Brian Cox

It’s hard to escape nowadays the figure of Professor Brian Cox on our television screens. The universe he describes is so old it is timeless, and so vast it is infinite.

The planet we are on, one of countless masses hurtling and spinning into an ever-expanding void, feels like home until we begin to give it a second thought.

Did it begin in time, or with time? Did time exist before the universe, and if so what existed before the universe existed?

And this void we (the universal ‘we’) are expanding into, how big is it? Does it have an end? Or an outside?

But I have a greater puzzle to share with you. If you find these questions disturbing to the point where you feel compelled to spend much of your conscious life probing and analysing them, and if they so upset you that they find a place in your everyday conversation, you may be considered a little eccentric if you are lucky, and just plain bonkers if you are not. Whereas if the things you want to probe, analyse and talk about endlessly are games, sport, celebrities, music, entertainment and other things of little or no importance, you will be hosted and toasted as ‘one of the best’ and, above all, sane.

A definition of sanity then seems to be: Not being disturbed by what is disturbing.

Book Group

Ours has been going for years. We meet monthly at our house. Always we eat cake, talk about a book we have chosen to read and usually a couple of poems that I have found relevant to the book, and generally discuss all manner of things broadly cultural that we have recently encountered. There are six regular attenders.

Last night we reviewed Us by David Nicholls. None of us liked it that much. We found the characters hard to sympathise with.

One of my favourite quotes is: Other people’s sex lives are a little like other people’s holidays: you’re glad that they had fun but you weren’t there and you don’t necessarily want to see the photos.

Here are the poems. The first conveys the rather cynical view of life and relationships we found in Us, the second presents a sweeter picture. Enjoy them.

Self's the Man
by Philip Larkin

Oh, no one can deny
That Arnold is less selfish than I.
He married a woman to stop her getting away
Now she's there all day,

And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
She takes as her perk
To pay for the kiddies' clobber and the drier
And the electric fire,

And when he finishes supper
Planning to have a read at the evening paper
It's Put a screw in this wall -
He has no time at all,

With the nippers to wheel round the houses
And the hall to paint in his old trousers
And that letter to her mother
Saying Won't you come for the summer.

To compare his life and mine
Makes me feel a swine:
Oh, no one can deny
That Arnold is less selfish than I.

But wait, not so fast:
Is there such a contrast?
He was out for his own ends
Not just pleasing his friends;

And if it was such a mistake,
He still did it for his own sake,
Playing his own game.
So he and I are the same,
Only I'm a better hand
At knowing what I can stand!



The Orange
by Wendy Cope

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

Try again

I have decided to have another go at regular blogging.

Look out.

Hell on earth

"Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow."

- David Hume (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion)

To which I would add the reflection that when writers and artists seek to depict what hell would be like they draw on human experiences with which we are already familiar. Heaven is more often described as beyond our imagining.

Staying home

We're all going on a summer holiday, sang Cliff Richard. Not us. Not really. Not this year. Just a few nights away visiting distant family members. But hardly a holiday.

My wife remembers asking herself as a girl what holidays are for. What are you meant to do? Where to go wasn't a problem then. Parents decided. If lucky, you were taken.

As a boy I always knew what holidays were for. Escape, in a word. Escape from routine, especially the dreaded routine of school attendance. I never liked school. To wake up free of that ghastly obligation - what bliss!

At my age novelty makes me feel sad. Why have I never done this, been here, before? Revisiting old acquaintances, places, experiences is more satisfying. Moreover since retiring from parish ministry I have nothing and nobody to escape from. My centre of gravity (and how I love gravity) is here at home.

On Not Being Asked

I wasn’t asked

Whether I would like

To be born.

I should have been.

It was that important,

Awkward, Painful.

I cried, I’m told.

No wonder.

Loud, and then louder.

If only I had known

What was to come,

But by the time it did

I had learned

To count my blessings,

To look on the bright side

Of life

That was given to me

Without asking.

Something to believe in

That's what I need: something to believe in. 

The big question for me about Christianity is not just "What is the Good News?" but "What could possibly be Good News in a world that entails such terrible and gratuitous suffering?" What, in other words, would make human life worth living in spite of all that is painful and wretched about it - not only worth living but worth propagating?

What I come up against whenever I try to answer this question is not only my own suffering, nor even just the sufferings of others. What disturbs my attempts to make light of, rationalize, or avoid thinking about our adult traumas are the tears of pain and grief on the faces of children encountered in the flesh and depicted daily on page and screen, innocent and uncomprehending.

