Breaking point

Sigmund Freud has been described as the "prose-poet of the heart's desire to break". I think he was a kind of artist who gave us a language in which to express our deepest griefs. For the most part we are not able to do this in anything like a direct way, by simply naming them. We need a vocabulary which expresses and yet conceals them at the same time. Freud supplied it, or at least one possible version of it.

In the Old Testament there is a teaching that God loves a heart that is broken, indeed that brokenness is the only sure way to approach God.

Freud must have been well acquainted with it.

Thoughts on Travel

Maverick Philosopher has some wisdom from Albert Jay Nock:

Wherever we are, we see the world through the same pair of eyeballs, and filter its deliverances through the same set of conceptions, preconceptions, anxieties, aversions, and what-not. If I travel to Naples, thinking to get away from myself, what I find when I wake up there is “...the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.” (Ibid.) Shift your spatial horizon as you will, you may not effect any change in your mental horizon. If you can’t find enlightenment in Buffalo, where the water is potable and mosquitoes are rare, what makes you think you will find it in Benares where mosquitoes are ubiquitous and the water will give you dysentery?

I once had a conversation with a young Austrian at the train station in Salzburg, Austria. He told me he was headed for Istanbul “to make holiness.” But could he not have made holiness in Salzburg? Could he not have found a Pauline ‘closet’ somewhere in that beautiful city wherein to shut himself away from the world and pray to his Father in secret?

Stay home. Cultivate your garden in peace and quiet. Sink your roots into the soil of solitude. But travel a little so to appreciate the foregoing.

Here for a season

Human life is not to be judged by its longevity alone but by the quality of its brief encounters.

Irene Lancaster

Emily

One of our visiting children who have what are called learning disabilities was getting upset about the weather. It was cloudy and damp. This isn't called Greater Manchester for nothing. Pointing to the sky, she cried, "The clouds! They're working!"

John and Ted

I met John in prison. I was chaplain, he an inmate. I had kept publicly on the right side of the law. He had been caught briefly on the wrong one.

John's sixteen year old daughter had fallen in with a bad lot. Her boyfriend who was a bit older and should have known a bit better, had introduced her to a new circle of friends. One of the things they did together was inject heroin. In a vulnerable state he had 'taken advantage' of her and she was pregnant.

John, a man with no history of or known capacity for personal violence, had reacted like any father might. He hit the boyfriend - hard, with the nearest object to hand - an empty beer bottle. It caused the young man severe though short-term injury. Most people, including the prison officers who came to know John, thought his outburst perfectly excusable. They made life inside for him as easy as possible, even supplying him with an internet connection so that he could continue to manage his successful business of waste-disposal from his prison cell.

John was a Roman Catholic. He spoke to Father David, the RC chaplain. Two things worried him. He feared the incident had exposed a tendency to violence in his nature which contradicted his previous self-awareness. Secondly, he was not able to feel sorry for what he'd done. Father David quoted St Paul writing that our lower nature is often in conflict with our higher or spiritual nature. John found no consolation in this.

When John told me I tried to reassure him. He was plainly not a man given casually to violence. As for feeling sorry, it seemed to me that his concern about this was ample evidence of the kind of moral sense he feared he might have lost. If he couldn't feel sorry for the injury he had visited upon the miscreant, he did at least regret not feeling sorry, and could offer this to God in confession of his sins.

As you will appreciate John was more troubled by matters of moral motivation than the average inmate. He was a decent man, and a good Catholic. But there was one area where his conscience acquired what you might call a little elasticity. In his impending interview with the parole board, which could lead to his early release, his contrition would be as impressive as it was false; anything to get him out of that hell-hole and back to the family he missed so much. Honesty before God in prayer mattered deeply to him; honesty to civil servants less.

Truth-telling in prison can get you into a lot of trouble - and keep you there.

Ask Ted. Ted was a 'lifer'. He had strangled his wife in a drunken rage. That was fifteen years ago, and he too was due to appear before the parole board. If he behaved well and convinced them that he was no longer 'angry with women' he might be moved to another, more open, prison, a prelude to his eventual release. One member of the board was, as he put, right snotty to him - made him feel like a piece of shit. It happened to be a woman. He didn't like being treated like that, and he said so. If he could have held his tongue, shown less spirit, been more humble, seemed more sorry, he might have made it. But he couldn't. So he had to stay inside, for the offence of emotional honesty.

Spreadsheeting bad behaviour - which column?

Sue at Dicombobula is always worth reading.

The Australian Federal government is trying to address teenage binge drinking by proposing a tax hike for premixed alcoholic beverages like vodka and orange and bourbon and coke (two personal favourites in my teenage years, when I had the dosh).

The government believes that making these drinks more expensive will stop teenagers getting together and getting shitfaced. I wonder, do any of them really believe this, even a smidge? I know we are all economically rationalised to death and feel constrained onto spreadsheet columns, but does anyone at all involved with the government, including the toilet cleaners, really think that is anything but some sort of lip service? Surely not. And surely they don't think we're that stupid. And surely this is why listening to the blatherings of the world is so damn tiresome. It's enough to make you want to go and get shitfaced :)

This kind of thing really pisses me off. What a waste of time it all is. It's talking about issues without talking about issues. So much fluff, full of soundbytes and infuriatingly signifying nothing.

Teenagers get drunk because it feels really good to be pissed. Because they are full of angst and don't know who the hell they are and are suffering under the weight of living in a world where nothing gets discussed in ways that really make any kind of goddamned difference at all and because no one would listen if they said that Uncle Harry was doing bad stuff to them when no one was looking, or that they felt like losers because they didn't know what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives and therefore which VCE stream to set themselves onto at 15 years of age. Or that they felt like they would never ever belong and it didn't seem like there was all that much to belong to anyway and hey, how bad does that make you feel when we are the lucky ones and the rest of the world is being flung about by tempestuous weather?

Teenagers get pissed because it is so nice to quell your fears and shame - and that is surely the absolute crux of it, for mine. Or at least, that was always the reason why I got drunk. To get me out of myself. To have a blast. To tell my friends I loved them (love ya mate, I'll luv ya forever, mate. Now excuse me while I go over here and vomit). To give me a bit of Dutch courage to talk to that boy and maybe get a pash (or more). Fear and shame pursue every single person down through the days and to not address that is to not address anything in the end.

But then, what column would that fit into on the spreadsheet? And is that the responsibility of the government anyway?

Taxing alcopops will make teenagers resort to drinking beer, or they will buy wine and mix their own orange juice in it. Or whatever. Or maybe - heaven forbid - they will buy Blackberry Nip or Brandivino and mix it with Coke. However far your dosh spreads. 'Cause it's not about the taste so much as it's about the high and about the quell. And I really just don't know how that one can be regulated. 'Cause you can stuff it down and keep on going, but so far I have really only found one Place where fear and shame have been nailed. And it's got nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with Love.

A scientist speaks out

Roy W. Spencer is a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. His book, Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor, will be published this month.

Who to believe?

Surprising to find the (Eddie) Stobart Group so upbeat.

Stobart Group shrugged off fears of a UK recession yesterday and boasted that it was seeing record trading despite rising fuel costs.

. . . confident of strong profit growth over the next year despite the uncertain economic outlook.

Our business last week was the busiest week in the history of Eddie Stobart," he said (Andrew Tinkler, the chief executive). "I haven't seen any signs [of a UK recession] and neither have our customers, who are hitting their targets. Even the building [industry customers] are still hitting their forecasts. The sub-prime market really damaged the banks but [other] businesses are carrying on as normal.

Yet on the same day the Financial Times headlines "Mounting signs of economic slowdown."

Whatever are the humble poor to believe?

Miscarriages and misreporting

This from Harry's Place.

And our sanctimonious media elite wonder why politicians ’spin’?

Susan Hill on Boris

I think he will do well so long as he is true to himself. They had to gag him to get him in but now he is in, I hope the gag comes off, that he continues to be his own man, and that above all he does not become Cameron`s puppet. Because Cameron is a man to be wary of, and a man not to trust if ever I saw one. He is just the sort of smooth, slippery, bland, bend-whichever-way-it-takes politician we should dread. And any man whose wife is boss of a shop that flogs fuchsia pink suede bibles at £150 a pop and handbags named after her daughter for £1,000, should be viewed with the gravest suspicion. The wives say it all and they do count for a lot, like it or not.

