“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance” are the last words of Colonel John Sedgewick during the US Civil War. Memorable, but stupid! I love looking up famous last words, and was delighted today by Alexei Navalny’s last words in his autobiography.
Navalny was a Russian opposition politician, poisoned with the infamous Novichok. He was treated in Germany, but returned to Russia where he was imprisoned. Three years later he died in suspicious circumstances (like many of Putin’s enemies). Navalny’s last words, at the end of his book, Patriot, are a passage on how not to worry. He knew that he would likely be killed and wrote about the pointlessness of worrying about it. They are a masterclass in how the Christian faith can be the antidote to worry.
He wrote that faith makes life simpler, then asked, “But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about? Why, under your breath, would you mumble a hundred times something you read from a hefty tome you keep in your bedside table? Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself. My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.”
That’s a phenomenally helpful set of last words. First, he asks if his readers have put their trust in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to know God personally. That’s the foundation. If the reader has, there is nothing left to worry about. Eternity is secure.
I had a season of great worry twenty years ago and a friend asked me at the time “Will you still be worrying about this in 500 years?… No, then why are you worrying about it now?” That is incredibly freeing. There is literally no point worrying about what might happen.
Navalny used the words of Christ – don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Holocaust survivor Corrie Ten Boom once said that “Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.” Leave worrying about tomorrow for tomorrow. And to help us today, the Apostle Peter exhorts us to “Cast all our anxieties on Him, for he cares for us.”
Our days are better spent as Navalny encouraged seeking the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and not worrying about the rest!
With all the horrific carnage of wars assaulting us daily in the news it seems right to ask whether resurrection could be possible, and would those killed by war, resurrected and spread across the universe bring about eternal peace?
To even start to think about this I am guessing that we would have to understand and be able to control reality. But what is reality? According to Carlo Rovelli’s book, ‘Reality Is Not What It Seems’, some scientists are working on the theory that reality is a manifestation of quantum gravity but what does this mean?
Time is not what it seems. Time slows down with speed and with movement away from large objects like planets. If you left earth and travelled at high speed before returning you would have aged less than your relatives who remained on earth. Time is therefore not a constant, as it seems to us, so scientists think of it as part of space, space-time. If you could travel at the speed of light would time stop? If it did would this mean that space-time is travelling at the speed of light? It is all very confusing, but scientists find that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity does work in practice for calculations related to large objects like planets.
Similarly, Quantum Theory seems to work for very small sub-atomic particles. Scientists have tried to break materials into smaller and smaller parts to find out what they are made of. Quantum Theory tells us that this is not an infinite quest but that there are smallest objects which are finite. Werner Heisenberg had the idea that light, which is an electromagnetic wave and which appears to us to be a continuous stream, is in fact made up of tiny particles called photons. He first had this idea when he watched a man walking through a park at night. The man appeared under a street light and then disappeared before reappearing under the next light.
In a reality which is constantly changing, is there anything that does not change? Scientists tell us that there are three constants, the speed of light in a vacuum, the minimum length as defined by Max Planck, and Planck’s constant for action which is expressed as energy multiplied by time, i.e. joules per second.
Quantum theory and particle physics occupy a strange world that nobody really understands but again, Quantum Theory does seem to work in practice. This is why some scientists are suggesting that Quantum Theory should also be applied to gravity. In other words, is gravity an energy field which is composed of tiny energy-rich massless particles which travel at the speed of light and could this be the fundamental constituent of space-time and matter?
All these unanswered questions mean that we are very primitive when compared to Jesus, if, as it says in the Bible, Jesus is able to resurrect the dead. Jesus says: ‘I am the resurrection and the life’, John 11:25.
