Category: Hmmm

Ambition, its evolution and fulfilment

Still the great prize

Photo by hannah grace on Unsplash

Recently the church calendar shone its spotlight on the Presentation of Christ at the temple, and our attention was drawn to those two old codgers, Simeon and Anna, who had been separately hanging around the temple, for, like forever, waiting for the Consolation of Israel.

Then one day along come Mary and Joseph with the early-childhood Jewish routine of presenting the child at the temple. Surely Mary was a little anxious about her eight-day-old being circumcised, like nowadays when your kids have their first jabs. What if he cried? What if he didn’t stop bleeding? What if they got it wrong with the knife?

Anyhow, presumably before any knives are wielded, up jumps Simeon, followed closely by Anna, and starts prophesying. All my life I’ve been waiting for this, says Simeon. Indeed that was my life. And now I’ve seen this baby. He’s the one. I’m done here.

Which raised the question, what am I waiting for? What am I hoping for? What is yet unfulfilled? This is a question you can ask periodically through your life, with, perhaps, different answers along the way. In my case: I’ve worked as a writer all my life. I fell in love with a girl and thirty and more years later she still brightens and fills my days. We raised two wonderful children. We paid for our house and saved up, some, for our retirement. I didn’t die along the way. What more could I want?

It turns out that the more that I want is craftsmanship. I think that, and not dying yet, are my remaining ambitions. OK, those and loving people and hanging out with my wife and family and continuing to be a disciple of Jesus.

Craftsmanship: doing things beautifully and well. For better or worse, I live behind a keyboard. I inhabit a world of books and words and ideas and images. I don’t smell, like some men do, of engine oil or rural pursuits. Flakes of sawdust don’t fall from my hair. Craftsmanship for me is writing beautifully and well. And it’s still a bright shining, guiding (and maybe distant) light.

What, I wonder, about you?

Appealing against the Second Law

I’d like to protest the passing of time.

Photo by Elena Koycheva on Unsplash

It’s a humane feature of earthly laws that you can appeal.

The law I’d really like to appeal against, though, is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is roughly, everything gets old, wears out dies.

I’ve had it with seeing what Time and the Second Law do to people. What is this force that takes good people, drains them into a wizened hulk, then tosses them aside? How can that be right? I wish to appeal on behalf of the spry 85-year-olds I know who any time soon will hardly be able to climb onto their perch, and a little later, will have fallen completely off it. Good, strong people. Old age so isn’t fair.

Can you appeal? A lot of people, most of us, try to defy the Second Law or hold it back. It doesn’t really work, of course. But can you actually appeal? Since we are dealing with the created order here, we would have to appeal directly to the Creator. And we have a clue in our favour, namely the life, death and resurrection of God the Son, Jesus Christ.

So our appeal. Best to bring the issue to the One God and ask him to think about it in the light of his total Godness. That is, just be God, God. In all your total love, justice and mercy, faced with these things that you created, namely (1) the Second Law, and (2) people made in your image, made in your love, just be totally yourself.

If one can so speak.

And when you do that, what results? I don’t think we really can know. But I’m thinking, if the appeal is granted, and I can see how it might be, the eternal state that results isn’t just about halting time’s flow. I would quite to have my twenty-three year-old body back (halting time in that sense) but I’d quite like to hang onto my much older head, please. And when I think about it, the pattern of childhood, youth, midlife, old age, each with their attendant joys, are all lovely and I wouldn’t like to miss any of them. I wonder if Eternity will be still be roiled by the slowly passing seasons? I kinda hope so.

But it that’s the case, and if you appeal to God against the Second Law, asking God to be totally God in all of this, what does a successful appeal look like? I think it looks like hope, new birth, regeneration.

The really bitter thing about the Second Law is not really the ageing, or the weakening, or the becoming erratic and vulnerable. All that can be covered by love, at the end of life, just as it is covered by love at the beginning of life. No, the really bitter thing is when people fall away into a dark pit of hopelessness. So that I will never see them again. I will never know them again. I will never enjoy them again. We will never talk together again. Never again.

But if the wizened elderly were in fact seeds ready for a new planting, ready for a new life, still the essential them, but re-made for a new dawning world, all the losses on this side of things would be OK.

Slowness and labour-saving devices

There is an argument that commitment to going about things slowly means should shouldn’t surround yourself with timesaving kit. I mostly don’t agree. As well as the standard stuff that everyone has had for years, we’ve also introduced a breadmaker and then a robot vaccuum cleaner to our managerie.

They mean you can choose your slowness. Making bread with a breadmaker is huge fun, a world away from the chore of having to make it like my grandparents knew.