Sarah is the best reason I can think of for giving Gordon another chance.

Honestly

I've just heard another discussion on the Today programme about whether politicians will ever stop being devious. I do get sick of this self-righteous moaning. The answer is obvious. Politicians will give up telling lies when the rest of us do. They're only human after all.

A touch of class

Overweight, barely comprehensible, infamous womanizer; it could be John Prescott - or Boris Johnson. One thing's for sure. Boris will never be as unpopular as Prezza who was never forgiven for being plainly working-class.

Gas guzzling

Perhaps it's my lack of appetite for travel, but I can't help noticing how much respect is shown to those who can't find enough to entertain, intrigue and stimulate them in these beautiful British Isles of ours.

Take Tory MP Ann Widdicombe who was asked in a recent broadcast about her visits abroad. Her only regret seemed to be that she hadn't been to more places and in particular 'I'd like to see the penguins in Antarctica'. Miss Widdicombe often promotes herself as a devout Christian woman with self-denial as a major component of her moral and spiritual life. Yet is not her wish to travel the globe to spend time with a flock of flightless birds the most shameless fantasy of self-indulgence? What possible good would accrue to Antarctica, its inhabitants, or the planet as a whole, from such personal extravagance?

Another interview, this time with Michael Palin, in which he shared his experiences in foreign lands, concluded with the question, 'Is there anywhere you'd still like to go?' But why are such people never asked, 'Don't you think you've done enough globetrotting? Do you think it's necessarily a good thing for you, the human race and the environment, that you should continue your international perambulations?

Carbon footprints

If global warming and carbon emissions really do pose such a threat to the planet and its peoples, why does the UEFA Champions League Final which must now be fought out between two British clubs take place in Moscow? Or was Bill Shankly right about soccer being more important than life and death?

It's the Telegraph, so it must be true

The cricket club where no-one can hit a six . . .

Back again

After a break in the English Lake District with no postings for days and days, I'm surprised to find that I have as many readers when I'm not actively blogging as when I am.

One of my dearest friends has written to tell me that in his opinion I'm a 'good egg'. Am I flattered? No way. To reduce my struggle with life and its meanings, my ambiguities and ambivalence, my high ideals and my often abject failure to live up to them, my painful honesty in the face of organized lies and half-truths, to the epithet 'good egg' feels like the worst kind of pat on the back. What makes it worse is that the friend I speak of is one of the kindest people I know. With any luck we'll have many hours to laugh at my sanctimonious pomposity.

Peter Hitchens writes . . .

The Book of Common Prayer, originally published in 1549, has affected me more powerfully than any other book I have ever read. I hope to have it with me when I die. Best known in Britain in its 1662 version, and in the USA as The 1928 Prayer Book, it is the now-forgotten third pillar of written English, alongside the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Excerpts from it occupy more than 15 pages of the Third Edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, yet - since it is now hardly used by the Church of England or its cousin, the Episcopal Church - those who quote from it, or use its phrases and cadences in their language, are mostly unaware of the fact that they are quoting at all. It is, amongst other things, the refutation in practice of the idea that religion is a resort of the stupid and the illiterate. Its marriage service is the constitution of private life, expressed in numinous poetry. Its burial service is a raw, uncompromising confrontation with the majesty of death.

But it is in its regular, ordinary services of Morning and Evening Prayer that, with a sweet persistence, it softly asks the listener - who is also often a participant - to consider, reasonably and carefully, the alternatives to the bare, comfortless tedium of materialism, and to reflect on his place in the universe. The apparently simple phrases quietly slip into the mind and compel thought. No revolutionary manifesto ever equalled the Magnificat's scorn for earthly greatness.

And running through it all is the knowledge that almost all of this, especially its repeated calls for God's help in the struggle to be good, 'forasmuch as without Thee we are not able to please Thee', was written or compiled by a rather bad man, Thomas Cranmer, Henry VIII's highly political Archbishop of Canterbury. This is not the work of some unapproachable, impossible saint but of a married man, wily in worldly affairs and capable both of great cowardice and of astonishing courage.

Just to get me going again

Having sorted out my computer problems for the time being, I've been afflicted by another kind of virus that's left me spiritually and intellectually shrivelled.

Then I read this, and wanted to blog again.

Hope it lasts.

• The only faith that makes sense to many people is one that offers a story to resonate with. Belonging to a community, and any promise of life after death [or even of a god who loves even you, you dirty rotten scoundrel], are no longer draw cards.

Some thoughts on love

From Dennis Prager:

"The love relationship between a man and a woman is unique.. . .it is the only relationship in which it is a good thing to seek to be loved. In other relationships, it is bad to seek to be loved. Parents who seek to be loved by their children will inevitably do a poor job as a parent. They may even damage their child. Leaders who seek to be loved by the public will be ineffective at best and dangerous at worst. One can only lead if he does not yearn to be loved. A teacher who tries to be loved by her students will likewise fail. Parents, leaders, teachers have jobs to do, and seeking to be loved compromises their ability to do those jobs properly. They should seek to do the right thing, and doing the right thing often means being not loved, even hated. If they seek any response from those they lead, it should be respect, not love.

"But in the love of equals — i.e., the love between a man and a woman and the love of friends — it is not only all right to seek to be loved, it is a good thing. Taking the love of a spouse or friend for granted is perhaps the single greatest cause of marital divorce and the breakup of friendships. “What can I do to ensure his/her continuing love?” is a wonderful thing to keep in mind."

What think you?

Are you religious?

Maverick Philosopher has a quote from Simone Weil:

The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it.

This suggests one of several tests you might apply to yourself to see if you have a religious ‘bent’ or sensibility, or orientation toward life, or however you wish to phrase it. If, upon reading the Weilian line, a ‘yes!’ wells up in you, then the chances are excellent that you are religiously inclined. If your response is in the negative, however, or if you are just puzzled, then that indicates that you lack the religious attitude.

Soul food

"The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread [God], but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry."

Simone Weil (1909-1943) French philosopher and mystic; from Waiting for God.

Love and understanding

"Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing help, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it's those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding."

Rev. Norman Maclean, from the movie A River Runs Through It

How true.

Jack

It wasn't easy to walk past his house without stopping to talk. At least chat. Local stuff. Neighbourly stuff. A bit of putting the world to rights. But not much. If you didn't want to stop or talk, it was easier to take a different route, past someone else's front gate.

When I was a lad, my father had a corner shop. People, mainly women, came in for the company. It wasn't the kind of shop where the service was swift and efficient. Hygiene and accountancy were not high among my dad's priorities. You didn't get a receipt. There wasn't a till. Dad was as much a friend, counsellor, entertainer, as a shopkeeper. His customers were his captive audience. To work alongside him was a great laugh, but ours was not the kind of shop I would have visited as a customer.

To pass Jack's gate was to enter into a relationship with him; to know and be known. Like shopping in my dad's shop.

Jack would also have made a great country parson. He would have done supremely well what I could never do. Standing in one place, watching the world go by, passing the time of day with villagers and visitors alike. I wasn't good at it. I was always friendly and affable, and ready to talk about everyday things. To men I could chat about sport, but cars and tractors and DIY left me cold. And always in the back of my mind I would be thinking of what I ought to have been doing that would have been more worthwhile, more like a proper job, more like work. I was paid to be the Vicar after all.

Jack would have taken all this in his stride. At least I think he would. What I don't know is how good he was at keeping confidences, or how much he just liked a good gossip. I've no doubt though he was a mine of personal information about the local populace, and people don't usually talk as freely to those they can't trust. He had his very own drop-in congregation, many of whom I never see now.

It was too cold in winter for Jack to take his stand, and that's why we didn't miss him for weeks after he died. In fact we didn't know he had died. Now we do, and our walk to the post-office will be more direct, but less of an event.

Jack RIP

One crying in the wilderness

From The Times:

Despite the many mistakes that have been made I still do not regret that the war happened. I regret deeply what happened after the war. I take hope from the work of the Multi National Forces in Iraq, not least the US and UK troops; they are doing an outstanding job. I also take hope from the way that the Iraqi Army is developing.

The writer is Canon Andrew White - known as the vicar of Baghdad - the only Anglican vicar still working in the city.

Mary Doyle

Mary was my auntie. Hers was the last funeral I took, months ago, as a family favour. She was quite old - in her eighties. When she was only in her seventies she lost confidence in her GP. There was, she said, something about him she didn't trust. She thought he was out to do her harm. We all thought the same thing: She's going funny: It's her age: Poor Mary.

