Category: Seasons

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!

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?

Like a subscription to a sweetshop

So. I just discovered Perlego.com and it is like having a subscription to a sweetshop, or an all-you-can-eat buffet, or a pizza restaurant. I think it was originally for students. It stores a million textbooks and for a simple monthly fee, you can download and read them all. (Note that it is perlego and not perlogo. The alternate spelling in my experience is a site that has been taken over by cybersquatters who intend you harm.)

Here’s my usage over the past two months.

  • Our church has a teaching series on the biblical book of Nehemiah, which I’m speaking on in August. Want a commentary on Nehemiah? Perlego offers 94 of them across the range of Biblical scholarship. I tucked into Derek Kidner’s 2015 Tyndale commentary for starters.
  • I helped myself to Tom Wright’s biography of Paul, which I just read in hardback and wanted to review.
  • I was able to hunt down all John Walton’s books, which are revolutionizing studies of Genesis and read in detail The Lost World of the Flood, very much enjoying his blend of Biblical scholarship, from a conservative perspective no less, and his receptivity to God’s other book, the book of nature as opened and read by modern science. His secret sauce that blends these two ingredients is a renewed study of the ancient literature and an awareness of the cultural flow of the times. If we know what they meant then, today’s science isn’t a problem.
  • I chewed without finishing Joshua Swamidass’ book The Genealogical Adam and Eve, which I have blogged about in a previous year. It claims that you can have a historic literal Adam and Eve and they can be ancestors of everyone, provided they weren’t the only humans on earth at the time. I haven’t eaten my crusts so far as this book is concerned because (a) it’s quite dense and my eyes glazed over and (b) I’m not wedded to a literal Adam and Eve,especially after reading Walton. But still.
  • Fancying something a little more spiritually improving, I looked to see what the scholar-archbishop (and Cambridge resident) Rowan Williams had on offer and dug out probably the most difficult of the alternatives, his book Passions of the Soul which is, broadly, a study of what the Greek-speaking Desert Fathers did all day in terms of scrutinizing the human psyche’s response to God. One wonders if the Desert Fathers rather pushed to the background the Second Great Commandment, love your neighbour, but it’s nevertheless interesting.
  • Then I’ve been listening to Justin Brierley’s excellent podcast series The Surprising Rebirth of Faith in God which is also a book and isn’t yet available on the sainted Perlego, but his previous title Why I’m Still a Christian is. The podcast had an episode on a woman called Louise Perry, who, starting with impeccable feminist credentials, has come to conclude that the best way for most people and for societies as a whole to thrive is to aim at a life not incompatible with many of the Christian values. (I don’t think she herself is at the moment a Christian believer, saying she stumbles on the metaphysics.) She was so eloquent, gracious, honest and deeply, deeply smart in the interview that I put her in Perlego and lo! There her book appeared, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and I can read that too. I can read them all. For my £12 or so monthly subscription.

Cue the rumble of the earth moving around me. I have written about how sad it is that thousands of pieces of excellent writing (in my particular world, Christian academic writing) are hidden inaccessible behind mighty paywalls. Woe to you if you are Nigerian youth leader or a Filipina pastor or, frankly, an ordinary Joe in the West whose budget doesn’t stretch to this literary feasting. The seven titles I’ve mentioned here would empty your wallet of the best part of £100 to buy, even assuming you could find them.

The Internet was always supposed to give us access to every film ever made, every piece of music ever recorded, and every book ever written. Big tech has muscled in mostly, so the films are divided between different streamers, and the music is being buried under a weight of AI generated elevator sound. Amateur films, books and music are everywhere, creators far outstripping the capacity of consumers.

But Perlego is, I think, where publishers’ backlists go, a far superior place to the literary Hades which is the nether end of the Amazon bestseller lists, where books crowd in semi-darkness, waiting usually in vain to be called up higher by an Order. (This is where my books reside, incidentally, at least until I get my move to Substack sorted out, of which more sometime.)

Enjoy it while it lasts.

My challenge now is to find le temps juste when I can moot to my wife the idea of an annual Perlego subscription (£100 or so, so a saving really) and perhaps a compact little Android e-reader like this to read it on.

Faith and patience.

