The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence

Goodbye, for now | New Book

I think the time is right to drop the curtain on ‘Signs of Emergence’  / ‘The Complex Christ’ / ‘Der Jesus Faktor’ and move on. The idea of this blog has been to give some space to extend the ideas presented in that book, and, personally, I feel that’s been successful.

But you shouldn’t keep flogging a dead horse. There have to be periodic moments of silence / jubilee / death / hidden-ness if the moments of speech / action / life are to have any meaning.

So I’m going to stop this blog, and spend some time working on a follow-up book.

The idea, as it stands in various sketches in my note books, is for an extended meditation on the idea of ‘the other,’ leaning left on the poetry/theology continuum, and hopefully drawing on the stories of some fantastic people I’ve met.

I’ve been pondering Jesus’ summary of the Law to ‘love God, and love your neighbour as yourself,’ and re-phrasing it as ‘love the other, love The Other.’ The other within the Self, the other within our communities, The Other that is immanent and beyond all… It strikes me as the core of everything we are about as people of faith. Indeed, since the birth of consciousness, it’s at the core of everything we are about as people.

And yet, with the continuing rise in anti-social behaviour, teenage stabbings in London, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, theological schism, global terror threats and clinical depression, it seems that in our fluid, multicultural, melting-pot, border-less, easyJet world, we are further from accepting the other than ever before.

Yet, despite all this. I think there are signs of hope. And we need to be those signs of hope. Personally, communally, locally, corporeally, we need to be communities that have this love for God and other at our core.

No, I haven’t got a publishing deal, or even spoken to anyone about one. I’m not sure how much that matters, to be honest. I’m just going to spend some time thinking and writing. And if you have any thoughts you’d like to throw in on the theme, any good books to read, do get in touch, come for a beer, leave a comment, or whatever.

Doubtless I’ll be around online again at some point… No idea when. But you’ll find out ;-)

Fare well, for now. And thanks. It’s been fun.

We Turn From the Light to See

"We turn from the light to see."

Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows.

Technorati: Paterson

The Long Road | Restorative Theatre

I went to see The Long Road at the Soho Theatre on Tuesday night. It's a new play by Shelagh Stephenson based on her experience of working with Synergy Theatre and The Forgiveness Project in some of the UK's toughest gaols. It's been directed by Synergy founder (and brother of Jonny) Esther Baker, and follows the story of a family grieving the loss of their son, needlessly stabbed to death at a bus stop, and their move towards meeting the killer.

The people who know best say she's done a fantastic job:

"Esther Baker’s impeccably acted production confirms the play’s suggestion that restorative justice is far from a soft option."****’
Sarah Hemming, The Financial Times

"Rare and remarkable, this is drama that cries out for attention, and richly rewards it... The acting is tremendous."
Charles Spencer, The Telegraph

And she has. When a play leaves with questions about your own life and attitudes towards living it, and challenges you to re-think, you know it's proper theatre. What the hell would I do if it was my son who was stabbed to death? I'm afraid to even peer into that abyss, and hope I never have to, but for those in and around the criminal justice system, that's what they have to do. And what society demands they do in response to that does affect us all.

If you're in town, go and see it. With great talks around the issues before each Tuesday performance. On til 5th June.

Technorati: Esther Baker | The Long Road | Synergy

"The Man Who Betrays God is the Stronger of the Two"

I've been reading some Yeats recently. In his short play, Calvary, Jesus is confronted by Judas as he walks with his cross:

Judas: I betrayed you because you seemed all powerful.

Jesus: My Father,
Even if now I were to whisper it,
Would break the world in his miraculous fury
To set me free.

Judas: And there is not one man in the wide world who is not in your power?

Jesus: My Father put all men into my hands.

Judas: That was the very thought that drove me wild.
I could not bear to think that you had but to whistle
And I must do; but after that I thought,
'Whatever man betrays Him will be free';
And life grew bearable again. And now
Is there a secret left that I do not know,
Knowing that if a man betrays a God
He is the stronger of the two?

It's a strange play, from a strange poet, but this passage seems to encompass all the problems of free will and divine omnipotence so beautifully. I've yet to read Pete's new book - funny, my complimentary copy just doesn't seem to be forthcoming (the measly git) - but I wonder if we can see some of that fidelity in Judas' thoughts here: subverting God, precisely because God 'seemed all powerful'... and in that bizarre power-struggle of free will and knowledge, God allowing himself to be subverted. As I write in Signs of Emergence, I think Judas has been wrongly tarred by Christianity, and actually can serve as a very helpful, if troubled, mirror onto our own misconstructions of God and God's power.

Technorati: Jesus | Judas | Calvary | Rollins | Yeats

Clinton? Obama? McCain? This Guy Gets My Vote...

Thanks so much to Shane and his people for sending me a copy of his new book, written with Chris Haw, Jesus for President. It's gorgeous to look at and hold, fabulously designed, and perfectly balanced between seriousness and playfulness... starting with the title. Why can't every Christian book be like this? I just hope people get it, and read it thoroughly as they think about the coming US elections.