Her doctor was Harold Shipman.

Starting over

Buddhist spirituality I like. What I can't figure out is how such sensitive and intelligent people as are drawn to that great religion can fall for such a logically incoherent doctrine as reincarnation.

The belief that I was someone else, say Guy Fawkes, in a previous life seems straightforward enough until the next person turns up claiming the exact same identity. What criteria could we possibly apply to distinguish the true claim from the false?

Yours truly

I wish that we took Oscar Wilde more seriously about many things, but one of the most profoundly insightful sayings attributed to him is that prayer should never be answered. Prayer that is answered, he continued, ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.

Honesty

A few random thoughts on honesty:

It was Honest to God by John Robinson that convinced me back in the sixties that religion should be taken seriously by thoughtful people.

Being honest has many times been expensive for me in life and ministry.

I would like to belong to a Church that was more publicly honest. Andrew Shanks on liturgy as an ideal enactment of public honesty is interesting. More on this later.

I wonder what would happen if, like those with Tourette's syndrome, we all acquired a tendency to blurt out the most shockingly immediate and uncensored version of the truth as we saw and felt it without regard for the needs or feelings of others within hearing distance.

Vivienne Westwood's use of the phrase 'organised lying' with reference to the propaganda put out daily for public consumption caused to me to wonder whether all human institutions are based on this practice, and whether the Church could and should be the exception.

Prejudice

From Normblog:

Name the odd one out, and discount gender in doing so.

Neil Harvey, Herbert Hoover, Garfield Sobers, Harry S. Truman, Graeme Pollock, Ronald Reagan, David Gower, Bill Clinton, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama.

If you can't get it on your own, the answer is available here.

Honesty

It's one of the things I mean to blog about, along with the old Death and Immortality questions, in the coming weeks.

Honesty is so difficult, and so neglected, and so easily evaded. Trouble is, we are, by and large, so dishonest about honesty, and so hypocritical in the way that we demand it of others, especially children, not least our own, but manage it cunningly to our advantage as adults.

Let's be honest, nobody wants to live in a world where everybody is honest. Our local headteacher who likes to include in her school prayers petitions for strength to be honest at all times, would be the most horrified if one of her pupils told her, honestly, that she was grossly overweight.

Some things are better left unsaid.

I'm back, honey!

I've been out of touch for a few days; what in the Church of England we call an interregnum.

We used to have AOL Broadband, but now we have Sky. A kind of conversion; just can't get away from God-talk. But between my two ISPs there was a silence, a not-being-connected, a not-belonging. And worse, for me, there was having to acquire and install a new computer to go with my new connection, because the other one was too old and didn't have the right socket for me to plug the router into. And one thing led to another - an easy transfer cable that I bought and whose CD I then inadvertently discarded (PC World kindly replaced the CD, even though they hadn't lost it) - an easy transfer cable (the same one) that turned out to be a 'won't transfer anything at all' cable, again because the old computer didn't have enough disk space to operate it (the saintly staff at PC World replaced this with a Flash Drive which I'm assured will do the job but much more slowly) - constant to-ing and fro-ing - attempts, soon abandoned, to run two computers with only one monitor - . . . . and now at last a kind of normality, and a lesson learned

. . . . . to be humble is to be sane.

Madge

One of the best nights I have spent in the theatre was for An Evening's Intercourse with Dame Edna Everage. Emily Perry, who played Edna's bridesmaid, Madge Allsopp, died last week aged 100. One of the tributes paid to her was that her job was to do nothing, and she did it beautifully.

During the more than twenty years she worked with Barry Humphries she travelled the world, though she admitted, at the age of 99, she couldn't remember a thing.

Doing less, and eventually doing nothing, but beautifully, seems like a good plan for retirement. Between now and when I'm 100 I'd like not so much to see more, do more, and travel further, as to digest, value, appreciate what I have; reflect on what I have seen, read and done.

And then, mercifully, to forget.

Is religion good for you?

Oliver James reckons that people who go to church once a week are more likely to be mentally healthy. He asks whether this counts as evidence for the existence of God.

I hate it when people make religion a kind of health-trip. Getting yourself crucified is far more damaging to your health than smoking.

Hereafter Again

If talk of the survival after death of a non-material body leaves you, like me, in a state of complete incomprehension, or desperately seeking convincing evidence, then it may be that the dualistic view of human beings made up of two parts, the body, and the mind or soul, may help us still to make sense of our Christian belief.

One problem is with that word 'part'. Unless my soul is me, and not just a part of me, as one philosopher put it, the news of the immortality of my soul would be of no more concern to me than the news that my appendix would be preserved eternally in a bottle.

My own view of what human beings are, and what a person is, rules out the notion that I am essentially an inner thinking substance that could conceivably have an existence quite independent of the physical world we share or the other persons we share it with. I can't begin to imagine how life without its public aspect of relationships, shared language, meanings, and experiences, would be a human life, with the capacity for what we call introspection, in the first place. Giving meaning to words is itself a public rather than a private matter.

What then of reincarnation? And, before you reply, 'I don't want to come back as a tin of milk', I will say - more later.

Broadbrush

The ability to identify significant movements in thought, and present them in a way that helps others to grasp their significance without oversimplifying, is a valuable art. I can still recall the excitement that I experienced when the works of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud were first linked in my mind as thinkers who had progressively shifted our perception of human beings, once seen as freely autonomous individuals, the crown of God's creation, set on earth, at the centre of the universe, to the much more modest position we now occupy in the cosmological, evolutionary, and psychological worlds of most people.

Sometimes though this ability can be put to the service of sinister causes. I suppose every petty dictator has a vision of the world and himself which neatly accommodates his own megalomaniac fantasies.

Jacobo Timerman, the Argentine Jewish newspaper editor who was kidnapped and tortured by the death-squad regime in his country in the late 1970s, analyzes the work of the neo-Nazi element that formed such an important part of the military/clerical dictatorship, and quotes one of the “diagnoses” that animated their ferocity:

“Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space.”

Why you no listen?

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
-- George Bernard Shaw

Is brown the new black?

Tidying my underwear drawer the other day, I noticed that my erstwhile black underpants had over time turned a shade of brown. A question occurred to me: Why do men, and women who buy for their men, buy far more pairs of black underpants which eventually turn brown, than brown ones which presumably stay brown? Why not buy brown in the first place?

I am now going to drop my underpants.

What are you hereafter?

I have commented that every belief in survival after death I've come across is either the product of confused thinking, or subverts my understanding of morality, which is about doing something for nothing, and generally gets in the way of appreciating and loving the world we live in as it is.
I want to argue that life after death makes Christianity (the religion I know best) and morality (as I understand it) impossible.

One principle I'd like to explore is that beliefs in an afterlife are unsatisfactory religiously speaking insofar as they are rooted in a desire for more of selfhood rather than more of God. They seek to satisfy an anxiety that my life might be meaningless without its continuance to a fulfilment beyond death; as if life is not worth living, and good not worth doing, unless it can be justified by post-mortem events.

There has never been convincing evidence that 'we' can survive the dissolution of 'our bodies'. There is an important sense in which we are our bodies. Still, the reputation of many psychical researchers have been dashed in the attempt to produce evidence for the existence of non-material bodies. No such 'subtle bodies' have ever forced themselves upon the attention of physical scientists, however sensitive the apparatus they have deployed.

Perhaps though my essential self has nothing to do with bodily existence at all. Perhaps it is to be found elsewhere. Perhaps a dualistic solution should be sought.

In memory

I wrote a letter of condolence to the widow of a priest I worked with many years ago.

"One thing I have valued over the years may surprise you. Denis had what I then found to be an infuriating habit, when discussing things in a meeting, of rehearsing how part of him thought and felt this, whilst another part of him thought and felt that. With the impatience of youth I often wanted to make progress by asking him to come more quickly to the point, but thought better of it. I later came to appreciate that this way of speaking may have come from his counsellor training and I found, and find, it a liberating way of talking especially about more personal things. Through it you can own thoughts and feelings you do not like and would certainly not wish to act upon. A part of me says ‘this’. A part of me says ‘that’. Thanks Denis."

Love is a losing game

The real winners in life, says Oliver James, "are those people who don't worry about winning and losing."