Doing fun things with old people

The world is ageing fast. Every day, 10,000 American baby boomers turn 65. Figuring out what to do with them (/us 1) is something we need to think about. Better yet if it can increase well-being across the world.

Photo by Janosch Lino on Unsplash

A recent Economist article described how some university campuses in the United States are building retirement homes. I hope they will forgive me quoting large parts of their article.

Most residents are having a ball. They get a university pass, which allows them to attend the same classes and cultural events as students, but with the distinct benefit of not having to take exams. Golf buggies can drive them around the sprawling campus, though many are still fit enough to mountain bike.

In their dorms, four restaurants serve better food than college grub and amenities include an art studio, a pool and gym, and a games room. Only the second floor feels institutional, with a memory-care centre and rooms for residents who need round-the-clock attention …

This is part of a wider trend. An estimated 85 colleges in America are affiliated with some form of senior living. The idea sprang from two college presidents who wanted to retire on campus in the 1980s. Today, universities from Central Florida to Iowa State to Stanford offer senior-living arrangements. Andrew Carle, at Georgetown University, estimates that as many as 20,000 older Americans live like this …

Bill Gates—not that one, but an 80-year-old former newspaper editor—moved to [one of these communities] with his wife, who has a PhD in chemistry, two years ago. They have made friends with residents but also, to their surprise, with younger students. “Being among young people is really invigorating,” says Mr Gates. At “pizza and a slice of future”, a discussion group about AI with pizza served halfway through, one of the topics was whether a lifespan of 200 or 250 years would be desirable. “The 20-year-olds were enthusiastic,” he reflects, but those in their 70s and 80s “had some reservations”, he chuckles.

When I saw this, I thought it was a downpayment on heaven. Being in community, attending lectures and discussion groups, surrounded by young people … oh man … what a fantastic way to spend your life’s teatime.

I heard another example from the UK. Our church used to run a day centre for the elderly. I heard of a similar day centre that had combined with a toddler group. So instead of the elderly looking at each across a circle of high-backed chairs, the elderly were looking at each other across a circle of high-backed chairs over a space filled with toddlers doing toddlery things. I can’t imagine how this wouldn’t be fun, perhaps even for all concerned.

Old people are changing. But the picture I have had of them so far in the UK is people on the edge of things, and unbelievably lonely, and deprived of the things that really matter, namely purpose and people. How astonishing and lovely it could be if they were folded back into new forms of extended families and communities; such healing, such wholeness.

The power of the small

I wrote some years ago about fractals, objects that are similar whether viewed on large scale or a small scale. For example, the way trees branch is the same whether you look at a whole tree or just a small portion of the branch. They are ‘self-similar across scales’, which is to say, fractal.

photo of bare tree under clear blue sky
Mathematically and theologically significant. Photo by Chris F on Pexels.com

Everything is infinitely small compared to God so (to God) the pattern presumably matters more than the size.

So it isn’t surprising that fractal behaviour crops up whenever we consider God at work. Parables–picturing God at work–are self-similar across scales. Is the parable of the sower about the history of nations? Or of a single small tribe? Or of a single human heart? It’s self-similar across scales, so it applies equally to all of them.

The pattern matters more than the size

Faithfulness is fractal. If you are faithful in a little thing, you will be entrusted with much. One who is faithful in small things will be understood to be faithful in big things too. The pattern is the thing; the size doesn’t much matter in the eyes of God.

This is a stunning fact when you hold it up against our desires for prestige or respect or generally just to be associated with big stuff. Two things stand out to me, one of them relevant to this advent season.

  1. The young woman caring for the infant Jesus, wiping his bum, burping him, rocking him to sleep, was supplying exactly the faithfulness needed at that moment; enough faithfulness to save a whole Universe.
  2. Our smallest faithful actions shine out in God’s eyes like stars– a secret of a life of patient revolution.

Healing and the end of life

Not that I am personally planning on calling it quits any time soon, but I was wondering recently what ‘healing’ looks like in the context of the end of our lives.

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

We don’t know if this will be relevant for us, of course. Some friends of mine have been snuffed out without much time to do anything about it. Some apparently didn’t know it was going to happen. But most of my late friends and family had plenty of warning.