Worst case scenario: Shane gets asked to be Obama's advisor on something. As Campolo is quoted in the book: "Mixing the church and state is like mixing ice cream and cow manure . It may not do much to the manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream." Stay pure and creamy Shane!

Check http://www.jesusforpresident.org for details / reviews / news.

Technorati: Claiborne | Don Carson | Jesus for President | Politics | Poverty | Power | puppy

Saviour Sibling?

A bill regarding the use of human embryos is currently passing through parliament at the moment, and, naturally, causing a huge amount of debate. One piece on the BBC caught my ear the other morning - a Bishop was asked what he thought about the creation of so-called 'saviour siblings': human beings created for the sole purpose of saving another. And I thought, this is going to be interesting, how is a Christian going to respond to that?

He didn't go there of course, but it remains a difficult area of theology: is Jesus just a 'saviour sibling'?

Technorati: Embryo | Saviour Sibling

Jaime Lerner ¦ Stealth and the City ¦ The City is Not the Self

Thanks to Helen of Urban Practitioners for sending me this article in The Guardian a couple of weeks back about Jaime Lerner and his radical environmental policies that have transformed the Brazilian city of Curitiba.

I say environmental in the truest sense: he is an architect by trade, and is concerned with the built environment, as well as carbon footprints.

What is particularly interesting was the necessity of stealth and speed: with political turmoil and dictatorial governance, he was never quite sure how long he had before his authority as mayor was swept away, nor how long it would be before someone tied his ideas up in red tape. Hence:

"We had to do things quickly because next week we might not be here anymore [because of the dictatorship].' And you have to be quick to avoid your own bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything. We built the opera house in two months, the botanical gardens in three months, Niemeyer's museum in five months. We transformed the city's main street into a pedestrian area in 72 hours. It wasn't that we were chasing after records - it was necessity."

There's something of the trickster about him, and as London comes to its own mayoral elections, it's going to be interesting who people plump for. One wonders if Lerner would have won the popular vote; in the case of Ken Livingstone, many of his policies for London - like the congestion charge - have been wildly unpopular, and yet have been very successful and vital to the city's environmental awareness.

Einstein once said 'the environment is everything that isn't me', and we might re-phrase that as 'the city is not about the self.' It's worth holding this in mind whenever we vote. Are we voting for our own pockets, or for the common - and more difficult - good?

No, This is Not a Joke | Yes, This is a Post About Bestiality

Or, perhaps more accurately, a post about liberty. An article I read over the weekend was arguing that the Church has let people down by shying away from theologies of sex. So I thought I'd dip my toe in...

Good to hear Peter Tatchell on the radio this morning, talking about the protests over the Olympic Torch in London yesterday, and the extraordinary story of his citizen's arrests on Robert Mugabe. I've heard him in person twice; I expect it's more to do with my journey than his, but Peter is someone I have increasingly warmed to over the years. At Greenbelt his life of extreme simplicity and strong vision came across very well. His attempts to force the church into facing up to issues of sexuality are well known, and some might disagree with his methods, but he has equally done huge amounts of justice work in other areas, notably the citizen's arrests on Robert Mugabe (for which he was beaten unconscious by his guards, live on TV). He has also be the focus of huge amounts of hatred, with his life in constant threat.

However, I digress. The second time I saw him was at a debate in school. The question I asked him there was about the liberalisation of sexuality. Over the course of (western) history, things that were previously taboo have become acceptable, things that have previously been punishable by the law have now become protected by the law. So, I wondered, though it's not really my cup of tea, did he foresee a day in the future when bestiality would become acceptable?

[The all-time most read story on the BBC's site is that of a Sudanese man who was forced by his tribal elders to marry a goat after being found having sex with it. The goat has since died, for reasons unknown, so the man is a free agent again. Bestiality is clearly a minority interest, but something in the wider consciousness is fascinated by it.]

The heart of what I was trying to get at was whether there was some idyllic just place where what was right was protected, and what was wrong was punished. The boundaries keep getting pushed back, but how far do we keep pushing? Clearly pedophilia is wrong - though I've heard people on TV sickenly argue otherwise, suggesting that society has ignored the issue of pre-pubescent sexuality - because the rights of the child are being abused. But there are other grey areas. If you're not a vegetarian, and aren't so concerned for an animal's rights, why exactly is bestiality wrong? Is it about disease control? And what about incest? An Australian couple describing themselves as 'normal intellectuals' made a plea on TV this week for understanding of their incestuous relationship.

What about other sexual pursuits? The head of FIA, Max Mosely, is under huge pressure to resign after an exposé of an orgy he'd organized and paid for. Have people been in uproar about the orgy, or about the fact he spoke German to the prostitutes, and there were therefore possible Nazii overtones? Was anyone there against their will? Good question. Did the prostitutes involved really want to be there?

We can get high and mighty about this, but, if we are honest, none of us are free of guilt when it comes to issues of sex and oppression, and society's twin defaults of romantic fantasy and nudge-nudge humour are clear markers of this.

So, if there are absolutes - and I was cheerily mocked for suggesting one in the area of biology last week - where do they now lie? In the same place that Christianity has always placed them? And if these absolutes are simply unworkable in the world we find ourselves, what should our response be?