My own view is that sooner or later we are all losers. We are all going to lose everything that we have and we are forever. So better accept it.

Among the groups of people least willing to come to terms with this unavoidable truth are the religious. They are mostly hooked on the idea of some kind of afterlife in which they can go on going on, so that they don't have to lose everything, at least not forever.

But they do. And this craving for something they can't have prevents them developing a real spitituality - a spiritualty with guts.

Or so it seems to me.

Getting off to a good start

On a blog thread the other day I recounted that on my first day in a new parish, a second curacy, one of the churchwardens, very much the senior one, was about to introduce me to his wife after Evensong. I had met the lady earlier that day at the 8am Holy Communion. I therefore interrupted the churchwarden to say 'Oh I've already met your MOTHER.'

What made it more inexcusable was that she wasn't even older than him. Fortunately she was one of those Christians who really did forgive. As far as I know she never held it against me.

In my defence (or is it hers?) I can without effort be twenty years out on either side in guessing any person's age.

Bonkersgate

In the Church Times, Andrew Brown does what he does best; writes about journalists and journalism. Towards the end of a fine piece on Rowan Williams' recent bad press, he says:

"By the time that Dr Williams rose to speak on Monday, the outline of a defence was clear. He had been brutally and unfairly attacked for things he never said. What the press had done was an assault on the very possibility of nuanced discussion - and this is true. But it is much more important and and just as true that he was brutally and fairly attacked for things that he did, in fact, say, and quite probably meant."

Give a mouse a bad name

Douglas Adams, back in 1999, saw how the internet was being demonized.

"Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day."

Bring Back Jehovah

Simon Hoggart illustrates what it is about Christians that gets right up intelligent noses.

"A week ago the TV news included a heartwarming story about an 11-month old baby boy in Tennessee who had been picked up by a tornado and thrown for 150 yards. Rescuers found him lying face down in mud, but alive and only scratched.

"Neighbours and friends lined up to say how kind God had been, how God had looked after him, and so forth. I wanted to yell at the screen: "But his mother died! He's an orphan! What was God thinking of?" You don't have to be Richard Dawkins to realise that belief in a God who is both all-benign and omnipotent is going to lead you into some pretty tricky philosophical tangles.
Americans seem to have come up with the notion of God as the fourth emergency service, stepping in to mitigate misfortunes which for some reason He couldn't prevent: Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 for example.

"I've seen Christian newsletters which argue that God worked hard on 9/11, organising traffic jams in Manhattan so that hundreds of people didn't get to work in the twin towers before the planes hit. A bit rough on those who went by subway.

"Maybe they ought to get back to the Old Testament Jehovah, angry and vengeful, constantly seeking blood, destruction and revenge. It would solve so many problems."

Double Entendre

She showed me hers. I showed her mine.
She found it so exciting that in no time at all she believed we would be related by marriage.
I had another look at mine to see what it was that had impassioned her.
Upon closer inspection I found that her great-great-grandmother is mine as well.
Genealogy is sexy.

_______________

My wife can't get randy.
Is this a psychosexual problem?

No. It's 5 Down in today's Quick Crossword.

Quote of the Day

The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266 words. A recent federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.

– The Atlanta Journal

Vocation

From Prodigal Kiwis:

“This led me to revisit my own understanding of the vocation … question, and I finally asked it the right way. What I asked myself was this: is there anything in my life that I have always felt called or compelled to do, any drive or impulse that I have ultimately been able to ignore?... I can ignore it, but it does not go away. I am happier when I am following it than when I am not. It is something that gives me a sense of integrity and meaning…” (Gregory Augustine Pierce).

Jewish Heretic

I like this epithet as applied to Jesus.

Jewishness appeals to me because a religion that ends in 'ish' has a suitably modest opinion of itself.

To be out of step, as a heretic must, with something so ill-defined as to end in 'ish' in the first place, makes the man from Nazareth all the more attractive to those of us who have never found it easy to nail our colours to a particular doctrinal mast.

The great Iraqi insurgency

From Harry's Place:

The BBC is carrying a report about two bombs exploding in busy Baghdad animal markets have killed at least 64 people. According to the report the devices were attached to "two mentally disabled women, and were detonated remotely".

Is this some new dispicable low? Is the great Al Qaeda going around and rounding up the mentally ill and strapping bombs to them?

Iraqi security forces spokesman Brig Qassem Ata al-Moussawi told the BBC: "The operation was carried out by two booby-trapped mentally disabled women. [The bombs] were detonated remotely.

"Forensic and bomb squad experts as well as the people and traders of Al-Shorja area of the carpet market have confirmed that the woman who was blown-up there today was often in the area and was mentally disabled...

"In the New Baghdad area the shop owners and customers of the pet market confirmed that the woman who was blown-up there was mentally disabled as well."

Gene adds: This isn't the first time the "resistance" has done such a thing.

God or the devil?

Is the reason for not worshipping the devil instead of God that God is stronger than the devil? Is it that God will get you in the end, and then you will be for it. 'Think of your future, boy, and don't throw away your chances.' Is that how you see it?

If so, what a creeping and vile sort of thing your religion must be, writes Rush Rhees.

But how far can we and should we eliminate self-interest from the moral and religious life? Could we help loving God, even if death was the end of us, and no reward or justification awaited us?

The importance of being nothing

Simone Weil's insistence on the importance of being nothing has an implication for what we call the problem of suffering. It is the instinct for self-preservation, putting oneself at the centre of one's concern, that makes us ask, 'Why is this happening to me?' It is the same instinct that causes me to think that God sent suffering by an act of his will and for my good. But the chief use of suffering is to teach me that I am nothing.

In Gravity and Grace she writes, 'The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.' It is precisely because evil has no explanation, that the suffering can be used to show that one is nothing.

More supernatural

One of the consequences of believing in a supernatural God, as defined in my post here, is the possibility of thanking God for his goodness whatever happens in an individual's life.

It seems to me that counting one's blessings is not characteristic of Christian life. It is no more than prudent and sensible. I have always been struck by the way that Jesus gave thanks on the night that he was betrayed, when he had nothing obviously and immediately to be thankful for.

Daniel Barenboim

From 'Portrait of the artist' in today's Guardian:

Complete this sentence: At heart I'm just a frustrated ...
Good-for-nothing.

Nothing more

There is a nothing that is God, in the sense that to fear God is to fear nothing. There is a nothing that we need to be, in relation to God. And there is a nothing that we can feel we are, in the course of a panic attack.

How are we to understand these three kinds of nothing?

Man has the spirit of God in him to the extent that he negates himself. Simone Weil prayed, 'May God grant me to become nothing. In so far as I become nothing, God loves himself through me.'

Thinking Allowed

Norm quotes Hannah Arendt on Adolf Eichmann, that what characterized him was 'sheer thoughtlessness' - or, as she put it in another piece ('Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture', Social Research 38, 1971), 'extraordinary shallowness' and a 'quite authentic inability to think'.

I seem to have met a few such people; in fact, I'm related to some of them.

Bertrand Russell, the intellectual hero of the young goodfornowt, wrote 'Most people would rather die than think, in fact, most do.'

Panic Attack

"The sense of exposure is central to the experience: isolated, cut off, surrounded by hostile space, you are suddenly without connections, without stability, with nothing to hold you upright or in place; a dizzying, sickening unreality takes possession of you; you are threatened by a complete loss of identity, a sense of utter fraudulence; you have no right to be here, now, inhabiting this body, dressed in this way; you are a nothing, and 'nothing' is quite literally what you feel you are about to become. The overwhelming reaction to finding yourself in this situation is the need to flee, to find refuge in some 'safe haven' like your home or your car, anywhere protected from the unremitting hostility of public space."

This exactly captures an experience which is no more bearable, believe me, when it happens to a priest in a pulpit.

Lonely, eccentric and bizarre

We are all lonely, eccentric and bizarre, writes David Smail.

"We do not need our imagination to be policed and our feelings to be regulated by moralizing professionals who are no less victims than we of the ruthless forces which too often make our lives so bitter and our hopes so blighted." He invites us to see ourselves as characters whose experience of the world, however bizarre, gives us something true to say about it. "We have nothing to thank those people for who seek in one way or another to pass judgement on the validity of our experience. Our pain is not an indication of what is the matter with us, but of something that is hurting us from outside."

