Barefoot in the wilderness
in search of understanding

Haiku

Hospital lights shine
through flurries of wind-blown snow;
bodily safety.

pax et bonum

Bone from my bone

Fancy a wedding ring made from your spouse’s bone? Then visit BioJewellery, which is looking for participants in a one-off experiment in bone-cell culture.
(Thanks to the New Scientist for this!)

Brian Sedgemore MP says goodbye in style!

Brian Sedgemore MP (Labour) gave his farewell speech on Wednesday, and it’s quite a scorcher. He lays into the government for its authoritarian stance, including (among others) establishing a “gulag” at Belmarsh, removing the right to trial by jury and the current attempts to bypass due process.

Have we all, individually and collectively, no shame? I suppose that once one has shown contempt for liberty by voting against it in the Lobby, it becomes easier to do it a second time and after that, a third time. Thus even Members of Parliament who claim to believe in human rights vote to destroy them.

It’s a shame to see a Labour government separated so far from its roots; perhaps if a few more MPs were willing to hold the government to account in this fashion, they might be more reasonable. Of course, a large part of Sedgemore’s ability to be so forthright is the fact that he’s standing down, but still!

The Hansard transcript is here.

pax et bonum

Nerdy

I seem to be quite nerdy – nerdier than 85% of all people, apparently!

Slightly worrying

pax et bonum

Secret identities?

No2ID has an interesting slant on the current news about Maxine Carr and her success in keeping her new identity secret. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this particular case, the need for some people to have “secret identities” is definitely a problem for the plans for ID cards in this country.

Haggis

After my previous exploits into sausages, salami and black pudding, today saw the last such effort for the moment – gluten-free haggis. Being based on oats means that Anne has never had haggis (because she’s coeliac and can’t eat wheat, oats, barley or rye). However, we had a cunning plan: substitute quinoa, a South American grain that has an oddly persistent crunchy/chewy ring around each seed.

So I took my sheep’s pluck (lungs, heart and liver), boiled them for a couple of hours, then minced them, added the quinoa, suet and seasoning, placed the mixture into skins and boiled for a further 3 hours. The results were gratifyingly haggis-like:

My advice to any other would-be haggis makers is, have a go – it’s rather easier than most sausage-like things to make. Do tie your knots in the skins well, and allow plenty of room for the skins to shrink – just over half full seemed about right for me.

Sadly, I included too much liver in the mix (some of the recipes I saw said to use only half of it, but most said to use all of it, which was what I did), so I found the result not as much to my taste as I’d hoped. Anne, however, loved it As did Ruth, our 10-month-old!

Which was nice.

pax et bonum

New terror law

The new terrorism law currently being fast-tracked through the UK Parliament is woefully poorly defined, reports The Register

Write to your MP for free!

For UK voters, here’s how to get in touch with your MP using the web, for free! WriteToThem.com is the new version of FaxYourMP, and lets you contact MPs, MEPs, Assembly members and local councillors. Good stuff

I’ve just used it to ask that my MP oppose the new legislation being brought by the government to allow people to be imprisoned in their home with no access to communication based on nothing more than suspicion, with no proper judicial oversight. Currently, this legislation is vast overkill for the purpose. We must not give up our liberties or our rights based on hysteria about terrorism. For goodness’ sake – it’s not as though terrorism is a new threat to the UK!

Enter your postcode in this form and you’ll get a list of your representatives and forms to send them messages!

pax et bonum

Labels

Waving or Drowning has a good article on the way we use Labels to describe ourselves.

The Da Vinci Code

Before I get stuck into the books I mentioned yesterday, I wanted to get something off my chest. I’ve finally read The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (I know, right up with the latest trends!) and, although it’s an OK read, I was very frustrated over various problems with it. I have no problem with a novel on this theme – it’s fiction, after all. But that is part of the problem. Dan Brown proclaims that much of it is not fiction but fact, in particular all his secret societies and their histories and rituals. And many people believe him, despite the total lack of evidence. Even worse than that, though, is that his research is often woefully weak and, where he has done his homework, he’s often failed to think about what he’s found out and ends up spouting nonsense. And the worst thing is that there was actually a good book in there crying to be let out, but it was smothered in all the ill-thought-out, poorly researched material that the author felt that he must include.

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New books

My parents came visiting last weekend, which was nice – especially seeing as they twice took Adam and Ruth out with them for a couple of hours. My father also had some old books that he was getting rid of that he wanted me to look through and see whether there was anything I wanted.

Among the various books (including my old Dr Who comics from when I was younger!) were some books of theology that I’m looking forward to reading.

