Fingermaze 09

The last Sunday in July saw us braving the grey clouds and threatening rain for another meditation on the Fingermaze in Hove Park. Last year we concentrated on the theme of identity and this year we thought we'd expand on that by looking at the relationship between individuality and community.

Taking our cue from the Greek myth of Theseus and Ariadne, we gave everyone a ball of wool to trail behind them as they walked the labyrinth leaving their own individual path behind them in their choice of colour. We also provided the walker with an iPod playing an audio meditation about walking with God featuring the voices of Ben and Maggi Dawn who had joined us for the weekend. You can listen to the audio meditation here. So that the walker could focus on the meditation and the walk they also had a helper (a 'woolwalker') who trailed behind them helping to lay the thread.


In the centre of the labyrinth we placed a dead tree which would feature later in the event.


There were many things to learn from the walking - how difficult it was to keep the thread running between the lines of the Fingermaze, how some people outstripped their woolwalker with the speed of their walking, what people did when the wool ran out before they reached the centre of the maze (some stopped, others continued, some fetched additional wool to complete the trail). All of us learnt a lot about ourselves as we focussed inwardly through listening to the meditation and walking.

Once we'd all walked the Fingermaze it was transformed by the coloured trails that now spiderwalked their way around the labyrinth, adding a track of bright colour in the gloomy evening light.




At that point we all spaced ourselves round the Fingermaze and gathered up the wool from the ground together and draped it on the dead tree in the middle, as a communal act transforming it into a symbolic burning bush.















Though we walk through this life on a single path it criss crosses the paths of others and joins with them in community. It's in these communities that we often experience God's Holy ground which underpins this all and is the foundation of the world.


You'll find us at Greenbelt next (www.greenbelt.org.uk) doing lots of things over the August Bank Holiday and then we start up again here in Brighton & Hove on 27th September when our theme will be 'Reflections'.

Midsummer Celebration

Summer is here as England enters a heatwave but it wasn't quite so warm on the evening of the 21st June as we met to celebrate Midsummer by the seafront on Hove Lawns. We promised an evening of mellow music and meaningful words and that's exactly how it worked out.

Four different musical acts played for 20 minutes each interspersed with poetry and readings on the theme of Midsummer, Sunset or Light.

It was great to see people being drawn in from all around as the music drifted out across the grass, especially when the voice of Garry Sutcliffe, singer with the English National Opera, echoed out across the beach.

There were a couple of local groups involved - Approach are a duo from the Brighton Vineyard fellowship and Orchid are connected with The Garden, an alternative faith group who you can find on the links page on our website.


The rest of the music was provided by singer, songwriter and theologian (it's not often you get to write those three words together!) Maggi Dawn, who came down especially from Cambridge with two new band members.

Other travellers who should get a special mention are Pete who accompanied Garry, and Billy, our sound man, who both cycled from London as part of the annual bike ride before then spending the evening with us performing.


As well as poems put together by the BEYOND team we also had contributions from Poets Cornered, a group that meets in the Poets Corner area of Hove who had specially prepared material for this occasion.

We finished the event with an informal breaking of bread and sharing of wine, echoing that last meal that Jesus had with his disciples after the sun had set nearly 2000 years ago. The finale to it all was the release of some sky lanterns which we had all signed which then drifted out to sea as the darkness fell.

Here's one of the poems we didn't get to use on the night but which sums up lots of the emotions of the evening

THE LAST ENEMY
Stuart Henderson

And He Who each day
reveals a new masterpiece in the sky
and Whose joy
can be seen in the eyelashes of a child
Who when he hears of our smug indifference
can whisper an ocean lashing fury
and talk tigers into padding roars.
This my God
Whose breath is in the wings of eagles
Whose power is etched in the crags of mountains
It is When I will meet
in Whose Presence I will find tulips and clouds
Kneeling martyrs and trees
the whole vast praising of his endless creation
and he will grant the uniqueness
that eluded me
in my earthly bartering with Satan
That day when He will erase the painful gasps of my ego
and I will sink my face into the wonder of his glory love
and I will watch planets converse with sparrows
On that day
when death is finally dead














Our next event is also out doors and is on the Hove Park Fingermaze 26th July 7pm

HOPE

We always knew that choosing Hope as a theme in the middle of a recession was going to create an interestingly relevant evening and this proved very much to be the case.