"It is sometimes helpful to suggest to people that, rather than thinking of themselves as social inadequates in need of adjustment, as containers of various undesirable components, they consider themselves as they would a character in a novel: as individual, certainly, but as interesting, as signifying something about the world and as having something to say about it."

Academic Travel Causes Global Warming

As a non-flying envirosceptic myself I am at least mildly entertained by this:

As the environmental writer and activist Mark Lynas argued in the New Statesman: "Probably the single most polluting thing you or I will ever do is step on a plane."

Ian Roberts and Fiona Godlee published an editorial in the British Medical Journal on the "carbon footprint of medical conferences." They determined that flights destined for the annual conferences of the European Respiratory Society and the American Thoracic Society put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than do 110,000 Chadians or 11,000 Indians in an entire year. The problem does not end with medical researchers. Scholars of all stripes travel to meet, greet, and, in one of our more ironic roles, preach the gospel of sustainability.

Supernatural religion

I need to say something about my take on religion and the supernatural. If by 'the supernatural' you mean unseen worlds, such as the spirit world, magical powers, astrology, parapsychology then I don't see this as an essential part of the religious view. Indeed I see religion as contaminated by an attachment to it, for most of these I regard as no more as an attempt to escape ordinary human responsibility for what happens in our lives.

But I do think that Simone Weil's distinction between a natural and a supernatural conception of God is important. If we believe in a natural God, the nature of the God we believe in will depend on our earthly fortunes. We will seek to establish a connection, indeed a causal and explanatory connection, between the nature of God and our life-events. If all our goods were stolen, our servants killed, our house and children destroyed, and a natural God, on whom we were causally dependent were responsible, it would not be possible to call such a God good and loving.

It would be difficult to imagine more tragic circumstances than those recounted in the Book of Job. If one attributes goodness to God by an inference from the events of one's life, it is difficult to see how Job could have avoided saying that God is evil. But instead Job asserts the goodness of God.

The faith of Job and Simone Weil is a supernatural faith. For them the meaning of life does not depend on how it goes.

A couple of things

A couple of things I heard on BBC Radio Four last week have been buzzing around in my brain since.

On Start The Week Tony Blair was criticised for declaring his intention to support George Bush in the Iraq invasion too readily. It was compared to Neville Chamberlain making all too clear in advance the lengths he was prepared to go in thwarting Adolf Hitler's international ambitions.

But, I shouted at the radio, Blair was Bush's ally and not his enemy. And far from being the one who might have put a brake on Bush, it was Blair who was the driver of the policy that decisive action be taken against the threat Saddam posed to world peace and security.

Later that day, in Beyond Belief, the panel shared some thoughts about the meaning of life. Dr Susan Blackmore confessed that having come to the view that life is entirely pointless, she feels a sense of liberation. Ernest Rea, who presents the programme and comes across as a very liberal protestant churchman, said he would find that conclusion intolerably nihilistic.


Blackmore seemed to me to represent a particularly benign form of nihilism. She seemed to be saying, 'life is pointless, so let's invest it with as much joy, beauty, significance, value as we can while we are here and have the chance' - I certainly subscribe enthusiastically to that. Another kind of nihilism all too commonly found today, namely 'life is pointless and therefore let's completely destroy civilisation as we know it without any regard for the needs and feelings of others who may have their own reasons, valid or otherwise, for disagreeing with us - now that does leave me feeling a little edgy.

That's better. Now there's a whole lot less buzzing going on!

Interruptions

My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered the interruptions were my work.

-Henri Nouwen (1932-1996)

Going On

Robert Frost reckoned to sum up everything he had learned in life in just three words: IT GOES ON. And so with blogging and this blog. It goes on. Fitfully. Desultorily. Sometimes pointlessly. But on it goes. And it has a readership. I do receive messages of appreciation and even encouragement. I can do no other. God help me.

Man Bites Dog!

At last, good news from Nigeria - but only if you're a carnivore.

Eating dog meat, that's it the flesh of a dead dog, gives you immunity from many diseases - and improves your sex life.

Leaves the dog feeling a bit limp though!

Don't criticise Islam

Holy Smoke, still swimming against the tide.

It didn’t attract much notice, but the General Assembly of the United Nations ended the year by passing a disgusting resolution protecting Islam from criticism of its human rights violations.

The resolution goes under the innocuous title "Combating defamation of religions" – but the text singles out "Islam and Muslims in particular". It expresses "deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism".

Wrongly associated? As of today, terrorists have carried out 10,277 separate attacks since September 11, 2001. They all belong to the same religion, and it ain’t Methodism.

The resolution (which of course makes no mention of the vicious persecution of Christians) was pushed through by the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which has been agitating for it for years. Naturally every Muslim country was among the 108 supporters, but it’s interesting to note how other countries lined up.

Cuba, China, North Korea and Zimbabwe all voted the same way. I’ll give you one guess.

They should lash us to our pews

Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?...Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?

The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.

—Annie Dillard, (1945 - ) from her book Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

How green was my valet?

Slavery was in fact the very first form of "Renewable Energy". Slavery was green! And, what is even better, slavery was sustainable - it lasted for thousands of years, until the ability to use fossil fuels gave us the liberty to feel bad about it. Whenever someone waxes eloquent about "Renewable Energy", think slavery. Because that is where wishful thinking is taking us.

- Commenter Alice.

The First Noel

Mr Noel Coward is supposed to have said that he loved criticism, just so long as it was unqualified praise. Now I've mixed feelings about that cove. The closet he was in was made of glass. Everybody knew. I have no need for a closet in that sense. All my sexual sins are straight. But my need of praise is probably greater, and certainly more secret, than Mr Cowards ever was.

At the same time I tend to think less of those I am able to impress. How could they be so easily fooled? It's not the best basis for friendship, which is one of the reasons I don't have a lot of friends. I see them either as lying to me, or as lacking perspicacity. The notion that they might just like me is beyond my credulity, though I really do get on with a few of them. Groucho Marx's complaint, that he would not wish to belong to a club that would have him as a member, is a self-defeating mantra with which I am well acquainted.

Out of the mouths of teenagers

From The New Statesman:

"Our local high school participated in a government sponsored science program called "GLOBE". They faithfully recorded air temperatures (high/low/noon) for 12 years, even during vacations and summer breaks. No matter how the numbers crunched- no evidence for rising temperatures. Curious, we tapped into the data for all the other school's data participating- no evidence. We chalked it up to the fact that data since 1994 isn't a good enough time period ( but it feels like it when your doing the work)."

Reasons, God and doing the right thing

More sanity from Norm:

"A.C. Grayling tells us that Tony Blair 'practically said' the following:

I believe in God and he told me to go to war in Iraq.

"Practically said, because in fact Blair didn't say that. Grayling is referring to the former prime minister's remarks as reported here or here or here. And it's an obviously prejudicial way of representing his decision; as if Blair had no reasons for going to war but just listened to the Big Guy and bing, that was it - He commanded and Blair obeyed. Others, likewise, make much of the fact that Blair sometimes says he did what he thought was right. The scandal! You might imagine that other people, in acting, don't do what they think is right, or that Tony Blair arrived at his decision about what he thought was right independently of the reasons he had for thinking so. Of course, Blair did have reasons for going to war in Iraq, reasons which he set out before parliament and the country. Doing what one thinks is right, and (for a person of faith) communing with God in coming to a decision, these are not necessarily processes above all reasoning; they can be, respectively, the outcome of and an aid to weighing reasons.

"All the wise souls, so many liberals amongst them, who wilfully misconstrue what Blair has said on this score reveal only their own failure to accept that there might have been reasons on the other side from the one they took. That is one measure of their liberalism."

From below ground

On my daily walkthink I was turning over in my mind how I see my place as a Christian priest in a modern world. In a word 'unattached'. I don't mean that in a denominational sense. I am happy to be called Anglican, albeit a member at-a-distance.

My trouble is that I have always been a rather idealistic priest with an ideal view of the Church. In other words, the Church that I could serve in does not exist. During my ministry the people who upset me the most, no - who crucified me with their vicious nastiness, were members of the Church, not outsiders. I appreciate, even relish, the opposition of genuine opponents, as well as the loyal opposition of friends. What I cannot bear is the extremes of 'family' behaviour that turn the local Church into a sub-human, let alone sub-christian culture.

Another thing I find tricky is representative office. The peculiar expectations that people have of the clergy has meant that being a priest in the Church has felt to me too much like being in a prison, sometimes a dungeon, and too often it has felt like being buried alive.

