Do nothing, Christmas is coming!

In this week’s blog the School Chaplain, Canon Andrew Haviland, suggests we regain our sense of perspective amid the frenzied approach to Christmas.

As I write the Black Friday sales have been and gone, and the Christmas countdown is well underway. The frenzied activity leading up to 25 December is wonderfully exciting. Here at Bryanston, a huge Christmas tree is already dominating the main hall and in millions of homes, schools and businesses across the world people are starting their preparations. Christmas is rightly a great opportunity to decorate, get in touch and to celebrate with family and friends. 

However, for many the preparations can be tough. There are people who are struggling to get everything done, there are those who are finding it hard to make ends meet and there are those who are anxious about being alone when so many others seem to be enjoying themselves. We need to do what we can for all those who will find it difficult and challenging. As a school we know that we can make such a difference when we put our minds to it. This term as a community we have raised a huge amount of money during the Charities Fair, given boxes of food to the Blandford Foodbank at our Harvest Festival, reached out to those who might be on their own through our Tuesday Club, remembered the sacrifice of those who enable us to live in a free country at Remembrance Day and much more.

There is a small book that I discovered a few years ago (and have mentioned before) entitled Do Nothing, Christmas is Coming. How can anyone suggest such a thing – there is so much to do!

What this book dares to suggest is that during this season we should try and slow down. We try so hard to get everything just right for Christmas, but at times we can lose our sense of perspective. Let’s think of Mary and Joseph. Were they ready? Not really. She was engaged but also a pregnant teenager trying to get to Bethlehem. The place where Jesus was born was far from ideal, an unhygienic stable was not the best place to give birth. The shepherds who came to visit the new born baby came straight from the fields with no time to change into their Sunday best. After a few days Joseph and Mary had to flee Bethlehem under threat of death from Herod and became refugees in Egypt for a time. All this was hardly well prepared.

Perhaps what this book is suggesting is that we do the things that really matter and not try too hard to make everything perfect. The world was certainly not ready for Jesus’ arrival, but he came anyway.

My hope and prayer for this Advent, as we lead ever quickly to Christmas Day, is that we can all slow down just a little, take our time to focus on things that really matter and those we love, and to help those who have so very little. If we can do that then maybe, just maybe, the true Christmas gift, the message of love of God through Jesus, can sustain the world even more effectively in 2017.

A2 Charity Weekend

This week we are delighted to welcome the Heads of School, Nancy and Sam, as guest bloggers. Alongside their team of prefects, they recently organised the annual A2 Charity Weekend, in which the entire year group worked together towards the common goal of raising funds for their chosen charity. At this year’s event pupils surpassed their fundraising target and you can read more about the weekend here. In their guest post the Heads of School explain why they chose PumpAid as their charity and what they learnt from organising the weekend.

Two weeks ago we led the A2 year group (year 13) in organising a fundraising event for a charity of our choice. This year we chose to support PumpAid, a charity based in London but which operates in Malawi. Our aim was to sponsor the building of a water pump for a village in rural Malawi.

Having done some research it really hit home how pressing the issue of access to clean water is. We had no idea the conditions that some people were living in, and indeed how far reaching the problem is. Water-borne diseases are currently the main contributor to child mortality in Malawi, so there is an obvious health impact caused by the lack of access to clean water. However, what we hadn’t appreciated was the additional social issues the problem creates. For example, the long distances that children, mostly young girls, have to walk every day to collect water is having an impact on their education, as they have less time to spend in school studying. Hopefully with the funds that we have raised we can stop this for around 240 people and provide a community with water for generations to come.

In terms of what we have learnt from the weekend itself, the experience has not only been incredibly humbling, it has also taught us a lot about organising charitable events like this. It was such a good thing to do and has really helped us to appreciate not only how lucky we are at Bryanston, but also how we can truly change other people’s lives through small events like these.

As part of the weekend a Bryanston pupil composed and performed a song especially for the event to support PumpAid. You can watch the video of it below.

