Traveller from the East

"My name is Tomasz Marszalek and I have been in England for about 2 years after coming over from Poland. I came to find work, hoping to improve the quality of my life.

Unfortunately work dried up and I ended sleeping on the streets in Norwich with my friend Max. We heard about the King’s Church drop in and came along to use the service in May 2008. The volunteers made us feel welcome and I got chatting with them. I was invited to come to the Sunday morning meeting and started attending in August 2008. Very soon both Max and myself helped out in the kitchen during the week to give us something to do, and we were allowed to use the showers and laundry which helped us to stay neat and clean.

I remember thinking during the meetings on Sunday how very different it was from church in Poland and how nice the people were. I was invited to Alpha in November 2008 and I came to know that God is real and Jesus really did exist. I came to understand that church is not about buildings or money but about people and having a relationship with God and Jesus. During Alpha I decided that I would like to give my life to Jesus. I then went to a group who met at people’s houses and got a greater understanding of what it means to be a Christian and things like reading the bible, importance of praying, and lots of other helpful stuff on Christian life.

I have decided to get baptised today because when I was little my mother got me baptised and I didn’t have a choice. Now I am a man: I have a choice, and I choose to be baptised in the name of Jesus. I see this as the first day of the rest of my life. I look forward to growing in my relationship with God and Jesus; it’s so great that now I can talk to them whenever I want. I really like my friends here in church and have never come across a place like this church before.

Thank you for listening to this." (Tomasz Marszalek; Summer 2009)


An alternative ending...

Christmas is for life, not just for Christmas. The new album: www.myspace.com/thescatcat

Shirley Towers

We met at 22.
He said, “I’ll never leave you.”
Oh, he actually said those stupid words to me.
But I was in love;
I opened myself up to all of the punishments the years have laid on me.
I felt like a bride on her wedding march:
my body confetti in his hands.
He begged me and I couldn’t bear the sight.
One more girl self-sacrificed to one more careless man.

It started at nights when I couldn’t read his eyes.
He had so many great ideas that I couldn’t see.
His jokes turned to black at the rate I grew fat.
I made all of the conversation every night at tea.
I thought that the baby would make him change;
he held it and looked so full of love.
We laughed and threw parties with friends again.
So how could he take one bag and never ring me up?

I did everything you asked me to.
I gave everything I had to you.

He waited just long enough for Sam and I to miss him. This double bed is cold.
I used to tread fingers along his side-
am I just impossible to have and to hold?

Tim had to strain to write this song.
It’s not his life – he’s probably got it wrong.
He’s sod-all hope of helping out.
But he’s found a Lord who’s felt all this before.
Jesus is the only one who will help, and can.

I gave everything I had for you.

A sort of twisted epilogue...

Christmas is for life, not just for Christmas. The new album: www.myspace.com/thescatcat

Mother City

This is my personal ‘Driving home for Christmas’. I think everyone has a special relationship with the place they grew up. Because that’s when we form our understanding of the world, the place we grew up is what we think the world is like. It is reality, normality, and we probably read those expectations onto everywhere else. I think of it like the start of Civilisation II, or Command and Conquer, when your one man stands in a patch of light on a king size duvet of darkness. By the end of the game, you may have opened up the whole world, but no other patch is as special as your first city, your first bit of ground. My first city is Southampton.

It’s not a big city and it’s not a small city. You can count our famous sons on one hand:
· Isaac Watts (wrote a brilliant song, when I survey the wondrous cross),
· Harry Hill,
· and Craig David (who I saw playing goal keeper in the newsletter of the dodgy boys school over my road).

A lot of the city was bombed flat in World War Two (we invented and built the Spitfire), so there’s hardly any interesting old buildings; or even tall buildings. The main marks on the skyline are 60s tower blocks, like giant grey arrows marked ‘for Poverty, see here’. I sometimes felt like half the city was a council estate. Most of the yuppies and upper middle families travel in from suburbs all round, over the M27 ring-motorway.

I tried to give some friends a guided tour once. In less than 2 hours we were in John Lewis coffee shop watching them try to screw together IKEA; and I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. To me, it’s the sort of place you live, making your own entertainment; not a holiday destination. Our football club have always been a bit rubbish; history and culture are thin on the ground; we’ve got broken families and teenage pregnancy and unemployment, substance addictions and functional substance addictions (‘living for the weekend’), 20000 Poles scraping a living (apparently ‘Polish shop’ isn’t a place to take your shoes), an official roads department policy called ‘managed deterioration’... but ‘the best shopping in the south.’

