To make the maximum impact for good with your life:
keeping doing the simple things that you love and are good at.
It might be called the ‘horse chestnut principle’. If a conker can avoid being stolen by squirrels or collected by children, it can become a horse chestnut tree, huge and lovely.
Attached by fungus, but still doing the business, the horse chestnut outside our our house
Here’s an open letter, from a much-loved Sri Lankan Christian leader Ajith Fernando, to elderly theologian J I Packer. It’s a testimonial to Packer’s long lifetime, to Ajith Fernando’s consistent service, and to the compounding power of faithfulness.
“Believing in him is not the same as believing things about him such as that he was born of a virgin and raised Lazarus from the dead. Instead, it is a matter of giving our hearts to him, of come hell or high water putting our money on him, the way a child believes in a mother or a father, the way a mother or a father believes in a child.”
― Frederick Buechner
So stirred by this quote. I think we can pray in many ways. Sometimes it’s good to lift up people we love and situations we care about, working through our lists.
Sometimes we can worship.
Sometimes we work our way through a psalm, or a liturgy.
Some of us like to use the Lord’s Prayer as a set of headings or jumping-off points, a kind of road map to guide our thoughts.
But I wonder if this best sort of prayer is beyond all of these. It’s to do with unpacking our problems before Christ until we come to a place, not necessarily of understanding, but of peace.
Or clambering up an impossible problem in prayer, scrabbling for a foothold, until again, Jesus reaches down and gives us something to hold onto, something that holds us and gives us quiet, happy hearts. The view all around may be terrifying, but we are safe and snug, supported by some promise or gift of trusting that is beyond our understanding.
We have stumbled onto the rock that is higher than we are: Christ’s own trustworthiness. We don’t know how it happens, but it happens.
It’s a novel first, a science-fiction novel second: in other words, it has rich characters, a compelling plot, and leaves you with much to think about. The SF element is done seamlessly well with good hard science and coherent thinking about another world and how it might work.
The plot is all about a Jesuit mission to another culture, what happened there, and how it affected the hero, a Jesuit priest and translator.
I suspect Mary Doria Russell gave her story an SF context only because on earth, most of the strange tribes have already been encountered, if not by Jesuits then by their Protestant missionary cousins.
Underlying the whole tale all are deep questions about God, about faith, redemption, surrender and devotion.
It really is a wonderful book, and shows perhaps how hollow much of the rest of the SF universe really is. (Not that that stops me enjoying it: it’s just that this book is so much richer.)
It rightly won prizes. This is the only SF book I would recommend my wife should ever read. It’s a wonderful novel, not to be missed.
First light: it isn’t dark: the sky is brightening, day is inevitable. But it isn’t day either, because the Sun has yet to rise in all its glory, transforming everything.
When the Sun rises, it touches the mountaintops first. The church is very like these mountains. We are positioned there in the night-time landscape. We ourselves are a mixture of darkness and light. But what makes us different is that without any merit on our part, without us even particularly doing anything, the Sun is shining on us.
Here in the night-time, we are already enjoying the day-time. God brings a little day-time to us, and through us a light is cast on a twilit world.
Something real has happened to us if we turned to Christ. The New Testament boldly states that when Christ gives someone a new heart, it’s a piece of the world to come: ‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!’
Then—like that sunlit mountain—we are a sign of something, and an example of something, to the world around.
As has been often observed, the old paradigm in the West is Christendom, and it’s disintegrating.
We now need to rethink this new day. But we have help.
The prophet Jeremiah also saw two paradigms in his own lifetime. He saw the idea of God’s-people-as-a-country, with its surface-mounted devotion, corrupt and hollow, collapse — the end of one paradigm.
At the same time he called on Jewish exiles in Babylon to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” (Jeremiah 29:7).
This was astonishing. God’s people are no longer a nation, Jeremiah was saying. They were to be more like a network. In his way, Jeremiah was as radical as Moses, radical enough to see what of Moses to scrap.
No more separation from the non-Jewish people around you, Jeremiah told the people of God: get stuck in. Keep your faith, but build a good city along with them.
No more Promised Land: now the God of the Promise, present with God’s people in every land.
No longer propping up an abandoned structure: now they were starting a new build. No longer a national focus: now a global one.
This echoes down into the New Testament, and is our call now.
… It’s a place of welcome and laughter, of healing and hope, of friends and family and justice and new life.
‘It’s where the homeless drop in for a bowl of soup, and the elderly for someone to chat to. It’s where you’ll find people learning to pray, coming to faith, struggling with temptation, finding new purpose and a new power to carry it out.
‘It’s where people bring their own small faith and discover that when they get together with others to worship the true God, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. No church is like this all of the time. But a remarkable number of churches are partly like that for quite a lot of the time.’ (p 105)
Many of our churches have a habit of investing too much in the next big growth-delivering, soul-saving, church-renewing spiritual product, often backed by a handbook and set of videos from some wealthy church somewhere a long way from where God has placed us.
This is all good, but in my experience doesn’t quite work as well as advertised on the tin. Most church-renewing spiritual products, it seems sometimes, haven’t met my church.