Technorati: Bestiality | Liberal | Mosely | Peter Tatchell | Sex

Waterlogged | Foff

It's been a difficult few weeks:

'What are you reading?'

'A book about open-water swimming.'

'Errr....'

Actually a far more subtle and interesting book than one might think, Waterlog is a homage to John Cheever's classic short story 'The Swimmer', in which the hero decides to swim the 8 miles home from a party using his neighbours' swimming pools. I blogged about Roger Deakin's other book, Wildwood, some time ago, and this is equally good.

The swimming, like the trees in Wildwood, is just a vehicle for meditations on British life, and on the relationship we have with water. Deakin parallels swimming pools with lawns: both are sanitised versions of nature, and neither will fully satisfy. Far better to wander the woods, or swim in rivers, natural pools or the sea.

It was also a lovely surprise to read a chapter about Jaywick, where Deakin spent many childhood holidays, and to hear him describe my Great Grandfather, who bought the land and developed the resort:

Like a lot of makeshift landscapes, Jaywick grew up as plotlands, sold off in the 1930s by a developer from Dulwich, F.C 'Foff' Stedman, with ambitious plans for the place as a holiday resort. In 1928, Stedman paid £7,500 for the reclaimed marshland, dunes and dykes, but Clacton Town Council refused him planning permission for houses because they were unhappy about the sewerage arrangements on such low-lying land. Undeterred, Stedman got permission instead for 'Beach Chalets' and 'Bathing Houses'. By 1929, he was offering beach chalets in the London papers for £20 to £100, and plots with land for car-parking or a garden for anything from £25 to £200. The chalets caught on with East Enders and by 1931 there were 200 of them at Jaywick.

Strangely, my wife and I almost bought a house in what would have been the garden of the house he had be born in in Dulwich, South East London. His wife, my Great Grandmother, lived next door. Her parents thought him unsuitable; too much of a wheeler-dealer. Troubles with dirt, reclaiming land, I love his spirit. We live just up the hill from, and I often think of him.

The last of the family's holdings in Jaywick were sold last year. I feel I want to go back and swim there again, and spend more time in open water.

Technorati: Cheever | Deakin | Dulwich | Foff | Jaywick | Swimming | Stedman | Waterlog

Taking the Fight to the Government on Civil Liberties | "Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?"

Disadvantage of getting older: you have to go to 40th birthday parties.

Advantage of getting older: the friends throwing the parties have done more interesting stuff.

Never more so in the case of Jules vs. His Rapidly Disappearing Youth... Great time on Saturday night hooking up with a lot of the old Abundant crew - who, if the ripples could be traced to their edges, really have had a profound impact on life, faith and culture in London and far beyond.

It had been common comic currency in the old days that Jules was always suing the police - making sure they were chased down properly over wrongful arrest, abuse in prison etc., but I'd missed the fact that he'd been representing some very high-profile people like Lotfi Raissi. Raissi was the first person charged in connection with 9/11... And subsequently Jules won him a huge victory by forcing the UK government to issue a complete exhonoration, which won him Lawyer of the Week in The Times last month.

Nice one Jules. Keep at them. As he notes in the interview, "in the past six years there has been an unprecedented expansion of the State into the life of the individual. Parliament has significantly failed to protect rights we have enjoyed for hundreds of years. Unless this trend is reversed soon, in ten years’ time I will be viewed on a surveillance monitor playing football in the park with my wonderful boys teasing me about how old school I sound going on about civil liberties."

It does genuinely worry me that we are sleepwalking into 1984, but we can all sleep more easily with people like Jules 'watching the watchmen.'

Connected: Phorm - don't let your ISP stalk you | The All Seeing Soc(i)ety | First Pilotless Police Drone Launches

Technorati: Civil Liberties | Jules Carey | Law

The Nicene Creed | Constantine and the Beginnings of Power Religion

Last April, in the build-up to Easter, I posted a series of thoughts about Jesus and Paul's journeys toward Jerusalem, and the very different attitudes they took when arrested there. I argued that in Paul's 'strategising' to get himself to Rome, we see the conception of power-Christianity, which perhaps came to full birth with the rise of Constantine and his assimilation of Christianity as a political and military tool.

For those interested in exploring this further, I highly recommend listening to this episode of the fantastic BBC programme 'In Our Time', which discusses the Nicene Creed. What's fascinating is how this statement of faith was actually itself a set of statements designed to allow certain Bishops to 'sign up' to the view of faith Constantine wanted. It was 'delicate theology and robust politics.'

As such, it too is couched in politically loaded language, and thus, as the contributors point out, a creed that helped move Christianity from a religion of peace, to one of war and power; from a 'sea of boats all moving on their own tacks generally toward belief in Jesus, to one mothership, which demanded this creed as a boarding pass.

As you may know, the council was called in part to deal with the 'Arian Heresy', and Arius himself became a figure of hate in the Church. He died in a public toilet as his bowels exploded, and the church later set up a statue of him on that site, encouraging people to piss and shit on him. Nice touch that. Just what Jesus would have done.