In order to look at hope you have to be prepared to consider the other side of the equation which is most easily described as despair. One of the things we noted as we looked at imagery around Hope was how dark and depressing paintings called Hope often are. The two paintings above are both called Hope and are respectively by Gustav Klimt and George Frederic Watts, Klimt's painting of a pregnant woman features a deaths head peeping out from behind her and Watts painting was once retitled by GK Chesterton as Despair because it was so depressing!

The puzzling thing about this theme from a Christian perspective is the assertion that we have 'a sure and certain hope'. This is not a normal reading of the word which in general usage equates hope with wish fulfilment or dreams coming true. Even Wikipedia recognises that in a religious context hope has a different meaning.

In the end we came up with a metaphor which helped to explain this and gave everybody a lot of pleasure at the same time. As everybody came in to the event they were given a spoon and later in the evening we asked them all what they thought about being given this. Someone shouted out pudding and that's what we had - everybody was given a gorgeous chocolate dessert because having a spoon is a promise of dessert to come.

Another symbol of this certain hope were large jigsaw pieces that everyone could write their hopes on and take home with them. Christian hope is all about knowing that there is a picture because we have a piece of the jigsaw, even if we don't know what that picture is.

The next event is our seafront celebration of the longest day which will be an evening of mellow music with artists such as Maggi Dawn, and thoughtful words as we watch the sun set over the sea. June 21st by Hove Lawns directly opposite the end of Grand Avenue from 8pm. It's also London to Brighton bike ride day so allow extra time for traffic if you're coming down by bike!

Easter Resurrected

Easter came to a close for BEYOND at Easter Resurrected on Sunday 26th April where we brought together all the art from the Easter Path in one place at one time for a final viewing/meditation. Bringing things together into a new space gave us a chance to reinterpret some of the installations in a way that was appropriate for the space and with some additions.

During the hour we journeyed together from one installation to another following Jesus' path from Gethsemane to the cross. Station 2 was Jesus is condemned and originally this had been in Sydney Street Bikes where we had used the security grille in the shop window as a symbol of imprisonment with roped hands shackled to the ironwork. In the Old Market we suspended an old piece of wrought iron to make a three dimensional image of torture and restraint.


Dave's Comics also in Sydney Street put an amazing amount of thought into their display which featured a cross shape made from a series of comics about a 'godkiller' force that destroys a number of major superheroes. We added to this with images from the Manga Bible and some thoughts about the themes of death and resurrection which are so common in this kind of literature.



One of the other extensively reworked stations was number 9 at City News newsagents where Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem. The original window featured images of weeping women backlit and for our theatre installation we collaged these same images onto a series of colour changing lightboxes of various sizes.

An added bonus for those who came to the theatre was a station entitled 'Jesus is stripped of his garments' using a ripped and slashed suit jacket displayed in the form of a cross. This version of station 10 didn't work for the shop owner so we created something different around the soldiers throwing lots for Jesus robe which was the artwork eventually used for the Easter Path. Both images make us think about the importance we place on external appearance while God sees into our hearts.

Easter Resurrected finished with two neon crosses created by Andy Doig of Fishtail Neon which we installed on a darkened stage so that they spoke eloquently to us of the beauty and glory of the resurrected Christ symbolised by the empty cross.

We also managed to get hold of a copy of the BBC South East Today news report which went out on Good Friday.

Our next event is on 24th May at the Old Market on the theme of HOPE.