One part of healing near the end of life is, of course, that your life doesn’t end, you recover, and go on to see many good days.

But it occurred to me recently there is such thing as a ‘time to die’. However good or bad or complete has been our life, whether its conclusion will be bitterly painful or a blessed relief, our impact on the world is over, our days are winding down, this is it.

I wonder if ‘healing’ in this context isn’t about making peace with that fact; and going on to make peace with as much in your life as you can, and especially with God.

What’s fun about this idea is that it gives you back some agency. You’re in charge again. You have accepted the big fact (you’re mortal) and now you’re free again, to love and conclude things as you see fit, and as best you can.

Populist bingo

After another heavy day on the Select Committee. Ashish Upadhyay on Unsplash.

And so Boris is gone, sulking, in a spray of adjectives and grievances.

In the USA, justice is chasing down President Trump, suspected of hiding documents in his toilet.

The populist First Minister of Scotland has fallen, with the cops sniffing around her house and looking for (among other things) a motorhome and a wheelbarrow. The suspicion (still unproven and hotly denied) is that the Caledonian Cabal made off with party funds to buy a wheelbarrow. This is a misuse of the misuse of funds. If you’re going to misuse funds, I mean, don’t do it at B & Q.

Over in Russia, let us hope, the authority of the president is pouring away like the water from a (former) Ukrainian dam.

Let us play populist bingo. Cross off the words when your favourite populist departs:

Witch-hunt

Kangaroo court

I did not lie

Not a shred of evidence

I am innocent

I was saying what I believed sincerely to be true

I take my responsibilities seriously

They have wilfully chosen to ignore the truth

I am now being forced out of Parliament by a tiny handful of people

A political hit job

I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out

Anti-democratically

Egregious bias

A phrase book for your convenience

I’m also providing a phrase book since language means a different thing on whatever planet the populists’ heads reside:

‘Tiny handful of people’ = A majority of the House of Commons, of the consituency, and of the whole country.

‘Egregrious bias’ = fact-based

‘Anti democratically’ = democratically

‘I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out’ = I am bewildered and appalled that I have to obey the rules

‘They have wilfully chosen to ignore the truth’ = They have wilfully chosen to follow the evidence

‘Not a shred of evidence’ = pants round ankles, hand in the cookie jar

Radar charts and the management of complexity

Radar charts are a way of putting lots of different scales in one picture. (If you speak Excel – I don’t – you can probably either build them already or find an internet reference about building them that you understand.)

Here’s an example of what you could depict, the textbook Romantic Hero.

The Romantic Hero

Tallness5
Solvency
5
Capacity for brooding/smouldering5
Position in British Aristocracy5
Vulnerability despite all the above3

That gives you five axes.

Then, give a score to each axis. On a scale of 1-5, your proper Romantic Hero would score fives on each axis (five is high and 1 is low), with the exception of Vulnerability, where he gets a 3… enough for some tenderness but he’s not looking for another mother.

The current option on the table, however, is Ed from Accounts, let us say. Here’s his score:

Ed from accounts

Tallness2
Solvency
4
Capacity for brooding/smouldering1
Position in British Aristocracy1
Vulnerability despite all the above4

He’s OK with solvency, intriguing with vulnerability, hopeless at brooding because he’s a chirpy, upbeat sort of chap, has no links with the aristocracy and is fun-sized, rather than premium, when it comes to stature.

Spider (or radar) diagrams save you much tedious working and turn all this data into useful pictures. The picture broadly summarizes all you know and helps you make a decision. (Do you invest in Ed, who is conveniently at hand, or do you keep singing ‘One day my prince will come’? Tricky, but a radar chart may help.)

Countries

You can do the same for countries. Some countries claim to be ‘democratic’ because they are ruled by a benign father figure who, in a lifetime of public service, always acts for the good of the nation. And anyone expressing an alternate view finds large people bursting into their house and bundling them into the back of a van.

Other countries also claim to be democratic and they also possess a free press, a robust and plausible opposition and the kind of independent courts that enable an individual to prove the goverment is acting unlawfully. All these can be put on a scale and in fact probably are put on a scale somewhere conveniently for us by hard-working NGOs.

