Do Nothing to Change Your Life. Stephen Cottrell
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Church House Publishing
Church House
Great Smith Street
London SW1P 3NZ
Tel: 020 7898 1451
Fax: 020 7898 1449
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.
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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
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
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.
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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