I was thinking the other day about pre-dishwasher days. They mostly coincided with my not-being-married days, and quite often with being invited for Sunday lunch. As a young guy and recent Christian I ate a lot of other people’s Sunday lunches, usually a roast, and typically followed up by a walk or a chat and then a tea. Along with others, I have gratefully tackled piles of washing-up, enjoying the conversation and the shared work. I found various species of washers-up over the years, all now sadly ghosts of history.

  • The perfectionist. This was someone who basically took charge of the sink and made sure every dish came out spotless and gleaming. They were not quick, and their fellows on the cleanup crew had to stand and wait.
  • The drier-up who gleefully, even maliciously, returned washing up to the sink, requiring it to be redone.
  • The drier-up who assumed if you pick it off with tea-towel, that’s just fine.
  • The enthusiast who splashed around like a toddler in a bath, soaking everything, washing up with speed but not always with the highest quality.
  • The mono-tasker who, if you asked him a question, would stop even drying up a plate while he thought about the answer.
  • The contrarian, who washed the dirtiest things first, using prodigious amounts of water and time.

On that spectrum I was definitely, as a washer-up, the enthusiast, and as a drier, the picker-off-with-the-teatowel, unless I really didn’t like the person washing up, in which case I returned every plate I could find.

So much is lost with the demise of the Sunday wash up. Psychological assessment. Control. Submission. Dominance. Mentoring. Shared endeavour. Friendship.

Still, though.

Community can heal

I was gob-smacked and jaw-dropped, if you can be both, when I watched this this week:

As well as a few side-benefits – a second revolution, saving the NHS, that sort of thing – it was a glimpse into what the future could be like for all of us. And what a happy, healing place it looked like.

At root it what’s being described is, I think, an NHS GP practice in one of the most deprived areas of London, that has realized doctors only get to a fraction of illness. The rest is caused, or cured, by things like employment, education, environment and creativity.

With that realization taken seriously, what has evolved is a thriving community with an NHS medical practice (and, as it happens, a church) at its heart.

I do recommend you put this on next time you are cooking or driving or working out or something. (You don’t need to see the video and the pictures anyway add little to the story.) Instead of a clinical setting, think cafe, community, art, creativity, fun … it’s just really something.

‘The cultural mood might just be shifting’

A few thoughts from Oxford

Token photo of Oxford University. Oxford may be a car factory with a university attached, but you can still capture nice shots. Thanks to Nikita Ti on Unsplash.

In a super piece published in the Gospel Coalition website, journalist Carolyn Morris-Collier wrote about her surprising experiences while studying for a master’s at Oxford University. Even if if you edit out and allow for the way US Christians’ eyes go all misty when things Oxford are mentioned, it’s an interesting piece. A Christian, she expected ‘aggressive antagnonism’. What she found was ‘unexpected spiritual openness’.

She gave some reasons:

  • Nobody, of her generation, trusts institutions any more. ‘Maybe people are hungry to be guided by more transcendent principles instead of man-made institutions vulnerable to cultural conditions and corruption.’
  • Community: ‘The church’s concrete invitation into communal life … answers a culture-wide longing sharpened by the individualism of modern society.’
  • The transcendent: ‘Many people in my generation have grown up in atheist households without exposure to religious communities or spiritual teachings … In my conversations, even staunch skeptics light up when asked if they’ve ever experienced one of these unexplainable moments of wonder.’
  • The anxiety of wandering in an ethical wilderness: ‘Having a religious faith, some sort of trellis on which to build your emotional and moral life, sounds less tiring than conjuring your own beliefs and ethical systems … Suddenly, a moral system like Christianity, meant to produce virtuous, wise, and respectful individuals, may not seem so stifling or oppressive anymore.’

All super stuff, and chiming with what the major UK-based student Christian Christian movement, UCCF, is saying about students across the country. They are re-writing some of their study material less around the theme of ‘is it true?’ and more concerned with’show me that it works.’

Why not me?

Healing seemed to come quickly in the New Testament

Photo by Johannes Roth on Unsplash

Today (yesterday as you read this), my wife and I listened to the Pray as you go app as we often do, a little daily dose of Ignatian spirituality. The passage was about the person with leprosy who said to Jesus, ‘If you are willing, you can make me clean’ and Jesus’ reply, ‘I am willing! Be clean.’

My body was still upside down after our very recent and lovely holiday in Singapore. We had arrived back three days earlier. I was extremely breathless, perhaps exacerbated by jet lag. The previous evening it had taken me many minutes and several stops to walk the 200 yards in the dark and cold to our post box and I was frightened.

My first thought on hearing the passage was ‘why not me?’

But this was followed by a second thought: ‘It is you, and has been you.’

