Photo: Church Times
'I ought to hate everything about Greenbelt. But I love it, and always have.'

There may be chemical toilets and rain, but Greenbelt is still a spiritual detox, says Giles Fraser

I ought to hate everything about Greenbelt. But I love it, and always have.

It is particularly crazy that the things I most value about this Christian arts festival, set in a boggy field in Cheltenham, are the things I would usually run a million miles to escape.

Take camping: I think camping is unspeakably horrible. At the weekend, the Frasers went to bed under canvas, and slept an hour or two at most.

As the temperature plummeted and the damp started to eat into the tent, we realised that the plan of bringing duvets and not sleeping bags was Baldrick-like in its cunning.

We all huddled together for warmth, arms and legs convoluted as if in some manic game of Twister.

Warmth

Then, just when one of us had managed to trap a tiny bit of warmth in a space around us, another mini-Fraser would need the loo. And so would begin one more trip into a freezing cold field to find a disgusting chemical latrine.

Yet, for all this, camping reminds me that I am a physical being in a way that our lovely warm house in London, with its scented baths and porcelain lavatories, just cannot.

It is precisely this rude awakening to your own physical vulnerability which carries with it an unexpected message of real joy.

The way in which you have to care for each other in a tent can suck up a great deal more of the reality of human love than the talcum-powdered version of daily living that we City-dwellers are wont to experience.

As ever, the talks and music at Greenbelt were inspired. Looking out over the hills, Mark Yaconelli had me in pieces as he spoke beautifully about the courage of people who had come to terms with great loss in their lives.

Wisdom

Where else could you hear the Christian wisdom of Stanley Hauerwas set against the rhythmical verve of Beverley Knight?

I was disappointed not to hear Gil Scott Heron. My favourite song of his from years ago was “The revolution will not be televised”.

The idea is that there are some things you cannot do from a distance, some things that you have to participate in. The revolution is live, and so is Greenbelt.

I don’t have a hippy bone in my body. But there is certainly a liberation in letting all your sophistication drop away. In the morning, I was warmed by the sun, not by a radiator.

I woke to the sound of birds, not John Humphrys. I didn’t have to get dressed, because I went to sleep in the clothes I had on all the day before. I smelt.

This is not a bad spiritual detoxification for somebody who has regular conversations about whether it should be the George V copes for evensong.

• The Revd Dr Giles Fraser is Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, and Director of the St Paul's Institute.

• This column was first published in, and appears courtesy of, The Church Times

• Visit the surefish Faith section