Sticks and Stones

Jonathan Derbyshire writes about how hard it is to avoid giving offense, since some people take offense simply because they are oversensitive, or because they harbor unjustified prejudices.

. . . there is no "distinctive performative verb for insulting"; that is, we don't say, "I insult you," whereas we do say, "I promise to you" or "I censure you." This means that insults are often ambiguous: One can be insulted without taking offense (the insult can, as Austin puts it, "misfire"), just as one can take offense where none is intended. There are . . significant implications here for restrictions on hate speech confined to profane or vulgar language. There can be "politely worded insults," after all, but to prohibit these as well would be to risk "stifling all controversial discourse." It is one thing to claim that words are also deeds and can do harm, and quite another confidently to specify the words that wound.

Terry Wogan on his morning radio show often describes people listening or watching TV, and waiting expectantly to be offended. Some of them have lived in parishes I have served as a priest. Then again Jesus was accused of blasphemy, and the early Christians were known as atheists. So what should we expect?

Sweet Reason

AC Grayling in defence of the "New Atheists".

. . . eventually, one hopes, those who persist in wanting to have an invisible friend, who continue believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, will do so in private, where such proclivities belong, along with wearing the opposite sex’s underwear. And we will all enjoy the Mass in B minor and Chartres Cathedral, as we all enjoy the Coliseum where the gladiators fought, and the murals of Pompeii, and the essays of the atheist David Hume, for their intrinsic merits, understanding the sociology of their provenance in due perspective, not needing to believe in the Norse or the Hindu or the Christian gods to do so, nor wishing to, nor – best of all – having to, for fear of the lit faggots at the foot of the stake.

'Tis the season to be jolly

Thaddeus Tremayne explains why we may soon have to find a way to put Santa Claus back into Christmas.

"A frosty reception awaits Santa Claus in Britain this year. It seems that the much-loved benefactor of children everywhere is, in fact, suspected of being guilty of a number of illegal practices.

"Greenpeace UK has accused Santa of 'environmental terrorism' by encouraging crass global consumerism without any effort to dispose of packaging and minimise waste. They have also attacked Santa for his record of pollution output and have demanded that he take steps to lower the carbon footprint of his activities. The complaint has prompted officials at the Department of the Environment to investigate Santa for possible breaches of the EU Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment Directive, which makes the producers of goods responsible for their environmentally sound disposal.

"Further trouble can be expected from the Information Commissioner who has pointed out that Santa may be in breach of the Data Protection Act by keeping records of all the country's children. In particular, his lists of who has been naughty and who has been nice constitutes a behavioural database which cannot be kept without the unambiguous, specific and informed consent of the subject.

"The Equality Commission has also weighed in with concerns about Santa's employment practices. His policy of only working with elves is clearly discriminatory and leaves him open to prosecutions by pixies, faeries and goblins who are not being considered for employment due to their race.

"The Department of Work and Pensions is also investigating the work practices of Santa on the basis that, over the Christmas period, he demands that his elvish workforce work around the clock in order to meet the seasonal demand. This is a clear and unequivocal flouting of the EU Working Time Directive which limits the working week to 48 hours and could give rise to a further prosecution.

"Santa's time-honoured habit of stopping for a drink of brandy in every household (and there are 25 million in the UK) will also bring trouble. According the Civil Aviation Authority, the alcohol limit for any pilot is 20 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood. Police forces nationwide have been put on alert for an overweight, elderly, bearded man at the controls of a nine-reindeer sleigh and, if spotted, to apprehend him immediately.

"Santa was not available for comment but a spokeself has said that Santa is seriously considering whether or not to fly over British airspace this year."

Kith and Kidney

"Barbara Ryder, 59, is one of only four people in the UK to have made an altruistic kidney donation."

Until September 2006 living donors were only allowed to give kidneys to those genetically linked, or related through marriage.

A question occurs to me. If these donations are truly anonymous, could they be used to aid the recovery of, say, a notorious child-murderer, and would that cause prospective donors to have second thoughts?

Heaven's Above

This Peter Sellers' film in which he plays a country parson appointed by mistake always touches me, especially the words he addresses to his disgruntled parishioners:

"What I have, you don't want. What you want, I can't give."

An epitaph for my ministry.

Living for kicks

From Faith and Theology, this by Reinaldo Arenas:

“The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream.”

Fair Trade?

James Bartholomew worries about the really poor.

"I have long been slightly resentful of "Fair Trade" labels because of the implicit suggestion that all other trade is unfair. The slogan has seemed anti-capitalist in making this implicit suggestion and since capitalism is the source of prosperity around the world and the reason that so much of humanity has been lifted out of absolute poverty, the suggestion seems to me both inappropriate and damaging.

"I have also suspected that the Fair Trade labelling could also more damage specific groups of poor people. Now, today, Andrew Alexander has provided an indication of how this could work:

"In fact, the Fair Trade doctrine is pernicious, for all its genuinely good intentions - such a common feature of "cures" for world poverty.

"The doctrine may bring satisfaction to a substantial bureaucracy and a sense of virtue to consumers, but it is positively harmful to the world's poorest.

"FT producer acquires his label by showing he is paying a "fair" wage, is treating his workforce well and ensuring that the children get education and medicines. Obviously, this favours those who have already moved out of the most basic poverty.

"The prospects for the very poor are thus made worse since they cannot compete on such terms. The right to undercut is the privilege of the poor - of poor individuals, poor countries, poor businesses. It should not be undermined.

"Moreover, to obtain a Fair Trade label, a producer must buy a licence and submit to inspection - in countries where corruption is notorious. To impose a licensing cost, a tax and a powerful bureaucracy on any producer hardly seems a natural way to help the poor. It is also a barrier to those wanting to start up on their own.

"Coffee production provides useful examples of cost. For coffee production co-operatives of under 100 workers, the Fair Trade people charge £1,500 for certification and annual renewal costs of well over £800. Since the average Kenyan income is under £200 a year, this is not negligible. The system also creates a significant travelling inspectorate."

Bethlehem and bigotry

Michael Gove continues to swim against the tide.

Eggnog lattes on sale at Starbucks? Feature-length M&S commercials? There’s one invariable sign that Christmas is almost upon us – a story about how Bethlehem is suffering at the hands of wicked Israel.

It has become almost as much a feature of seasonal journalism as stories about how Nativity plays are being subverted and commentaries on how commercialism is snuffing out the true meaning of the festival.

This year we’ve already had our first exercise in demonising Israel for its treatment of Bethlehem with the graffiti artist Banksy enjoying extensive coverage for his trip to decorate the security barrier near the town with his work. The message of Banksy’s work and the coverage it has generated is the same: oppressive Israel has snuffed the life out of the town where the Prince of Peace was born. Herod’s spirit lives on, even as the spirit of Christmas is struggling to survive.

The truth is very different. The parlous position of Palestinian Christians, indeed the difficult position of most Christians across the Arab world, is a consequence not of Israeli aggression but of growing Islamist influence. Israel goes out of its way to honour sites and traditions sacred to other faiths while the radicals who are driving Palestinian politics seek to create an Islamist state in which other faiths, if they survive at all, do so with the explicit subject status of dhimmis. But when it comes to Israel’s position in these matters it’s still a case of O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see them lie.

Moral Maze

Susan Hill asks:

At what point would you abandon an old friend who committed some serious offences against both the law and the moral code of almost everyone who is sane enough to have one? At the first crime ? The fifth ? When they went to prison ? Never ? At what point would you say enough, I cannot be associated with someone who has done this any longer ? And what would it take ? Murder ? Before that ?

Getting Jiggy

One of the things that got me down about being in the Church was the endless cycle of debates about this, that, and mostly the other, which over my lifetime never seemed to go anywhere only sometimes backwards.

The answer of course is to incorporate into the canon of scripture the writings of people who knew much more than Isaiah, Jesus, St Paul, and the gang about such issues as human sexuality.

A couple of examples from Gore Vidal:

• Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.
  • "Sex Is Politics" (1979)

• The reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist. The human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about.
  • "Sex Is Politics" (1979)

On global warming

My own position may be summed up as:

1. It's probably happening.

2. But there may be some benefits - like fewer deaths from hypothermia.

3. Some of it might have nothing to do with how humans behave.

4. We should be careful not to spend so much money on trying to stop it

happening that we fail to protect the vulnerable from its consequences by investing in such things as water conservation, health and education.

