´óÏó´«Ã½

Festival – Martin Wroe

Folk. Harvest. Rock.
Winter. Beer. Sacred.
Fire. Literary. Blues.
A holy day or a holiday.
A day on ... or off. Or several in sequence.
A break from the norm.
An other place.
An other way of seeing.

An act of hopeful imagination, somewhere to wonder how different the world might be. A thought experiment under canvas and stars where for a moment it’s possible to conceive history dancing to a different beat.

To imagine breathing another air.


Welcome - Molly Boot

Good morning, and welcome to the act of hopeful imagination that is the Greenbelt Festival, celebrating its 50th Year from Boughton House, near Kettering.

I’m Molly Boot, one of Greenbelt’s Trustees, and I am delighted to be here with you on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4 this morning for Sunday Worship.

If you’ve never been to Greenbelt before, it might seem a bit odd to to spend an hour with us, to imagine breathing another air.ÌýBut, over the next forty minutes or so, we’ll be doing our best to bring you a slice of festival-shaped-joy, from this field where faith, art, and justice collide.

We’ll be joined by friends from across the festival, and I’ll be teaming up with Azariah France-Williams to lead us on our wayÌýwith a prayer:


Prayer - Azariah France-Williams

God of justice and compassion. May we hear your words of affirmation and commission over us as your beloved children. We are called into the many worlds around us and within us. We are mandated to bring light and life to those locked and lost in shadow. Equip and enable us to detect your kingdom on earth as it reflects heaven, held within your loving embrace and sweet shelter.

May we become theÌý instruments of grace which herald the arrival of justice and peace for all, and hope everlasting.ÌýAmen


²Ñ³Ü²õ¾±³¦:ÌýWade in the Water
Sung by The Spirituals


Bible reading: Philippians 2.1-4
read by a Festivalgoer


Reflection: Azariah France-Williams

One day when I was a trainee vicar, about a decade ago, I was sitting in the lounge of the church leader responsible for my timetable. We were drinking his good-quality coffee as the sunlight danced around his spacious home, and the vibe was upbeat.

Until I asked the wrong question.

‘When can I arrange to have my retreat this year?’

The leader’s face stiffened, the sunlight dimmed. It may have begun to drizzle ... or was that just my internal weather.

We curates, trainee vicars, were entitled to four days of retreat each year, an opportunity to embark on a special journey. A journey away from everyday responsibilities in order to connect with God, to connect with self.

‘Azariah ...’

The leader’s voice brought me back to the room, his head tilted to the side, as he studied me, it seemed, with a mixture of pity and bemusement. He shifted in his seat and I sensed — this wasn’t the first time I’d been in a situation like this.

‘Azariah, we do not retreat here — we only advance!’

He looked at me, pausing to allow the weight of his profound declaration to land.

Looking back I can almost see my illusions as they shattered. It’s only in hindsight that I realise that while we were using the same word, retreat, we were approaching it from different worlds.

This is what I meant: ‘I’m knackered. I’ve lost a sustainable rhythm. I need to be able to be, to create time for healing, to be as whole as I can possibly be.’

This, I suspected, is what he had heard me say: ‘I have been defeated by the enemy. I seek permission to shirk my responsibility. I am a shrivelling little man, who is abandoning my unit. Sir!’

Our society often commands us to march, to advance, to charge! Younger generations are exploited to fund and fuel an insatiable appetite for bigger and better. ‘Go big or go home!’ is the refrain of the sports jock, the fast-talking entrepreneur, the lycra-clad superhero or the space-rocketing tech titan.

Sitting with that church leader all those years ago I realised I didn’t want to go big. I wanted to ‘go home’.

I wanted to be held and embraced by God who is mother. To be fully accepted, not dissected as ‘the other’.

That’s what retreat is. The journey home, to be born again and to resist the headlong rush to the tomb.

In those early stories about the life of Jesus, when his friends race to the tomb early on Easter Sunday, Jesus is nowhere to be found. Jesus’ friends fear defeat. I see retreat. Jesus will soon be present again with loving light.

Maybe the only way to advance is to retreat. And when I retreat, I draw my next breath.