 

Crazy for God | Frank Schaeffer at Greenbelt 08

"I'd rather be arrested for shoplifting than ever be an evangelical leader again. There was a certain basic and decent honesty about stealing pork chops that selling God had lacked."

It's only March, I know, but I'll put a punt on Crazy for God still being one of my top 5 books of 2008 in December.

The subtitle, "How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back", pretty much sums the book up nicely. Frank is, of course, the son of the massively influential Christian leader Francis Schaeffer, who was a profound influence on my parents and their generation's view of faith. Francis Schaeffer set up 'L'Abri' in Switzerland where everyone who was anyone hung out at some point in the 60's. The Rolling Stones, Led Zep, Os Guinness and every other star in the Christian constellation all passed by there to argue faith and culture with Francis and the L'Abri workers.

While Frank skiied, avoided school, hit on the scores of girls who passed through and scored with plenty of them, and his right hand too. This is what makes Crazy for God such a refreshing read: here's someone from the true Christian royalty actually telling it like it is, with all the sex drugs and rock and roll edited in. If you don't want the honest truth about a teenager helping a disabled friend jack off, praying for him to be healed by emptying a jar of oil over his head and ruining his clothes in the process, then this book isn't for you.

But if, like so many in the emerging movement, you've wrestled with your parents' faith, wildly oscillated between crazed commitment - and Frank does a very good job outlining how he did set up the Religious Right, and exactly what he thinks of it now - and total rejection, then you'll absolutely love it. Indeed, as the US heads into election fever again I'd say this should be required reading for all who are looking for their candidate to back up their faith perspective. Here's a book by someone who really knows, and has really been through it: extraordinary childhood, celebrity, acclaimed artist, teenage father, Hollywood director, jet-setting evangelical speaker... and he gave it all up, and had so much taken away, and did end up stealing pork chops.

It's a genuine laugh-out-loud read, moving, committed and written like the proper novelist he is (and if you haven't read Portofino, you must) and I'm really excited that he's agreed to come to Greenbelt this summer. That's reason enough to get your ticket now, before the March discount deadline ends.

Technorati: Francis Schaeffer | Frank Schaeffer | Religious Right

There Was No Blood | Religion and Identity

Not the most romantic of movies, but we went to see There Will Be Blood last night. It's a terrific movie. If you haven't yet seen it, do. No matter how big your plasma screen, you'll need to see this one on the big screen.

Oil, Crude and Spiritual, are the two things two men are drilling for. Boring down into dangerous fissures within themselves and their communities, risking explosion and hurt to those around them. Daniel Day Lewis' extraordinary performance as Daniel Plainview, and Paul Dano's equally good one as revivalist revelation cult leader Eli Sunday are full of gutteral, primordial sounds, helped along by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood's score.

No matter how deep they dig, and what riches they bring themselves - crude or spiritual - it's real blood that they both know are absent. Plainview's 'son' is simply an orphan he took on, the brother that finds him a fraud, and the blood of Jesus that Sunday screams for never materialises into grace. There may be oil and wealth, but there is no blood, no family blood to root one of them, none of God's blood to save either. And so they fight and drill deeper into darker places.

This is, of course, a film about the American identity: a country built on escape from back-slidden families, a new puritan world with opportunities for all. A country built on, and sustained by, oil. Yet, it seems, a country at sea in its own quest for identity, for real history. As an outsider it seems the US is, more than elsewhere, a country in search of blood. Family blood - desperately trying to cling on to Scottish, Irish, African, Spanish heritage - and God's blood - desperately trying to divine Christ's blood to purify all the soiled ground beneath everyone's feet.

And, in the final instance, as in the film, there is blood. There always will be. In the madness of the consuming search for God's blood and our family's blood, we strike out and wound the other. If we get blood-fever, like Gold or Oil Fever, then blood we will find. Violent, painful and destructive. The same blood lust that wounded Christ.

Grace needs no drilling, no violence to the earth or the body. Instead, it seeps into us if we will seek the peace and silence to simply wait for it. Only then will it, in the mystery of the elements, become blood, binding us to God and our brother, allowing a gentle security of identity to take root.

Technorati: American | Grace | There Will Be Blood | Violence

Power Religion | Food | The Hunter-Gatherer Eucharist [5]

Power Religion [1] | Power Religion [2] | Power Religion [3] | Power Religion [4]

So, how might we try to gather some of this together into a ritual, a performance, a remembering worthy of the rich tapestry of signs it suggests? I think, firstly, we have to humbly accept that we simply never will do this most mysterious meal full justice. But secondly, we must commit ourselves to trying. The bland, tasteless bread and wine that is served at many of the churches throughout the world is appropriate for the bland and tasteless act of weak theatre that communion has so often become. Here is a ritual, a commandment, an act of collective memory, an enactment that has so much power... and it demands that we don't allow it to be neutered.