I have a very privileged job, not only do I accompany people from all sorts of walks of life on their journeys through the health system, but I also get to do so alongside many people from different cultures, countries and faith perspectives. In 2024 the Sacred Space inside the QEH has hosted displays and heard people talk passionately about some of the major religious celebrations and festivals from around the world as well as major occasions in this country. Holi, Hannukah, Easter, D-Day Commemoration, Remembrance, Christmas, Eid, Onam and Diwali to name but a few. Within the hospital, at the last count, there were over 130 different nationalities represented amongst the workplace. The hospital is probably one of the most diverse places to work in the town. Sometimes the festivals were celebrated with dancing and music and food and sometimes with displays. Sometimes a solemn service has told a story and sometimes the hubble and bubble of lots of people having conversations have told their own story.
And for me this is one of the most beautiful things about my job, I get to learn about different people and what makes them tick and I also get to learn about my own faith as well. I am a Christian, a follower and disciple of Jesus and when he was alive, Jesus was visited by people giving his family gifts, who were not from his own country and who followed stars. The magi or wise men. When he was teaching, he healed the servant of a man whose government was oppressing his own. The story of the healing of the Centurion’s servant. In one of the longest episodes in Jesus’ life he gave teaching to a woman who came from a country that worshipped God in a different way and who came from the country that bordered his. The story of the Samaritan woman. And when he died, his cross was carried by a man from Eastern Libya. Simon of Cyrene. The list could go on and even more fundamentally than that, Jesus was a Jewish man, born in Israel and he definitely was not British, unlike myself.
But even if all of that were not true, its still an honour to find out about other people and listen to their stories. For what I find is that by listening to others tell their stories, you then have the permission to tell your own story. And by doing that, having that conversation, you probably learn more about yourself and what makes you tick.
Rev Lee Gilbert, Head of Spiritual care for the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Kings Lynn
How we long for light at this time of year. Each day it slips away far too early, well before we have dealt with all our daytime tasks. To comfort ourselves we fill our seasonal festivities with lights.
In John’s gospel we hear of the light that enlightens every human coming into the world. We are all enlightened. How do we experience this?
One of the inspirational early Quakers, George Fox, wrote: “Now this is the light which you are lighted withal, which shows you when you do wrong … and you know with that when you have wronged anyone, and broken promise, and told a thing that is not so, there is something riseth within you that is a witness against you, and that is the light… If you love this light it will teach you”
Modern believers know that we have a conscience but we associate it with guilt, not seeing it as something to be celebrated. It’s more of a dirty secret than something that illuminates our lives.
If we explore the experience of being guided by this inner teacher we can begin to notice what gets in the way of the exposing light that brings things into the open that we might prefer not to see. It is our fear, our sense of inadequacy, our shame or burden of guilt that cast the shadows. And also all the many distractions we can find to turn our attention other ways.
This isn’t our own private problem – each and every one of us has the capacity to see clearly.
In the 17th century there was a Quaker called George Watson living in Upwell who, as a young man, took the King’s shilling and went off to fight in the Low Countries. Then after a season of fighting and a winter season in camp, he came to realise that he could not, when the time came, take up arms again. That could not be what God wished him to do, he could see that very clearly. He defied orders and thought he would be shot, but instead he was left to make his way home through enemy territory as best he could.
One Sunday many years later, having rejoined his Quaker meeting, he listened to some inspirational preaching and once again felt a clear nudge to act. He made a written confession to his meeting and his testimony is kept in the Norfolk Record Office. But the burden he was carrying was not that he had been a soldier and, very probably, broken the commandment not to kill. What he confessed to was that he had received a powerful and irresistible push from God to change what he was doing and he had not shared that experience with others.
George Watson came to understand that the point is to support each other in sustaining a practice of letting light into our lives. It’s not about being “good” (and being ashamed if we are not). If we are to retain trust in the moments when we allow light to shine upon our inner lives, we do have to remember that everyone carries that amazing inner light and we can relate to each other in ways that reduce the shadows.
