Beach Hut 1

This years Beach Hut Advent Calendar got off to a cracking start tonight with loads of people turning up to enjoy a rain free evening for the first time in ages, we hope that God continues to look after the weather for us as the month continues. People came see what was in the hut, to share in mince pies, mulled wine and chat and to collect a stamp on their postcard to give them a chance of winning our fabulous prize. Hut 431 is owned by the Hotel du Vin in Brighton and the person who collects the most stamps during the month stands a chance of winning dinner, bed & breakfast for two at this chic boutique hotel between The Laines and the seafront.

The theme for tonight was God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and Karen Morton from the Beyond team created a tableau featuring two gentlemen who were resting after partaking of a very fine meal. The table was laid with the remains of their plum pudding and half a bottle of port as the two men slumbered peacefully awaiting the dawn of Christmas day.

People have been telling us all day that they've heard or seen news reports about the launch on TV and radio and we're also being followed by The Independent who plan to feature something from us every day this month. We can't claim to be unique this year as a group in Bridlington have picked up the idea and are doing their own advent calendar using one strategically placed hut and giving 24 different artists a chance to interpret a part of the Advent story. You can follow them on their blog and compare the daily displays as we head towards Christmas. If we manage to get our heads round the technology we may even start tweeting from the huts so if you tweet follow us on @BeachHutAdvent.

Tomorrow we're at hut number 395 where there'll be an artwork particularly suited to the weather at this time of year.

Rhythms of Life and Advent

Sunday we looked at Rhythms of Life starting from the cycles of the universe and solar system down to seasons, days and our own daily routines and rhythms. Rhythm is built into all creation and we all carry a reminder of that with us everywhere in our own heartbeat.

We looked at the passage in Ecclesiastes 3 which talk about the times and seasons of life and is written in a beautifully rhythmic way as a series of contrasting couplets. We used these couplets to play game and then took some time to draw a rhythm map of our lives using a circle made from the couplets and considering how close or far away we felt to each of the emotions described in the passage.Finally Tirl Bryant from the Psalm Drummers took part in the event and urged us all to look for God's heartbeat in our lives.

After only a year we have developed our own rhythm at BEYOND and find ourselves back at the Beach Hut Advent Calendar which launches tonight. Got to our website for the full timetable of openings and if you're anywhere nearby come and visit us one night at 5.30pm. Come back here every day if you can't visit us in person and we'll post photos and words from each night as we go along.

Dark

This blog is a little late going up because we've been focussing on launching an exciting new initiative - our very own printed Advent Calendar based on last years Beach Hut event. The calendar is available through our website or in various Brighton shops such as Borders, Wesley Owen, Malarkey and Eikonoklast as well as in some churches and at Church House in Hove. They're only £5 and any profits from the sales will go towards funding future BEYOND activities.


The night after 'white night' here in Brighton, we chose to focus on Dark in a beautiful studio space called The Basement. The great thing about this venue was it is underground and so could be absolutely blacked out.

As is so often the case with themes that we pick months in advance, something came along on this same theme just the week before our event. Tate Modern launched 'How It Is' by Miroslaw Balka which is all about exploring the dark, they've created an interesting web experience around it which you can see here.

The Tate exhibition is interesting because at first it is a bit scary as you enter the dark but you very quickly become used to it and in fact it's quite light inside because one whole wall of the box is still open to the the light. In The Basement we were able to create total darkness and while at first this made everyone a little afraid and quiet, we very quickly began talking and laughing in the dark and moving around quite freely.

Through readings, discussion and a re-creation of the tearing of the veil of the temple in two at the same time as the world went dark and Jesus cried out on the cross, we came to realise that we are not alone in the dark, but that God shares in that darkness with us. The moment when Jesus cries 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' is what Pete Rollins calls Divine Dereliction and is the very essence of Christianity. That we believe in a God who experienced the fullness of darkness should help us to embrace this, not necessarily expecting to see the light, but being able to experience the holy in this void.

The next event is 29th November about Rhythms of Life.

Reflections

Reflections was the start of the new season of BEYOND events in a new venue with a new way of doing things. We met in the upstairs room of a pub in Hove called The Alibi and on reflection it was a good move which prompted a very different atmosphere to the Old Market venue we have been using up to now. Rather than follow a set programme as we have at previous events we threw out various ideas about reflection and let people talk and think about them as they wanted to so there was a lot of discussion and free flowing conversation throughout the evening.