Music: Standing here wondering
sung by Lee Bains III


Molly Boot

As we celebrate Greenbelt’s 50th Year, fifty festival friends were invited to ponder fifty words that capture something of the sparkÌýthat kindles what we do together.ÌýWe’ve heard Azariah reflect on his word: ‘Retreat’ —ÌýThroughout the rest of today’s service, we’ll hear four more Greenbelters offer four more words to spark our imaginations:ÌýWe’ll ponder ‘failure’, with Marika Rose; then, we’ll ‘wonder’, with Cole Arthur Riley; and finally, Miranda Threlfell-Holmes will leave us with a ‘question’.

But first, we listen to a Bible reading, and reflect with Eve Poole on what ‘listening’ really means.


Bible reading: 1 Kings 19.11-13a
read by a Festivalgoer


Listening – Eve Poole

If you scour the lawns at Boughton House you might find puff-ball mushrooms nestling quietly in the grass. These pristine organic golf-balls resemble a cold war listening station, scanning and tuning the frequencies, searching for insight.Ìý

For fifty years Greenbelt has been that listening station, drawing in those who scan the programme, tune in to the music and worship and wisdom, ready for insight. Expectation is in the air. That thrill of quiet as the crowd settles in to hear the next event. That flurry of questions and chatter in between, as thoughts and ideas are chewed over, internalised, or spat out. That rush to get to the next tent, so that you don’t miss anything. And the perennial problem of buying too many books ... Greenbelt represents fifty years of listening, discerning what’s on everyone’s mind, what’s in the ether, and what is not yet. Anyone who wants to take the nation’s pulse can find it and themselves there, grounded and challenged by what’s on offer.

I got involved with Greenbelt because I’m a listener too. And whenever I come back to Greenbelt I come back to a conversation with friends that continues from just where we left off. Knowing that the festival is there every year to metabolise our collective preoccupations makes the fallow times in between more pregnant than empty, with friendships in abeyance just waiting to be resumed.

At a business school where I used to teach, we had a favourite listening exercise. It imagines that when we speak, we transmit on three simultaneous frequencies. One is the facts and data: the content that we seek to convey. Beneath that lies the emotion animating our speech. And underneath that lurks the realm of intuition, our gut feel about what’s really going on. The exercise had people listen to colleagues using just one channel at a time, to see what they learned about their own preferences and skilfulness; and then to surf the channels as a way of maintaining complete attention. If I listen at Greenbelt, I hear a lot of great noise — exuberant content of every kind, more than there’s time for, a rich abundance. Underneath that I hear a welter of emotion, because everyone brings their own in all its glory. I perceive some patterns in this noise, because one thing I prize about Greenbelt is that emotion is truly invited in. We can really feel while we’re there, and that’s very rare. It lends a lilt to the emotional soundtrack, because that permission generates enough positive emotion that harder and more complex emotions can be held well. And at the level of intuition I see a shining purpose. Greenbelters pack their bags with intent, both when they arrive and when they leave, galvanised to be salt and light in the world.

I’ve often heard it said that the point of monasteries is to hold a heavenly space, like the portal created by the Holy of Holies in the Temple to enable the presence of God. It’s what churches try to do, and what we do when we pray. These glimpses of God remind us of the bigger reality of which we are a part, and sustain us in living out our faith in the day-to-day. Greenbelt’s purpose feels rather similar, an annual bridge and token, and a collective encouragement that if we only decide to build it, the kingdom on earth will always be within our reach.


Music: Alleluia
recorded at the Iona Community Big Sing


Bible reading: Matthew 21.42-44
read by a Festivalgoer


Failure – Marika Rose

It’s a weird time to be a Greenbelter. As we celebrate 50 years of the festival - 50 years of risks that have just about paid off, long enough for whole generations to have been born and raised around these yearly gatherings - it’s hard not to feel hopeful, and to feel like Greenbelt has played a part in shifting the conversations many of us are having in church throughout the rest of the year. Things that used to feel edgy have come to be normal for many of us, whether it’s LGBTQ inclusion, caring about climate change and social justice, or even just goths leading the eucharist.Ìý

But the broader context is scary. It feels like lots of things are getting worse, and hard-won victories are being undone around us. What can we do with all the failure and loss that surrounds us?