‘How can I help you today?’ asked the pleasant-sounding young man on the helpline. Could it really be that I had got straight through to speak to somebody personally and not have to to wade through pre-recorded messages, pressing of buttons or be subjected to half an hour of muzak while I waited to be put through. However when he repeated ‘How can I help you today?’ in exactly the same manner, I realised that this was not a real human being, but artificial intelligence. And if I did not respond in an expected way, I would not receive the assistance I required.
The request ‘I want to speak to human being’ was not understood by the bot. So I though the best approach was to shut up. Once I did get through to a real person, and expressed my relief after this brush with AI, I was told that I had just met ‘Danny’, the name given to the bot. As I get older, my ability to deal with the modern world seems to diminish. Whether it’s an incorrect item in the bagging area at the self-service checkout or difficulty downloading an app to pay for a parking ticket, it seems you have to conform to the system or you will suffer.
Life rarely conforms to a system. Life-circumstances are different for each of us; life is often complicated. That’s all part of being human. Only a human being with empathy can begin to understand what life is like for another person, and the problems they have to face. A bot cannot understand or express emotions; a bot cannot comprehend how difficult life can sometimes be; a bot does not care how you feel.
In the Christmas season, Christians celebrate the coming to this world of God’s son Jesus Christ. We celebrate the incarnation, that the Word of God became flesh and bone and became one of us. The Christ-child reduces the distance between us and God to an intimate degree. He knows what it is like to be human with all its joy and pain. And so, when we pray to him, we pray to someone who is completely interested in everything we have to say to him. He is here with us, through the Holy Spirit, all the time. We might ask ourselves if he is really there, but he is, he never goes away. Just as he is always there for us, and cares about us, so we must be there for each other, supporting each other. As our modern world becomes more dehumanised, this becomes all the more important.
When do you put up your Christmas tree? It’s that time of year…a time of tinsel and fairy lights, the season of streets crowded with shoppers, the smell of cinnamon and the sound of jingle bells…
For Christians it can be of a balance – in the shops we have been looking forward to Christmas since the beginning of October! And yet we are to patiently wait during the time of Advent – a time of watching, waiting. A time which is quite literally a pregnant pause
looking forward to Christmas, when we celebrate God being with us
The birth of Jesus – with all the great Christmas carols that speak of glad tidings and the birth of a new era when we can all rejoice and share the good news
It’s also that time of year when we don’t look too far, when we don’t lift our eyes too high when we are scurrying about (why does it always feel like it’s all at the last minute?!) lest we lay eyes on someone who is not
Who does not fit with all the tinsel, lights and shiny plastic snow scenes. Someone who isn’t jolly, who maybe looks a little lost, for whom this season is not a time to rejoice but rather to retreat…
We don’t really want to see those who will spoil our mood.
And yet, the marginalized, the lost, the widow, the orphan… the littlest and the least are the very people Jesus came to walk amongst. And so we should be alongside.
Churches Together in King’s Lynn newsletter December 2024.
The Churches Together in King’s Lynn Peace and Justice Forum will be hosted at Gaywood Church Rooms between 10am and 3pm on Saturday 18th January 2025.
The keynote speaker will be Bishop Rob Wickham who has been CEO of the Church Urban Fund since 2023. There will be stalls run by local charities. The aim of the day will be to look at the underlying causes of poverty in King’s Lynn. The moderators are planning to invite Bishop Jane, James Wild MP, the Mayor of Lynn, Cllr Paul Bland, and other local church, government and charity officers.
Invitation to participate in Caritas Festival at Holy Family Church on 8 February 9:30 – 12:30
Over the past year the Catholic diocese of East Anglia has embarked on a series of Caritas Festivals to celebrate local social action in the community. Saturday 8 February will be when the Holy Family Church, 34 Field Lane, King’s Lynn will be hosting the Caritas Festival for all the churches in the Kings Lynn deanery. In Kings Lynn, as elsewhere in East Anglia, Catholic support for and involvement in local social action is mainly through partnerships with other Christians and individual volunteering in those local secular charities that address the needs of others. Each Caritas Festival celebrates and publicises what is being achieved locally and encourages others to participate. Accordingly, it is hoped that many members of Churches Together in King’s Lynn will be represented. Please contact Caritas@rcdea.org.uk for further details.
Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: The 8 days of the week in 2025 run from Saturday 18th to Saturday 25th January. The resources from Churches Together in Britain and Ireland mention the topic of prayer as: ‘We are invited to reflect on the story of Martha’s confession of faith in Jesus as narrated in John 11:17-27. Each is called to sit with Jesus’ provocative question to Martha: “Do you believe this?”
Revd June Love plans to produce a video to circulate to churches each day. Each video will contain a reading followed by a 2-3 minutes reflection by a lay person from our church communities. Each day’s video will end with a prayer for the churches in the town led by June or Kyla – It is hoped that the reflection for the final day will be led by Vicky Price. Individual churches will be able to use the video as they think fit.
Imagine Norfolk Together: Congratulations to Vicky Price on her appointment to the role of Imagine Norfolk Together development worker. Imagine Norfolk Together is a partnership between the Norwich Anglican Diocese and the Church Urban Fund. Vicky is already involved with the international charity Viva who are undertaking surveys into the needs of families, children and schools in King’s Lynn and Norfolk. The results of these survey will be shared with church and community contacts at a meeting which will start at 4pm on Friday 24th January 2025 at St John’s Church. The meeting will include networking and prayer in order to give rise to action to try to address the problems which the three surveys will highlight.
The next Clergy Breakfast will be hosted by Ola at the Church of the King’s Glory on Tuesday 11thFebruary 2025.
Gratitude from the Foodbank: Noel McGivern, as treasurer of the Foodbank, wants to extended a big ‘Thank you’ to all the many churchgoers in Lynn who give regular donations to the Foodbank. These donations make a huge contribution to the work of the Foodbank, supporting the less fortunate members of the society.
CAP King’s Lynn Debt Centre
Requests for help with debt needs have been constant this year, and referrals are now back to pre-pandemic levels. Jobcentre staff are routinely booking in clients for debt advice and signposting. I currently have 16 households on my caseload, and many of the new referrals have come via word-of-mouth. We have been celebrating the news of a client becoming debt-free this month after a debt relief order cleared £11,000 of debt. The client said, “I’m very happy, and I really appreciate the help; no more worries.”
Most of our clients accept prayer on a regular basis, and some appeared visibly soothed by this experience. One exceptionally lonely man was invited to church by a volunteer and now attends services regularly. He has been amazed by the warmth and attention received from this fellowship. During the summer we hosted Picnic in the Walks, a social event for clients and volunteers, and all of our CAP families were provided with school uniforms from the King’s Centre back to school appeal.
Along with celebrations, there have been challenges. Many of our clients have difficulty engaging with the debt process due to mental ill health. Most struggle to maintain focus even with small goal setting, getting stuck at the fact-find stage, or are unable to provide information to action the route out of debt. This requires a lot of input to support clients to move forward. Referrals from single men and couples have increased recently, which has heightened the need for male volunteers for appointments. We desperately need more men to volunteer for our service to share the workload.
Prayer meetings at the King’s Centre are held once a month on the 3rd Tuesday of the month. Thank you for your support and prayers! Laura Joslin laurajoslin@capuk.org
King’s Lynn Foodbank.
We have much to be thankful for at present:
• Overall, this year so far, the numbers of people being fed has not increased on last year. This is the first time since 2018!
• We are getting tangibly close to being able to move our main distribution centre to a new location. I look forward to hopefully being able to provide more details in my next report.
• We are discussing with St Faiths about possibly opening a new satellite distribution centre there in 2025.
• Financial and food donations continue to come our way, which enables us to serve others.
The Night Shelter re-opened on 1st October, and is already busy with our guests. We’re very pleased to have been able to make a decision this year to commit to year-round opening, this is in direct response to feed-back from our guests about the risks of homelessness at any time of the year and means that we won’t be closing next summer as we have each year so far! We offer our guests a room of their own 24/7, hot meals, pastoral care, and support to plan for the future and find longer-term, sustainable accommodation.