The memories that we are working with are loaded with paradox. We remember a man dying, a bloody sacrifice, an injustice... and commemorate the beginning of our reconciliation, the breaking of elements that draw us together. In these posts we have been thinking about the bread and wine acting as prompts for grief at our domestication of the earth, our spread of cultural mediocrity and blandness where there was such vibrant diversity. We have also seen how they suggest to us the breaking of the hunter-gatherer God. (Something I haven't touched on is the symbolism of Jesus as the 'lamb of God' - Diamond makes the case for domestication of animals like sheep as a root cause of much human disease, and thus responsible for the wiping out of many times more indigenous peoples than European guns.)

I wonder then if the Hunter-Gatherer Eucharist ought to contain within it more 'savage' elements. Rather than eating fine bread, perhaps we might incorporate a battering of the wheat, a physical milling and breaking of the grain into flour. Rather than sipping fine wine, we might similarly trample grapes, and thus get back to the raw materials and processes involved in food production. Alternatively, we might celebrate with found or scavenged items. Freegans collect and eat discarded food from dumpsters behind restaurants. There is risk here, and dirt, and life.

The Hunter-Gatherer / Food Producer distinction does not simply exonerate the Hunter-Gatherer as some wild and truer way of life. Food production began in part because the hunters had exterminated most of the large, passive mammals that once roamed the earth. And food production has led us to have to get along, to be interdependent, rather than simply killing the stranger.

So we must also turn the Eucharist into a meditation on our own use of resources. Are we living lightly on the earth, or are we feasting from it? Are we drinking fine wine and ripping into fresh bread as exponents of a religion of power, or are we partaking in the body of Christ, the body of the hunted, the broken, the condemned, the poor, the misunderstood, the dying prophet who, like a grain of wheat, fell to the ground and had to be buried before bearing wild fruit?

I hope for one that my eating of this strange meal might lean more toward the latter, and somehow sow the seed within it, as Christ's eating did, the downfall of power religion.

Thanks for journeying on this little series.

Technorati: Anarchy | Body of Christ | Guns, Germs and Steel | Hunter-Gatherer | Jared Diamond | Power | Agriculture

"cos, you know, you can treat them like shit"

On the train to this little drinks thing for an education weekly I write some stuff for, just a couple of stops. Three guys sitting in seats across the aisle:

"So, we go from the pub to the match, and then from there onto another pub, and I'm so wasted by now, and then we go on to a strip joint, and I just spend SO much..."

"Cool..."

"And this one girl comes up, and I've already shelled out loads for dances, and begs me to pay her to dance..."

"I bet you did a bit of that, eh?" (guy mimics lifting up of a skirt)

"...and she then like promises me something a bit special, so I get my cash out, and show it to her, and she looks well pleased, then I think, fuck it, and tell her to piss off, cos, you know, you can treat them like shit"

And I look at the middle-aged lady sitting opposite. And look at them, bigger than me. And think of the broken promises I'd made to get really stuck into campaigning with The Truth Isn't Sexy, and my stop comes, and I get off, without saying anything, feeling none of the wisdom of the wise men, and none of the raw courage of Joseph, and none of the 'fear not', and all of the shame of the shit I'm complicit in and feign to shout loudly about and continue to do nothing about, pray for at least an ounce of John the Baptist's gall to stand up for what I know is right and pay the price. Because you know I know for sure that every day trafficked women are paying a lot more than that. And I let them get away with it, and treat them like shit, and go and sip my champagne.

Just another compromised day in the life. Sometimes I'm just not proud.

Technorati: London | Strippers | Truth Isn't Sexy

His Dark Materials | PowerReligion

Andrew Jones posted yesterday about the imminent release of the first film of the Philip Pullman trilogy 'His Dark Materials'. (Why the hell has is been re-named? Durrr.... ) In the post he leans to siding with Matt Barber, who has written that Pullman's anti-theist stance is a strong theme, and thus Christians should avoid the films.

The other weekend my dad asked me my response to the same question - he'd had a very strong email from an Australian campaigner saying Christians should be actively boycotting the movie and protesting about it.

I totally disagree.

The books are a 'rich casket of treasures' - for children and adults alike. And, while one reading might be a strongly atheistic view, I think that Pullman is more interested in critiquing the 'power religion' exemplified by historic Catholicism and institutional Anglicanism. The villains of the book - though this is apparently watered down in the film - are the members of the 'Magisterium', the paranoid and power-mad government of religion, who fight to close down free thought and cut off children's souls to gain power for themselves.

And I have to agree with him. It's clearly powerful stuff, but no more cutting than Jesus' critique of the Pharisees as 'white-washed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but inside are full of shit.' I heard Pullman in conversation with Rowan Williams, and was struck how both were egged on by 'fundies' on their own side... but both resisted their encouragements to slam the other. Indeed, Pullman admitted to being struck by the character of Christ, and said he was writing about him.

If we try to protect our faith from criticism like this, we seal it from the tricksters, and prevent it from being refined. If we truly believe it, we should allow our children to see the film, and trust that the truth will out. If we begin protests on things like this, don't we risk end up jailing people who let kids name their teddies Jesus? I hope the God believe in is more robust than that.

