Birthdays with a bang (Pop)

March birthdays here a great success. Lucy and I hit London for mine — lunch with a great mutual friend in the city, Duchamp/Picabia/Man Ray at the Tate and time with Catherine in her flat above her Day Centre, followed by luscious family dinner with Indian friends — the real thing, you understand.












Late March included Stewart & Nick’s birthday. Our Go Ape trip was snowed off (watch this space for the re-run) but we compensated in part with Diet Coke-and-Mento pyrotechnics out the back — 11 turns out to be the optimum number of mentos:

Recherche du temps perdu

In 1752 England changed calendars and twelve days fell out. Some believed the government had stolen time from their lives. When the clocks went forward today, I knew how they felt. I’ve got an idea to recover the time of our lives. Watching all six Rocky movies would take 10 hours and 34 minutes. If you could pack that cultural experience into a few seconds, you could claw back, say, 10 hours 33 minutes of your life for other purposes. Sounds good? Watch this:

The Horror! The Horror!

The temporary Glitch downloading movies with Blogger seems to be fixed, so it’s time to celebrate with a dire warning about video piracy from the IT Crowd:

Ballad of the Bread Man

Having some trouble publishing a video today, so I thought I'd try a poem instead to check the works are working — Charles Causley...

Ballad of the Bread Man

Mary stood in the kitchen
Baking a loaf of bread.
An angel flew in the window
‘We’ve a job for you,’ he said.

‘God in his big gold heaven
Sitting in his big blue chair,
Wanted a mother for his little son.
Suddenly saw you there.’

Mary shook and trembled,
‘It isn’t true what you say.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said the angel.
‘The baby’s on its way.’

Joseph was in the workshop
Planing a piece of wood.
‘The old man’s past it,’ the neighbours said.
‘That girls been up to no good.’

‘And who was that elegant fellow,’
They said. ‘in the shiny gear?’
The things they said about Gabriel
Were hardly fit to hear.

Mary never answered,
Mary never replied.
She kept the information,
Like the baby, safe inside.

It was the election winter.
They went to vote in the town.
When Mary found her time had come
The hotels let her down.

The baby was born in an annexe
Next to the local pub.
At midnight, a delegation
Turned up from the Farmers’ club.

They talked about an explosion
That made a hole on the sky,
Said they’d been sent to the Lamb and Flag
To see God come down from on high.

A few days later a bishop
And a five-star general were seen
With the head of an African country
In a bullet-proof limousine.

‘We’ve come,’ they said ‘with tokens
For the little boy to choose.’
Told the tale about war and peace
In the television news.

After them came the soldiers
With rifle and bombs and gun,
Looking for enemies of the state.
The family had packed up and gone.

When they got back to the village
The neighbours said, to a man,
‘That boy will never be one of us,
Though he does what he blessed well can.’

He went round to all the people
A paper crown on his head.
Here is some bread from my father.
Take, eat, he said.

Nobody seemed very hungry.
Nobody seemed to care.
Nobody saw the god in himself
Quietly standing there.

He finished up in the papers.
He came to a very bad end.
He was charged with bringing the living to life.
No man was that prisoner’s friend.

There’s only one kind of punishment
To fit that kind of crime.
They rigged a trial and shot him dead.
They were only just in time.

They lifted the young man by the leg,
Thy lifted him by the arm,
They locked him in a cathedral
In case he came to harm.

They stored him safe as water
Under seven rocks.
One Sunday morning he burst out
Like a jack-in-the-box.

Through the town he went walking.
He showed them the holes in his head.
Now do you want any loaves? He cried.
‘Not today’ they said.

Holy joy in a (nameless) holy place

Easter Day this year ended up for me celebrating Christ’s resurrection with a couple of dozen people in what I’m told is the smallest Church in Bucks — Little Hampden. For just over 800 years it has served what is now a few scattered houses up a valley high in the Chilterns. Historically it went with Hartwell, miles away, but it’s now in with Great Missenden, most ably served by Rosie Harper, and Tricia Neale. It’s so small that it’s hard not to feel very much connected and part of things. Worship included the world’s most adorable baby, about eighteen months old, who pootled up and down throughout proceedings smiling at everything and commenting in a surprisingly quiet and gentle, stream of consciousness, kind of way. A tangerine is certainly not a small orange.