This autumn we launched a fundraising appeal for the second phase of the ‘St John’s House Project’ to extend our capacity by a third – following the successful completion of Phase 1 this summer! It’s an exciting project but also a vital one which will enable us to help more people in great need – to give an idea of how much this work is needed, between November and June last year we were able to accommodate 32 guests, out of the 109 people referred or self-referred to stay with us. We also remember those of our local homeless community who have suffered because of their vulnerability and who have died young. Life expectancy nationally for homeless people is reduced to 47 years for men (74 years in the general population) and 43 years for women, (80 years in the general population).
The Night Shelter receives no national or local government funding. Around a fifth of our annual costs are covered by Housing Benefits which some of our guests are able to claim; the remainder has to be raised through grants, fundraising and the generosity of our local community. Our local churches have been wonderfully generous in their support for the last few years and we greatly value their help not least because it also gives us the opportunity to share some of our guests’ stories, and to ask our churches for your prayers. We’re always happy to come and talk about the Night Shelter with local churches and groups so please do ask.
It is also very good to have retained a link with Churches Together through members of local churches who continue to offer their time as volunteers. Time is an immensely valuable gift and makes a big difference to the welcome we can give our guests. Many thanks again to our friends at Churches Together for your support.
Last week our Government opened a debate on Assisted Dying. The MP for North West Norfolk, James Wild, shared his thoughts on the subject in last week’s Lynn News, and understandably on any issue where the welfare of our loved ones is involved, people will have strong, and different, convictions on what is right and what is very wrong. We can be thankful we live in a country where all our elected representatives are given a free vote on such issues, so that at least even if we disagree we know that they have had a chance to decide what is right for themselves.
A national opinion survey meanwhile, carried out by the research team at Theos, has discovered that 10% of their respondents supported assisted dying for people suffering from extreme poverty, and 9% for people experiencing homelessness. I found myself wondering if the 10% who took this view were themselves the people waiting in a queue outside the Foodbank, or if the 9% were themselves sleeping on our streets.
The same week I spent a morning at the magistrates’ court in Lynn. Over the last few years the waiting area of the court has become fairly familiar, with visits from time to time on behalf of the Night Shelter to support guests either as victims or defendants. Sitting around waiting for everyone to be seen isn’t easy and I’m often struck by the tact and courtesy people who have very little will show to others when they are in trouble – empathy, sometimes, comes from knowing how it feels.
And yet – I look around that waiting area, and I see familiar faces. The court pages in this newspaper from week to week almost always contain names we know. And we might ask, why do homelessness, and poverty, go together with the kinds of crimes which bring people back to magistrates courts – sometimes, as can happen when people lead very chaotic and difficult lives, without being very sure why they are there.
Jesus met a man once begging by the roadside, he was blind, and his name was Bartimaeus. He shouted for Jesus, and the people around them told him to shut up. Jesus came over, and said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” and he said to Jesus, “I want to see”.
Perhaps the people who responded to that survey on assisted dying thought poverty, and homelessness, were so awful that people should be able to end their lives to opt out – if they did, I wonder what they would make of the fact that already 1,400 people died while homeless in the UK last year without an Assisted Dying Bill, or that the Night Shelter lost 12 former guests in the same period, people we have known and valued here. Or perhaps those 10% or 9% knew what poverty and homelessness felt like, and responded in empathy, knowing also the feeling of life being no longer worth living. What we can know, is that we cannot look at a Foodbank queue, or a night shelter, or a court waiting room, and tell the people we meet there to shut up. Because if we don’t go over, and say “What do you want me to do for you?” then they will never know that we value them enough to be able to answer us, “I want to see”.