Hm. As I’ve said, where you grow up defines your view of the world, but I do feel that this is basically what our country is like. So, I may be singing to Southampton, but I’m also singing for your hometown. Even if it’s Pompey.

Just so you know I’m not slagging like a stranger, but like a member of the family: I was in Sydney with my great friend Matt when the massive cruise liner Queen Mary 2 slid into dock beneath the Harbour Bridge. Thousands came to see and snap. ‘What an amazing ship.’ ‘What wonderful place could she have come from?’ I looked up at the white letters on her prow and grinned. SOUTHAMPTON.

You know you're from Southampton when...

Christmas is for life, not just for Christmas. The new album: www.myspace.com/thescatcat

Emmanuel

I love the word ‘Emmanuel’. Not because it’s the name of the beautiful college that turned me down and saved me from living someone else’s life. Not because it’s the name of the Ugandan pastor I lived with for 3 months and ribbed me about everything from my singleness to my facial hair. I love the word ‘Emmanuel’ because, according to the Bible, it’s the name of God. And ‘Emmanuel’ means, ‘God with us’.

Probably like everyone else, I grew up thinking God was a long way away. I actually thought I was on his side; that I was in his good books. I was a spiritual teacher’s pet (And now I know some teachers, I know literally no one likes a teacher’s pet). But even though I badged myself a Christian, chewed on morals and spat out judgement, I was more of a fan of his work than anything else. “Good teachings, God.” “Love that new book, The Sermon on the Mount; ‘love your enemies’, good stuff...” But I’d get all shifty if you asked me if I actually knew the guy.

I think all that changed at the end of school year 9. I’d spent 3 years trying to get in with the cool crowd and screwed up my life in the process. They used to sing in science (to the tune of Wild Thing),
‘Hugsy, what is your street cred,
On a scale of one to ten?
I think you’ll find it’s two.
Hugsy, your life sucks.’

Then they dumped me. I walked alone round Alma road to the station, singing Whitney Houston’s All by Myself.

That’s when it happened. I had the best summer of my life. I went to a Christian sailing camp and discovered I loved the bible. I went to church and discovered people who thought I was worth getting to know. I bought a Delirious CD and sang those songs everywhere I went for months – songs about God.

Something was going on. Instead of getting bored by church songs, I started getting excited. I started jumping and shouting and laughing and smiling and longing for the next event. After one of those nights, I’d go round hugging people, and apologise to my family for things, and I actually felt happy being me.

What happened? I think what happened is that God stopped being ‘out there’ and started being ‘in here’. He showed me he loved me. For that I said, ‘come; take over my bankrupt life and make it work again. Do it better than I ever could.’ I became an employee in my own life; but I’m so glad I did. Our turnover increases every year and our share price has never been so good. Plus we get on really well.

gr

This is the reason Christians celebrate Christmas. Yep, it’s about Jesus being born into poverty and some unusual goings-on with stars and angels and the like. But that’s really only interesting because of what it tells us about God. It tells us that God doesn’t want to be the distant judge we grew up with. He wants to come and do life with us, talk to us and listen to us and help us and laugh with us and cry with us and explain to us why that man’s got a funny leg

and take us on adventures and hold us and tell us how special we are and how much he loves us... He wants to be the Dad we all wish we’d had or could be.

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And it tells us that he’s not going to give up on us or get bored or start a new family somewhere else – because he became a man like one of us, and died for us as a man, and came back to life as a man, and is waiting for us in paradise and he’s still a man. He’s committed. He’s wonderful. He’s Emmanuel – God with us.

gs

gs

I was born in poverty, with animals and rags.
I grew up a refugee, and couldn’t see my dad.
No one paid me interest: ‘bastard’ was my name.
I sweated for my living until my hour came...

gs

Christmas is for life, not just for christmas. The new record: www.myspace.com/thescatcat

Sufjan, Southampton, Santa & Me

It all started back in 2005. Quite a summer. I got made redundant, left home, worked at a theatre in Birmingham, recorded an album, and started Uni. I’d been pretty low for a while and these were my first steps out of it.

Back then, I listened to music even more obsessively than I do now. I would buy a new CD, listen to it non-stop until I got bored of it, then buy a new one. I measured how good a record was by how long that took. A standard classic album at that pace – Oasis’ Definitely Maybe and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, for example – lasted about a week. Coldplay’s X&Y hung on a gargantuan fortnight.

The night I came home from Brum I went to a party. At one point I noticed some interesting brass hooks coming out the stereo and asked my friend what he was playing. ‘The new Sufjan Stevens record’, he said, with a crazed smile. My life has not been the same since.

