Ordinary is back

I’m writing this in the second week in March, just after the schools in the UK have returned. And so my wife has returned to school, for the first time this term, so a 6:15 wakeup, an early start on the newly rebuilt A14, a covid test, then an actual lesson with actual children. Ordinary is back.

The book ‘Bread’ that I am working on talks about the rediscovery of ordinary as a great gift. It is in the context of losing it through illness and then regaining it. But as our lockdown rachets down, we hope, everyone I speak to is looking forward to the return of the ordinary. Here’s a passage from Bread that might even make it into the final version:

When I was a student, my friends and I pushed against the ordinariness from which we had come. We wanted to make a splash. We wanted to live radical lives and change the world. ‘We want to run a totally open home’ one said, everyone welcome, everyone fed, anyone can stay the night. I remember one of my friends saying she didn’t want ever to have a mortgage. She wanted to rent all her life so that she was flexible and free, not tied down and conventional.

My friends are living striking and distinctive lives, but I have observed that they, like me, also came to embrace the ordinary. When it is focused on spending time with people you love, work you love, locations you love, day after day, ordinary life can be very good. It is wealth. It is treasure.  When you are denied it, you learn the deep loss from not having it. Both the working for and the attaining of the ordinary brings meaning and contentment into our lives.

Wealth and success can rob you of ordinariness, which is quite a surprise, since wealth and success are supposed to bring happiness.  But just as there are burglars who are greatly relieved to be caught, so there are successful people who are greatly relieved to pass out of the limelight. In both cases, a weight is lifted.

Those who lose the ordinary see its value and the wise ones among them devote themselves to making ordinary life again. Those of us who have attained or discovered ordinary life can treasure it, by savouring it for the gift and blessing it is.

Healing prayer and the quick fix

If it were only so simple

Image by mathey from Pixabay

The quick fix is what I usually want with a health problem. I have a problem, the doctor fixes it, we all walk away happy, like taking the car to the garage. We can approach healing prayer the same way: I have this pain or limitation or sickness, please make it go away so that I can go back to normal life.

Doctors live with this stuff all the time and I am told that they also are aware of the psycho-social aspect to almost any healing: ‘who and what are you?’ is important alongside ‘what seems to be the problem?’ Doctors possibly get fed up of people who present with COPD or obesity, for example, and want a pill or a procedure rather than to make changes in their thinking, their lifestyle or their relationships.

Proper biblical Christian healing is about the whole person, their relationships, and eternity. It is also about the real problem, not just the symptoms. The New Testament (in the book of James) locates the proper place for healing as alongside pastoral care: is any of you sick? – Call the church leaders.

It means that seeking healing through prayer should really be about seeking God. We should expect such prayer to ‘work’, but on God’s terms rather than ours.

How atheists too should get used to a post-Christian world

One grump among atheists I sometimes read is that it isn’t fair that Christians still have access to political and cultural power. Bishops sit in the House of Lords, for example. This is, it would seem, a much greater scandal than all the other people who sit in the house of Lords who were:

  • Sent upstairs because they were just so annoying
  • Bankrollers of political parties
  • People who the electorate turned against but their political friends felt were too good to waste. People, in other words, about whom the People were wrong.

I even saw a complaint today that Christians are given high academic posts: former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, is, for example, the Master of a Cambridge College, handsomely paid and with privileged access to a rather good wine cellar.

We should hear this atheist keening for what it is, namely the complaint of one group against another group that the other group has unfair advantages. Christians do exactly the same, grumbling how their mighty secular enemies keep overturning laws and putting things on TV and probably will bring the wrath of God down on all our heads.

As I’ve often mused in this blog, and not with much originality, the era of Constantine, of state and church, is, if not exactly dead, deserving of other metaphors of decay: shot, derelict, over-mature, senescent, creaking, past it.

I think both Christians and (this is my point) atheists have to get to used this. This is handy for Christians actually. It is quite cool to belong to a subversive, radically good, cheerful, counter-cultural trickle, flowing into the global cultural sea.

It’s quite a thing to belong to a movement that teaches the right response to oppression is not protest but lending the oppressor a hand in his difficult life. Not for us, or at least not for us if we knew better, are the politics of grievance.

Meanwhile, atheists complaining of the Church having too much power is so Second Milliennium.

One more thing. Once you accept this, that the era of Constantine is over, that all good citizens aren’t Christians, that Christians are in the minority, it turns out we are quite a large minority. Like rats or cockroaches, we get everywhere.

Think of what we’ve done in my favourite field, science. Among other prominent Christians were: untangler of the human genome (Francis Collins); crusading leader of the UN Committee on Climate Change (John Houghton, a scientist who won the Nobel Peace Prize). Discoverer of pulsars (the Quaker Jocelyn Bell Burnell). These are just the examples roaming my brain at the moment. Or go back: Wernher Heisenberg had a faith (though presumably also held with a bit of uncertainty). Leonhard Euler used to lead Bible studies for his household. Johannes Kepler was a radical Protestant. Faraday’s faith was one of the most prominent things about him. The person who gave Faraday’s discoveries the complete mathematical treatment, a treatment so complete it will last to the end of time, was also a person of faith, James Clerk Maxwell.

This is just me shaking my brain to see what falls out. Turning to Wikipedia’s (admittedly slightly dodgy) list of Christians in Science, Alessandro Volta and Andre Ampere were both people of faith. (The correct response is ‘Watt?’) And Heinrich Hertz. (Who by the way, made his name in oscillations, not in car rental.)

So: Let’s all agree the Constantinian Church/state thing is a bit musty and generally off and the Christians are duly demobbed as members of the establishment. This is a new day. They are free to be happy annoying disrupters of a world that is not exactly legendary for its grace. Friends and foes of the faith alike should get used to it.

Future shaping

It’s not necessarily bad

They can’t cancel the spring. Photo by Jill Wellington from Pexels

Not long ago I was rootling through some computer files and I noticed a list I’d made of prayer requests. There were about seven items in the list, and I think five had already been answered. Looking again, two years further down, and with this list long forgotten, I realized the two remaining items could also be checked off.

This is so fascinating. Where will we all be in five years’ time? What will the world be like? The year 2020 has been a tremor in the normal heartbeat of life. Who would have thought about crashing economies, two million deaths, face-masks everywhere, people afraid to go on the train or to shake hands?

How will history record the past year?

After 2020, the great rises in living standards and shared wealth that had marked that previous quarter century resumed their astonishing and compounding progress

or

2020 marked the start of serious upheavals that continued for the rest of that dreadful century called by some the world’s first true Dark Age.

I’ve sometimes wondered what it must have been to be born in my grandad’s generation (born 1899) and facing, but not yet knowing about, half a century of war, death, recession and a long tail of mourning and deprivation.

Or which year in our current century is most like 1913, that summer of the British at their mustachioed, imperialistic peak, a moment that looked like a new high plateau rather than (as it proved) a moment of teetering and fleeting poise, the sunlit dewy morning prior to the slaughter.

My rootling in my computer reminded me that whatever else the next five years will hold or the next 50, for that matter, they will be years of answered prayer. They will be years when our longings have been taken to God and years in which God, mysteriously, but from our perspective, and in response to our cries, spun a golden thread of kept promises and tender goodness into whatever wild tapestry is elsewhere being woven.