Reflection of the Month - Rev. Josh Richards

What The New Term Can't Give You

It's always tempting to think the new thing will give us what we want. We are ever-hopeful that acquiring this new friend, excelling at this new project or just being really clever in front of this group of people will offer an approval and assurance that quiets our fears and restlessness. I'm new to this job and I notice it in myself. There is this inescapably needy part of me that is trying to work out how to appear as impressive as possible to those around me. I know disappointment is inevitable and yet this futile hope for a gold star persists. Just me?

Something striking happens about halfway through Olivia Rodrigo’s album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. The love songs of part 1, girl so in love, revelling in a new relationship, give way to something else. Part 2, you seem pretty sad, opens with ‘the cure’ in which she explores the way that, as good as any relationship can be, it cannot meet her deepest longing and need. She sings:

"But it doesn't matter how your love feels anymore. It'll never be the cure"

There is something in each of us beyond what even the best romantic relationship can sate. So too will it be left unfulfilled by any success or personal optimisation, even by a new academic year. Places like the chaplaincy exist as a kind of signpost to the gap Olivia Rodrigo sings about. In a university full of 50,000 impressive people, we need to remind each other that we are loved for reasons beyond, and sometimes despite, any claim to impressiveness we each may have.

We grasp and yet are already held.

The different faith and belief communities represented in the chaplaincy and across campus will disagree on what both grasping and being held means. Each of our traditions comes with different diagnoses, prognoses and proposed cures. But what I hope we share is a conviction that these questions matter and should ground and shape how we approach everything else, our work included.

In my Christian tradition, 'held-ness' is understood most clearly in terms of the grace of God: the unconditioned gift of a loving creator to broken creatures. Our grasping hurts ourselves, others and the rest of creation. But such is God's care for us that, in the person of Jesus, he takes these wounds into his own hands. God receives the harm we do and the harms done to us, so that we might know his embrace. The Nigerian Pentecostal theologian Nimi Wariboko writes in his book The Pentecostal Principle about how this grace relieves the pressure to instrumentalise. We are accepted so we do not need to use things or people to prove ourselves. We are left with a sense of playfulness toward our work and study. We can delight in the new and pursue the tasks of the day, secure that they will not determine our worth.

They will never be the cure, so we can hold them, and each other, gently. May we each receive this new academic year as what it is: a gift.

This reflection was written by Rev. Josh Richards our Christian Anglican Chaplain. You can find out more about Josh by clicking here to visit his profile.

The views expressed in this reflection are those of the Chaplain and do not necessarily represent the position of the University of Birmingham's Multifaith Chaplaincy.