Easter Path Finale

Easter brings with it the culmination of the Easter Path after 6 weeks of activity, interest and a surprising amount of maintenance. We've had displays that got accidentally broken requiring repair with a blowtorch; one window that got replaced due to a shop refurbishment which meant the original design had to be radically changed; one display that kept mysteriously being removed for the first few weeks of the path and one central artwork that got sold while the shop owner was on holiday!

Throughout Lent we've guided a number of groups around the path at various times of day and in various conditions and we know that there have been lots of other groups using the path as an opportunity to do their own Lenten walk. Good Friday saw our final BEYOND group walking the path in the rain from midday to 2pm followed by fish and chips by the beach.

We've had a lot of interest from the media, especially over the last week as they look for good Easter stories and have filmed news reports with both Meridian and BBC South East Today. You can read a short report at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sussex/7993987.stm and hopefully the TV reports will appear online soon.

Emily Jeffery of BBC Radio Sussex recorded a wonderful piece for their Sunday morning show which you can listen to on Easter Sunday sometime between 7am and 9am or here.

Through doing this we have learnt a lot about what it means to bring the Easter message out of the church and into the community. For most people Easter is about bunnies, chicks and chocolate - a million miles away from the suffering, death and resurrection that we focus on in the church, and yet these themes are incredibly relevant to modern day life especially in a recession when people are only too aware of the meaninglessness of materialistic living. It is time we stopped huddling away in our churches concentrating on our own little rituals and iconic observances and found ways to engage with those around us who are looking for some hope and inspiration and Easter is a great opportunity for that.

On April 26th we are bringing together all the exhibits from the Easter Path plus a few extras, including a visit from Siku, the artist who created The Manga Bible who will be telling us a bit about his work on this project. The event is at the Old Market from 7pm with bar open from 6.30. If you weren't able to make it round the Easter Path during Lent, please come and see everything together in the one place.

Easter Path 1

The Easter Path has now been up for about 2 weeks and people are beginning to use it and comment about it. A number of church groups have been in touch to ask for further details so they can take their own group round and last week we ran our first guided tour.

The thing that surprised me about walking the path in a group is how much attention you get from everyone else around at that time. Our walk started at 5pm on a Sunday so it wasn't massively busy but even so people stopped to see what we were doing as we gathered around each window for a short reflection.

We think of spiritual practice as something which is quite closed and conducted in a safe environment but going out on the streets like this invites public attention which alters the experience. There is also something quite different about being meditative in a public environment from the kind of public evangelising you sometimes come across in town centres. It felt to me more respectful for a group of people to be standing in the street in silence meditating than trying to engage with passers by in some way.

Jesus walk to Golgotha was a very public event that had no exposition to it, it just happened and people were left to draw their own conclusions about what was going on. The message of Easter is more powerful if we just find ways to tell people the story and let them interpret and understand it for themselves.












The next guided walk is 29th March at 5pm starting at Brighthelm and it takes a little over an hour and a half.

Beauty

At the end of a beautiful day on 22nd February we convened at the Old Market to consider the age old problem of beauty - what is it, how do you define it, why is it so important to us and how is it that I am not it!







The format for the evening was very different to anything else we've run and was like an exhibition with short talks rather than a directed series of activities. From the beginning people were asked to look at a host of images on display all pver the room and write their thoughts or reactions to these images on a post-it note and stick it to the picture.

We were also lucky enough to have some experts to talk to us about their view of beauty in relation to a number of different topics.

Karen spoke to us about personal beauty and the importance this plays as part of our whole view of ourselves, Stuart took us through one of his favourite pieces of music, Samuel Barber's adagio for strings, and explained why it was so moving for him. Danny talked to us about what he found beautiful in a painting by Hans Feibusch called 1939, and David showed us what beauty is architecture consisted of. Finally Martin spoke about the story of the woman who washes Jesus feet with her hair and anoints him with perfume - an act described by Jesus as beautiful.

Finally we came to rest on the image of Jesus on the cross - the most beautiful act for mankind whilst simultaneously being the most hideous event.


