[ hold :: this space ]

Mike and Blythe have sent through photos of the basement space, which look great. At some point i’ll put up a fuller description of the space, but - like everyone at the moment - i’m hurtling from one event to the next just now, and there’s not time to think about tomorrow, let alone remember what happened yesterday…

As I said in a previous post, it was a retro ‘welcome to christmas at our house’ theme. We had a life-sized diorama at the entry, welcoming people to the space

This is a very creepy photo of mike’s kids standing with them…

Blythe and Dave produced a fantastic stop-motion animation of the nativity that we projected large onto a wall [with a frame drawn around it so it looked like a picture in the loungeroom]. And this is Henry, who’s 2, standing in front of it - he was a little gobsmacked by the whole thing. ‘Oh!’, he kept saying. ‘Oh’.

The invitations we sent out for the space were a tiny baby doll with a tag attached, that included the line ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water?’, so we had a baby bath with a projected image and sound of water being drained down the plug hole. people could put the doll they received into the water if they wanted.

Henry got worried about them so pulled them out to put on the side of the bath where they could talk to each other…

Here’s where you could sweep the crap of christmas under the carpet:

this is the dining room table, set up for christmas dinner:

We wrote prayers and words onto the plates - I had this thought this morning that if we were to do it again I’d write each setting from a different ‘voice’ - so one would be something like ‘It’s like we’re strangers sitting around the table’… another would be ‘I hope they know I just want them to be happy…’, another would say ‘why does every other family enjoy this, and not ours’ - and then there’d be prayers written onto the table cloth ‘unwrap our grief, leave space for joy… unwrap our despair, leave space for hope….’

We also had a living room space with retro christmas nibbles [mixed nuts and coconut ice!], a ’spare room’ out the back, and a christmas tree with the most complicated origami stars ever… but more about them at another time…

i wanted to get that last post off the top… and in the temporary absence of good photos of Sunday’s space, i’ll put up one taken on my phone of the entry to the basement! It was kind of a retro ‘christmas at our house’ space. I really liked it.

We’re learning that we can’t do anything low-key, and that we’re starting to get good at this…

Half way through the evening I got a text from Andrew, who sits at the desk next to me here at work. His wife had just given birth to twins, at 28 weeks. Much love to Andrew and Sal, and to the two little ones. The promises of this christmas seem to be wrapped in very fragile realities.

Christmas in the basement, this sunday, between 5 and 7 pm… email me to rsvp. We tried to keep this low key, i’m not sure we’ve succeeded - we never have yet.

I’m then concentrating on prison stuff for a couple of weeks, including worship in the lead up to Christmas and on Christmas Day in Port Phillip Prison, and making bookmarks to hand out as gifts in the prisons… then we’re on to NCYC in the first week of January, where a few of us are planning an alternative worship service for the convention. This is proving one of the trickiest alt worship things i’ve been involved with - the space we’re using has only just been finalised, and the venue is such that we won’t be able to have all 1200 people together at any point in the service, and there’s really only one spot that will ’seat’ a group of people [400 seats], so we need to do installations / stations for 800 people, and work out a system of moving people safely through hallways and foyers, and rotating the whole group through the auditorium … Some of it will need to be outside, which is fine unless it coincides with a Melbourne summer storm [at which point we might just all adjourn to the Skinny Dog to drink gin and tonic]. Of course, we have no budget, very limited tech resources and only two hours to set up… luckily, we love a challenge… and function best with no sleep…

… then it’s Valentine’s Day - we’ll be working on promotion for that next week … it’s a fabulous and frightening couple of months coming up…

i mentioned in an earlier post that we’re curating a basement space for christmas this year. just to clarify, the space is open to everyone, but I’m not putting details up here because we want to keep track of who’s coming - and we want to send you an invitation in the mail! please email if you’d like one - and if you’ve already emailed, the invitation’s on its way…

And of course, if you’re wanting to be part of creating these spaces, let me know. A group of us meet once a month to have a drink together, and plan the spaces, and there’s always space for another around the table. We’re taking the spaces into another direction next year which is going to be brilliant…

I’m back from holidays, which were very lovely and all too short… The time between getting back from the UK and going on leave was pretty relaxed, but that’s well and truly over now…

I spent the week in Adelaide, mostly hibernating and doing the family thing, but I did have dinner one night with Sarah and Michelle, who were both part of this year’s UK trip. Over the last few years Sarah has been organising Black Wood Jazz, which is ‘an alternative style ‘church’ space in which to enjoy live jazz and thought provoking stories and conversation’. She sent me through the following information about the next evening:

Kick off Christmas with an event that can be as kicked back, or stimulating as you make it. 6.00-8.30pm on 30 November 2008

BYO picnic, folding chairs, (and a table if you are that way inclined), cold drinks, friends, neighbours and good conversation to Christmas under the stars in the Blackwood Uniting Church carpark (At the Roundabout, 266 Main Road Blackwood, Adelaide).

Hot drinks available for gold coin donation.

Enjoy the smooth sounds of Daniel lee and Friends. Enjoy cool company – bring your own if you aren’t to sure about ours. We will unwrap some stories of hope too as the evening gives way to stars.

