Greenbelt

We went to Greenbelt this weekend; we used to go as students but this was our first time with children. In case you don’t know, Greenbelt is a Christian festival that includes performing arts (music, visual arts, anything else), spirituality (prayer, services, talks about things) and a concern for the poor. So describing it as The Christian Glastonbury is a fairly rough approximation.

I’ll get all the bad bits out of the way first. The journey there was pants – lots of Bank Holiday motorway traffic in hot weather. There were queues for most things – to get onto the site itself (about an hour for us, longer for others), to go to the loo, to get into see things. I forgot to turn off the mobile notifications from Twitter, and my mobile’s battery was slowly dying so I kept it turned off most of the time and when I turned it back on I had 28 text messages to get rid of. At times we suffered from tired and grumpy children and tired and grumpy parents – this put a dampener on the Sunday morning service more than I was expecting.

The worst bit was losing K for about 10 minutes, which seemed like ages at the time. We had just come out of the just-before-bedtime activity and Katy was elsewhere with A. K wandered on ahead like he often does and is usually OK, but a steward popped up and asked us to evacuate to one of the stages. By the time he’d finished talking to me K had disappeared! It was dark, loads of people were milling around being evacuated and J and L were starting to panic about K. We went from steward to steward and eventually found K in tears with one of them. There were two ways down from where we had separated and K had taken one and us the other. After much cuddling things were better, plus I got L into a carrier on my back so I could the boys’ hands. Shortly afterwards Katy and A appeared as they had been evacuated too.

That’s all the bad stuff, but there were many good things too – some were things we chose and planned, but many were just random nice things. For instance we were walking back to the tent one night and two blokes dressed as knights (shields, cloaks, armour, lances) suddenly used the metal hand rail that went down the middle of the bridge we’d just crossed into a jousting rail and jousted with each other! Marvellous. Apparently they were dressed like that all weekend, which has style. In the queue for something I had an interesting conversation with an ex-soldier who’s now in army recruitment and does citizenship courses for recruits based on what the British Army did in Sierra Leone and a few other places. He’s possibly going to do one on Afghanistan but will avoid Iraq for a long time.

There was a very impressive children’s festival, which looked after 700 children at a time. The boys enjoyed themselves, as did L although she was unhappy for the first few minutes when we left her (she didn’t like sharing toys – she’s not been to nursery school!).

Katy managed to rekindle something from her youth and take part in a scratch panto. There were more people than parts, so you had to follow who was wearing the narrator’s hat, who was wearing Aladdin’s costume etc. rather than following people. Katy narrated while cuddling A and did a good job (oh no she didn’t, oh yes she did).

It was nice to be with other people (the Raines, the Stepping off the Path crew and Jo and Bill), and we bumped into several sets of friends who happened to also be there. One couple live in Cheltenham and told us how much the floods had affected the area – they’d been without water for 8 days, and the local swimming pool will be out of action for a year. The rough edges to the organisation of the festival were probably very small given the problems they must have had.

The children saw their first proper live music – the band were obviously enjoying themselves which was great, and the children liked it although it was too loud. That was followed by an excellent production of Return to the Forbidden Planet, which was too loud for A so I took her for a walk. Katy had to explain why one of the crew members was referred to as only Redshirt but apparently it was very good. I wandered about with A, and stumbled upon the main stage where Chas ‘n’ Dave were performing – class.

We went to a couple of Godly Play (Montessori meets Sunday School) sessions, including a very good one about Abram/Abraham and Sarai/Sarah and their child that they named Laughter (Isaac). Raine Major did a very good play dough sculpture of Abram building an altar out of stones (see Flickr) and L got me to help to do a collage of a butterfly (of course).

I managed to get to a late night Taizé service, and hear a talk by Mark Yaconelli entitled How to Ensure Your Funeral is Well Attended. It was a very good talk and was based on things like how the 10 Commandments seem to give equal importance to not killing people and taking a day off, giving time for God to catch up with you, being transformed by his love to love other people. Apparently Desmond Tutu taught a course at a theological training college in America and said that everyone was going to get an A for the course, and that they would just sit around and tell each other stories about God’s love, because if you didn’t have God’s love penetrated down into the marrow of your bones, how could you share it with others? When the students protested about his giving everyone an automatic A he said “God has amazingly low standards”. It was especially moving as I’d heard his late father many times at Greenbelt and it was Mark’s first visit to what his dad called his spiritual home.

Although the big Sunday service wasn’t perfect (for reasons above, plus the sermon was fairly feeble, and we hadn’t managed to meet up with the Raines, J+J or J+B), it did have some lovely bits. We were in groups of about 15, and each group had a bag of goodies and tied to the top was a red (bio-degradable) helium balloon. During the prayers these were all (about 1,000 of them) released together which was beautiful, a bit like the bouncing balls advert for Sony TVs and many more than Nena managed :). I was too busy enjoying the moment to take advantage of the photo opportunity.

The Sunday service included Communion (bread and wine were in the goody bags), and as it wasn’t a Methodist-only event the wine was real wine. We normally let the children take the bread and sometimes they also ask to have the wine (sorry if this causes you problems – yes, they don’t understand the miracle of grace but then I’m not sure if any adult does properly either – see the earlier remark about God’s standards), and when we pointed out to them that this was real wine they all wanted to try it. Watching their faces was amusing, and I think they’re happier with our alcohol-free non-conformity. Afterwards J asked “was this an Anglican service then?” and I explained what ecumenism was, and how Jesus asked us to be Christians and not to be Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist etc, and how it’s great that things like Greenbelt are just people getting on with following God. Despite all the hassles and so on, the weekend did give me much food for thought and show me things I need to change.

There were all sorts of other things which I’ll whizz through. I was mooching around the music shop tent and some blokes happened to be just about to give a hang drum performance – a beautiful sound. There was an excellent area called Messy Space which aimed to be like your living room – lots of toys to play with, dressing up costumes, some bean bags and children’s books to read, a slightly strange storyteller popped up occasionally, and a face painter (mmm… face paint + camping) plus a fair trade cafe, a lovely cool floor and proper toilets :).

There was a room to just sit and be quiet in, with candles, pictures on the walls and some Tavener music playing. I found it lovely, but J and Katy tried it as well as found Björk warbling in Greek and English too weird! Much more up J’s street (and all the other children’s) was Fischy Music and playing and colouring in a DFID tent.

Something I did while we walked about was spot interesting T-shirts. The good ones that I can remember are:

• 667 – The neighbour of the beast
• God loves everyone, but I’m his favourite
• Below a picture of Tardis, with Winnie poking his head around the door: Dr. Pooh
• My other body is a temple
• Below a picture of a TV: Live outside the box
• Below a picture of a fork with a little green blob on one prong: Give peas a chance
• Below a picture of Big Bird, the Cookie Monster etc: Representing the Street