Paul Chambers

(the things you find when you aren’t looking, St Peter Port: canon 30d)

…steps are more difficult to make than others

(memories: canon 30d)

… the silence can be deafening

(canon 20d)

I got an email from a colleague at work yesterday. In it he quotes St. Augustine: “Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies.”

It’s kept me up half the night…

(heart of the matter: canon 30d)

Do you think joyful and sorrowful tears taste the same?

Do they come from the same place in our souls?

Does joy sometimes feel uncomfortable?

Does sorrow sometimes feel comfortable?

I got the call today, I didn't wanna hear
But I knew that it would come
An old, true friend of ours was talkin' on the phone
She said you found someone

And I thought of all the bad luck,
 and the struggles we went through
And how I lost me and you lost you
What are those voices outside love's open door
Make us throw off our contentment
  and beg for something more?

I'm learning to live without you now
But I miss you sometimes
The more I know, the less I understand
All the things I thought I knew, I'm learning again

I've been tryin' to get down
  to the heart of the matter
But my will gets weak
  and my thoughts seem to scatter
But I think it's about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don't love me anymore

These times are so uncertain
There's a yearning undefined
...people filled with rage
We all need a little tenderness
How can love survive in such a graceless age?
The trust and self-assurance that lead to happiness
They're the very things we kill, I guess
Pride and competition
  cannot fill these empty arms
And the work I put between us
  doesn't keep me warm

I'm learning to live without you now
But I miss you, baby
The more I know, the less I understand
All the things I thought I'd figured out
I have to learn again

I've been trying to get down
  to the heart of the matter
But everything changes and my friends seem to scatter
But I think it's about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don't love me anymore

There are people in your life who've come and gone
They let you down and hurt your pride
Better put it all behind you; life goes on
You keep carryin' that anger, it'll eat you up inside

I've been trying to get down
  to the heart of the matter
But my will gets weak
  and my thoughts seem to scatter
But I think it's about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don't love me anymore

I've been tryin' to get down
  to the heart of the matter
Because the flesh will get weak
  and the ashes will scatter
So I'm thinkin' about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don't love me anymore
(Don Henley)

(flowers grave: canon 30d)

Someday the silver moon and i will go to dreamland. I will close my eyes and wake up there in dreamland. But tell me who will put flowers on a flowers grave? Who will say a prayer? Will I meet a China rose down in dreamland? Or does love lie bleeding in dreamland? Are these days gone forever and always if i die tonight another rose will bloom. For a faded rose will i be the one that you save? I love when it showers but no-one puts flowers on a flowers grave.

As one rose dies another blooms. It’s always been that way. I remember the showers but no-one puts flowers on a flowers grave.

(Tom Waits)

Taken from one of the most beautiful records ever made…. Alice….

(Hebron, The West Bank, 2008): Canon 20d)

Before I rant i must explain that this post is a consequence of a brief conversation with a  Christian ‘know it all’ yesterday – he has never been to the land once known as holy.

Anti-semitism is a shocking thing. In fact it’s more than that. It’s a spiritual abyss along whose ridge Christians walk when-ever they speak about Israel, read about Zion in the Hebrew Scriptures or reflect on certain passages of John’s gospel. Anti-semitism is a collection of pernicious thoughts and arguments that have been fuelled by the Christian charge of deicide over centuries, which found its ultimate expression in the mechanised genocide of European Jews only 60 years ago. Its grip on the collective Christian imagination should make us regularly ashamed and always watchful. But none of these truths should stop Christians speaking about the land we too call holy and the appalling destruction visited on the people of Lebanon and Palestine.

It’s not just on the basis that Christian Palestinians and Lebanese are suffering with our Muslim brothers and sisters in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon that we cannot look away; that would seem to pit Christians against Jews and that is not the point (something my ‘know it all’ friend couldn’t seem to understand). It is on the basis that a democratic state is accountable to the international community. Israel is breaking international law by continuing to build settlements in the West Bank and by building an animal 11 meters high separating Palestinian families from their schools, hospitals and farms.

Palestinians are short of water; Israeli settlers have sprinklers on their lawns. Palestinians live in overcrowded refugee camps; Israelis cultivate Americanised urban chic with air con apartments and spacious shopping malls. Fearing the charge of anti-semitism, and because European nations have not learned how to remember the atrocities of the Holocaust without it paralysing them into the present, EU governments, even in the light of what we witnessed in Gaza of late, is too soft and pressure to light.

I have reflected deeply since my visit in October of last year. I ask to be ’searched and known’ like the guy who wrote the Psalm, but I am not naive enough to know that throwing accusations of anti-semitic behaviour is enough to stop the debate. israel may be the only democracy in the region, but it is also the only nuclear power, receiving billions of US dollars a year. Surely it is the Israeli government policy of collective punishment that should be censured, not the Jewish people as a whole? Judaism is a noble and precious religion, honoured by Christians. Israeli government policy is not worth the support of civilised people. It is brutal, offensive and cruel. It must change.

it’s the friday we call good and i am about to have a moment with the almighty, an altercation even.

(Better days: Tanzania, 2005 – canon s 70)

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.

Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

All day and night, music,
a quiet, bright
reedsong. If it
fades, we fade.

RUMI

(Uluguru Mountains, Tanzania – Canon s 70)

The key to traveling light is to not need very much

(canon 30D)

some things get lost, somethings just disappear, but not my love for you, I keep it safe and near…

silence between people, strangers sitting beside each other on a train or at night or taking shelter under the same awning in a rainstorm. Two lives hidden behind faces, divided by fathoms of empty space, wrapped round in silence which one of them breaks then with maybe some word that in one way or another means know me, know me.