As I quote in the book, the trilogy ends with the hero Lyra, having 'killed God' urging people to 'work hard, all of us, to build the republic of heaven.' I think this is a fabulous metaphor: heaven as republic takes the power away from the high-and-mighty pompous white men who try to keep the gates closely guarded for only their own pure few. And that's something I can definitely cheer for.

Technorati: Golden Compass | Pullman | Northern Lights

In Praise of Eccentricity

Just back from a wonderful weekend in the depths of Wales. I didn't find RS Thomas, or any great rural epiphany, but, in keeping with the joys of weekends in other people's houses, had a great time dipping into some books.

The most enjoyable was Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics*. It's an eccentric volume itself, but delicious for that difference. The Folio edition I was perusing began with a quote from John Stuart Mill:

"In this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time."

The quote comes from his 1859 book 'On Liberty', where he regularly rages against 'custom', believing it leads to conformity, and thus lack of freedom:

"Even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes."

Eccentricity simply means 'having a different centre'. For this reason alone, and with no thought for wanting to be 'quirky' or 'different', I'd like to sing in praise of being eccentric. Within this definition it is only the eccentric who can speak prophetic criticism. It is only the eccentric who can, by the gravity of their thought, draw close and change the orbit of the masses. Bauman writes in Liquid Life of "the mind-boggling quandary of having to mark oneself out as an individual, while also remaining obviously an acceptable part of the group" and it is this pressure that draws us into predictable, one-dimensional orbits. Being such a satellite around such a large mass is safe, yes, but cold and life-less.

The force to break away from this comes in two forms. The greater force, perhaps, is the gravity of the a-centrics, the vacuous cult of celebrity that tempts us with ideas of total freedom: responsibility-free sex, rootless trans-atlantic existence and the exultation of form over content. But nothing can have no centre, save nothing itself.

So it is down to the eccentric, the differently centred, the 'dirty trickster' as my book would have it, to provide some alter-orbit. The physics is clear on this: the closer this eccentric orbit swings to the other mass, the greater its changing effect. Eccentricity is not an excuse for seclusion or flight, but an invitation to challenge the prose-flattened, cathode-ray world with some vital poetry.

[* The book. Not the online fashion store. Urgghhhh.]

Technorati: Eccentricity | Eccentrics | Mill | Sitwell

Howies: Tales of the City

OK, so Howies opened a store in Carnaby Street - their first in London. Which is great. I hope they do well. But I have to admit their attitude to the city - and to London in particular - has been mostly negative. Indeed, their catalogues in the past have regularly been virtual tracts for country-side life, waxing lyrically about how fabulous it is to live by fields and go biking in the woods at lunch time. Which it is. Trouble is, the vast majority of their customers don't live this life, and it sort of pisses me off when they so blatantly bite the hand that feeds them.

Of course, many of their more vitriolic rants against the city ("We're flying in and out for a day - it's all we can cope with! - to do our sale" etc.) have been removed from their site - although one raging against big money remains, which I hope their new owners Timberland don't mind about.

As I say, I hope Howies do well. I love their products and the rest of their ethos. But it's an attitude to the city that is quite prevalent: we'll go on and on about how shit it is, about how noisy and how grey and how unfriendly and how violent - but hell, it's where the money is, so we'll happily plunder it for its wealth.

I love the countryside - I'm off to darkest Wales this weekend - but let's not pit city and country against one another. Everything in the city is raw material from the countryside - rock, stone, ore - that has been processed by human hands into metal, glass, brick. But where is virgin countryside now? Everywhere has been managed. Everywhere has our fingerprints on it. We simply need to ensure that those prints are lightly made.

Technorati: Howies | London | City

Dump

Still on holiday here, and doing some clearing jobs around the house/garden that have been building up for a while. Which means I've had to go to the dump today - one of the finest, most joyous experiences in the urban environment.

You go heavy loaded, driving slowly, suspension almost topping out... and leave it all behind. The priests who preside over this sacrament at our local place are fantastic too - helping you with the bigger stuff, directing you as to which skip to dump stuff in, advising whether something ought to be recycled. Everyone drives away feeling lighter, happier, going home to a simpler, less cluttered place. It is distinctly sacred.

This isn't, of course, to be naive about the problems of urban waste. It is incredible to see the stuff people do chuck, when most of it could very well be posted on a site like Freecycle. At least they sort stuff for recycling now, which they didn't a couple of years back.

Technorati: Dump | Freecycle | Waste

Has Old Father Thames Lost His Virility? | Sacred Rivers

Last night I went to hear Peter Ackroyd speak on the South Bank (pictured here), ostensibly about his new book: Thames, Sacred River. It was a fine lecture on the thread of the sacred throughout the history of humanity's interaction with London's river, followed by a hilarious Q&A led by the Times' Literary Editor, who had a torrid time trying to get anything much out of the old curmudgeon.

One recurring theme was the votive offerings that have been dug up from the Thames, covering pretty much every age for millennia. In more recent times churches have lined its banks, and one interesting observation by Ackroyd was the number of them dedicated to the Virgin Mary. There seems no rhyme or reason to this - and yet over the river's 240 mile passage there are over 50 churches given that name. Ackroyd connected this with the deeper history of the river as a place for fertility rituals: women would come to bathe in the Thames' waters before trying to conceive.