Woody Allen is quoted as saying that if God exists he'd better have a good excuse. But can an excuse, even the best, be good enough? And is anything better than an excuse imaginable? Is Good News possible?

We're not going

We're all going on a summer holiday, sang Cliff Richard. Not us. Not really. Perhaps a few nights away visiting our more distant family members. But hardly a holiday.

My wife remembers posing the question as a girl - What are holidays for? What are you meant to do? Where to go wasn't the problem back then. It was for parents to decide. If lucky, you were simply taken..

As a boy I always knew what holidays were for. In a word - Escape. Escape from routine, especially the dreaded daily routine of school attendance. I never liked school. To wake up in the morning free of that ghastly obligation. What bliss!

But now, at my age, novelty makes me sad; leaves me asking why I have not done this, been here, before. Revisiting places and experiences, even reading again much-thumbed books, is more satisfying. In particular, since retirement from parish ministry I have nothing and nobody to escape from. My centre of gravity (and how I love gravity) is here at home.

A sober contemplation is that one day I will indeed be taken, bodily removed, from my home and the blessed company of those who share it with me, for a long, long holiday, an endless rest. Too long. Too soon.

It's harder when you're old

One of the things I've noticed about being old - did I tell you I've just turned seventy? - is how hard it is to avoid the company and conversation of those who only want to talk about their ailments and their holidays. Lacking curiosity about the first, and having little appetite for the second, can put you at a social disadvantage. 

Which is why we started our own Book Group.

I've always been a non-fiction type myself but in the group we have been mostly reading novels. I'm presently convalescing after a bout of exposure to Erin Morgenstern's 'The Night Circus'. Reading it I found was like being caught up in a magical whirlwind. As with the circus of the book, leaving it you are left wondering whether the dream is on the inside or the outside.

Some religious traditions seem to recognise that the external world may be hallucinatory. European philosophers of the Enlightenment acknowledged as much. The imaginative work of writers like Morgenstern awaken us to a strange reality we too easily take for granted.

Contrarian

I figure I must be one of these. I wasn't even sure I hadn't made the word up.

You know how St Paul describes his approach to Christian witness as becoming all things to all people - to the Jews a Jew, to the weak as weak - in order to win people for the gospel? Well I seem to swim instinctively against the tide. I suppose that means I'm anti-Pauline.

Whenever I'm in the company of people who are sure of themselves and present a united front or a unified view of anything I just automatically want to oppose them. With other clergy I'm anti-clerical. In the company of Christians or other religious people I become the most sceptical secularist. When I'm with atheists, new or old, I want to be an apologist for God. I'm left-wing in deliberation with right-wingers, but to like-minded lefties I can come across a bit 'Ayn Randy'.

And those closest to me will tell you that I am always and everywhere vehemently anti-homophobic. Trouble is I'm also anti-homophobia-phobic - and that's when it starts to get complicated.

Something in common

I sometimes think that my main reason for becoming vegetarian was to have something in common with Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Gautama Buddha, Pythagoras, Plato, Leonardo Da Vinci, Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, George Bernard Shaw and Albert Einstein.

Or was it to be different from most other people?

As if just not wanting to have anything to do with the cruel and wasteful way we farm and slaughter animals isn't a good enough reason in itself.

Suburb of the Soul

"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again ... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul."

I have no context for this quotation from the work of J G Ballard. All I know is that it touched me in a way that brought me back to blogging. Whether the effect will prove lasting, time will tell.

How the world has changed in my lifetime. What spectacular advances have been made since the birth of my grandparent in the nineteenth century. But only in the sense that things - the same things - have got bigger, smaller, faster, more accessible, more measured. There are a few more things that we know, and rather a lot more we can do, within the compass of an imagination hardly stretched or challenged by these most recent accretions.

On Midwives

An item on Breakfast TV this morning seemed to be predicated on two assumptions: 1. It's good to have babies. 2. It's good to have as many babies as you want.

The item was about cuts in the midwifery service and in childcare. Of course these will not result, as they should, in fewer babies being born, because we don't first check that resources are in place and then go ahead and have babies. We have them anyway - because babies are unconditionally a good thing.

Apologies for using the word "we" a bit loosely here - like Neville Chamberlain when he announced to the British people in 1939 that "we" are at war with Germany. 

