Tending the Garden of our Mind Last year’s BBC Reith Lectures were given by forensic psychologist Dr Gwen Adshead who has studied the minds of society’s most violent perpetrators for more than 30 years. Dr Adshead has come to the conclusion that the capacity for evil is to be found in all of us and in one lecture she suggests that individual minds are like a garden that needs close tending so that its boundaries are not obscured and lost. Neglected weeds so easily choke all else to death in an untended garden, and so she proposes the importance of cultivating goodness in the individual mind, and so more widely in communities. ‘We need to grow goodness by practicing compassionate states of mind which can lead to the growth of tolerance, gentleness and patience. Such virtues act as a protection against violent and destructive states of mind.’ Dr Adshead believes that defending against such states of mind means developing a capacity to take horrible emotions, like rage and hatred, seriously. We especially need to recognise in ourselves the kind of anger that leads to a wish to hurt others, so that we then take care to protect ourselves and one another. She concludes that this kind of self-care is vital given the wilderness of combative attitudes and aggressive ideologies to which we’re regularly exposed. It is perhaps especially important for those of us who have suffered trauma and for whom anger may be a constant struggle to manage – anger which could so easily be the connection with later violence. St Paul urged us long ago in similar vein: ‘Whatever is true, pure, pleasing and excellent … think about these things … and the God of peace will be with you.’ The Rev’d Dr Richard Hines Rural Dean for Wisbech Lynn Marshland richard.hines@outlook.com
Christmas IlluminationThe sudden change of expression on my friend’s face convinced me she was, probably for the first time, and despite my stumbling words, hearing and understanding the Christian conviction that in the life of the man Jesus the eternal Creator God was really, astonishingly and wonderfully present among humankind. This is of course what St John meant when (as we hear read on Christmas Eve each year) he wrote: ‘No-one has ever seen God. It is Jesus the only Son of God … who has made him known.’ My friend looked a bit stunned, as well she might.Christmas trees will by now be lit up in many people’s windows, glittering LED cords will be wrapped around the gutters and downpipes of our homes, and a buzz will be heard in supermarkets announcing (in case we’d not otherwise noticed) the approach of our annual festivities. These customs make young children excited but I doubt if any adult’s breath will be taken away by just the thought or sight of Christmas decorations.But the birth of Jesus, announced as a simple story with extra-ordinary details – details that for many give it the ‘ring of truth’ (consider the persuasion necessary to get Joseph to go through with marriage to Mary; the sign for shepherds that a child would be found wrapped in cloths, laying in an animal’s food trough) - does retain the capacity to stop people in their tracks. The story takes on a new God-given dimension when we dare to consider that the child inexplicably, but jaw-droppingly and amazingly, was indeed Emmanuel - ‘God with us’.May God shine into our hearts, illumine our minds, and stop us in our tracks – and so bless us again this Christmas!The Rev’d Dr Richard HinesRural Dean for Wisbech Lynn Marshland richard.hines@outlook.com