5. By being vegetarian, not flying, recycling, and not wasting fuel, I feel I do my bit for the environment.

6. I get sick of being lectured, by rich people who live in big houses, jet about and eat meat, about how much more I should be doing to save the earth. Incidentally, they mean 'save the earth for humans', the earth is a lot older than us and will survive anyway in one form or another.

Not about race

Martin Amis denies he is racist.

. . . it's not about race. It's about ideology.

If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are. If, on the other hand, some of them believe in Sharia and the Caliphate (and believe, too, that slaughtering the attendees of ladies' night at the Tiger Tiger discotheque is a good way of bringing that about), the numbers start to matter.

Advent

It's December and, as Nancy Banks-Smith writes:

About this time of year, you sense a trembling like railway lines shaking with the rumble of an oncoming express. Or, as it is known in soaps, the Christmas Special.

Michael knows best

The Bishop of Rochester offered yet another of his opinions to the BBC this week.

"I am sorry that Tony Blair feels that he could not talk about his faith in case people thought he was a nutter. Christian vision underlies all that is important about Britain: its laws, institutions, and values. If Blair had been able to relate his vision to his policies, we would have had a much more constructive social policy at home and principled policies abroad."

It seems to me that sounding like a nutter is the least of Mr Blair's worries. Some of my best friends are nutters, but none of them are as unbearably condescending as Nazir-Ali.

Not in my name

Bill Buford asks is it possible that meat is now openly enjoying a renaissance—that it’s finally cool to be a carnivore? He reviews The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

It has a coherent ideology, evident in the opening pages, "an eleven-photograph sequence that shows the author taking two cows to slaughter. The pictures are not sensational, but they are unflinching. The first is of the animals boarding a trailer, the floor covered with hay, backed up against a corral (a dirt road, a wooden gate, early-summer foliage, a green-diffused light, Fearnley-Whittingstall, in his familiar Wellies, coaxing them along). Then: a captive bolt gun pressed against the top of an animal’s head. Then: the animal on its side on a concrete floor, collapsed, blood starting to pool. It is raised by its hind legs and hung upside down to drain blood. It is skinned, a thick white fat being peeled off the body in a single rug piece. This is followed by a tug-of-war removal of the unwieldy, instantly expanding intestines, like a white plastic trash bag filled to bursting, and the sawing of the carcass in half, the moment when conventional butchering begins. There is little accompanying text, apart from a rhetorical aside:Why is it considered entertainment when a predator kills another animal in a wild-life film, Fearnley-Whittingstall wonders, “whereas the final moments of human predation of our farmed livestock are considered too disturbing and shameful to be made available even for information.” The reader understands the point. Meat comes from an animal—a banal connection that has been obscured by the way supermarkets prepare and present our food—and the animal has to be killed. If you fear the sight of a carcass, you shouldn't be eating from it."

Heavy Metal

"When I lived in England, not so long ago, one of the minor pleasures of rural life was walking across a couple of fields, along a public footpath through a copse, discovering a small medieval country church, and going inside to contemplate the divine for a few minutes. In those days, the churches were unlocked. They’re not anymore. Presumably there were local lads who would steal from the Lord even then, but not a significant segment of the population who targeted houses of worship. So today there’s wire mesh over the beautiful (one assumes) stained glass to stop thieves pinching the lead from the windows. It’s a small loss, but a telling one. The police have no leads, and the buildings have no lead. Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it was stolen last Thursday."

- Mark Steyn, on escalating metal thefts in Britain.

Two Faces

Holy Smoke has this comment on Rowan Williams' uncanny ability to miss the point.

"Christians in Indonesia, Africa and the Middle East are being beaten, imprisoned, tortured and killed in the name of Allah. Moderate Muslims in Britain desperately need to be made aware of this situation.

"And what has the Archbishop of Canterbury given them? Yet another sermon on the evils of Yankee imperialism."

At the same time Kate Herbert in Education Guardian has been teaching primary school children about Henry VIII.

However . . .

"Many of them didn't understand the situation of Lady Jane Grey, having to choose between her religion and her life. One suggested that money is as important now as religion was then: they would rather change religion than give up money, homes and toys. Not the Muslim children. They wouldn't swap their religion for an easier life, even if it meant ruling the world for the next nine months."

I thought of my little grandson who would make serious sacrifices to get to see his wrestling heroes knocking ten sorts of **** out of each other but, as the child of a vicar's daughter, has no obvious sense of religious commitment whatsoever.

And then last week there was the TV programme Never Mind The Buzzcocks during which a member of the panel, commenting on David Bowie's performance in The Last Temptation of Christ, said it was so wooden that Jesus Christ should have been nailed to it. We all laughed. Minutes later an awkward attempt was made to tease another panellist, Germaine Jackson, a Muslim, about his beliefs which ended in a half-apologetic withdrawal when the look on his face signalled obvious displeasure.

What is is about Islam that so many otherwise outspoken people are reluctant to criticise, let alone poke fun at, it? In order to maintain the multiculturalist ethos are we in danger of creating a double standard under which the west, modernity and liberal democracy are always on the defensive? I feel increasingly uneasy.

Human Rights

Simon Deng, a former jihad slave and now a human rights activist, has written a remarkable protest to Bishop Desmond Tutu who has accused Israel of ‘apartheid’.

"The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. I know because I write this from Jerusalem where I have seen Arab mothers peacefully strolling with their families – even though I also drove on Israeli roads protected by walls and fences from Arab bullets and stones. I know Arabs go to Israeli schools, and get the best medical care in the world. I know they vote and have elected representatives to the Israeli Parliament. I see street signs in Arabic, an official language here. None of this was true for blacks under Apartheid in Tutu’s South Africa.

I also know countries that do deserve the apartheid label: My country, Sudan, is on the top of the list, but so are Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. What has happened to my people in Sudan is a thousand times worse than Apartheid in South Africa. And no matter how the Palestinians suffer, they suffer nothing compared to my people. Nothing. And most of the suffering is the fault of their leaders. Bishop Tutu, I see black Jews walking down the street here in Jerusalem. Black like us, free and proud.

Tutu said Israeli checkpoints are a nightmare. But checkpoints are there because Palestinians are sent into Israel to blow up and kill innocent women and children. Tutu wants checkpoints removed. Do you not have doors in your home, Bishop? Does that make your house an apartheid house? If someone, Heaven forbid, tried to enter with a bomb, we would want you to have security people ‘humiliating’your guests with searches, and we would not call you racist for doing so. We all go through checkpoints at every airport. Are the airlines being racist? No.

Yes, the Palestinians are inconvenienced at checkpoints. But why, Bishop Tutu, do you care more about that inconvenience than about Jewish lives? …Slaughter and genocide and slavery are lashing Africans right now. Where are you for Sudan, Bishop Tutu? You are busy attacking the Jewish state. Why ?"

Scripture Stricture

I've always thought the Bible a dangerous book. Christopher Evans, who taught me New Testament Studies as an undergraduate, himself wrote a book entitled. 'Is Holy Scripture Christian?' But to find such a spiritual and intellectual giant as Kierkegaard calling for a ban set my eyebrows soaring skywards.

“Fundamentally a reformation which did away with the Bible would now be
just as valid as Luther’s doing away with the Pope…. The Bible Societies, those
vapid caricatures of missions, societies which like all companies only work with
money and are just as mundanely interested in spreading the Bible as other
companies in their enterprises: the Bible Societies have done immeasurable harm. Christendom has long been in need of a hero who, in fear and trembling before God, had the courage to forbid people to read the Bible. That is something quite as necessary as preaching against Christianity.”

DARLING SENDS 25 MILLION BANK RECORDS TO NIGERIAN DOCTOR

According to The Daily Mash Chancellor Alistair Darling has admitted sending millions of bank account details to a Nigerian doctor who contacted him earlier this week.

The Chancellor told the House of Commons he had received a 'very moving email' from a Dr Kwantana in Lagos who is hoping to begin a new life in Canada.

Mr Darling said: "Naturally he wanted to transfer his assets to his new home and asked for my assistance."

In keeping with our manifesto commitment of helping Africans to help themselves, I agreed to send him 25 million bank account details.

