Welcome everyone. I'm David Bell.
A question on most people's minds these days is:
how can we live well?
What simple, practical steps can we take to change ourselves for the better?
Any number of life coaches, personal trainers,
and self-help courses offer that exact possibility.
But I wonder how much actually changes?
Do people remain stuck in a rut?
Are they stopped by the roadblocks, and can't find a bypass?
Over decades of professional life as a church minister,
and theological educator I have seen
congregations wax and wane,
church members grapple with challenging circumstances,
face success and failure,
embrace life and turn their faces toward death.
I've seen theology students find their faith, lose their faith
and struggle with the realities of church structures and hierarchy.
They find church can be a much harsher task-master
than many secular organisations.
But when it goes well,
it seems to provide a depth and quality of life rarely matched elsewhere.
Why do some people achieve outward success
but beneath the surface are plagued by gnawing doubts
about their personal adequacy?
And others never get started, and give up before they try.
I've learnt one obvious thing that sheds some light on these matters.
Fear of failure puts up a big barrier on the road ahead.
Some much potential, so much creativity, so much cheerful enthusiasm
is lost to the family, the sports club, the church, the schools,
because we are afraid of what others think.
We don't want to be seen to have tried and not succeeded.
We feel small and unimportant when we think we have failed.
Sometimes this fear of failure takes hold in group life.
An organising social committee, a school board, church leaders
- none are immune.
No one on the board wants the school to get a bad name.
Every church leader wants a thriving congregation.
Yet it usually remains nebulous.
Desirable but ultimately unachievable.
So we don't begin to change, or our group doesn't begin to change
because our fear is self-fulfilling.
Here's one not so obvious fact that I've also noticed:
that most times can get us round the roadblocks.
In a deep psychological sense
our individual identity is totally bound up with our memories.
As the wonderful Oliver Sacks succinctly put it,
we are our memories.
When memory's destroyed, personality diminishes,
and a cohesive sense of identity disintegrates.
When we remember: we become.
We become who we are.
Yet we are also more than our memories.
In ordinary speech we use phrases like body and soul,
heart and mind,
mind and spirit. And so on.
So we can say that we are our memories plus.
Even more than that, our memories are never just our own.
Human memory is communal,
carried by what the biologists call memes.
Memory is a golden key to overcoming what we are most afraid of,
either as individuals or in groups.
Virtually everyone knows that to recall an act of kindness done for us
changes our emotional state.
And when we feel gratitude, interest, admiration, hope
we are drawing on a pool of positive memories
which reinforce our sense of identity,
our feelings of belonging.
So in this 4 part series we will touch on
how to live well by activating our individual and group memories.
In #2 we will use the Danish concept of hygge in daily life
In #3 we will use the principles of design for self-reflection and prayer
In #4 we will use music combined with story for personal inspiration.
I promise there'll be no dramatic turnaround
to get you instantly started on a more creative and inspirational path for living.
But with a little quiet reflection, actively remembering,
you will find you are much further along than you could have imagined.
Now, how does this work?
Well, memory itself is a re-creation of things past,
but it also nurtures insight into both the present and the future.
To borrow St Augustine's phrase from the fourth century
memory is a "window in the walls of time".
This contains a profound clue about how cultural memory works.
What might we see when we look through these windows in the walls of time?
The past is like a vast panorama spread out before us.
It is complete but it's so big
inevitably we comprehend only a microsm of it.
It is like an infinity of memes playing within us
not at a conscious level, but much more deeply.
And some of these memes surface into our thoughts as archetypes.
This window in the walls of time exerts its influence
on our consciousness.
The archetypes speak across time, culture, place.
Inside our own memories are hints of where we have come from,
who we are,
and what we might yet become
not just as individuals but as the human species
within God's creation.
To help us live well we need to work with these memories.
You can learn more about this in the video series
C G Jung and the Psyche: exploring the contours of a 21st century soul
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