This lifted my spirits as I realized it was true. It was true in the larger sense 12 years ago when I recovered from a coma in which I was expected to die after my church held a 36-hour prayer vigil. But it was also true in the lesser senses of other bad times and fears negotiated. It was true in the smallest sense of daily acts of grace and goodness to my life and soul. I am a child of the kingdom! What a thing. I am a beneficiary of the power of Christ! Goodness and mercy has pursued me all my life! The (remaining) light and momentary afflictions are not to be compared with the glory to be revealed. In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

This time of year we are also putting away the cards and letters received over Christmas, and I see these tendrils of love and faithfulness extending into lives all over the place. So many grateful! So many restored, or maintained, in life and health!

Why not me? It is us. In the midst of the shadows all around, it is us.

Is it 1913?

My own lovely home town, just outside King’s College. Photo by Chris Boland on Unsplash. Chris Boland’s beautiful wedding photography site is here.

I sometimes wonder: is this year 1913?

I think of an Edwardian summer, and I think of moustaches, straw hats and stripy blazers. The moustaches played cricket and took girls on boats. They picknicked. Elsewhere, British moustaches quivered over a quarter of the earth, ruling it for good or ill. Seen back through that summer’s haze, the world looked (quite) ordered, prosperous, globalized, heading in a good direction. (At least it probably did from one perspective.) Injustice, was, of course, flowing underneath, undermining this white male imperial old world. But few knew or suspected what was coming.

What was coming was Europe’s own slaughter of the firstborn. Every street lost a son. Every village sprouted a war memorial. This was followed by a pandemic, by a long Depression, by a second spasm of world war. Empires fell; the world changed. I often think my grandad, born 1899, gassed 1918, had a rough 50 years till peace and prosperity started to grow again.

Plenty of parts of the world are suffering their own 1914 already of course: Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan just to start with. Theologians who viewed Russia’s early massacres in Ukraine wondered if they had a working theology any more, so senseless and terrible it was.

The Economist newspaper offered a few possibilities for 2025 including:

  • A new global pandemic
  • The seizing up of the North Atlantic Ocean Circulation
  • A solar mass ejection (in this year of solar maximum) destroying satellites and fusing transformers across half the world
  • A volcano or supervolcano

And these come on top of the worries about the world that we might already have, just reading the news.

You possibly know where this is heading. Thank goodness for Mary’s Son. Who both deserves to be world king and actually is; unrolling the scroll of history with a voracious love and desire for the human race. Even if evil and time erases our theology, our sense of good, it doesn’t extinguish his.

The hope of the age and of the ages.

Happy Christmas!

Dethroning anxiety

I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting this wonderful blog from Nadia Bolz-Weber. On the face of it, her circle and mine (hers is much bigger) do not much intersect: ordained, tattooed, a former addict, divorced, remarried and probably further over on some theological spectrum than I, but she writes and thinks so beautifully that I would recommend her corner of the internet to you and anybody. Here’s the link that should enable you to sign up. And here’s something she wrote a couple of weeks ago, about anxiety:

As a child I worried a lot about quicksand. To be fair, the TV shows I watched made it seem like more of a potential danger in life than it’s proved to be.

And as a teenager I worried that the Soviet Union would drop nuclear bombs on us but I equally worried that I wouldn’t get tickets to see Depeche Mode.

In my early 20s I was mostly worried I’d run out of booze, and that I would not be able to pay my $325 a month rent. Sadly, I did not think to worry about how those two things might be related.

And when I got sober and I worried that I wouldn’t be funny anymore never realizing I wasn’t all that funny before.

Then I was told to worry that Y2K was going to make airplanes just sort of drop out of the sky.

And when 9-11 happened I for sure worried the terrorist attacks would just keep going and by that time I had 2 babies and that made it feel more acute.

Then when the economic collapse happened in 2008 … honestly I was entirely free from worry because I was entirely free of money. So it was very a relaxing time for me.

Then I worried that people would think less of me when I got divorced not realizing they didn’t think that much of me to begin with.

Feel free to go home and write your own biography of worry. It’s a humbling project to undertake.

But also kind of calming.

Because writing my own this week helped remind me how worrying about what might happen didn’t do one thing to make me feel safe, or to prevent bad things from happening or to ensure that good things did. It really only kept me from being present to the gifts of the day I was in.

… worrying about what might happen didn’t do one thing to make me feel safe … It really only kept me from being present to the gifts of the day I was in

But what I really want to tell you about is how our reading from Revelation helped me this week –

The churches in Asia minor to whom John’s Revelation is addressed had some pretty high anxiety levels too – they were living under the thumb of the Roman empire and the book of Revelation was meant to offer them comfort. It’s famous for 7 headed beasts and heavenly battles and whatnot, but If there is an overwhelming message in this, the weirdest book in the Bible, it would be this: that dominant powers are not ultimate powers. Which is another sermon for another time.