The philosopher Walter Benjamin has a famous description of the angel of history, its wings outspread, being blown into the future by the unstoppable winds of history, with chaos and disaster piling up before it. The idea of progress, Benjamin suggests, is tempting when times are hard. Things might be bad right now, but if we can just keep going, sooner or later the good will win out. But Benjamin suggests that when the goal of human life comes to be understood in terms of taking control of history, and guiding it towards the triumph of reason, there is little suffering which cannot be justified, few sacrifices which cannot be demanded from us in the name of the future.Ìý

In the gospels, Jesus is often described as a rock, an image with two sides. On the one hand, it seems, Jesus is a solid foundation stone, a strong anchor in times of trouble. But on the other hand, Jesus is a stumbling block, something you trip over just when you think that the arc of history is laid out smoothly ahead of you, and leaves you falling over, failing. As we get older, as individuals or as a festival, it’s easy to want to build something solid and lasting, something we can rest our laurels on or look back on as a job well done. When we’ve built something we love it can be tempting to brush uncomfortable questions (or people) under the carpet. When we’re invested in succeeding, in a particular vision of the future, it’s easier to blame the people who insist on pointing out what’s wrong for causing problems than it is to let go of our fantasy of harmony and progress. Benjamin suggests that the risks of investing in a particular vision of the future are precisely why the Hebrew Bible forbids divination. We cannot master the future. We must not sacrifice those around us on the altar of progress. Instead, Benjamin suggests, we might see every moment as a narrow gate through which the Messiah might enter, tripping us up, causing us to fail again, fail better.


Music: Will your anchor hold
sung by Siskin Green


Bible reading: Psalm 19 (extract)
read by a Festivalgoer


Wonder – Cole Arthur Riley

When I speak of wonder, I mean the practice of beholding the beautiful. Beholding the majestic — the snow-capped Himalayas, the sun setting on the sea — but also the perfectly mundane — that soap bubble reflecting your kitchen, the oxidised underbelly of that stainless steel pan. More than the grand beauties of our lives, wonder is about having the presence to pay attention to the commonplace. It could be said that to find beautyin the ordinary is a deeper exercise than climbing to the mountaintop.

To encounter the holy in the ordinary is to find God in the liminal — in spaces where we might sub consciously exclude it, including the sensory moments that are often illegibly spiritual.

Practising wonder is a powerful tool against despair. It works nearly the same muscles as hope, in that you find yourself believing in goodness and beauty even when the evidence gives you every reason to believe that goodness and beauty are void. This can feel like a risk to those of us who have had our dreams colonised, who have known the devastation of hope unfulfilled. I once heard the Japanese artist Makoto Fujimura say, ‘the most courageous thing we can do as a people is to behold.’

When we wonder, we loosen the cords that restrain our love. And the people most in love with a thing are prone to become its fiercest protectors.

To be a human who resembles the divine is to become responsible for the beautiful, for its observance, its protection, and its creation. It is a challenge to believe that this right is ours.

Wonder, then, is a force of liberation. It makes sense of what our souls inherently know we were meant for. Every mundane glimpse is salve on a wound, instructions for how to set the bone right again. If you really want to get free, find God on the subway. Find God in the soap bubble.

Me? I meet God in the taste of my gramma’s chicken. I hear God in the raspy leather of Nina Simone’s voice. I see the face of God in the bony teenager bagging my groceries. And why shouldn’t I? My faith is held together by wonder — by every defiant commitment to presence and paying attention. I cannot tell you with precision what makes the sun set, but I can tell you how those colours, blurred together, calm my head and change my breath. I will die knowing I lived a faith that changed my breathing. A faith that made me believe I could see air.


Music: Wonder
sung by The Spirituals


Bible reading: Matthew 16.13-15
read by a Festivalgoer


Question - Miranda Threlfall-Holmes

To question is to embark on a quest for truth, for meaning. For more truth, deeper meaning, greater understanding — or a more profound sense of connection with the one of whom you are asking the questions.

The quest is one of the great archetypal stories. The protagonist receives a call to adventure — they debate whether to respond — they meet people who give them clues, objects or information that they need — they encounter obstacles and overcome them. Sometimes they find what they were seeking, only to be disappointed by it. Sometimes they discover that they were seeking something illusory, or that their real object of desire was close to hand at home all along. But whether or not they achieve the original object of their quest, they will eventually return home, changed by the experience of questing.