It’s all split levels, with a beautiful simple altar table from the fourteenth century. There’s a parvis room over the porch, but nobody knew the way in any more! This church has no certain dedication, but a lot of Saint Christopher, in the glass, and in an unusually tall 13th century wall painting that originally greeted you as you entered the Church from the other side.

It has a lot of wall painting, including this doom in an usual position on the South wall — St Michael weighing souls, whilst the Devil jumps up and down on the bad side, trying (unsuccessfully) to outweigh Our Lady on the good side! I also noticed a 12th century Bishop, wearing exactly the gear I’d just had on at Coleshill for the big service earlier that morning. It’s always moving to stand in the place where hundreds of years of Christians have worshipped, especially in the very intimate setting of Little Hampden, with us all jammed together closely in a holy place the size of a living room.

Somebody said to me how disappointed they are by Fleet Street dwindling congregations, so we looked in the book which went back sixty years, and discovered that in general more people go to Church there now than did sixty years ago! I have had exactly this conversation followed by the same revelation of reality three times already this year. It’s strange how Flat Earth News becomes part of people’s consciousness, regardless of reality...

Churches that grow too big?

Great and interesting series of Easter posts by Mike Croghan critiquing classic US denominational models of Church, including a great post about Church size and growth. When you go over 75-100, he suggests, it becomes very difficult to maintain real relationships:

I can't think of anything that a single church community can do which a network of communities working together can't do (though admittedly, such networks would probably move more slowly in many cases). On the other hand, I can think of a bunch of thorny issues that begin to arise when communities get so big that anonymity is possible - which probably happens when they approach 50 or 70 adults; fewer if the leadership responsibility is concentrated in one or two individuals. Once anonymity is possible, the church ceases to be a community of followers of Jesus.

He draws attention to two particular issues:

It's not a community where relationship is optional. It's OK to be an introvert. It's OK to hang back and take relationship at your own pace. But once it's possible to simply fall through the cracks - to neither know or be known and for no-one to realize that - it's not a community. It's more like a neighborhood - or a housing development. There are , no doubt, communities within the neighborhood - groups of people who share real relationship with each other - but the only thing shared by the entire group is not relationship, but mere proximity. Just like in the average housing development in the US today.

It's not community where following Jesus is optional. It's OK to be just starting on the way. It's OK to not be sure you want to be on that way at all. But it should be clear to everyone that following Jesus is what the community is about. It's not a group with a dual track: one group of people who try to be disciples, and a second group who choose the second, perfectly acceptable alternate track: simply show up once a week and pay for services provided by the first group. Oh, I know that every church says it's about discipleship. But practical reality speaks way louder than words, and the fact is that in communities large enough for folks to "slip through the cracks", it's blatantly obvious to all involved that the "just show up and consume" option is a perfectly valid one, 'cause folks can see plenty of people all around them choosing that.

Thinking of our network of almost 300 congregations in Bucks, I can see real truth in Mike’s words, encouraging and challenging. Encouraging because it’s a tremendous opportunity to serve in a Church which doesn’t (by dint of history) have any denominational coherence, and never has had. Practically speaking, there are one or two large (even four figure) congregations, but they have a really sophisticated game plan for maintaining community on a smaller scale within them. Far, far more often, parishes come in small packets: Mike’s 75-100 figure is eerily accurate for many. Call that good news, if you will, where people really relate to each other within those congregations — and that does happen surprisingly often. Smaller rural Churches can be really strong relationally; places where everybody is somebody. Sometimes.