I begged a copy of this weirdly named guy’s wierdlier-named record, Greetings from Michigan: the great lake state. It sounded like a Paul Simon record produced by Brian Wilson. Hubba hubba. And I listened to it. Lots. It barely left my CD player until I left for university... 6 weeks later.

What made Michigan so fascinating was not just the crazy wonderful style of it all, but that it was about the place Mr Stevens grew up. And the magic is that it takes you back through your own story. The names and places are different, but the feelings & memories are very much the same.

So even though we were in the middle of recording our first record, Haberdashery, I started dreaming about writing a new set of songs that were meant to be together from the start. About the place I grew up. Southampton.

The songs have been coming together ever since. 5 songs in 5 years - not exactly prolific. Quality not quantity, that's what I say. They’re basically the supporting walls of my live set (so you’ve probably heard them all before.. but never like this); perhaps the best few songs I’ve ever written.

I was still fiddling with ‘Emmanuel’ between vocal takes in our recording sessions (appropriately, last Christmas). It was an idea I had during recording – to do an intro pondering the central theme of Christmas; God coming to live as an ordinary person. So I ripped off ‘Christmas song’ and went from there.

‘The Mother City’ is a common nickname for Cape Town. I was living there in 2008 and got a birthday card from my parents. Which got me thinking about leaving home and going back. About that indefinably significant relationship you have with the place you grew up. So it's a nice pun.

I wrote ‘Shirley Towers’ right at the start of the story, the week I lost my job, for a single mum I worked with. The idea suddenly made sense when it landed in the record, and I rededicated it to the little estate (full of single mothers) down the road.

‘Traveller from the East’ is my processing of a fact I’d heard years before – that 2 men had starved to death in Southampton. In Southampton? A modern western city? There’s also more than a bit of me leaving home in there. How much more must any of the thousands of refugees and migrant workers in the city feel it?

‘Christmas Complete’ was really the key to the whole thing. It’s still probably the best song I’ve written. Everything came together – cool 9/8-6/8 finger picking pattern; the old lyric-before-tune free verse approach I’d used for my previous best song, and a fascinating image.

I was home from Uni for the summer and happened to end up at the old warehouse of the charity SCRATCH down at the docks. And there I saw, hovering above your daily field of view on one of those massive shipping containers, the Rotary Club Santa’s sleigh that rolled past our house every Christmas since I can remember. To me, that thing is as much part of Christmas as presents and pine trees. Christmas! What more wonderful way to light up the magic in the ordinary? To top it off, on the side of the sleigh was written, ‘for the homeless and the hungry of Southampton’.

That pretty much summarises this record. Christmas, poverty and my hometown. For me, it doesn’t get much more fascinating than that.

Christmas is for life, not just for Christmas

For the next few weeks, I'll be posting a series of pieces I've written specially to accompany the record I'm releasing on December 1st: Christmas is for life, not just for Christmas.

This album has been a long time in the making, but I'm so pleased to finally share it with you. I'm really proud of it. I think you'll love it. And the essays. And the artwork. And the fact that your money will make a new life possible for many of the people who speak through the songs. In the spirit of the title, Happy Christmas!

Outsiders

I had finished the Bible book of Mark, so this morning I turned over to read the introduction to Luke, and read this fantastic piece. I really identified with it. I might read Luke, too.

"Most of us, most of the time, feel left out—misfits. We don’t belong. Others seem to be so confident, so sure of themselves, “insiders” who know the ropes, old hands in a club from which we are excluded.

One of the ways we have of responding to this is to form our own club, or join one that will have us. Here is at least one place where we are “in” and the others “out.” The clubs range from informal to formal in gatherings that are variously political, social, cultural, and economic. But the one thing they have in common is the principle of exclusion. Identity or worth is achieved by excluding all but the chosen. The terrible price we pay for keeping all those other people out so that we can savor the sweetness of being insiders is a reduction of reality, a shrinkage of life.

Nowhere is this price more terrible than when it is paid in the cause of religion. But religion has a long history of doing just that, of reducing the huge mysteries of God to the respectability of club rules, of shrinking the vast human community to a “membership.” But with God there are no outsiders.

Luke is a most vigorous champion of the outsider. An outsider himself, the only Gentile in an all-Jewish cast of New Testament writers, he shows how Jesus includes those who typically were treated as outsiders by the religious establishment of the day: women, common laborers (sheepherders), the racially different (Samaritans), the poor. He will not countenance religion as a club. As Luke tells the story, all of us who have found ourselves on the outside looking in on life with no hope of gaining entrance (and who of us hasn’t felt it?) now find the doors wide open, found and welcomed by God in Jesus." (Eugene Peterson, 'The Message')

Pt 6. An Answer

Looking back to Jesus, I’ve noticed some new things.