In September, I went to the circus in King’s Lynn with my family. There were many amazing acts – the clown was hilarious; the dancers were fantastic and there were some impressive displays of acrobatics and juggling. But the act that really got me thinking was the man spinning plates, aided of course by his glamorous assistant! I have forgotten how many plates he had spinning at once. But it was a lot. He kept running backwards and forwards to keep the original plates spinning as more and more were added.
Often, we use the term ‘spinning plates’ to refer to our busy lives. And dare I say it, as a woman, I wonder if women feel this pressure even more keenly. There are just so many plates we need to keep spinning. We live in fear of them all coming crashing down. There is my work as a curate, studying, volunteering, socialising, housework, shopping, cooking, kids’ homework, kids’ activities, hobbies, TV, social media…. The list goes on.
I wonder if sometimes we give ourselves extra plates when we should be removing plates. Sometimes we let other people give us plates when they could do the thing themselves. Or perhaps, the thing just doesn’t need doing. There are only so many hours in the day and so many days in the week. We need to prioritise. We all have our limits. Giving ourselves a bit of time regularly to think, reflect, or pray can help us evaluate our lives. Perhaps also talking to someone thoughtful who knows us well. What would you like to be doing that you don’t have time for? Is there anything that you feel you should stop doing?
Jesus lived an unhurried, peaceful life. He had time and space for others. In the gospel of Matthew, we find these words of Jesus,“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matt 11:28-30) Jesus doesn’t call us to lives of stress, but flourishing lives coming from places of rest. I wonder if you could take down some of your plates or give them away to others? And perhaps start finding that rest for your soul.
What do we do about history? We march through time, leaving behind the bits of thepast we don’t like, holding on to the bits we do
A recent visit to Houghton Hall was a chance to reflect on that process. Houghton was a house built for lavish entertainment and the assertion of political power by the prime minister, Robert Walpole. This year, moving through rooms of ridiculous opulence with riches sucked in from all corners of the globe, the visitor could be beguiled by some much simpler shapes, ceramics in glossy black and tan that speak of Africa. Magdalene Odundo’s ceramics, in that context, start to provoke questions about what the rest of the world was doing to enable the extravagance of the lifestyle the house demonstrates. And then you come into the Marble Parlour to be confronted with an astonishing structure like a particularly tall and opulent wedding cake. Titled “The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer”, it is made of jasperware, fudgy brown ceramic with black forms and figures superimposed in the way that the classical Wedgewood designs have delicate white nymphs and foliage. But here the images are of manacles and instruments of control and torture, the bodies of slaves lined up below decks in ships, and scenes of labour and the carrying of heavy burdens. Curved blades, that could be palm leaves but look menacing, hang from the tiers.
This work developed during a year when Magdalene Odundo explored the work of Josiah Wedgewood, the ardent abolitionist.
Reparations for slavery are proving a difficult topic for Christian churches. It is natural to kick against guilty feelings, to make a distance between ourselves and wrong-doing. And in any case, how can we make good the damage that was done? Who can we pay? What compensation can possibly be adequate or appropriately directed?
These questions are complex; it is possible to work towards answers by listening to those whose communities and futures were harmed. But making reparations to heal the past can never give us a clean new beginning, a past we can leave safely behind.
At the very top of Odundo’s centrepiece is the figure of a Kenyan woman railing against economic injustice in 2024. And if that still allows us to feel “That’s far away, it’s not really my business”, the title Odundo has given the work pulls us back in again. The title refers to Yeats’s poem The Second Coming; the “widening gyre” in the first line and the menacing tone of the poem warn that the spiral of injustice and ethical loosening whirls ever wider, and sweeps us with it. The work we have to do can never be left behind. Just as peace work has to be a process not of solving particular conflicts but of recognising all the parts of the processes by which individuals, groups and nations generate division and make enemies of each other, so reparations work needs to include a process of recognising the ways in which exploitation takes place, in the continuous flow of economic activity from which it is very difficult to separate ourselves.
Lucy Faulkner-Gawlinski
King’s Lynn Quakers
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