I’d add a third problem to Mike’s two. People can be too geed up about quantity. The first question people ask vicars at parties, and vicars ask themselves, is often “how big is your congregation?” Fear and fantasy infects their minds, and they begin to think they are failures if they don’t grow into a 200+ congregation. So they flog themselves to try and grow. This compromises their authenticity, which in itself prevents them growing. Thus the vicious circle runs, and the more they bash their head against a wall, the more it hurts, and the more stuck they become.Jesus once said something interesting about grapes, figs and briars. A Tangerine is not a Small Orange, and however hard it fantasizes about being a Big Orange, God won’t let it happen.

What concerns me isn't the size of congregations as much as Mike’s second point about dual tracks. Where congregations of any size become “dual track” with a bunch of keenies doing the Jesus bit and everybody else in it for what they can get out of it, or sheer force of habit, Houston, we have a problem. We’re probably less hung up (explicitly) on numbers than Americans, but more hung up on relationality. Hmm. What do you think?
PS h/t Studiohermetique for “Schizophrenic Supplicants, above.

Embryo Wars — five critical questions

What did I do in the great embryo war? — stay out of it is one possible answer, but if twentieth century science was driven by physics (leading to us going nuclear) the twenty-first is set fair to be driven by life sciences. Towards what? Hard to say, but it’s a vital question. I am very much an ordinary Joe, Historian not life scientist, but people have asked me for a view, so here are some preliminary critical questions (in ascending order of importance):

• Q1: Why whip people’s consciences?
  There is a political dimension, because politics is where laws come from. I like the idea of free votes, because it requires people to make out cases that persuade others rather than coerce them using the party machine. This is all the more true of a conscience question — Using whips looks like you know you really can't persuade them, and maybe you can’t.
• Q2: Is Every sperm sacred?
  It’s a simple modern idea that conception defines the logical top of the slippery slope. It’s one easy and obvious place to draw lines. Christian tradition, however, has taken a rather more “farmer Giles” view of these things. Augustine talked about embryo inanimatus, not yet endowed with a soul. Medieval Christians dated ensouled life from “Quickening.” Trying not be be too gross, Lucy and I once lost an early pregnancy and turned up to our surgery with what our doctor tactfully referred to as “matter of conception,” wrapped in a hanky. Was it within the purpose of God, whatever its precise status? Yes. Did I want to rush out and give it a Christian funeral? No. Ten weeks later I would have, and it would have mattered very much to me. Call me illogical. I’m with Saint Augustine on this one. A Blastocyst has the potential to become a baby. The vast majority don’t make it, within the purpose of God, including that one.
• Q3: What about Species bending?
  Well, producing Chimeras sounds much more frightening than breeding mules. We’ve been doing some degree of this since the Bronze age. But what about altering what it means to be human or animal? Genesis teaches a sacred ordering of nature. God asked the man to name what was already there — to order and steward all pragmatic possibilities. We have many more possibilities before us than Adam. How do we fulfil the charge and avoid the curse that was laid on us all in him? If I have a pig's valve put in my heart, does that make me a hybrid? technically, yes. Practically, even within the Jewish/ Christian view that you are a body rather than have a body, such hybrids obviously retain their full humanity. Cytoplasmic embryos are emphatically not the same thing as true (mixed gamete) hybrids. We already use transgenic embryos for medical purposes, but on the “One step at a time, and learn from it” principle I would oppose any proposal to put animal genes into human embryos. As to the matter under discussion, if we should be reluctant to monkey about with this stuff (and I feel we should be) use of Cytoplasmic embryos actually reduces the requirement for human embryos. There are thus pro-life arguments for allowing it. Radically different research options are coming up in the outside lanes, too, but we need to take every proposal very much on its own merits.
• Q4: We can do all sorts of things — does that make them right?
  No. Life is God-given. The Warnock report gave limited special protection to human embryos, and this is surely right, to honour the concept of humanity. I don’t buy the idea that something becomes right merely because we can do it. Lots of things we can do are emphatically wrong, and this lies at the heart of the classic nuclear dilemma. Far better if nukes had never been invented, but you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Saint Paul pointed out that Instrumentalism is not enough — something isn’t right merely because it can be done. If I have to err, I would do so on the conservative side of this argument. It’s easy to mock slippery slope arguments, but one thing does lead to another. We should keep in place strong legislative protection against, for example, the implantation of research lab embryos in a woman, or culture beyond the current 14 day limit. What we actually need far more is a map for the country around us as research proceeds — a major agreed framework within which to understand the implications. I can’t see we’ve yet quite got that, though Warnock was a start. Our lack of this worries me more than than anything proposed in the current bill, and I think serious ethics committee work needs to be done at a more theoretical level.
  
