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Good morning

Our dishwasher, which had packed up, has been fixed.

This will not be headline news in your house but it is in ours because I fixed it myself and I can’t fix anything.

A broken glass was clogging up the rhythm section - I think that’s what it was called - anyway the manufacturers online instructions showed me how to pull the machine apart and stick it back together.

Within an hour I had entered my parents lost generation… those who make do and mend.

There is something impossibly satisfying about being able to do something you had no idea you could do - more so when it involves the act of repair.

The saving in time and money is complemented by the feeling that in some infinitesimal way you’re reducing the amount of waste in a throw-away world.

On Monday John Lewis, partnering with Timpson Group, begin a five city trial in which customers can take in a worn-out but greatly loved piece of clothing and get it repaired.

Other chains, like Selfridge’s, are piloting similar schemes.

Extending the life of a piece of clothing by nine months is estimated to reduce its carbon, waste and water footprint by nearly a third.

In the world’s most prosperous economies we have been sleepwalking into an ecological dead end where replacement is more convenient than repair and obscelence is built in.

But also where we may write off human beings as beyond fixing.

No coincidence that Timpson Group, famous for shoe repairs, is led by James Timpson, recently appointed Prisons Minister, who believes in a rehabilitative edition of justice in which incarcerated people are offered a chance to repair their lives.

It was a Dutch rabbi, Awraham Soetendorp, who introduced me to the elegant Jewish tradition of Tikkun Olam.

The idea, he said, was that as the world is evidently broken… what are humans here for, except to repair it?

The notion of Tikkun Olam conjures up a sense that life itself is a kind of cosmic repair shop and that the calling on the human community is to both fix the world inside us and fix the world around us.

That none of us are obsolete or beyond repair.

One of the most rewarding parts of participating in the weekly cycle of a faith community is the promise of some kind of reset.

A community you plug into which both recharges you and repairs you.

On a good day, ancient faith practices - from meditation or singing to sharing in community life or agitating in political protest - offer us a way of both healing our souls and repairing our world.

Maybe the C16th Book of Common Prayer could be renamed The Book of Common Repair.

‘Create in me a clean heart…’ as it reads. ‘ And renew a right spirit within me.’

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