None righteous, no not one...

New Horizons in Infamy, as the Telegraph reveals that one Labour MP tried to claim £5 to put in the plate in Church. The whole country is now one seething cauldron of self-righteous rage and scorn, aimed at MP’s. Now we know all about their garden gnomes, tennis courts, staplers, dictation machines, chocolate santas, envelopes, and dogfood. Hang on, staplers dictaphones and envelopes, are legitimate office expenses. But what the hell, they’re MP’s and they should pay it all back anyway.

MP’s allowance fraud is a really significant story, and it was very important to draw it to public attention, and all dishonest politicians everywhere should be held to account, espeically the ones who have been playing hooky with houses. That said, Some of our boldest crusaders for righteousness have their own dirty underwear, and I don’t just mean their lunch expenses.

The last owner of the Daily Telegraph, for example, has been inside for fraud, having charged such items as FDR memorabilia and Cardinal Richelieu costumes up to his expenses. The way in which various present Fleet Street owners flip their homes for tax purposes is not as well known as it could be. It takes one to know one, I suppose. Squirming under a shower of filth, England tried to cheer itself up by following the antics of breakdancing East End pensioner Fred Bowers:

But now we learn, allegedly, Fred has been claiming £70 a week Disability benefit. He says his left leg is in fact disabled, a kind of still point in a turning world thing. This is giving me some misgivings about flooding parliament with unknowns and retired celebs.
People who aren’t atually MP’s can apparently be as bent as people who are. The Fall turns out to be stone cold sober truth; to quote the late great Noel Coward “Everybody is bent, Camp Freddie.”

Here’s the heart of the matter. We could develop yet more labarynthine and draconian regulations, guidelines and allowances to stop this kind of behaviour, but I’ve another suggestion. Brits have gotten into the habit of treating the ten commandments as obsolescencies in our Secular Brave New World, but they do have a certain resonance just now. “Thou shalt not steal.” “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” “Thou shalt not covet.”

Not exactly rocket science, are they?

But they do seem to reach some of the parts that regulations, guidelines and codes of practice don’t.

OUT with the old... IN with?

The Cambridge University Diary used to bemuse me. Against New Year’s Day it printed a puzzling slogan: Circumcision. University Library Closed to Readers. Today’s a natural time to look forward, perhaps with some caution about cheesy and unrealistic resolutions. Perhaps, for most of us, everything is now so complicated it has to be time to simplify, not to take on new stuff. Courage! I do not need to invest time in Facebook groups like Damn it feels good to be a hamster or Cats that Look Like Hitler...

Historcially the Church has interpreted the day through the lens of Jesus’ Circumcision, still kept as such by Eastern Orthodox, Uniates and Anglicans. Jesus’ parents, obeying the law, locate him within the covenant of Moses. From that place, he will lead his disciples out into the cornfields, through the curse of the cross, to a glory far greater than Moses could ever imagine or reflect. By obedience to the law he begins to redeem those under the law.

Secular Redemption myths seem to be growing, however, in the public square — Times Square, to be exact (h/t Jean Fitzpatrick). People have been gathering there for the past two years to celebrate Good Riddance Day on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (28 December):

"SHRED YOUR BAD MEMORIES – EVERYTHING FROM WORTHLESS STOCK CERTIFICATES AND DEPRESSING BANK STATEMENTS TO PHOTOS OF OLD LOVERS AND DEAR JOHN LETTERS – IN THE HEART OF TIMES SQUARE," read the invitation on Craigslist. For just one hour on December 28, shredders were stationed along Broadway between 45th and 47th Streets, near the snazzy new TKTS booth, where New Yorkers or tourists could discard any distasteful, embarrassing or depressing memories from 2008. Passers-by could also write their bad memories on stationery available onsite and watch them get shredded. Or you could post your message online to be printed out, shredded and carted away for disposal or recycling. "Because sometimes," said the Times Square Alliance invitation, "you just need to let go."

And let go they did, getting things off their chest with all the spontaneity New York inspires in residents and visitors. One woman shredded a photograph of her ex-fiance posing with his current girlfriend. A Brooklyn man brought a picture of his appendix, taken after it was removed during emergency surgery. A woman visiting from San Diego used the onsite stationery to write "strife with my family," and her 13-year-old daughter wrote "getting bad grades on report cards." Another woman shredded a printout of her boyfriend's email breaking up with her. A Yankee fan shredded a poster of the Boston Red Sox: "I hate them," she said. "It felt good."