The Easter Path is now set up and will run throughout Lent - look at the website (www.beyondchurch.co.uk) for more details.

GIFTS

Our first event of 2009 started with everyone in the theatre being given a gift which then got used at some point later in the evening. We started by looking back to Christmas and in particular the visit of the wise men and the gifts that they brought. Their gifts of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh were symbols that had some significant meaning in Jesus' life and we were reminded that every gift is symbolic of something, from the bottle of champagne given to celebrate an achievement through to the pair of socks that says something quite different about the attitude of the giver.

We also considered the other meaning of the word gift relating to talents or skills. Everyone got the chance to do a personality survey to give them an objective idea of the things that they were good at which then led into writing a personal gift statement. You can try one of these tests online here Personality Test and look at the different personality types here Personality Types

This was an attempt by each person to write an honest appraisal of the personal gifts they exhibit in life. From there we all wrote late New Years resolutions, a reminder to us that to get the best out of life and truly live as the people that God intended us to be then we have to exercise those gifts to the best of our ability.












Finally we were asked to consider Jesus - God's gift to us that we might be whole. Everyone left with at least one gift, the most popular being a selection of gold pebbles with words on them expressing some of the most precious gifts of all such as love, joy and peace.

Beach Hut 24

The first ever Advent Beach Hut Calendar drew to a close in spectacular fashion tonight as something like 250 people turned up to celebrate Christmas Eve.

The theme was the wise men and their gifts - the hut decoration was gold, with frankincense burning outside and the opportunity to have a Christmas blessing and anointing with myrrh oil.


Above the hut we had our very own star shining and glittering to attract people from near and far.

We had three sets of wise men at the event, one was a series of images created by local artist, Annie Kemp, another a set of three sculptures from Poland and the third were three giant wise men who came from the East playing Christmas songs and carols.


The wise men on stilts were a local performing troupe called The Top Bananas and we all sang We Three Kings together. People continued to enjoy mulled wine and mince pies with the added luxury of hot roast chestnuts while many lined up to receive a Christmas blessing.


Thanks to all those who took part in this wonderful event and remember there's a chance to see a number of the huts open again at 3.30pm on Boxing Day.

May the God of light who came into the world at Christmas
bring you light and life.

Beach Hut 23

We had another peaceful, calm evening for the penultimate hut of this first ever Advent Beach Hut Calendar, so calm that the candles in hut 410 hardly flickered at all.

The theme for tonight was The Holly and the Ivy and the centrepiece was a beautiful display featuring holly, ivy, bay leaves and oranges which smelt as gorgeous as it looked. Karen finished off the design with numerous candles in lanterns, on the centrepiece and in a fantastically ornate candelabra.

While the children helped themselves to gingerbread biscuits and more and more people came to join in, we sang the theme carol after hearing a little background about these two plants and their association with Christmas. Everyone was invited to take a little posy featuring a candle set with some ivy or to help themselves to an orange.

Tomorrow is our final day as it Christmas Eve and should be quite a special evening at hut 395 including a chance to receive a Christmas blessing. A number of the huts will also open at 3.30pm on Boxing Day for a little recap for those who might not have been able to get to one of the evenings or who are visiting Brighton & Hove for Christmas.

Beach Hut 22

Yesterday was the Annunciation in churches across the country with the story of the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary and telling her that she is going to give birth to the son of God and it felt right to focus on Mary today. The carol we picked for this theme was Gentle Mary Laid Her Child which is not very common and is sung to the same tune as Good King Wenceslas.


Originally the hut was due to be decorated by a local artist but sadly her grandmother died last week and she is busy with the funeral this week so was unable to take part.


One of the local churches always runs a 'Blue Christmas' service at this time of year for those who find Christmas hard because they've lost loved ones or are on their own for some reason and so we combined the idea of Mary with the colour blue to create a very simple image for tonight.

Our thoughts are with Catherine and her family at this sad time.

Tomorrow - hut 410.