Other spheres too

I wonder if plotting things on multiple axes might help us see, and manage complexity, in other spheres too? For example, perhaps in medicine, Western practice can often be a bit one-dimensional: you count the infection markers in the blood, you apply antibiotic, you watch the infection markers go down again over time. (I think.) It’s possible to attempt a more rounded picture (are you sad, lonely, overweight, under-exercised, an adult victim of childhood trauma, or surrounded and nurtured by people like that, and is that really why you are so often off sick?)

There was a trendy theory of church growth that could work the same way. A church will usually grow, the theory says, until it reaches a limit caused by the one thing the church is least good at. Fix that, and it will grow again until it reaches a limit caused by the next-least-good quality of the church. And so on. All this could be conveniently mapped on a radar diagram.

Finally, the total witness of all the people of God could be summarized on a radar chart, though I suspect this can only be viewed in heaven. It would be nice if we (the church) scored a five on all the axes, doing social justice, witnessing to the truth, exercising hospitality, treating people with respect, sharing our goods with the poor, lifting the fallen, committed to creatively, worshipping Christ and introducing people to him…)

Where does this lead us?

Er- wish I knew.

Why electricity is just as good as miracles

Feels better already. (This is a photo of Singapore by lee junda on Unsplash)

Again I’m writing about healing, partly because I’m living it, partly because what I picked up from many years as a Christian now seems so wrong and there is so much rethinking to do.

I’m still rethinking, and I’m still breathing, both of which I feel are important.

The last few weeks: we bought a disabled buggy, a wonderful little thing, and took it on holiday. (It folds into the car.) We were with our daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren and there was much walking on the prom and the cliff-tops, all of it now painless and easy. Nor was anyone needed to push me around in a wheelchair. And I could give the kids rides. So now in God’s riches I have an electric bike for longer journeys around Cambridge and an electric buggy for when I am with others.

Then yesterday I took the train down to my specialist heart centre in London where they retuned the pacemaker in my chest. A week or so before that, after phone calls from me, I had downloaded the pacemaker data and sent it to the hospital via a piece of kit that lives under our bed. The hospital looked at it and called me in and did the necessary reprogramming. Amazing. It is early days for this treatment but I feel less breathless and my wife tells me I am no longer blue to look at. Those guys at the hospital (both female guys as it happened) don’t just measure your ECG; they modify it and tweak it. They don’t take an ECG lying down. They press buttons and see what happens. Such fun!

This techno-assistance, though, seems a far cry from the New Testament where the Lord Jesus or the apostles did their stuff and immediate physical transformation appears to have happened. My electric buggy and the retuning of the extraordinary electronics that supply my heartbeat seem a different order of a thing to that. Why can’t (as Naaman asked) a prophet just wave his hands over me and make me well? Does this techno-medical intervention really count as ‘healing’ at all? Or is it a second-best solution for those whose lives are so cold and lacking in faith and zeal that the real healing stuff never happens to them? What is healing after all?

The New Testament contains hints that what I have heard doctors call the ‘psycho-social’ parts of healing are important, just as are the physical deliverance parts. Ten lepers were cleansed: only one came back to say thank you. Was there a lingering psycho-social unhealing among the healed lepers? Body fine, head in wrong place. Demons are driven out of the Gaderene demoniac. He is seen sitting clothed and in his right mind. But Jesus tells him to go home to his family, rather than joining the band of disciples. Is that to complete his healing? To address the pyscho-social roots of what got him in such a state in the first place? As it is, Mark records that the former demoniac takes up a speaking ministry in the Ten Towns, and Mark is silent over whether or not that was what Jesus really intended for the man. Interesting.

Then I watch friends, with a cancer diagnosis say, put their lives on hold until the treatment is completed. I observe, I think, I might be wrong (I hope I am), that they are putting all their eggs in the physical healing basket. Zap the cancer, go back to the life we had before. Nothing else matters.

I am so not so sure that this is right. (Of course I have to allow for the fact that I am sitting in my garden, at my ease, contented, writing this, not suffering some medical emergency or hospitalization which would indeed require a lot of effort and focus.)

But still. I am coming to believe more and more that healing is life today, bread today, thriving today and that it is entirely God’s business how he delivers that. All good gifts come down from the Father of lights who does not change as the shifting shadows: buggies, pacemakers, holidays, instant miraculous physical transformations, play, vocation, nice food, people you love and good relationships with God and others.