Jesus tackled poverty on an informal relational basis. No feeding programmes, but the odd miracle to share lunch. No national revolution, but people empowered to live a full life, even if not a wealthy one. Failures dealt with and people affirmed back to action. Quality time and honour showed. All the things we would think about doing to help a friend going through a tough time. But perhaps not how we think about helping someone who sells the Big Issue? Jesus seems to be trying to defeat poverty one person at a time! It’s not how I’d think of trying to save the world - seems like quite a slow method. Looking at history, it has been! But what was that thing about ‘slow and steady’?

I just realised: Jesus’ teaching wasn’t just an expression of his philosophy and philosophy of ministry, it was something he did to help people; to give them courage, hope and wisdom to navigate life. Jesus perceived deeper needs than people felt themselves, and I don’t just mean spiritual needs. And of course, these areas took time and patience to change. People certainly didn’t ‘get’ his teaching first time.

All Jesus’ ministry fought poverty, not just the toolkit I’ve got fixed on. I didn’t notice a lot of it because he was doing it one person at a time, rather than in a systematic way. But all his life should be our precedent.

Jackie Pullinger’s story chimes in with this. The patient (effectively, parenting) work she did, living in community with her recovering addicts was essential to their long term change. Those that wouldn’t agree to it generally ended up using again. Her story also adds an element – that Jesus’ power continues to be available and relevant to the fight against poverty. And that Jesus may exert it in ways he did not in the Bible, and has not before.

Which brings us to a perhaps reassuringly unclinical answer to my original question. The Bible does offer precedents for helping people escape poverty. There are probably plenty more I still haven’t seen that remain to be discovered by faithful Jesus-followers partnering with him in this work. And the precedents really do recognise all the complexities of poverty, and different appropriate responses.

If we want to join Jesus in bringing his kingdom to our smashed-about world, we should think carefully, work relationally with people, and always be open to his supernatural power. Above all, we must keep in step with him, because that’s how he can lead us in the unexpected and unlike-how-we-would-do-it way we should go.

Pt 5. Back to Jesus

So, what can I learn from these two amazing stories, of Jackie Pullinger and SAFE? They seem to embody those two opposite sides of the debate: “How do we help broken people change?” “With spiritual power!” “No, with careful use of the latest academic methods!” “No, what we need is power!...”

I’m kind of convinced by both positions, and flit back and forth between them, agreeing with whichever I happen to be thinking about at the time. (Both, it occurs to me, can be excuses for laziness or lack of faith) However, in sitting here chasing these ideas around my brain, I have a proposition that might get us somewhere: what Jesus seems to have done in Hong Kong and Southampton may shed more light on what he was doing back in the day.

SAFE’s approach is based on the observation that people experience difficulty in all different areas of life – relational, emotional, spiritual, physical, psychological, economic, socio-cultural, political... and that these all effect each other, but that each area needs different help to be relieved. You tackle relational poverty by spending time with people and including them in community. You tackle psychological poverty by helping people think more realistically and positively (particularly about themselves).

How do we interpret Jesus’ toolkit (preach, heal, hang out, bash demons) when it clearly ignores many of these areas of life? Let me try out some answers.

“Jesus’ toolkit was tailored to the specific needs of the society he lived in. And it happened to be that those needs could be dealt with instantly. People’s needs in 21st century Britain are more complex, and so we can expect their solutions to be similarly complex.” Um, maybe not. How can we be sure that 1st century needs were any less complex? I tend to think it was like the majority world today. ‘You know, simple poverty’. But depression, alcoholism and debt are as prevalent in Africa today as in the UK. And Jesus didn’t liberate Palestine from Roman occupation or turn over the means of production to poor farmers.

Another. “Jesus’ toolkit wasn’t for the purpose of tackling poverty now, but only saving people eternally. Engagement with needy people was important, but was only for the purpose of saving their soul.” I don’t really buy that, either. The unique (and central) Christian ideas of the Incarnation, the new heavens and the new earth, and the kingdom of God, all emphasise Jesus’ commitment to the current material world. Jesus made nobodies into leaders, sex workers into heroes of the faith. As with Jackie Pullinger’s drug addicts, saving people from poverty was necessarily a partner to saving people from sin.

So what is the answer then?