A place of cleansing

A trip to the dump leads Natalie Garrett to consider the quality of confession.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

A recyling centre with numbered bays and high netting to catch wind-blown waste.

A household recycling centre -a dumping ground for the soul.

Djm-leighpark, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I recently moved house. A process which rates highly on the stress-ometer. Not least because you see your life (as represented by the stuff of your life) packed up in boxes and taken away from your home to be reassembled somewhere else, in a strange ghost-version of your home.

To be organised, before we moved, I arranged for a clearance company to come and do the unimaginable – clear the loft. We had lived in our home for 13 years. My children had been born and grown up there. We had grown up as parents and as a family. To see all the plastic trophies of our children’s early lives being taken away to be rehoused was almost like seeing members of the family being taken away to be adopted into other families. But at the end of that process, I had thought that when we moved into the new house, we wouldn’t have too much by way of clutter. I was wrong.

And so, my relationship with the nearby Household Recycling Centre began. I have become almost obsessed with my weekly visit to the tip, which is located just outside town. The sense of catharsis and purging is verging on addictive.

At the tip, there is a range of different waste bins – wood, metal, large appliances etc – and a wonderfully ambiguous catch all, everything-else-that-can’t-be-recycled bin. There are places to leave what can be upcycled, there are places to leave dangerous chemicals. The tip is a welcoming place for those of us who recognise that we want to get rid of stuff that is taking up space in our life/home that isn’t helping us live well. It’s a place where a person is encouraged to acknowledge that we don’t need to hold onto what brought us joy in the past but only gets in the way in the present. What is now harmful to us can be taken away and dealt with by professionals.

Festering shame is one of the greatest poisons, one of the greatest risks to the flourishing of the human soul. It needs to be purged, not hidden.

Today, we are often told “never apologise”, “have no regrets”. But that’s really hard. Because most of us know, in some place in our being, that we’ve said, done or thought things that aren’t good. And that knowledge elicits feelings of guilt and shame. So what do we do with that? Ignoring and suppressing those feelings doesn’t mean they go away, instead they fester. Festering shame is one of the greatest poisons, one of the greatest risks to the flourishing of the human soul. It needs to be purged, not hidden.

And so, I return to the dump. At the dump, you aren’t judged for what you bring. There is a shared respect amongst visitors to the dump. Almost a greater respect for the person with the fullest car or the most fetid waste. Where can I go to leave my rotting conscience?

There is a spiritual discipline akin to my weekly tip trip. The discipline of confession. Confession is a spiritual gift that helps us unload the sometimes debilitating cargo of our psychological burdens. In the Christian tradition, the practice of confession can be a shared experience as part of a congregational worship service. Or it can be a more private moment, shared with a priest or trusted Christian friend.

Or confession can be done just me and God. Just you and God. We can honestly bring our mistakes, past or present, and be set free by God’s forgiveness. It doesn’t have to be in posh language, it just needs to be honest. We can just say sorry. We can say we just really wish we hadn’t done/said/thought … and we want to repent. Repentance means turning around and going a different way – so we can ask God to help us leave something behind, and learn how to go a different way.

Jesus invites you and me to bring our rubbish to the greatest spiritual waste centre, located outside town, outside time, at the foot of a cross on Calvary. His physical death was terrible. But the spiritual death was far more painful. He acted like a magnet to all the darkness of humanity and drew it into himself. So, out of love, he became the dumping ground for all that is worst about humanity. And it crushed him. But, Christians believe, he rose again three days later. He came out the other side and invites us to follow him there, too, into the light of forgiveness and freedom.

So next time I’m loading up my car with more (more!) cardboard and a few bulky leftovers from yesteryear, I’ll try to remember to do business with my burden of shame. Which we can dump at the cross of Christ, knowing that it will be dealt with. That it has been dealt with. And we can leave with an empty car. Lighter, hopeful, clearer-headed. Free

Article

Character

Culture

Film & TV

Music

2 April 2025

4 min read

We want to feel the main character energy of each of the Beatles

But is love all we need?

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Four actors dressed in black stand together

The new cast.

Neal Street Productions.

One of the joys of moving into central London is the nostalgia. You can 'remember' anything in London, but for a Beatles fan like me (one year I was in the top one per cent of listeners globally on Spotify - impressive, I know - and it was before I had kids), the aesthetic of central London is deeply connected to the fab four. I'm aware it's not Liverpool but look what London has to offer fans of the fab four. Abbey Road’s crossing, the rooftop performance in Savile Row, or the amount of time the fab four spent just here for the famous launch of Sgt Pepper. Walking around these streets with my headphones in, it's impossible not to smile at music that is faultlessly happy-making.

Sir Sam Mendes, however, is taking the immersive Beatles experience to a whole new level. Four coordinated films will be released in 2028 in a stunning act of ambition and delayed gratification. Mendes' production company says it will be the first 'bingeable theatrical experience.'

Now that the cast have been revealed, lots of questions remain: How long will the films be? Will they all be released at exactly the same time? Will there be Lord of the Rings viewing marathons? By the way - did you hear about the failed pitch for a Lord of the Rings film starring John as Gollum, Paul as Frodo, George as Gandalf and Ringo as Sam? We've missed that particular masterpiece, as Tolkien turned it down, as did Stanley Kubrick for that matter. The man it did fall to, Peter Jackson, recently also released a Beatles television experience in Get Back. Even for Beatles diehards like me I've not made it through all 468 minutes. But I saw enough to see Shakespeare being written.

Screenwriter Peter Straughan (Wolf Hall, Conclave) said that the different script writers for the not-so-imminent upcoming four films were "firewalled off from each other", so we receive four takes truly inhabiting the shoes of each protagonist. Band members wanting their own 'main character energy'? Surely not!

Only Mendes knows how the films will tie together. "Each one is told from the particular perspective of just one of the guys," Sir Sam told CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Monday. "They intersect in different ways - sometimes overlapping, sometimes not."

"They're four very different human beings. Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply. But together, all four films will tell the story of the greatest band in history."

An omnipresent director still has infinite attention for each one us within a grander narrative arc.

Lennon and McCartney are undeniably geniuses. But with the Beatles, they were always greater than the sum of their parts. Even the songs that were solos were credited to Lennon/McCartney. Their solo works, no disrespect, never quite reached the dizzying heights of their collective efforts.

But a biopic for each bandmember is a terribly 2020s take. We want to feel that main character energy pulsing through our veins. While we want to feel part of something bigger, we want to feel that our lives are unique and distinct, not derivative (the latter not being a problem for The Beatles).

But a quartet of films, "challenging the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies", harmonising in new ways (remind you of anything as subversive and groundbreaking?) provides an utterly lovely step-change in cinema. There's been no shortage of Beatles biographies and films, but this new concept comes closer to art imitating life. Our lives have to be lived independently, but are somehow made more meaningful and rich in connection and collaboration with others.

The philosopher Tom Morris wrote: "There are two striking human passions, the passion for uniqueness and the passion for union. Each of us wants to be recognised as a unique member of the human race. We want to stand apart from the crowd in some way. We want our own dignity and value. But at the same time, we have a passion for union, for belonging, even for merging our identities into a greater unity in which we can have a place, a role, a value.”

Can those passions be held in tension? The Christian faith, while commending us to be outward-focused, does more than polyphonic films. It says that each of us are worthy of our own 'cinematic events'. Yes, we mightn't have started living until we have broken free from our own confines to the concerns of broader humanity, as Martin Luther King said, but an omnipresent director still has infinite attention for each one us within a grander narrative arc.

All you need is love, they sang. But that love needs the perfect perspective of someone else.

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