be dead
iii, to be addicted

There are no other choices. Most of the world lives in addiction; most of the church has chosen to be dead. Followers of the carpenter are called to a life of longing….

I came across this at the Evertonian vicar’s blog in the wee hours of the morning… as we pray every sunday, Lord have mercy…



                               (Slum kids, Ghana: Canon 100)

A three-month-old boy and a boy aged three have been found dead at a property in Greater Manchester. Officers discovered the bodies at an address in Kilmington Drive, Cheetham Hill, on Wednesday night. A Greater Manchester Police spokesman said that officers were alerted after reports of “concern for welfare” were made to them. A 21-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of murder and is in custody awaiting questioning. The police spokesman was unable to confirm or deny reports that the children had been stabbed to death. A neighbour, who did not want to be named, said the residents were in shock at the news of the deaths. “It’s heart-breaking, just tragic – hard to believe,” she said. [Source: BBC]

THE CRUEL MOTHER
traditional

she leaned herself against a wall
all alone and so lonely
and there she had two pretty babes born
all down by the green wood sidey

and she took off her ribbon belt
all alone and so lonely
and then she bound them hand and leg
down by the green wood sidey

smile not so sweet my bonny babes
all alone and so lonely 
if you smile so sweet you’ll smile me dead
all down by the green wood sidey 

she a penknife long and sharp
all alone and so lonely
and she pressed it through their tender heart
all down by the green wood sidey

she digged a grave beyond the sun
all alone and so lonely
and here she buried those sweet babes in
all down by the green wood sidey

she stuck her penknife on the green
all alone and so lonely 
and the more she rubbed the more blood was seen
all down by the green wood sidey

she threw the penknife far away
all alone and so lonely
and the further she threw the nearer it came
all down by the green wood sidey

as she was going by the church
all alone and so lonely
she saw two pretty babes in the porch
all down by the green wood sidey

o babes o babes what have I to do
all alone and so lonely
for the cruel thing I did to you
all down by the green wood sidey

seven long years a bird in the wood
all alone and so lonely
seven long years a fish in the flood
all down by the green wood sidey

seven long years a warning bell
all alone and so lonely
and seven long years in the deeps of hell
all down by the green wood sidey

Spent twenty-three minutes this morning once replaying Martyn Bates and Mick Harris’s spare, terrifying version of The Cruel Mother, as a way of soaking in this sobering news from Cheetham Hill. Sometimes only being enfolded in some raw honest traditional English song will do as a way of ruptured praying

(Pilgrims: Canon 400D)

Everything changed in Palestine

I’ve wrestled with my demons all my life, a broken man just trying to piece his life back together.

i thought the tears would stop,

but they don’t.

how do we know where we belong?

the shadows,

the arc of the moon,

the autumn leaves that have fallen,

the ocean that is as blue as my eyes.

it’s all so far far away,

the innocence of children playing…

what can we take when we go?

i have nothing to hold, nothing.

when i close my eyes i can picture my grandfather singing old gospels;

what does that mean?

broken down at the side of the road?

clipped wings that can no longer fly?

why when i look at me do i see you?

tonight it’s hard to learn to breathe again,

but that’s nobody’s fault but my own…

…the wind is blowing and i can’t get to the sails

(Desert wanderlust: Canon 20D)

why can dreams be so cruel, so full of torment and hurt – why do the images have to get so bad before you wake that once you do wake the darkness of the night is so cold that the hearts decline seems to strangle you?

when my kids have nightmares i hold them… well, who holds the grown ups when the darkness comes? 

these words from the late mr fogelberg are very apt at 3am

Nothing lasts forever

I know that this is true

But I never knew how true it was

Until I was losing you.

Maybe I’m a dreamer

Or maybe I’m a fool

But I never thought that love could be

So careless or so cruel.

You wrestle with the reasons

But the reasons never ryhme

Or comfort when the

Heart is in decline.

And it doesn’t really matter 

If it’s chance or if it’s design

It’s going to take some time.

Love don’t play no favourites

You know there’s no one that’s immune

Cos she changes her demeanor

Like the phases of the moon.

There ain’t no easy answers

You know there’s only shades of grey

But when it’s love or it’s survival

I guess you gotta get away.

The days stretch on forever

And the nights are so unkind

And endless when the 

Heart is in decline.

And it doesn’t really matter

If it’s chance or it’s design

It’s gonna take some time,

It’s gonna take some time.

the people we met in the land once known as holy have to endure treatment like this, over 20,000 homes have suffered this fate… and someone yesterday had the audacity to tell me that my trip to palestine was just another ‘jolly’

people have asked me what on earth can be done – well, in the same way people stopped buying Nestle products, why not boycott anything CAT – I certainly will be…