• Q5: What is our Moral duty here?
  Cherishing life is a plain moral duty, but part of cherishing life is to relieve suffering and help people, and this often involves radical intervention in natural processes. Dr Frankenstein and Nazi mad science are very different from what is being proposed and why. God gave us brains to use, and there is a clear moral and social objective in enhancing our capacity to understand and promote healing. Of course there is the principle of Double effect (no good should rest on a bad); but you can only know Cytoplasmic embryo research is inherently bad if you take the “every sperm is sacred” line, which, with Saint Augustine, I don’t.

Whatever we do is within the mercy of God. These are very much preliminary musings. I’d like to hear very much more from morally aware Christians within the research community — like you?

Gay WMD and Millennium Bugs

G. K. Chesterton imagined a future when someone would be able to communicate with everyone on earth simultaneously — but without anything to say.

Nick Davies is a journalist who reckons we’ve pretty much got there. Media production lines churn out bucketloads of synthetic fury pulled off the wires and reheated, surveys and scandals made up on the phone by Astroturf organisations, Trolls & Mr Angry rentaquotes. Resulting nutritional content makes Turkey Twizzlers seem Mighty Meaty.

What’s the alternative? Well you could have a news based profession with reporters given the time to get to know their contacts and check their stories, but that would take time and cost more than Fleet Street is willing to pay these days. Anyway why bother, when you can churn out sufficient crap to feed the trolls and hang the ads around? We need hard-headed journalists more than ever. Sadly, they don’t run the show any more.

Mr Davies gives plenty of chapter and verse. Remember the Millennium Bug? Planes were going to fall out of the sky. Life as we know it was going to grind to a halt. Accidental nukes would plunge us into a thousand year winter. There was a problem, but not of the sort or scale that filled the papers. In the event it all passed off harmlessly. Remember WMD? Western powers with the technology to read a newspaper from space somehow bought the pup that Iraq was bristling with WMD. Tony Blair told us Cyprus was twenty minutes from destruction. It was all, literally, a bloody lie — half a million innocent men, women and children died as a consequence, and thousands of troops. Mr Davies charts the sexing up of dodgy information that grew this bloody lie, and the way the media are led through the nose as asses are. He ends with a powerful chapter on “Mail Aggression” that shows exactly how the fount of the nation’s morals operates, plain brown envelopes and all. The nasty niff from the woodshed is Hypocrisy, friends.

If it ever strikes you that most of the stuff in the paper is spiteful, half baked, mass produced and pre-digested, it’s because, er, it is. That’s all the poor dears have the time to churn out. Anglican planes have been allegedly dropping out of the sky because of the Gay Bug for the past ten years now, and none has yet hit the ground. Gay WMD are pulsating in their silos twenty weeks away. Time will tell. Just keep your critical sense switched on, and don’t forget the Millennium Bug.
See also the Interesting discussion of hammed up news by Simon Barrow here.

L4/44-50 Bringing it all home at Easter

Not a bad approach and landing. Flunked 46 and 47, but managed most of the others; although the day job that helped with some tasks didn’t seem to help with others, and made one completely impossible:

44. Help someone carry a burden
Talking through job applications with a colleague or drumming up cash for historic church buildings could be seen as this, or are these activities too metaphorical? Carried the bag back to the car after our weekly shop at Sainsbury’s, just in case...