• Paul Tillich – The Shaking of the Foundations
• Hugh Montefiore – Truth to Tell
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – Le Milieu Divin (in English!)
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Ethics and No Rusty Swords

However, before I get stuck into those, I need to finish a book I picked up as last year’s Greenbelt Festival – Jeffrey John’s The Meaning in the Miracles. I heard Jeffrey John speak on this subject at the festival and he was excellent, so I look forward to reading the book.

pax et bonum

World Press Photo of the Year

The World Press Photo of the Year for 2004 is a good picture, but not as uncomfortable as last year’s winner. I am truly ashamed of my country and government that such things have been, and are still, going on.

(Test sentence just for the Pivot guys – “look at me!”) This should show “ ) next to one another, which is what the source still shows, instead of “ followed by an emoticon.

Backing Blair

There is a general election looming in the UK this year, with the rumour mill pointing to May as the time. Getting all geared up for the big event is a new website Backing Blair. However, I suspect that “backing Blair” here has more to do with stabbing him in the back than slapping him on the back! The site promises to be an excellent resource for those who want to hold our Tony to account, whatever their political leanings. They have various posts up already, including a list of who to vote for if you want to oust the current MP
Another site to keep an eye on for the coming electing is SpinOn, which satirised the last election and promises to come out of retirement for this one!

pax et bonum

South America warms to Open Source

The Register is reporting that governments in South America are moving more and more towards Open Source Software – including Peru, which sees software freedom as part of its citizens’ basic rights!

Black pudding

Yesterday was largely spent making black pudding – the bucket finally had the use for which we bought it!
It’s not actually very hard, just a bit time-consuming, and even that’s only because the batch size is so large. Our recipe (based on the one in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Cookbook) is for 2 litres of blood, which doesn’t sound that much. However, our stock pot was only just large enough to contain the mixture once it had been made up! We’ve ended up with, I guess, well over 12 pounds of black pudding! And, given that it doesn’t freeze, that means our friends are going to be getting lots of free black pudding. And that, next time, we’ll be doing half quantities
Anyhow, here’s a small proportion of the produce (the puddings are 6-12 inches long):

The one surprise was that the puddings took a lot longer to cook than Hugh F-W. suggested – more like half an hour than 5 minutes! However, we also made some blood cakes (the same thing, but cooked in the oven instead of boiled in a skin), which worked fine and are easier, so perhaps that’s the route to take next time. They’re just not as satisfying somehow as the puddings!
Anyhow, we’ve now got lots of nice gluten-free British-style black pudding (made with rice instead of oats and barley) – the first black pudding Anne’s had in 23 years! And jolly nice it is, too

pax et bonum

Happy Birthday to Adam!

Today is Adam’s third birthday, and he is terribly excited
In addition to the presents he got at his party on Saturday, he’s now got a lovely bee-styled raincoat, new stories, a construction set and a blue football – and it’s important that it’s blue!

Navigating a child’s birthday seems to be an exhausting task – it seems to have been going on for ages now, what with having organised a party for last Saturday, then the actual birthday today, and his grandparents coming to visit next weekend.
The addition of illness for three-quarters of the family doesn’t make it any easier (Adam’s got a cough, Anne has tonsillitis and Ruth has conjunctivitis and a temperature!). Still, it’ll all be over soon

pax et bonum

Senses

This week’s New Scientist had various articles on perception. Quite interesting, you might think, but there was one factoid that boggled me slightly – the number of recognised human senses. Far more than the classical five senses are now known.

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Birthday party

Adam turns 3 this Tuesday, and we had his birthday party yesterday (Saturday). Quite a small party, with a few friends over for a nice lunch and games. Anne was especially proud of the chocolate bunny

pax et bonum

Welcome to my new home!

Hopefully, you will be able to find your way around this new blog. This is hosted at my own website and is based on Pivot, which provides quite a few extra features above what I had previously:

• a search form
• multipart posts so that you don’t have to wade through long posts on the front page
• a separate area for short posts (here called “Linkflash” )
• categories for posts

Setting this up is the reason for the few days of non-blogging I’ve had — setting Pivot up was trivial (it was literally working within 5 minutes), it was just creating my templates that took a bit of time Unfortunately, the process of importing my old posts from Blogger has lost all the comments, so a definite “Sorry” to those who took the time to post on the old blog. Do keep posting here, please!
Do let me know what you think of this design, and I’ll get back to posting my musings soon.

pax et bonum

Truth in unusual places

Today’s lectionary reading was the story of the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:1—42 ). I’ve always liked this story, because it shows lots of my favourite things in the Gospels – Jesus breaking barriers, Jesus being cryptic, the disciples completely missing the point. It’s got everything, as far as I’m concerned.