The part of today’s reading that I swear lowered my cortisol levels was this:

In his opening remarks, the writer of Revelation twice refers to God as the one who was, who is, and who is to come. That’s it.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

That is what comforted me this week as I read our texts for today and tried to manage my anxiety while writing a sermon.

That God was and is and is to come.

Or as the hymn goes:

Crown him the Lord of Years,

The Potentate of Time,

creator of the rolling spheres, ineffably sublime.

It helped me this week because it reminded me that this moment we are in is a very small moment in a very big story.  A story of God and God’s people that reaches back to the beginning of time, brushes the skin of the present and moves on into a future we cannot see.  

What I am saying is that I think I am most anxious when I invest myself too fully in some Johnny come lately story.

Because looking again at my autobiography of worry, I think that at each of those anxious points in my life I was believing a story I was being told; in the media and by my friends and from our culture. Which is understandable, but in hindsight most of the stories did not end up being all that true, they just ended up being quickly replaced by new ones so we never noticed.

What I am trying to say is that the beautiful thing about being a people of faith is how we are a very small part of a very big story. We tell it, we sing it, we eat it, we paint it, we read it, because it’s the most true thing we’ve ever heard.  And competing stories will always surround us.  Sometimes, maybe a little bit like our siblings in faith from the churches in Asia minor in the 1st century, we too need reminding that the dominant story is not the ultimate story. That that there is only one potentate of time.

When I look back, in all my times of grief and doubt and sorrow and anger and faithlessness, I can in the rear view, see the mighty hand of God.

To be clear, God was not busily arraigning all my desired outcomes. If that were true, had I gotten everything I wanted I promise you I wouldn’t be alive right now, much less standing here in this pulpit.

But what I can see now, is how often I was saved from having the thing happen that I was so sure would make me happy.

Looking back I see how often I was carried through things I thought I couldn’t survive, and how I was guided to beautiful things I wouldn’t have ever even wished for.

Because God is like a shimmering, divine filament woven into our lives that provides spiritual tensile strength, and beauty in each moment, even when we forget to trust him, even when we forget to pray or be grateful.

Green old age

Photo by Joseph Corl on Unsplash

Last spring we held a party for three 90-year-olds in our church. In the months since, two have died and the third lost his wife of many years.

It was, perhaps, a good shout that we had the party when we did.

I was thinking about them the other day. I liked them very much. The thing that stood out, I think (particularly in the two who have now passed on) was their zest and enthusiasm for life. They gave life to people, rather than sucking it out of them (as an introvert I am sensitive to this). Bits of them were falling off into the grate, as it were, but the flame was still burning bright. I remember joshing with each of them, weeks, as it turned out, before the end.

A life-filled, green old age can’t be easy, and perhaps doesn’t always happen even with God’s saints. The Bible describes old age as ‘the clouds return after the rain’ (Ecclesiastes 12:2): it must be hard not to be depressed at yet another medical appointment, yet more health-related indignity, yet further limitation. Yet their record stands. This life, this life-givingness, is that what healing looks like in old age and decline?

The gospel industrial complex and the big drummer in the sky

Photo by Caleb Toranzo on Unsplash

(I am grateful for the writer Chuck Lowe for this brilliance, which I hope I have not sullied too much.)

You need to make something happen? Here’s what you need:

  • A parts list
  • Step-by-step instructions
  • Hazards to avoid
  • Useful techniques for greater efficiency

Apart from the side effect of turning people into automata, this approach was powerful for simple things like recipes, fast-food restaurants, internal combustion engines, mills, factories and much else. The Industrial Revolution (I suggest) was a revolution because of the discovery and application of this power.

It is such a powerful approach that we humans have totally lost control of it and are applying it to everything, particularly complex systems, where it doesn’t work at all. Here is a partial list where it doesn’t work:

  • Babies
  • Adults
  • Children
  • Societies
  • Economies
  • Medicine
  • Education
  • Business

You get the idea: anything human. I notice (following Chuck Lowe again) how what powered the Industrial Revolution has hijacked the Christian Church, or at least the bits I inhabit. (Perhaps Orthodoxy largely escaped? I don’t know enough. )

Right now, around the world, how many courses are being delivered, how many notes taken, about about how to get the gospel working in lives and churches: evangelistic programmes, discipleship programmes, instructions on how to pray, heal, defeat evil, live well? What colossal percentage of time and energy is wasted delivering and receiving these courses. Because what works for the simple does not work for the complex. Anybody who has spent the shortest time with a toddler knows this.

Abandon it all. What are we supposed to do instead? I think in the Christian sphere it is about the attitudes that flow from a worshipping heart; about love love of God and neighbour; about serving as your passions and circumstances lead and constrain; and about trusting God, the big drummer in the sky, to call the dance.