"In exchange for my role in this surprisingly simple transaction he has offered a generous commission which I believe will begin to offset the £25bn I have given to Northern Rock and which - we are all now starting to realise - is never, ever going to be paid back.

"Not in a million years. No siree. Not a snowball's chance in hell."

Mr Darling added: "Our new relationship with this gutsy Nigerian not only raises Britain's standing in the international community, but will deliver real value for the British taxpayer. I commend it to the House."

The Kwantana email in full:

Hello dear lovely friend and I am introducing myself at you as Dr Jericho Kwantana MD.

Most recently since birth I have been leaving Nigeria to start my new life in Canadia but due to and because of international bank lawings, good Nigerian doctors like I and myself are unable to be allowed to make huge and large inter-continental money transferings to the Bank of Torontoro.

Dearest lovely friend, I have in a prized Zurich account-hole waiting 21 billions dollar money. I am able and ready to transfer this cash bomb to you and if able to hold and send to my wife in Canadia, I will make the kind offer to you of full 10 percentage of totals.

I hope with sincerity and much enthusiasms that you are able to look kindly upon my Canadian ambitions. One last and final pleading to you: In order for transactions to overtake speedily, I require that you send to me very kindly the sort code and account number of every British person.


With the kindness and prayers of Jesus,

Your Friend Jericho Kwantana

Joke of the Day

An English professor told her students that there would be no excuse for not showing up for their final exam, except for serious injury, illness, or a death in the student's immediate family. A smartass jock in the back of the room asked, "What about extreme sexual exhaustion?" The entire class did its best to stifle their laughter. When silence was restored, the teacher smiled sympathetically at the student, shook her head, and sweetly said, "You can write with your other hand."

Do you know who I am?

I can actually remember an Anglican bishop who was known for thus addressing an obviously unimpressed young antagonist.

You may have heard of the grey haired lady who climbed three flights of stairs, opened a carved mahogany door and walked into an exotically furnished reception room. A gong sounded and out of a cloud of incense appeared a brunette eastern beauty: 'Do you wish to meet with His Omnipotence, the wise, all-knowing, all-seeing guru, Maharishi Naru?' 'Yeah', said the old woman, 'Tell Irving his mama is here from the Bronx.'

It's the easiest thing in the world to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. Spouses and mothers can help prevent it. Unselfconscious humility is rare. It can't be an achievement, because to try for it is to miss it altogether. It's a grace. It's free, but by no means cheap. It goes with a certain honesty and transparency. I have also found that it's usually accompanied by a deal of courage.

Being afraid

It is distressing to read in The Times that this man, the award-winning artist Grayson Perry, is consciously avoiding comment on radical Islam in his otherwise highly provocative body of work because of the threat of reprisals.

‘I’ve censored myself,’ Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. ‘The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.’

Look after yourself

During a past bout of crippling anxiety I was urged to look after myself. I'd heard this before in the form, "Look after yourself, because if you don't do that you won't be able to look after anyone else." But, perhaps with brutal honesty, my counsellor offered a different ending viz "Look after yourself, for if you don't, nobody else will."

To this day I struggle with the bleakness of this: sometimes believing it true, and then again not being so sure.

From the Chief Rabbi

'You know that in the middle of our synagogue services we have what we call the reading of the Torah- the reading of a scroll- a section of the pentateuch and some Rabbis rule that when this is to be read you stand and others rule that when its read you sit. A stranger came to a new community one year in America and went to the local synagogue that Sabbath. It was wonderful- everyone was welcoming and the praying was wonderful until it came to this bit in the middle of the Torah reading of the scrolls.

'To his amazement and horror half the congregation stood, half the congregation sat and they started yelling and screaming at each other. The people that were standing were saying, “ignoramuses, don’t you know when the Torah is being read you have to stand” and the people who were sitting were saying to the ones who were standing, “Heretics! Don’t you know when the Torah is being read you have to sit?” This crazy pandemonium carries on; the reading comes to an end, peace reigns and etcetera. The same thing happens the next week and the week after. Finally, the stranger cannot stand it any longer. The town is currently without a rabbi so he travels to the nearest town where there is a rabbi, a distinguished rabbinical scholar and he is ushered into his presence. An old, wise, grey bearded scholar surrounded by books.

'He says, “Rabbi, I have a question for you. Tell me, when the Torah is being read, do you stand?”

'And the sage stroked his beard and said, “No, that is not the tradition.” So he said, “Well tell me Rabbi, in that case, when the Torah is being read, do you sit?” And the sage shook his head and said, “No, that is not the tradition.” And the man said, “Rabbi, you’ve got to help me here. Because in my Synagogue, half of them stand and half of them sit and they all shout out nasty names to one another.” The Rabbi nodded and he said, “Yeah, that is the tradition.”

Get it sorted

During a weekend visit from my step-daughter we were told that we should 'get sorted' our problem with not wanting to go on long journeys by land sea or air. We both feel the same way, my wife and I, and it doesn't usually matter to anyone else, except for those who consider it an absurd existential waste to be free and able to travel the world and not actually to do it. However, whilst knowing our desperate desire to move within a fairly short radius, the said step-daughter has booked her wedding in Las Vegas. Her mum of course wants to be at her only daughter's wedding but, like me, has something like a mental block about flying to Vegas. Step-daughter has set her heart on the full works. Irresistible object - immovable force. It could only end in tears. And it did.

Is there something wrong with me? with us? with this not wanting to go and be somewhere else?

I love my life - my ordinary, daily, fairly routine life. If I could live forever I would go on doing the kinds of things I am doing now. I'm never bored - confused often, spoilt for choice occasionally, frustrated sometimes - but never bored. I find life, people, things, endlessly fascinating. I don't need to go anywhere else, or travel far, or go on any kind of 'journey'. I don't believe those who advocate self-improvement.

I'm deeply contented with my life as it is, where it is, doing the kinds of things I'm doing. All I need is someone to share it with. I have that someone.

Does this sound unconscionably smug? I'm sorry. Maybe it's my age, but more than ever being 'at home' is important. It's very nearly enough.

Putting on stones

I guess Perry de Havilland speaks for all of us in this furious reaction to the interview given by Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari to the Telegraph. Dr Bari is head of the Muslim Council of Britain which is usually credited as representing moderate Muslim opinion. God help us.

Is stoning ever justified? "It depends what sort of stoning and what circumstances," Dr Bari replies. "When our prophet talked about stoning for adultery he said there should be four [witnesses] - in realistic terms that's impossible. It's a metaphor for disapproval.

I see...

Don't worry, dear, what we are about to do to you is just a metaphor

It is pictures like that which fill my mind with homicidal rage. The Muslims partially burying this Muslim woman, in preparation for her being stoned to death in accordance with the Koran, all deserve nothing less than a bullet in their brains, to be put down like rabid dogs. And when I hear people like Dr. Bari describing this practice as a "metaphor for disapproval" rather than a method of theocratic execution, my feelings towards him move from mere disagreement into transcendent loathing. Take a moment and really look at that fucking picture. According to Dr. Bari, if there were four witnesses, that is perfectly okay then. Try getting your head around that.

And so when a man who cannot bring himself to unequivocally condemn such barbarity tells us that we have anything whatsoever to learn from what he sees as Islam, it would be fair to say "I do not think so". As I discovered in Bosnia in the 1990's, being a Muslim and accepting the norms of western post-Enlightenment civilisation is entirely possible... 'Muslim' becomes more of an ethnic identity rather than a religious one, in which you just have to ignore large chunks of the Koran or 'interpret' them into something harmless (and face it, there are parts of the Old Testament most Christians prefer to gloss over too). The key is that the Bosnian Muslims became more and more secular (i.e. less religious), more western, the west did not become more like them.

Conversation

From the Guardian problem page:

"Almost every relationship problem that flounces on to these pages and collapses in an overwrought heap could be solved with one simple response: talk to each other. Bloody hell, it's not rocket science."

It's an ill wind

The first divorce directly related to the September 11th terrorist attack has been filed in New York. It appears that a guy with an office on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Centre spent the morning at his girlfriend's appartment with his phone turned off. Needless to say, he wasn't watching TV either. When he turned his phone back on again at about 11am, it rang immediately. It was his hysterical wife, "Are you OK? Where are you?" He said, "What do you mean? I'm in my office of course."

From Blackburn Diocesan Website

Announcement from Bishop's House
We are sad to announces the deaths of Rev Nicholas Clapp on 11 October.