So what are you waiting for?

Lucy Winkett

Description

Lucy Winkett is Rector of St James's Church Piccadilly. A longstanding contributor to Radio 4's Thought for the Day, she writes regularly for the New Statesman, The Times and The Guardian.
The season of Advent bends time itself. And for us, time drags or speeds by, depending on our circumstances and stage of life. Our attitude to time gives us clues about our attitude towards God.

It's a cliche to say that we live our lives often waiting for life to start, but that's what many people experience, until they realise that they were living their lives all along. Christ, for whom we wait and to whom we will return, is both beyond us and beside us; outside time and bound by human time.

Whether you're always in a hurry or have too much time on your hands, this course is for you, as we explore a spiritual life that encourages us to be active in the chronological world, and rooted in Kairos, God's time.

The four sessions focus on:

Session 1: Go with haste
Session 2: How Long O Lord how long?
Session 3: Prepare the way of the Lord!
Session 4: Kairos and Chronos: is time running out?

As with previous Advent York Courses, the standard study book is supported by an in-depth interview, covering all 4 sessions between Lucy Winkett and Simon Stanley, available on CD, as a Digital Download or as a transcript in either paperback or eBook.

This York Course is available in the following formats
Course Book (Paperback 9781909107175)
Course Book (eBook 9781909107663)
Audio Book of Interview to support So What Are You Waiting For? York Course (CD 9781909107687)
Audio Book of Interview (Digital Download 9781909107656)
Transcript of interview to support So What Are You Waiting For? York Course (Paperback 9781909107182)
Transcript of interview (eBook 9781909107670)
Book Pack (9781909107694 Featuring Paperback Course Book, Audio Book on CD and Paperback Transcript of Interview)
Large print (9781909107700)

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Living
• Philosophie et théologie
• Devotional
• Devotion
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: SPCK
• Date de parution: 01 août 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909107670
• Langue: English

Extrait

York Courses presents
So what are you waiting for?



Track [1]

An Advent course with Simon Stanley in conversation with Lucy Winkett, the Rector of St James’s Church in Piccadilly.


Session 1 :
Go with haste
Well, it’s great to be sat here, right in the heart of London, in Piccadilly - here to talk with Lucy Winkett, who’s Rector here. It’s all about time, this course. The first words in your introduction to the course are: ‘This course is all about time and our attitude towards it.’ So why is it important to have an attitude to time?
LW: I mean in some senses of course, we just live through it, so it’s quite easy not to have a kind of thought-through attitude towards time, but I see all through – essentially, my answer is: because Jesus had an attitude towards time. And because the Gospels are full of stories about time. So I’m just taking my cue, I think, from the way that Jesus told stories about - we’ll get onto it later on - but about preparedness, and being ready, and being decisive. So I think what I see from the Gospels is actually probably a fairly specific attitude towards time, which I find a struggle and a challenge. So I think it’s coming from a sense of my own inadequacy probably, that I’m interested in this subject. And I wanted to try to get closer to what I think the Gospels are trying to teach me about time.
[2] Well, are you a ‘hurrier’, or are you a ‘time-taker’?
LW: Am I a ‘hurrier’ or a ‘time-taker’? You know that depends what day you ask me! So, today I’ve got a really - I’ve got a full day, so I’m going straight from one thing to the next thing. I don’t think I’m hurrying, and I think that’s a really interesting distinction, so that there - I think that being busy is one thing, or being active in the world, or taking decisions, living on the front foot, all those kinds of ways of describing it, that’s one thing. ‘Hurry’ is something slightly different. And I think one of the things I was trying to explore was that our attitude towards time, and our internal hurried-ness or not, sometimes is not that related to what we’re actually living in the world. So you can live absolutely by yourself and not be going out to work, say, and you can still be living inside with a sense of constant hurry: getting onto the next thing, getting onto the next thing. You can also be living a very active life, and have a rather contemplative attitude towards time in your heart. So I don’t think that - I mean, the one affects the other, but they’re not always in synchronicity. And I find that really interesting.

[3] Mmm. It is interesting. We’ve got four voices - we call them our ‘Voices from the Pews’ - who just make occasional comments on this. Not on what you’ve said, because they’ve recorded it before we’ve recorded you, but we ask them various questions. They’re Sarah, Grace, Johan and Barrie, and I’m not going to say which ones they are each time, but I asked them, are they ‘hurriers’ or ‘time-takers’?
Barrie: I’m usually in a hurry because I’m not organised well enough to get to where I need to on time. So I’d love to be a time-taker, and on days off I probably am a time-taker, but when I’ve got deadlines to meet and things to do, I’m rushing around all over the place.
Grace: Definitely a hurrier - I’m always a few minutes late to everything, which obviously isn’t ideal. Am I happy with this? Um, yeah, so far it’s not caused anything too pressing! [Laughs]
Johan: I think I’m both a hurrier and a time-taker. I take time on projects that need a bit of reflection or development - I do editing and things, and you can’t really rush that - but I’d say on a daily basis I’m a hurrier. I don’t like to linger too much between things, and I try and cram a lot into the day.
[4] What do you think about those then?
LW: I was interested that all of those three particular people said that they were hurriers. Although there was one chap, wasn’t he, said that on his day off maybe, he was less of a hurrier. But most of those people said that they were hurriers, and although I just – I did detect, I might not be right about this - but I did detect that they weren’t entirely - they didn’t necessarily think that was a good thing. So there was a little bit of a - they were giving themselves a little bit of a hard time about that, which again I’m interested in. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. But we do judge ourselves a lot about how we live.
[5] You mention an evolutionary biologist who’s identified a sort of mis-match between our brains and modern technology, and that sort of life that that drives us to have. We’re not yet hard-wired to cope with the speed, and sheer volume of information and communication that the internet plunges us into. That’s what he seems to be saying. It can cause us to panic. Do you think that’s really true?
This particular biologist was writing - was being quoted in a book about depression. So I think the person who was, kind of, harnessing that argument was saying that there are perhaps biological reasons why for some people the information overload, which has become a well-worn phrase now, you know, ‘TMI’ people say: ‘Too Much Information’, the information overload that we deal with all the time can cause people to - exactly as you say - to panic, or to fall into a kind of mental fragility which can sometimes lead to actual depression. I think in kind of everyday life there are hints of that all through the day, and I do recognise that. I think that that’s probably where a religious sensibility, or an ability to reflect on time, helps us. Because you then start to say: ‘well, there is a difference between information and wisdom; and there’s a difference between knowledge and wisdom’. And sometimes we are - because of the amount of information that’s available to us - we can kid ourselves that the acquisition of more and more information or knowledge makes us wiser. And that isn’t necessarily the case.
[6] I asked our voices from the pews again whether they think that the computer is a blessing or a curse.
Barrie: It’s a blessing. There are lots of things that you can do through the internet now that would have taken you much, much longer before we had the internet. And so, while it’s always there and always present - so in a sense there’s no end to the internet, it goes on forever. So if you’re doing a bit of research, there’s always something else you can look at, whereas in the old days if you were doing a bit of research and eventually you got to the point where you had to wait for somebody to respond, you had to wait for something to arrive - you don’t have to do that now. So you do have to know when to stop. But I think it’s a great blessing. I love the internet.
Grace: The internet’s an absolute blessing. You do have to learn how to manage your time wisely on it, but it brings me all my work, and it’s very effective for what I do. So it’s fantastic.
Johan: It’s both! It’s fantastic that through the internet I can do so much of my work, book travel, watch entertainment, keep in touch with family and friends around the world. But at times it’s a real temptation to overwork - or underwork - because there are so many distractions available.