Donations will be collected to support Blackwood Jazz and the Christmas Bowl Appeal

And a couple of other Melbourne based things coming up:

We’re hosting a pre-christmas space in the basement on December 7. It’s invitation only, so let me know if you want to be invited!

I’m leading a workshop tomorrow on Psalms at the ‘Preaching in the Year of David and Mark’ conference. Hope to see some of you there.

NCYC is happening again in January. It’s not too late to register… Shane Claiborne is speaking, along with a host of others. I’m leading some electives and am involved in worship one evening [but don't let that stop you from registering...]. It should be a great week.

so many things i’ve been meaning to write about…

it’s finished now, but Ecstatic City at the ngv was simply superb. Due to the water crisis in melbourne the fountains in the moat at the front of the gallery have been switched off, so Chris Doyle made a fountain by projecting images of melbourne people jumping onto the front of the gallery. It was beautiful.

21:100:100 is still on… it’s a sound installation in at Gertrude art gallery, 100 works by 100 sound artists… everything ambient, electronica, drone. i was a little underwhelmed when i walked in - i wanted images, or darkness, some way of getting lost in it - but after a while i felt like a kid in a candy store. It’s an overwhelming collection of works, best consumed in medium sized doses over repeat visits. we were there for a couple of hours the other day. i’d really like to do more with sound in the stuff we do. it’s always the thing we think of last, the accompanying soundtrack rather than the central piece…

i kept meaning to blog about man on wire when i first saw it, but couldn’t ever find the words. It’s an extraordinary film, one i still think about. a couple of friends have said they won’t see it because they’re terrified of heights. i’m not good with heights [i'm not scared i'll fall, i'm scared i'll jump], and it didn’t bother me at all when i was seeing the film. oddly though, later that night i was lying in bed, and i felt almost paralysed with fear as i thought about what Philippe Petit had done. he was walking - dancing - on a tight rope, a quarter of a mile above the earth. it’s a film about passion and courage and the pursuit of dreams, but more than that, it’s about wonder and awe and defying the hypothetical and real laws of gravity that would keep us pinned to earth. i loved it.

tonight we’re having a between the spaces dinner to plan a christmas ‘moment’… and then i’m off and away for a week. see you when i’m back.

I think i’ve mentioned before that we’re rethinking our approach to basement spaces over the next year [if you're new to the blog, we use the basement carpark at my office in Melbourne's city centre, and curate sacred spaces and art installations in the space]. Previously we’ve created spaces around the different church seasons, but from next year we’re going to shape the spaces around a more secular calendar. We’ll curate a space for Valentine’s Day, another on the winter solstice [which is in June in the southern hemisphere], another on the summer solstice [our christmas - where we may even avoid the christmas theme completely].

I think ‘the public’ [cf 'the private'?] are interested in / intrigued by / gasping for an encounter with a story that speaks of life and light, and that many resonate with a christian version of that story… but they want their engagement with the christmas story, for example, to be very different than that. I don’t know that the church will reclaim christmas from its nostalgic home easily [and since many churches were complicit in the process of creating its nostalgia, we might not have a right to try!]. Rather than fight that battle, we’ve decided we’re going to try Valentine’s Day, the solstices - perhaps something like Hiroshima Day as well - as moments to explore themes of life, darkness, fear, hope, love, grief…

I’ve mentioned before that a group of us are meeting once a month to talk about spaces [and life, imagination, faith and creativity]. We’re using that time to do the broad brushstrokes of planning - and anyone is welcome, of course. But I’d hate to preclude people from being involved in the basement project just because they might not want to get involved in a group like this on an ongoing way. So if you’re interested in being part of one of the spaces, or in talking about how you might be involved in other ways, let me know…

A reminder that the Between the Spaces collective is meeting this Sunday afternoon, 4pm at the Wesley Anne, High St Northcote… conversation about life, hope, christmas and valentines, in the company of good people and a drink…

email if you want to know more…

it’s happening again this sunday afternoon, 4pm at the Wesley-Anne in High Street, Northcote… a conversation about sacred spaces, art, community and faith over a drink… let me know if you can come along, or want to know more.

we had the first of the ‘between the spaces’ nights on wednesday - a gathering of a wee group of people who have worked on the basement spaces over the last year or so, and who have decided we might want to meet more intentionally to plan the spaces and explore faith and spirituality within a creative context.

it was good. no grand plans [although a few great ideas for things we might do!], no great statements about the kind of group we might be, or the things we aspire to… just a conversation about where we’re at, and what might be possible within that. i think most of the group are not sure what shape of community we can connect with or commit to, so we have no plans for becoming a particular type of community - we’ll just begin with a common idea, a few possibilities that will no doubt be rewritten as we go, and see what evolves from that.

we’re having another drink together in a few weeks time. let me know if you want to be part of it and i’ll pass on details.

[the soundtrack for the conversation (provided by the pub where we were meeting) was the CD Divenire, by Ludovico Einaudi. it's piano and strings - kind of minimalist contemporary classical. it was so beautiful it stopped us talking mid-sentence. i just bought it and have it playing now...]