45. Forgive someone
Hard to think of anyone who’s wronged me really, but I forgive them anyway! As someone more sinning than sinned against, I’ve wondered down the years, about the difference between saying “sorry” (where the wrongdoer retains control) and “please forgive me” (where control passes to the person who was wronged.) Why is forgiveness such a dying art? perhaps many people are just so angry so much of the time, they just can’t focus on anything else?

46. Make Easter Card for a neighbour
Failed. Dong. I always love to get them from the select few friends who bother, and feel I ought to bother, and maybe we should make more of Easter Cards than Christmas cards, but never get round to it...

47. Polish someone’s shoes for them
Only bishop in England not doing this today. Next year? I miss it from parish life, though it was always difficult to get people to consent to having their feet washed. Maybe we’re just too prissy for this stuff in England...

48. Five Minutes Silence at 12 noon
Impossible, since I was kicking off a three hours service at exactly 12 noon, and if I’d fallen into total silence at that point someone would have called an ambulance.

49. Watch a film about Jesus Life
I need to admit that filmic Jesus seldom floats my boat. In the first century they had real problems accepting Jesus’ full humanity, but those are nothing compared to fifties Hollywood. Monty Python’s Life of Brian, pretty much a spoof of Hollywood Jesus, had a point. Mel Gibson was gross and schlocky, with a few shafts of light, but I couldn’t watch Casualty for months afterwards. So I settled for The Jesus of Montreal, which accepts Jesus’ basic humanity and is true to what it purports to be rather than creating a silly Disney world.

50. Celebrate Easter
Did that, round the fire first thing, in the snow at Coleshill, and at Buckinghamshire’s smallest parish church — Little Hampden.

PS Lucy’s and my chocolate fast did happen this year, though there was one party at which we were uncertain whether a brown smudge on a cream slice did or didn’t contain Chocolate. I resolved the situation by issuing a Rabbinic style decision that it didn’t. Perhaps I'm beginning to get the hang of this religion thing...

Dreaming of a White Easter

Principal Mass of Easter at Coleshill in the snow — beautifully decorated and very full, with an unusual but very apposite Resurrection East Window. To the Left is Lazarus, and, Right, the Widow’s son at Nain. Proceedings ended up very amicably in the Red Lion pub next door.

The congregation included a lady who was born in 1912, and had thus experienced Easter this early, as a baby. Here are the facts as I have received them (h/t Martyn Green & Ron Immelman). The next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913. It can only ever be one day earlier (March 22). The next time this will happen will be in the year 2285 (277 years from now). The last time it was on March 22 was 1818. So, no one alive today has seen, or will ever see, it any earlier than this year! So in 200 years time, Babies may be born who will experience both dates. Unless, that is, Aubrey de Grey is correct, and the first person to live to 1,000 has already been born (but that’s another argument)...

Easter Fire — Christ is Risen Indeed!

26 insomniacs at 5·50 in Great Missenden, not quite Dawn, as the clocks haven’t gone forward yet this year. Walking through the village afterwards, a dove (I kid you not) watched us go by from one of the cottages in the high street. If Candle light is a sign of Easter faith, it’s corny but notable that our candles guttered and occasionally blew out as the snow began to fall, but as long as we stayed together and re-lit from each other’s, we were able to carry the flame from our early bonfire all the way to the paschal candle in Church. Then the snow started in earnest... We are an Easter people. Alleluia is our song. Don’t know what the neighbours made of it, but one day they’ll understand!

Again the Light said, ‘Unlock!’
Said Lucifer, ‘Who goes there?’
A huge voice replied, the lord
Of power, of strength, that made
All things. Dukes of this dark place
Undo these dark gates so Christ come
In, the son of heaven’s King.
With that word, hell split apart,
Burst its devil’s bars; no man
Nor guard could stop the gates swing
Wide. The old religious men,
Prophets, people who had walked
In darkness, ‘Behold the Lamb
Of God,’ with Saint John sang now.
But Lucifer could not look
At it, the light blinding him.
And along that light all those
Our Lord loved came streaming out.

The Vision of Piers Plowman (Langland — 14th Century)