Nepal and beyond

There’s an episode of Friends in which Phoebe, the only really interesting (as opposed to likeable or funny) character, decides to work out if there is such a thing as a truly unselfish act. Everything she tries proves either to be in fact not a good thing at all, or something from which she benefits by making her feel good about herself.

It’s hard in life to do the right thing sometimes. Especially when some of the issues are so fantastically complicated. What should we do, for instance, as a country, a school, an individual, about the fate of so many Syrian refugees?

Every religion I can think of has the same golden rule of ‘Do as you would be done by’, from ancient Chinese philosophy to Hinduism and Christianity. Jesus was particularly tough on this. He told those who asked him how to live a good life to love God and their neighbours as themselves. He told his disciples to give away their worldly goods, to leave their family, and to follow him. Nothing complicated about that, although the leaving your family behind bit is particularly hard to come to terms with and sort of paralyses us.

Toby Ord, a young Australian philosopher at Oxford University, set up some years ago a charity called Giving What We Can. He gives 10%, or a tithe to the medieval historians amongst you, of his own earnings every year to those in the world who need our support. He does this on the basis that those of us who earn more than the UK national average wage are, in global terms, millionaires. And because his logic is simple: if you can, you should. Over his lifetime he calculates he will contribute £1 million and he hopes his example will encourage others to do likewise.

The ruins of Marpak, Nepal
after the earthquake

This weekend at Bryanston, we will host our annual Nepal Fair and hope to raise somewhere in the region of £12k at the fair and an additional £23k thanks to Mr Dickson’s extraordinarily generous offer to cut off his dreadlocks. We shall do what we can, and in doing so make things a little better in Nepal. It won’t change the world but it will make a difference.

School still goes on

We have supported charitable work in Nepal for well over 20 years now and will continue to do so; this is not something we can one year decide not to get involved in, as these small charities have come to rely on our regular support, especially as the world’s focus moves on to the next disaster. Whatever charitable activities we undertake, they won’t be one-off acts designed to make us, Phoebe-like, for all her best intentions, feel better about ourselves for a short while; they will be careful, thought-out, ongoing and simple. Because that’s what works. I very much hope we continue to get such opportunities and in the meantime, let’s do all we can to make this year’s Nepal Fair a success.

See you there!

Not to do everything but to do something

‘Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.’

John Wesley might seem an unlikely hero for a girl sent to a convent school as a small child but his famous saying is fantastically clear and keeps us straight. It would perhaps be easy otherwise to take refuge in that unpleasant First World phrase ‘charity fatigue’ as we watch the world from our comfortable armchair in Dorset. But thankfully Bryanston pupils are keen not to stand by. This term alone there has been the Nepal Fair (raising funds for Child Welfare Scheme and Right 4 Children whom we have supported for 12 years), followed by a Frugal Lunch for the children of Syria, and more recently by a day we called “Jeans for the Philippines”.

Contribution to the world we live in can be in this charitable form. And so it should be, both when there are disasters and emergencies which require all of us to respond and when we are continuing to support our long-term chosen charities. But contribution goes beyond this. Contribution is a frame of mind.

It’s about noticing others around you and looking outside your own needs and ambitions. It’s about being outward not inward looking. It’s about real life and real activity rather than a virtual version of both. Schools like Bryanston thrive on this way of living. Sport, music, drama and all social engagement are based upon this outlook on life. I strongly believe that you are not a fulfilled person without this sort of engagement and contribution to something larger than your own small orbit whether to your team or in the orchestra. I also believe this way of living can lead a child or adult to the realisation of the need for the emotional and spiritual wellbeing of others as well as themselves. Which might, for all kinds of reasons, be the most important lesson ever learned in school. All of this matters a very great deal to me.

The theme of our all being connected, even to those we might well not choose to be, by a common humanity is not a new one. John Donne was writing of this in the 1600s and before him Homer too composed epics of great scope and understanding that put victor and victim in the same humane focus. In the dark days of December, remembering what it is that really matters and looking forward to a Christmas holiday of joy and contribution can at least begin to make sense of our conflicting and complicated duties in this fast-changing world.