The room was setup with lots of different kinds of mirrors including some fairground style ones that we had made for the event and an interactive projection/reflection area where people could place their face into a frame and see themselves imposed onto images of Mother Teresa or Hitler or Marilyn Monroe.


We had some great films to watch including something we found on Youtube called Mirror, Mirror on the Wall and a fantastic version of Man in the Mirror by James Morrison which we set to a series of pictures of the changing faces of Michael Jackson.

Everyone got a chance to spend 5 minutes looking at themselves in a mirror, not something we often do in everyday life and quite an uncomfortable activity for some. Each person wrote about what they saw in their mirror and some of the things they would change if they could.

Taking some quotes from John O'Donohues Anam Cara brought us to thinking about the spiritual aspect of looking at ourselves:

The body is a sacrament. The old traditional definition of a sacrament captures this beautifully as a visible sign of invisible grace. All our inner life and intimacy of soul longs to find an outer mirror. The body is the mirror where the secret world of the soul comes to expression.

This led us to consider the other aspect of reflection which is to do with contemplation which is of course what we'd been doing all evening. We finished with the realisation from 1 Corinthians 13v12 that:

At present we are people looking at puzzling reflections in a mirror. The time will come when we shall see reality whole and face to face! At present all I know is a little fraction of the truth, but the time will come when I shall know it as fully as God now knows me!

As a symbol of that we had set up a dressing table with a few small fragments of mirror and someone trying to brush their hair in it without really being able to see. Everyone was given a shard of mirror and encouraged to add their shard to the mirror to help to make a more complete picture.

Finally everyone left with a small reminder that we only see a part of the picture now but one day will see everything. if you want one of these email us your address to info@beyondchurch.co.uk and we'll put one in the post.

Our next event on 25th October tries another venue - The Basement in the heart of the Laines in Brighton - a very cool artspace which we hope to use to it's full underground advantage as the theme is Dark.

Finally a little postscript to Greenbelt in the form of a video about the ice sculpture posted by Michael Radcliffe.

Greenbelt 2

One of the other things we organised for Greenbelt was a Prayer Wall. The idea with this was to give people a place to pray which was a cross between the Jewish 'wailing wall' style and the catholic 'light a candle' form of prayer. In addition to making individual prayers we also wanted people to feel that they were part of a community of prayer that involved others without having to do something together.

We erected a 6m x 1.2m 'wall' made of wire mesh which had a subtle design spray painted onto it.


People were encouraged to take a piece of coloured ribbon and write a short prayer on it. Then they should take the ribbon and tie it into the wall on a piece of wire of the same colour. So red ribbons went onto red wire, orange ribbons onto orange wire etc. For those who couldn't think of a prayer or whose prayer was too difficult for words there were black ribbons which couldn't be written on and which speak volumes even though we can't. The aim was that eventually the accumulation of ribbons would result in a design, or ribbon picture by the end of the weekend.

Not everyone got the idea that the coloured ribbons should work like a giant 'painting by numbers' and we ended up with quite a lot of orange in the red, some white in the orange etc. and loads that weren't even tied into the design at all!! There's a little lesson to be learnt there about human understanding and perhaps the need to not conform!

The end result wasn't quite the clear picture we had hoped for but something like 700 people tied a ribbon into the design and that's a significant number of prayers in the middle of a busy festival when everyone's rushing to get from one thing to another.

We'd like to thank Siku, the Manga Bible artist, who adapted one of his pictures for us to (massively) simpify as the basis of our design and welcome any ideas for the wall and all it's prayers now the festival has finished.

Greenbelt 1

We've just returned, exhausted from a very busy and very successful Greenbelt. We were involved in a number of things and I'll write about all of these over the next few days but we'll start today with the Ice Age Contemplation.

The idea for this came some time ago when considering this year's theme which was 'Standing in the Long Now'. This is all about taking time, letting things happen, experiencing the moment, being patient. From this the idea came for a huge block of ice with things embedded in it which would slowly become free as the ice melted over the weekend.