I got a brief chance to speak with him afterwards. I was interested in the idea of the sacred - in this case a river - as places for us to throw our shit. The votive offerings and the general detritus of society have emptied themselves into the Thames for so long, and I wondered if he thought the river would at some point call a halt and begin to fight back. "Of course not," he growled, "the Thames is cleaner now than its ever been."

Precisely. With its concreted banks and strict laws and worries about health and safety, the waters pass through the city now with no interruption. Nobody bathes, nobody enters the water. We pass over it atop buses and gaze down at the greying ripples. Our detachment from this river that has fed us and led us in worship for thousands of years, and carried off our shit, is now almost total.

The river-spirit flows through the centre of our capital in a well defended channel, leaving us dry. We cannot be fertilized by it now. We have, to corrupt Jung, purified 'Old Father Thames' to the point of sterility. Which makes me want to head to Putney and the boat houses, and have a swim.

Connected Post: Nature Watching in LA | Mango Body Whips and the LA River

Technorati: Catholicism | Fertility | London | Peter Ackroyd | Jung | Thames

Hidden Trees and Weeds | The Interstitial Jesus

I have been reading, sitting quietly with, meditating on Richard Deakin's wonderful book, Wildwood - A Journey Through Trees. Having previous written of his swims around England, this book is simply a series of reflections on the transformative power of this 'fifth element'. Much of it is taken with stories of sleeping out in the middle of woodland, fully engaged with and alive to the busyness of this environment.

There are a number of things that I want to blog about from it, but, to begin with, the book has simply opened my eyes to an new appreciation of our forests. I spent yesterday out in the Surrey hills, which Deakin mentions (he died almost a year ago to the day) and it was wonderful to read the book in the very environment it spoke of.

But it was when traveling back into London by train that the book gave me a wonderful insight: there are scattered forests everywhere along our railways. These inbetween spaces, tucked safely between dangerous high-voltage rails, are havens for all manner of plant life. And with the plants, animal life too. I was surprised to learn recently that the best honey the UK has to offer is made in London. Why? Because London has such high bio-diversity, and thus the bees carry a rich mix of flavours into their hives. In the countryside, where much of the land is given over to industrial agriculture, the honey is bland.

Those who have read here before will know about the allotment that a few of us keep, and this is one sort of 'hidden land' that excites me about the city. But it was only traveling through Clapham Junction, East Croydon and London Bridge that I began to see that there are huge acreages of small clumps of trees and bushes, all living with no threat from mankind. All growing in the gaps that our developments have left. All working their quiet transformations of our air, our ecology, our sight.

And I can't help but think that, hidden away in these places, an interstitial Jesus is camping. Quietly working. Beyond our boundaries, and in places we simply miss as we glide along rails in steel carriages. I need to look more closely.

Technorati: Deakin | Ecology | Environment | London | Railways | Wildwood

The Human Dress | Signs Launch

Thanks to everyone who helped out to give Signs a fantastic launch last night. It was great to phrase it as a time of worship; the guys from the Bridge imagined different sections in terms of doing laundry. Out of that I wrote this piece, meditating on 'the human dress', beginning with a quote from Blake.

"Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress."

One piece of divine fabric,
Unblemished, woven without defect
Knit together in a girl’s womb,
Perfectly fitting this human frame,
Was stitched up, and stretched out
And torn.

Die! said the soldiers,
And they took one and rolled,

They were mistaken,
And we have bought into their mistake.
This cloth was not for sale,
But offered as a free gift.

Taut, pierced, this pelt collapsed around a broken frame,
Pinned out and exhausted, it’s colour drained,
While, in the Temple, another fabric tore top to bottom.
And the weaver escaped
With thoughts for a new design

Hued with mercy,
And lined with love,
Shrouded in mystery.

Technorati: Blake | Bridge | Human Dress

The Dead Console the Living?

I am reading through a manuscript for a friend which is partly a memoir of his growing up during 'the troubles' in Northern Ireland. As I've been doing so, I was reminded of a quote by the Irish journalist Jack Holland, who wrote that

"the tragedy of Northern Ireland is that it is now a society in which the dead console the living"

Thankfully, though I have to tread carefully as I'm way outside my area of expertise, I think this is changing, and the final withdrawal of British troops from there is cause for some celebration.

When the dead console the living, there is always an element of deathwish: in the final analysis, people chose death rather than forgiveness or grace, so that they might be re-united with those who have already fallen. And so the bitterness circles round. Breaking that cycle, drawing people from a place where they gain energy from what is living, rather than from what is dead, is difficult.

We see the cycle in the latest round of shootings in Manchester. Gunmen actually attacked a wake for another victim, killing a man. Death circling and taunting; bitterness driving by and corroding all it touches.

Christianity without resurrection would have been just this: consoling memories of a great man, unjustly murdered by an oppressive regime. An acidic religion this would have been; it is one that many seem to follow. Always harking back, always cursing the breakthrough of the new. Finding comfort in opposition, solace in hostility.