Pulpitphobia

I suffered from this all my working life, which for a parish priest was a quite crippling handicap. It was like agoraphobia which is an anxiety disorder, often precipitated by the fear of having a panic attack in a setting from which there is no easy means of escape. For me that setting was a pulpit, especially a pulpit which was both elevated and restricting, where I could feel trapped and exposed in equal measure.

The sense of panic was not mitigated by the belief that the message I delivered was soul-saving truth. I learned this in my youth from the Reverend Father F W Osborn who preached as if our eternal life depended on it. It felt like that to me too as I hung on his every word, and so I could never rid myself of the feeling that someone just might be listening to me with the same intensity of expectation.

Ways of reading

They each read different books. Not just different - of different kinds.

She was a lover of fiction; he of non-fiction. She always had at least one novel on the go - sometimes more. He was reading, or re-reading, or referring to, works of philosophy, theology and psychology, to inform and guide his own thinking and experience.

He was typically reading aloud from his books, enthusing, seeking to share the insights he had gained, or thought he had gained, and relate them to people and circumstances they knew. She was more often lost in her books - lost to him even - as if for now in a closed and complete and separate world - self-contained, set at a safe distance from duty and the mundane.

He read books as he had learned to do bible study in church groups - seeking wisdom, guidance, searching for meaning and new ways of being - listening for a voice, a message that would change his life for the better, show him who he was and who he might become.

She read, and was charmed, amused, entertained, distracted, educated and informed. 

See them now on a quiet afternoon. Two people. Two open books.

Something greater

When people talk about believing in something greater than themselves they are usually taken to be alluding to God and religion. But why? Lots of things are greater than you, me and the human race - the known universe and everything that exists, to name but two. We seem strangely reluctant to concede this. In fact most religious teaching is not about something greater than ourselves. It's about other people like ourselves, and how we should deal with them, respect them, take care of them, love them. It's about other people as the object of our ultimate concern.

The Christian message that I was brought up with and came to teach and preach myself was something very like 'God is Other People'. In my declining years, as I drift into irrelevance, this begins to feel constricting and the thirst for 'something greater' remains.

Order! Order!

One of the things I noticed when I was taking anti-depressant medication was that I was able to see, hear, attend to and do one thing at a time. This will surprise people who suppose that they know me. They have probably never seen me do more than one thing at a time - anytime.

But that’s only partly true. Inside my head - in my mind and imagination - I am so busy. Voices. Ideas. Views. Opinions. Perspectives. Meanings. Interpretations. Experiments. Crowding in. Swirling around. It’s like the House of Commons - only noisier.

And it’s all very distracting, and makes it nearly impossible to give proper undivided attention to the immediate task. Simply reading a novel requires a major effort of concentration. Having a serious conversation, the only kind I really care to have, can be exhausting.

Medication, like Mr Speaker in the Commons, can restore order, but some of the side-effects are ruinous.

I had to find a better way.

Death in January

Although I have no plans to die at all, I did find myself looking back upon my father's untimely death. Untimely because I never wanted to lose him, but also for me out of season - for me if not for him.

DEATH IN JANUARY

I'd rather not
Die in January
Like my Dad

If you or You don't mind

It might have been alright for him
Dying in January
It gave him one last chance
To enjoy Christmas and
Have a good time
Enjoy a drink or two
And remember better, younger days
Of merriment he knew

For him it would have been
like a bonus
a golden handshake

For me
To die in January
Would be more like
Having to endure the torture
Before the coup de grace.

What have I done?

If it's true that I do not really know what my past has been, because all I have is a collection of memories, none of which I can verify for sure . . . 

If I do not know the significance of what I did in the past, nor have any way of telling whether I could have done otherwise . . .

If moreover in making a judgement about what I have done I do not know how many relevant factors there may be which I did not know, and still do not know, and may never know . . .

How on earth - or later in heaven - can I be held accountable for my life and what I have made of it? And why does the Church in its liturgy invite me on every possible occasion to own and confess and repent my individual wrongdoing?

Individual responsibility may be no more than a necessary fiction. But if so what kind of necessity is this?

In Praise of Money

Celia Green argues that a very good analytical case could be made out for the desirability of money, on the most idealistic grounds - but never is.

The charms of money are distinctly under-represented in literature. There are no songs or poems extolling its virtues.

She offers this:

Money which soothes my woes

Faithful and never-failing support when all else turns against me

Constant and reliable when men betray and deride me

Ever-attentive to my smallest wish

Providing me with a fortress of refuge much better furnished than

my enemies would wish me to have

Respecting all my needs which I could not possibly explain to a

social worker or my GP. . . .