I am coming to believe more and more that healing is life today, bread today, thriving today and that it is entirely God’s business how he delivers that.

Of course, you have to qualify that idea. There are seasons of emergency actions, long wintry paths of mourning, times of brute endurance of the deeply unpleasant. It’s hard to speak of ‘thriving today’ in the face of those. But still. Healing is thriving. Healing is enjoying our lives, nourished by God’s daily bread, despite everything, in these ramshackle tents of ours, before they are replaced for good with the eternal mansions of glory.

Relevance in an age of transience

Any excuse for a pic of Ely Cathdral. This was a day or two before the first lockdown when it shut its doors for the first time in approximately forever.

What do you when when you were the young whippersnapper but are being replaced by still younger whippersnappers? I found this brilliant piece from Wired magazine by Megan O’Gyblin (March 2021) in my notebook. It made me want to read a lot more of her stuff. She was answering the question from a 30-year-old that began, ‘I’m only 30 but already I feel myself disengaging from youth trends.’ (This is an excerpt.)

‘The sense that our lives are part of an ongoing narrative that began before we were born and will continue after we die.’ I have barely dipped my toes in this, even after the all decades my heart has been beating.

I don’t mean to depress you, only to slightly reframe the question. If perpetual relevance is a chimeric virtue, as futile as the quest for eternal life, the question then becomes: What will make your life more enriching and meaningful? On one hand, it might seem that acquiring more knowledge—staying up to date on music, slang, whatever—will lead to more meaning, at least in its most literal sense. To grow old, after all, is to watch the world become ever more crowded with empty signifiers. It is to become like one of those natural language processing models that understands syntax but not semantics, that can use words convincingly in a sentence while remaining ignorant of the real-world concepts they represent. It feels, in other words, as though you’re becoming less human.

But knowledge is not the only source of meaning. In fact, at a moment when information is ubiquitous, cheap, and appended with expiration dates, what most of us long for, whether we realize it or not, is continuity—the sense that our lives are part of an ongoing narrative that began before we were born and will continue after we die. For centuries, the fear of growing old was assuaged by the knowledge that the wisdom, skills, and experience one acquired would be passed down, a phenomenon the historian Christopher Lasch called “a vicarious immortality in posterity.” When major technological innovations arrived every few hundred years rather than every decade it was reasonable to assume your children and grandchildren would live a life much like your own. This sense of permanence made it possible to construct medieval cathedrals over the course of several centuries, with artisanal techniques bequeathed like family heirlooms.

This relationship to the future has become all but impossible in our accelerated digital age. What of our lives today will remain in 10 years, or 20, or into the next century? When the only guarantee is that the future will be radically unlike the past, it’s difficult to believe that the generations have anything to offer one another. How do you prepare someone for a future whose only certainty is that it will be unprecedented? What can you hope to learn from someone whose experience is already obsolete? To grow old in the 21st century is to become superfluous, which might explain why the notion of aging gracefully has become an alien concept. (As one Gen Z-er complained of millennials in Vice: “It all feels like they’re trying to prolong their youth.”) Meanwhile, the young become, for the old, not beneficiaries of wisdom and knowledge but aides in navigating the bewildering world of perpetual disruption—in other words, tech support.

Someone of your age, of course, has a foot in both worlds: still young enough to count yourself as part of the rising culture, yet mature enough to perceive that you are not exempt from the pull of gradual irrelevance. One difficulty of this phase of life is feeling like you don’t have a clear role; another is the constant anxiety over when you will finally tip into fustiness yourself. But to take a brighter outlook, you also inhabit a unique vantage with a clear-eyed view of both the past and the future, and if there’s one thing we could all benefit from right now, it’s a sense of perspective. Rather than merely serving as IT for your older friends and relatives, you might ask them about their lives, if only to remind them—and yourself—that there remain aspects of human nature that are not subject to the tireless engine of planned obsolescence.

As for those younger than you, I suspect your life would seem more meaningful if you focused less on keeping up with transient fads and considered instead whether you have acquired any lasting knowledge that might be useful to the next generation