We found a great company (Iceworks) who were prepared to put the block together for us and we added a spire to make the whole thing a little church like. Embedded in the ice were a number of little perspex crosses, some rosaries, sunflowers and in the spire a statuette of Jesus. The tonne and a half sculpture was delivered Friday midday and looked fab because the ice was so clear and the objects were visible floating in mid-block. It immediately began to melt and for the first day or so was covered in a living stream of water which not only looked beautiful but also began to change the shape, especially where the spire sat on the block.

As soon as the first ray of sunlight hit the block cracks began to appear and one in particular enhanced the whole effect. A feathery, flowery crack appeared in the spire directly above Jesus head making it look for all the world as though he had a halo above him, it was beautiful. People were fascinated by the whole thing and kept walking up to it and touching it, stroking it, licking it and taking photographs of it. Teenagers started to play games to see who could hold onto the ice longest and teams of people would rub away at certain areas to change the shape of the ice.

Slowly this awed interest began to change into something more violent and aggressive. Kids started to chip away at the ice to try and get at the things within and this gradually escalated.



Before long they were using hammers, stones and concrete blocks to hack at the ice which began to look less and less beautiful. Various people tried to stop this vandalism but it always started up again and by late Saturday afternoon all that was left was a large, ugly, grey lump which had been pushed off it's plinth and begun to migrate across the grass.



Lots of people were upset by this treatment but there are three things that we can take away from this:



1. You can't predict how people will react. The whole point of creating this kind of interactive art is to allow people to respond in the way they want to. We may not like their response but it's their response and it is authentic and valid nevertheless.



2. You can't always hold on to beauty. This artwork was designed to disappear, the vandalism merely speeded up that process. Because the initial sculpture was so beautiful we want to hold onto that moment but it was always destined to degrade and be defiled. Jesus' friends wanted to preserve the beauty of the transfiguration with some kind of memorial but he wouldn't allow that and instructed them to keep the event a secret. Modern life wants to capture everything for posterity as we saw with all the photographs being taken. Sometimes it's good just to experience the present and move on.

3. Isn't this a 'bit like Jesus'?! He was beaten and destroyed, made to look ugly and disfigured and it would have been a lot more distressing than watching a bunch of kids hitting an iceblock with sticks. Although I'd hesitate to draw specific parallels, there's something here about the violence of mankind being taken out on the beauty of God that I find quite profound.

So in all it's been a great lesson in what can happen when you put something out these and let things happen. I've learnt from it and I hope many others will too.

Come back in the next few days to read about the Prayer Wall, Light and the Burning Bush.

Greenbelt

BEYOND is very active at the Greenbelt arts and music festival over the August Bank Holiday weekend 28th - 31st August. As well as taking about a dozen people to the festival we're setting up a number of things and running an event which we hope will inspire people.

We're creating a number of installations on site which we hope people will interact with and which will point them to God.

Ice Age contemplation is a 1.5 tonne ice sculpture which will be placed between the festival village and the main stage. Over the weekend it will melt to reveal objects which we've embedded into the ice and which people can take away with them.

The Prayer Wall will be next to the main arena and is an opportunity for anyone to write a short prayer on a ribbon and then tie it into a pattern on a fence we will have set up. Hopefully by the end of the weekend all the ribbons will form a giant picture loosely based on the work of the Manga Bible artist, Siku.

A friend of BEYOND is creating a Burning Bush (within the stringent health and safety guidelines laid down by Greenbelt and the racecourse!) which will give people an opportunity to consider what it means to be on Holy Ground.

Finally we're running an event on Saturday 29th at 4pm entitled LIGHT in collaboration with our friend, the light artist Chris Levine. It's in the venue Greenbelt are calling Film but the racecourse call Foxhunter. Chris is lending us some of his amazing light sculptures, lasers and blipverts. We're also borrowing a cross from Andy Doig of Fishtail Neon to add in to the mix along with some spectacular lights of our own.

If you're at the festival please come and say hello and for those who can't attend we'll post some photos and news here afterwards.

The BEYOND website now has our Autumn programme on it and we are in the process of creating a printed Beach Hut Advent Calendar which we hope to have on sale sometime in October. It will be a unique advent calendar based on photographs from last years event - please let us know if this is something you would be interested in buying.

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