This year's Good Riddance Day saw the addition of a sledgehammer "to pulverize all those bad memories away." You could bring a broken cell phone or DVD player and a Times Square Alliance worker in protective glasses would smash it to smithereens.

If we don't get rid of our stuff it accumulates. But what do we do about it? That’s the basis of the sacrificial system — it takes sin seriously, rather than sweeping it under the carpet. But for Christians the naming and shaming is only the prelude to a greater act of redemption than Mosaic circumcision could ever be — Grace, in all its absurd, liberating, healing, ludicrous excess. Where sin abounds, grace superabounds. Relax! Now we can love without pretending, or trade-offs, or status games. This year I need a better grasp of Grace, right from the outset, prefigured but super-transcended in the Circumcision of our Lord Jesus Christ. Alleluia!

Acedia: Are we bovvered?

Why is everything crap? Why is life itself so damn boring? As we travel on life’s great highway, the cry goes up ‘Are we there, yet?’ Then Maggi Dawn’s blog tips me off about Kathleen Norrris’ fabulous new book on Acedia. This was the old Desert Fathers’ Noonday Demon. The best monks sometimes wasted days in the sun, clockwatching and bored, when they should have been getting on with the job. Call it Sloth if you like, but Ms Norris points out that in our century its most common form is the blue-arse-fly version, our own particular way of being there whilst not being there. Acedia kills off deep thought, relationships, religion and all kinds of other worthwhile activities that involve completer finishing. It kindles impatience, frustration, and superficiality. Get down on the street, and everybody’s doing it. In a great review of this book, Denis Ockholm writes:

We urgently need such reminders amid the “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair” of contemporary life, particularly in the context of a marriage such as the one that unfolds in this book. In a society where acedia results in relationships that are recycled more often than aluminum cans, Norris insists that what is most likely to maintain a marriage is not giddy romance but discipline, martyrdom, and obedience (which, at its etymological root, refers to hearing): “The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. You may say the 'I do' of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, but it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married.” Good advice in a culture where that "five-o'clock somewhere" mirage always beckons.

This all points us to the ancient wisdom of our holy father Benedict, whose Rule was not conceived as legalism on speed, but a toolbox for sticking with discipleship through the dead zone, so that it can bear real fruit. Confronting the futility of our own lives, we can wallow ’n bitch, or engage the mid-day demon more closely, and grow a few better habits to promote stability...
Stop Press: Comment by Prodigal Kiwi (Paul Fromont)

Return of the Magnificent Seven

Thanks to the Wonderful Jessica Hagy, (h/t Maggi Dawn), everything you always wanted to know about those deadly sins that have been making the news recently.

The diagram also demonstrates the distinction between “sins” as things inside which drive us to do wrong things and the symptoms, which surely aren’t, any of them, “sins”.

Why? Wherefore?

There is something in us all that isn’t quite civilised — a gap between what we are and the basic requirements of humanity. Before 1945 it was possible, convenient even, to pretend that it didn’t matter, or that progress and education and secular wisdom would render this gap obsolete. In 1945 there were many who thought nothing so bad could ever happen again, as long as the memory was kept alive. Since 1945 the gap, a radical expression of what theologians call the Fall, has opened wide again, all over the world. Where does this leave us? How aware of the roots of it within ourselves?

Shoah is the first of a sequence of seven memorial poems called Menorah by Don Barnard written in 2005.

Shoah

In the beginning was the Word and the word was Jew.
And the word said Other, the word said Them. Not Me, not You.

Then the ploughing of the minds and the sowing of the lies
and the lies said Rapists and the lies said Thieves
and the lies said Evil in disguise.
And the Word was Demonise.

Then the growing of the Weeds. And the Weeds were Greed.
And the Weeds were Spite and the Weeds were Schadenfreude
and folk passed by on the other side.
And the Word was Bleed.

Then the writing of the Laws.
And the Laws said Jews
are not as other men.
No loving of your neighbour.
No Jews as citizens.
And the Word was Cleanse.

Then the packing into trucks and the tracks led east.
People carried like beasts and harried like beasts
and herded like beasts into pens.
And the Word was Untermensch.

Then the Words became a sentence and it sent them to their death
by burdening the strong, who earned another breath
before they died,
and murdering the rest, who simply died.
And the Word was Genocide.