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Exclusion

My vicar, Tom, has written a good post at Thinking Anglicans about the decision by the primates of the Anglican Communion” to ask the Episcopal Church of the USA and the Canadian Anglican Church not to attend the Communion’s council meetings until the next Lambeth Conference in 2008. This is because of the disagreement from the conservative parts of the church (especially the African churches) with the decisions by these American churches to ordain an openly practising gay bishop, and to bless same-sex partnerships. (Father Jake has an interesting commentary on this decision.)

What is interesting in the comments on Tom’s article, ISTM, is what Tom and I were talking about this morning – that differences of doctrine are being confused with a supposed need to exclude the “unrighteous”. Jesus preached and practiced a radically inclusive ministry; have a quick look at the Gospels – Jesus got stuck right in with just about every excluded group of His culture: women, children, the disabled, lepers and even homosexuals (although that last isn’t ironclad, it is very likely that this is what was going on with the centurion and his “servant” ).

Not only did Jesus say that these people were loved by God, but He ate with them, touched them, laughed with them. He completely flouted the conventions of His time and the religious laws of His time, because He saw that these things were less important than the truth that God’s holiness was stronger than the sin of the world and that God’s love was stronger than the hatred of the world.

So, for us now, who profess to be followers of this Jesus, is it really right to exclude people from our churches because of their sexual orientation? Or is it right to exclude people from our churches for any cause? Would Jesus have done so? The only people Jesus condemned were the religious, the law-abiding and the hypocritical.

And is it right for us to say that, based on their kindness towards outcasts, another group of Christians are not worthy of our friendship and communion?

pax et bonum

People of the Way

Bigbulkyanglican has been talking a bit about an alleged PR disaster avoided by a cancer charity. Offered £3000 from a charity performance of Jerry Springer – The Opera, Maggie’s Centres were poised to accept (obviously enough) when they were contacted by Christian Voice, a campaigning group who object to JSTO on the grounds that it’s offensive (there’s swearing, lots of it) and blasphemous (in its portrayal of Jesus). Christian Voice said that accepting the donation would be a “PR disaster” for the charity.

Now, aside from the fact that this is not very nice behaviour in the first place, and is tantamount to blackmail in the second place (“refuse the donation or we’ll picket your offices” was the essential message AIUI), it’s terribly disingenuous for the organisation to claim (as they apparently did on the Today programme on Radio 4) that they helped Maggie’s Centres to avoid a PR disaster when there wouldn’t have been any PR disaster were it not for Christian Voice‘s involvement in the first place! To threaten someone with a PR disaster unless they do what you want, and then claim that you helped them when they do do what you want – is that really “help”?

In the ensuing comments, Kathryn commented that Christian Voice certainly doesn’t represent her voice, and mentioned that it was a shame that Christians stopped calling themselves “People of the Way”. I definitely agree with her. Although “Christian” isn’t at all a bad name, being based on the central figure in the faith, it has picked up lots of baggage over the centuries, and especially over the past few decades in the Western world. “People of the Way” thus has the advantage of being unfamiliar and so not carrying any unpleasant memories.

But the main reason for liking “People of the Way” is that it embodies a central truth about our faith – that we are on a journey. Christianity is not about having arrived somewhere but about going somewhere with someone. So, we should be reticent to claim absolute certainty about many things because we are not yet arrived; we should be slow to judge because we know that we will see more clearly when we reach our destination; we should be eager to help those who have fallen, because our own legs often become weary. The Way is the way Jesus trod – dangerous, difficult, unclear, messy and offensive to many.

pax et bonum

Spirituality is bad?

I’ve been reading in a few places, in the past few days, about how there is an attack on “emerging church“ in the USA. OK, fair enough, perhaps – it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, even if attack isn’t really a nice way to deal with disagreement. However, the wierd thing is that the problem seems to be with spirituality – which is actually seen as a bad thing! In particular, any idea of contemplative prayer is “eastern”, “mystical” and hence “the spirit of the AntiChrist”! Which is just so bizarre that I can scarcely conceive of it. The tradition of Christian prayer is extremely strong on contemplation – indeed, it’s pretty much the major strand.

Anyhow, there’s a post over on pomomusings about this, as a sort of commentary on a radio debate on the issue. It just sounds so strange! What do people think?

pax et bonum

Meaning in the miracles

As I mentioned the other day, I’m currently reading Jeffrey John’s The Meaning in the Miracles, which explores Jesus’ miracles as related in the Gospels and looks at what they tell us and why that matters. The central point he wants to make is, I think, that if we only ask the question “Did they really happen?” then we are missing almost the entire point of the stories. The Gospel writers selected their material carefully – indeed, they tell us that Jesus did many more things than are written down in the 3 years or so He was preaching and teaching. The questions, then, are why did the writers select these stories to pass on, and why did they write them down in the way that they did?

