Do Nothing to Change Your Life. Stephen Cottrell

      

      Church House Publishing

       Church House

       Great Smith Street

       London SW1P 3NZ

      Tel: [phone]

       Fax: [phone]

      ISBN 978-0-7151-4118-2

       eISBN 978-0-7151-4260-8

      Published 2007 by Church House Publishing

       Copyright © Stephen Cottrell 2007

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or stored or transmitted by any means or in any form, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission which should be sought from the Copyright Administrator, Church House Publishing, Church House, Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3NZ.

      Email: [email protected]

      The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the General Synod or The Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England.

      Printed in England by Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

      Life is not hurrying

      on to a receding future, nor hankering after

      an imagined past. It is the turning

      aside like Moses to the miracle

      of the lit bush, to a brightness

      that seemed as transitory as your youth

      once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

      R. S. Thomas, The Bright Field

      Why is it so hard to quickly sum up all of those things that we have learned while being alive here on Earth? Why can’t I just tell you, ‘In ten minutes you are going to be hit by a bus, and so in those ten minutes you must quickly itemise what you have learned from being alive.’ Chances are that you would have a blank list. And even if you gave the matter the greatest concentration, you would still have a blank list. And yet we know in our hearts that we learn the greatest and most profound things by breathing, by seeing, by feeling, by falling in and out of love.

      Douglas Coupland, Life after God

      In returning and rest you shall be saved.

       Isaiah 30.15

       CONTENTS

       Acknowledgements

       Chapter 1 The difficult business of stopping

       Chapter 2 The absolute necessity of becoming eccentric

       Chapter 3 The even trickier business of knowing who you are

       Chapter 4 The scandalous hospitality of God

       Chapter 5 The possibility of a free lunch after all

       Chapter 6 Becoming the person you’re meant to be

       Chapter 7 Plumbing the depths of a single moment

       Chapter 8 Learning to feel at home

       Chapter 9 A beginner’s guide to sitting still

       Chapter 10 Slowing down, shutting up and speaking out

       Chapter 11 A day off at last

       Chapter 12 A final thought

       A few things I have found helpful

       ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

       For Joseph, Benjamin and Samuel,

       with apologies for not always practising what I preach.

      I dedicate this book to all those people who have helped me find joy and meaning in life: to my parents for giving me the firm foundation of sound loving; to my brothers and sister for their companionship; to Rebecca for the shared adventure of a lifetime; to my children for the many ways they have put me back in touch with wonder and delight; to the people I have ministered to as a priest and who have welcomed me into their lives at times of timorous joy and terrible sadness; to all those friends whose lives have inter-cut with mine. And through these relationships have come the little grace-filled moments that make up a lifetime: listening to my Mum playing Chopin, climbing Pen-y-Ghent, a quiet day at Bede House, riding bikes up the Camel Valley. I have received so much; and it is these moments and encounters more than anything – and the grace that is revealed in them – that has shaped this book.

      I am also grateful for those who have read through the text and made many insightful suggestions. I read the whole thing out loud to Rebecca on a drive up to Shropshire and made lots of changes as a result. Kathryn Pritchard at Church House Publishing has been marvellous in keeping my nose to the grindstone, my eye on the ball and my ear attuned to the central purpose of this book: which is that out of patient attentiveness to the present an eternity can be grasped.

THE DIFFICULT BUSINESS OF STOPPING

      You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.

      Mortimer Adler

      Let us imagine the whole of this book as an exploration into the dynamics and possibilities of a single moment, an eternal now.

      Or maybe that’s too heavy.

      Maybe I should just roll over and go back to sleep for an hour and dream a bit. Or go downstairs and make a cup of tea. Or run a nice hot bath and enjoy that delicious wastefulness of time when as the bath goes cold you gently release the plug with one foot and turn on the hot tap with the other, replenishing the water at the same time as it drains away. Oh, but what a waste. There are many people in the world today who won’t get a glass of water, let alone an overflowing bathful. Really I should be more considerate. I should be getting on with something useful. And yet I have this feeling that all the really important things I’ve ever thought of have emerged from the well of this waiting, and apparently wasting time, which I discover is not really wasting time at all but using it differently. And I have this awful fear that one day I will no longer be able to lie in bed in the morning or wallow in the bath. I will have lost the ability. What a horrific thought; one to encourage a further burrowing down under the covers and a tightening of the duvet lest the grim efficiency of the world with its ticking clocks, busy schedules and insistent deadlines should overwhelm me.

      But