But, thankfully, we are not a death cult. The resurrection event, and the words 'forgive them father', demand that we don't find solace in the dead, but new life in resurrection. It's that resurrection hope that I pray continues to spread out in Northern Ireland, that resurrection hope I pray will really impact the lives of communities in Manchester - and beyond.

Technorati: Death Wish | Manchester | Northern Ireland | Resurrection

Religion: Ignore God, It's About The Sacred

This month's Prospect carries an excellent short essay outlining some arguments against Hitchens, Dawkins et al: 'the evangelical atheists, shouting from their pulpits'.

The author, Roger Scruton, is surprised by 'the extent to which religion is caricatured by its current opponents, who see it as nothing more than a system of unfounded beliefs about the cosmos - beliefs, that, to the extent that they conflict with the scientific worldview, are heading straight for refutation.'

Refuted they might be, but going away, they ain't. And this is what really riles Dawkins and Hitchens. They get very wound up at having exposed the whole thing as a fiction, only for people to nod and go on believing it. Scruton, as others have, points to work that has shown how the sacred ('moments that stand outside time, in which the loneliness and anxiety of the human individual is confronted and overcome, through immersion in the group') is actually a hugely important part of what it is to be human.

He goes on to look in particular at the writings of René Girard, who works with a kind of inversion of Nietzche: religion is not the cause of violence, but the solution to it. The arguments are too involved to set out briefly here, and I would strongly encourage you to read it fully, (PDF here) but a Scruton summarizes his position:

"The experience of the sacred is not an irrational residue of primitive fears, nor is it a form of superstition that will one day be chased away by science. It is a solution to the accumulated aggression which lies in the heart of human communities."

The question this leaves me with is: once we have returned to the sacred, where is God, and what of the Christ event? Girard does touch on this, but what I am really looking forward to at Greenbelt this summer is hearing Peter Rollins talk on this very subject.

Connected post: Gift Exchange and Terror. Violence occurs when 'the gift' - an act of openness between the self and an-other - breaks down.

Technorati: Dawkins | Girard | Greenbelt | Prospect | Jesus | Rollins | Scruton

Why I'm Loving Facebook | Dirty Networks

Having seen Ben and some others resign themselves to Facebook, I asked them why I should bother... do I really want another digital dimension to have to check/keep up? And with being a teacher, all social networking sites are slightly fraught with potential pitfalls. (Unlike an ex colleague, who I think is very unwise, I don't allow friendships with current students)

Well, having dipped my toe in anonymously for a while I decided to jump in properly, and, in fact, I love it. But perhaps not for the same 'hey isn't it great to hook up with my old grad school people again' reasons.

Firstly, I think Facebook have been very wise and seen the future more clearly than sites like MySpace. They've recently bought the Mozilla-connected start-up Parakey ("Give your computer the bird") whose whole premise is about bridging the gap between web and desktop. Watch out for Facebook really becoming an on-line desktop: contacts, photos, documents, events management. I've used it in small ways in this way and I think it's going to be huge.

Secondly, I love the fact that Facebook is 'dirty'. Well, it is for me anyway. Check my profile and you won't see a sterile list of Christian leaders. There are real people there. Who swear and post dumb things and chuck stuff around. Some I've worked with, some I've taught at High School. And I love the fact that they get to see the 'other side' of what I do right there on my profile, and others get to see the teaching side too. For me personally i've always found that they enrich one another, and provide great moments for conversation on all sides. Some of which doesn't have swearing or trrible grmr init ;-)

Technorati: Facebook | Parakey

Stones

If we could all
just stop throwing stones,
and stoop, knees bent
and write in the dust,

we'd see that the dust
was once stone -
grand, and hard, and proud, and tough -
now ground and dissolved
in grace and tears.

So... how much better
to be a grain of dirt
on that kind prophet’s hands
than a stone
in the cold, accusing Temple
of the pure.

Technorati: Dust | Stones

Dirty Dog | Allergies Rise with Cleanliness

So I'm having a drink the other night with this guy who works at the government's disease control centre - he specialises in TB and bio-terrorism threats - and he says "You want to have healthy kids? The best thing you can do is buy them a dog."

Apparently they bring such a lot of dirt into the house they do a brilliant job of increasing immunity.

Once again, paradoxically, it's sterile, pure lives end up killing you.

[Update: The Times has led this morning with a piece on the meteoric rise of allergies in the UK, citing cleanliness and animal exclusion as the problem:

"When animals, as happens in parts of Eastern Europe, continue to live in close proximity to humans so does the incidence of the common forms of allergy remain low. As the boundaries of the spick and span, spotless lifestyle spreads across Europe, so does the allergy become more frequent. It is likely that the adverse effects of an over hygienic lifestyle exert their influence on children when they are still at the toddler stage of childhood or younger."

Interestingly, it was better-off families who suffered most. Why? Perhaps because they have cleaners.

Human Reaction to Spotless Lifestyles ]

Technorati: Bio-terrorism |  Disease Control |  Dogs |  Allergies |  Health |  Times |  TB

Is The Emerging Church Hopelessly Utopian? [3]