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Father Jake Stops the World

Father Jake has a good post about giving money to the church. It’s specifically about giving in the Episcopal Church in the USA, but there are some good points about giving in general. I especially liked this part:

“special gifts” or “designated funds” can end up being a heavy yoke, and they are contrary to the teaching of good stewardship. Freely we have received; freely we give. When we give a gift, but insist it only be used for a designated project, or we’ll only give it if the church does this or that, it’s like we are still trying to keep a hold on it; we just can’t let go of it. It also speaks loudly of a lack of trust in the Church.

pax et bonum

Woman bishops

First step towards woman bishops from the CofE’s General Synod. From what I’ve heard, the debate wasn’t as “bitter” as some newspapers have reported, with the main reservations now seeming to be speed, and oversight for those opposed.

Giving it up

Maggi Dawn is writing a series of articles this week on the history and meaning of Lent, which I thoroughly recommend. One in particular has caught my eye for its emphasis on three aspects of the Lenten fast – it was uniform (applying to everyone), it was about giving up essentials (not luxuries) and it was concerned with social justice.

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Guilt

After the comments that Kathryn made on my article on Ash Wednesday, I thought I should clarify a bit what I was trying to say about exploring guilt.

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Synod and women

The Church of England’s General Synod starts meeting today, and one of the big issues this time is women bishops – should there be any? It may not surprise you that I heartily support the right of women to become bishops – and the church’s obligation to appoint them. However, what really gets my goat about this debate is that it consists almost entirely of rehashing the arguments against women priests, even though that debate was over a long time ago. Now, I can understand the arguments against women priests – it’s a logical , coherent theory – even though I believe that it’s flawed biblically, theologically, ecclesiologically and culturally. What I totally fail to understand is how there can be a coherent position that accepts the right of women to be priests in the Anglican church but denies them the right to be bishops. A bishop is simply a priest writ large – there is no qualitative difference that I know of between their roles, only one of scale.

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Relevance

Maggi Dawn has written about being relevant – that true history, true theology, true knowledge of any sort is that which speaks to everyone, not simply the academic. Writing only for the academic is narrow; writing for everyone is generous. She quotes CS Lewis (one of my own favourite writers on religion) as saying “if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones”. In other words, those who think about their faith (or their area of study in any field) must communicate that as best they can, as widely as they can. Otherwise their own knowledge becomes buried in the mass of ignorance and falsehood that grows up where knowledge is absent.
This phenomenon is easily seen whenever people talk about the subject of the day (whatever that is today). The same old opinions are spouted, leaving one breathless with the gulf that exists between two people. It becomes impossible to address single issues (homosexuality, divorce, government, war and peace, justice, whatever) because of the basic assumptions that are completely hidden even from the person who holds them. It is essential that people are not left in ignorance about their own beliefs. Not everyone feels the need to study things in depth, but I believe that everyone needs to be able to see beneath the surface. Otherwise, we are open to manipulation from whoever can speak with the loudest voice.

pax et bonum

The season of the wilderness

Kinesis has a good post today about the reality of living in the wilderness. Lent is often talked about as “wilderness experience”, but we often take this too lightly, thinking in terms of a little hardship or deprivation being “good for the soul”. The reality of wilderness, though, is danger, poverty, loneliness. We are thrown onto our own resources, removed from our ability to lean on other people. In that experience, the Lenten idea is that we learn to lean on God instead, that we learn about our own limits as well as about our real character.
For most of us, I suspect, and certainly for myself, I cannot take 40 days out for a real Lenten wilderness, but I hope that we can all find some time this Lent for aloneness, solitude and perhaps just a little spiritual hardship.

pax et bonum

Bagpuss and God

Bagpuss – An Analysis raises some amusing but interesting questions about how we see God in the world, and about how we do (or don’t) think about the TV we watch. Go, read, be amused, if you ever watched Bagpuss as a child!

pax et bonum

Penitence

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, and, as I was doing Morning Prayer this morning, it struck me that this is the season when Christians actually live up to one of our stereotypes. Kind of. There’s an image that Christians are too miserable, too guilty, too concerned with sin and their own wretchedness. Now, while there are a few who are, this is by and large an unfair picture of the church in my experience. However, Lent is the season when we are all encouraged to think about our own moral state, our sinfulness and wretchedness. And this seems odd at first, especially in a culture that regards guilt generally as a Bad Thing. But I think that it is actually a Good Thing.

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Faith in Asylum

Sounds like this should be a talk worth hearing if current political rhetoric about asylum seekers is a concern.