You haven’t heard from me for a couple weeks because I was volunteering and sharing work, life, art, and philosophy at Hay-on-Wye in the Welsh Marches. This is a place I have been going each May (with a COVID break, of course) for the last eight years.
The first week, I was volunteering as a Steward at the Hay Literary Festival. This is a place authors and thinkers come to share their stories and present their provocative ideas. The team I work with at the Hay Festival feels like a family, and I am grateful for the leadership of our BBC and Sky Arts tent crew, which comes in gentle encouragement from Paul, and Steve. Along with Gerald, I have somehow become a sign artist for the group. Black wooden boards stand at the entrance to events, and the stewards hand draw titles of events and names of participants. A few of the festival teams go a step further and turn the board into a work of art. I am certainly no artist, but I am decent with fonts, and a bit of doodling. Somehow my doodles caught the eye of comedian and Sky Arts presenter Frank Skinner. My event board and I ended up on stage at the end of the third day of Sky Arts Big Hay Weekend. Frank gave me the nickname Phil the Board, and apparently the interview will end up on the show on the weekend of June 18-19.
After a week at the Hay Festival, I walked across town with my hammock tent (yes, a tent that swings between two trees!), and just barely over the border in England, How The Lights Gets In, a philosophy festival happens. This was my first experience of volunteering as a Steward at Hay-on-Wye, and this festival is a different kind of family. It’s a little wilder in the evening, with dance parties, DJs, and significantly more drinking. It’s also a place where discussions regularly pop up about spirituality, theology, life philosophy, and assorted God and human experience topics. Like each year before, the festival and my network of friends did not disappoint. We talked life, spirituality, God, the devil, definitions of authenticity, and assorted other life and intellectual values.
I am now back in Caernarfon for a couple days. Tomorrow, I hit the road again with Hope Deifell (who is visiting the UK from Black Mountain, North Carolina) and Dee Cunniffe. Both talented ladies have been part of Burning Man teams, and other festival events I have been a part of. Dee will come with us, or I should say, take us, up to the Appleby Horse Fair in Appleby-in-Westmoreland. Here we will spend some time with the English and Welsh Gypsies, and Irish Travelers. Dan and Kristy Pattimore are once again offering a place for wayfarers to stay. Like everything else over the last two years, friends will be united, and ministry will reach the festivals and events once again.
Following Appleby, Hope and I will head toward Cornwall and the 3 Wishes Fairy Festival where we will be helping with the stage, and stewarding and following the lead of my talented and crazy friend from Glastonbury, “Diana the Goth Vicar”. After the Fairy Festival, Hope and I will be headed to the humungous Glastonbury Music Festival. We will arrange the decorating of the Iona Community space in Glastonbury, and through the four days of the festival, we will help provide a quiet and safe space for festival goers, with a warm fire under trees.
I will send updates about the festival experiences as I am able. It is not always easy to find dependable internet service, or even the time during the festival weeks.
Some people might ask, “Would Jesus go to a festival?” I would answer, “Isn’t that what he did during Passover, Pentecost, and the other Jewish festivals?” They may have been different kinds of events, but they were the places the people of Israel gathered. These festivals are the places the people in our world are gathering today, and I believe that Jesus is already there. He is just waiting for some of us to join him.
After arriving in Heathrow, I caught the London Underground to Victoria Station, and from there caught a £9 five-hour Megabus ride from London to Liverpool. During the bus ride, I met Alex. Alex is Russian/Lithuanian but has been living in the UK for years. He is currently homeless, and quite happy to be so at the moment. He plans to spend a few months in Liverpool working, and making some money. He has been befriending other homeless, and sharing God’s love with them for about three years. He showed me around Liverpool, and I am hoping to be able to get back there to see him again before I leave the UK in August.
40 hours after leaving the US, I finally arrived in Wrecsam in North East Wales for the Focus Wales event. I stopped at a pub in Wrecsam to get my bearings and try to connect with people I had contacted on the Couchsurfing network. I walked past a place called Saith Seren (Seven Stars), and saw a “
I also spent some time with Dot Gosling, the purple-haired vicar in North Wales. Dot and I had been circling in similar orbits for awhile and finally met face to face.
I spent some days with Mark and Anthea Searle. Being with them is always like coming home. They always have “room at the inn”, there is a place I can leave extra gear when I need to travel lighter and quicker, and they are always as kind as can be. During this trip, I joined them at a Dyson family day (Mark works for Dyson, which is far larger and more impressive than I imagined.) I also was able to meet with Tony and Dwee Cooke, friends who are former Bridge Church Pastors, who are now doing a television show on Dream Interpretation.
After spending a night on the streets of Oxford, I caught a plane to Prague. This was the second year that I was speaking at a spirituality and punk/metal festival called Meziprostor. “Meziprostor” means something like “the in-between space” in Czech, and the festival is designed to navigate the space between God and the world, Christianity and society, and across the spaces that divide people. Obviously, since this was the thesis for my book Burning Religion, one can see how much I might enjoy Meziprostor. This little festival, at the famous Czech Underground location, Skalak Mill, goes on my list as the best festival I have ever attended that accomplishes the task of being an “in-between space.”
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The Gathering 