It’s this story structure that seems to me to best describe the life of faith. It speaks of a spirituality of questing and questioning — where the aim is not so much to find answers, but to ponder the questions deep in our hearts, and to relish the journey that the questions draw us on. We may or may not find answers — but regardless, we can be confident that we will be changed by the quest to seek them.

The gospels report Jesus asking a lot more questions than he gave answers. There are different counts for exactly how many, but certainly more than three hundred. And very often when he was asked a question, he asked another question by way of reply.

Sometimes Jesus sounds a bit like a small child, asking ‘why?’ in response to what seems blindingly obvious. ‘Why are you sleeping?’ he asks the disciples, late at night after a heavy meal. Or, ‘why are you afraid?’, when they are in danger of being drowned: at night, far from shore, in a small boat in a big storm. At other times he asks eternal, existential questions that seem to speak right to us as we read the text now. ‘Who do you say that I am?’ ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ ‘Do you love me?’

When a child asks ‘Why? Why? Why?’ they are not only — or not primarily — seeking information. Although their questions may be prompted by a genuine curiosity about how the world works, they are also an example of what linguists call phatic speech — that is, speech designed not so much to communicate facts or exchange information, but to establish relationship. For those of us who identify as in some sense neurodiverse, this category of phatic speech is hugely helpful in making sense of what can otherwise seem like time-wasting. It’s also helpful to reflect on the idea of questions within spirituality as a type of phatic communication, designed not merely to elicit answers or information but to establish, foster and develop relationships — with God, and with one another.

The adventure of faith calls for strong relationships with our companions on the way, relationships that need to be built and stress-tested with good, strong questions. It calls for questions that are sharp-edged, that can cut through the Gordian knot of how our scriptures and theology are inevitably tangled up with the cultural norms of past and present. And it calls for questions that lift our gaze to the horizon, shading our eyes from the glare of the sun, drawing us away from the comfort of our homes and into a bright field that calls us onwards.


Music under prayers: Performed by Grace Notes

Luminous God, we are filled with awe and wonder. As we rest in your presence, fan into flame the light of your love, within ourselves. May that light expose hidden corruption, may that light compose new instructions for humans to dwell in peace and shared purpose. So God we invite you to shine through our lives illuminating others, who in turn, let their little lights shine, until the whole world is ablaze with your loving glory. Amen.

Living God, you are a God of love and liberation. You call us to accompany you on the journey to a fair and just world. Jesus you are Lord, enable us as we listen and learn speak as one, to ensure your justice is carried out for all of our siblings, may we who are bystanders grow the thoughtful prayerful courage to stand by no longer, but rather to stand with, and stand up for those in need of a friend and relief from their suffering. Amen.


Molly Boot

Festival. Retreat. Listening.
Wonder. Failure. Question.
Faith. Art. Justice.
A wonderland or a hinterland.
A few days on… or off.
Or many over a lifetime,
A retreat from the norm,
An other home.
An other way of seeing,
Of hearing, sensing, tasting,
Hoping, thinking, being.
Here today. Gone tomorrow.

One week there is no Greenbelt. The next, here it is. Then… gone again.

We walk the homes away from the place we made home, we look for the movement and people, for the spark, warmth and crackle,

And though we do not see it any longer,
We are all still warmed by what was fanned into flame.

An act of hopeful imagination.ÌýSomewhere to wonder how different the world might be. A thought experiment under canvas and stars where for a moment it’s possible to conceive history dancing to a different beat.

To imagine breathing another air.


Blessing - Azariah France-Williams

Hear the whisper of creationsÌýcantor.

Keep on, keeping on,
holy daughters, magical sons,
Trans, and non binary too,
Gods good story is animated by you.
As our stories unfold, as fibers are unspun,
memories are cleansed, nightmares are undone,
ancestral ghosts finally rest in peace,
so run now my child, you are released;
Ìý
In the name of the Creator of peoples and planets,
the Redeemer of powers and potential,
and the Sustainer of peace and purpose.ÌýAmen.


Music: The future starts now
sung by The Spirituals