When Jesus first taught the Sermon on the Mount to his disciples, it must have been a shock. It’s still a shock today. What he majored on was not technique, was not slick and didn’t need a workbook.
Blessed are the poor in spirit … those who mourn … the meek …
those who hunger and thirst for righteousness … the merciful … the pure in heart … the peacemakers … the ridiculed (or persecuted). (Matthew 5:3-12)
Instead, these Beatitudes are all these things:
slow
grounded in a deep need of God
long term
affecting all of life
undergirding and rising above any specific plans
concerned with our hearts, not our skillset
encompassing sadness and setback
starting small
costing nothing
using the materials to hand, and
successfully helping us and our works to be a sign, instrument, and foretaste of the total transformation of the world in Jesus.
A spiritual strategy, in other words, for the rest of us.
My monthly review of a wonderful book for those of us navigating the space between faith and doubt.
Algerian Karima Bennoune has made a familiar enough tour of the Muslim world but in search of unusual specimens: vocal Muslim-heritage opponents of radical Islam.
It’s the being vocal that gets them into trouble. Like cyclists in London these people are too often steering themselves into a non-existent gap between the juggernaut of short-tempered men in beards and the unyielding concrete kerb of political repression.
Intimidated, bombed, bloodied but not giving up, they are contemporary heroes: the Pakistani theatre director trying to put on a children’s arts festival. The Algerian journalists, bombed almost out of existence by Islamists and at the same time fighting censorship and intimidation from the government.
The requests these kind of people make are so small: wouldn’t it be nice to have a youth centre somewhere in Lahore, where children can learn to paint or play music. There are none. If you want a madrassa, however, they’re on every street.
This is the frontline of the struggle for human rights. Prof Bennoune’s book simmers with a rage that it is hard not to share: the teenaged Iranian girl, swimming in her own garden, in a bathing costume, reported by a neighbour for ‘inciting male lust’. She is arrested, then sentenced to 60 lashes. The terrified teen only received 30 lashes because, by then, she was dead.
Prof Bennoune argues that instead of drawing a line between violent and non-violent (moderate) Islamists, we should draw a line between those who respect universal human rights and those who don’t. If ‘moderate Islamists’ or ‘moderate Taliban’ don’t believe in women’s rights, for example, in a way that any English schoolgirl would understand, Prof Bennoune has no time for them.
This is a passionate, moving book, highlighting the sheer power of intimidation.
Not found in common books of liturgy, I reproduce it here with thanks to the peerless Neal Stephenson who puts the prayer into the mouth of Samuel Pepys. (Lithotomy is of course the removal of a gallstone.)
‘Lord of the Universe, Your humble servants Samuel Pepys and Daniel Waterhouse pray that you shall bless and keep the soul of the late Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, who, wanting no further purification in the Kidney of the World, went to your keeping twenty years since. And we give praise and thanks to You for having given us the rational faculties by which the procedure of lithotomy was invented, enabling us, who are further from perfection, to endure longer in this world, urinating freely as the occasion warrants. Let our urine-streams, gleaming and scintillating in the sun’s radiance as they pursue their parabolic trajectories earthward, be as an outward and visible sign of Your Grace, even as the knobbly stones hidden in our coat pockets remind us that we are all earth, and we are all sinners. Do you have anything to add, Mr Waterhouse?’
One of the things not to watch at King’s Cross station is tourists talking selfies as they crash luggage trolleys into a brick wall. On top of the brick wall is the sign ‘Platform 9 3/4’, and you can also find a convenient shop nearby of Potter memorabilia.
Great though Harry Potter is, you can find an even better story hidden around the corner from King’s Cross Station.
The British Library stores every book ever printed. Its greatest treasure, which may even be the UK’s greatest treasure, is on exhibition there. This is something more valuable than the crown jewels and more influential than than The Wealth of Nations or the Magna Carta (also on display nearby) or Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
The Codex Siniaticus, the book from Sinai, is the ‘oldest Bible in the world’, and the earliest complete New Testament, dating from 320 AD.
Seetheholyland.net @flickr
How it was found is unbelievable.
The first 43 pages of it were discovered in a monastic fire-basket in 1844 by German scholar and explorer Lobegott Friedrich Constantin von Tischendorf. He was visiting St Catherine’s monestary on the traditional site of Mt Sinai.
I perceived in the middle of the great hall a large and wide basket, full of old parchments; and the librarian informed me that two heaps of papers like this, mouldered by reason of age, had been already committed to the flames. What was my surprise to find among this heap of documents a considerable number of sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek, which seemed to me to be one of the most ancient I had ever seen.
Prayer life: good. Central heating fuel, some improvement needed. seetheholyland.net@flickr
His excitement prevented the monks from handing over the rest, but also, fortunately, from burning any more pages.
In 1859, he persuaded the monks to present the whole MS to Tsar Alexander II of Russia. It contained about half the Old Testament and all the New Testament. After the Russian Revolution, and long after Tischendorf’s death, the revolutionary government didn’t want it, and the British bought it.
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