Today's cheesy flash game

What? Is Dany upgrading from cheesy midi files to cheesy flash games? Oh yes, and this time she expects you to take part and sing along too...

A fairly-traded cash crop is still a cash crop!

In the impoverished Shire Valley [of Malawi], a South African company runs a lush, 30,000-acre sugar plantation that uses huge amounts of water from the Shire River every day for irrigation, with energy provided by hydroelectric dams. The plantation employs 7,000 workers and has enough extra water to support extensive landscaping and a small golf course.

But company officials said they had no interest in switching from sugar to corn, which after years of government price controls is seen as unprofitable in Malawi. "To grow maize as a commercial crop, it's not viable," said Irene Phalula, a company spokeswoman. "We wouldn't make anything out of it". See this Washington Post article on Malawi.

This wasn't the point of the article, but I got thinking: hang on a minute, I'm fairly sure that my Fairtrade sugar is from Malawi. I just double-checked a moment ago, and it was. But they don't need nice sugar farming co-ops in Malawi. They need food for the whole population.

They shouldn't be using that water for a cash-crop and I don't care if a portion of workers are making a living wage if nearly 11 millions struggle without jobs and without irrigation for their subsistence plots because the World Bank and IMF won't allow state-led development. Fairtrade is just a stupid cosmetic solution to make stupid westerners feel good.

Hardcore post about famine and stuff - feel free to skip

There’s a movie (I can’t remember which, unfortunately) in which a couple of young people enter the home of an old lady in Florida and kill her. Their justification is that the old lady’s pension funds -and her decisions to have them-, have killed many more people and she is therefore guilty of their death.

It’s weird to discuss this online, and the weirdest thing is probably that I don’t even feel very strongly. I should scream my head off in despair, but instead I just “sense”, on some intellectual level, that something is wrong. If anything, I feel like I’m rather more sensitive than the rest of the population and secretly I can be a bit smug.

A guy called Robert hasn’t been able to find work for nearly a decade. He owns a field, but the crop has failed. He has no money and no food. Nobody around him has money or food so he can’t even beg. Maybe there is food on the shelves of a shop a few miles from where Robert lives, but he cannot afford it. So Robert went without eating, apart from tree leaves. He got so weak that he was admitted to hospital. Yet, the hospital did not keep him. They discharged him, telling to eat more or he would die. Food was not an option. Robert prepared to die. He said goodbye to his family and kids. He prayed to God for their welfare. After a couple of weeks Robert died.

I’m not making up this story. I’m not even making up Robert’s name. I Skype to Rwanda and I think that’s way cool. I’m good at networking, at linking people to each other. I speak several foreign languages. I’m reasonably clever. Yet I did not find a way to network with Robert. I did not implore my church and my work colleagues to help me find solutions. I was busy with other things.

If Robert had been my brother I’m sure I would have found a way. How complicated can it be to wire some cash directly to Malawi? People who have loved ones in Malawi do it all the time. By the looks of it, I have no loved ones in Malawi. Robert died of hunger and I did nothing. And I knew, the whole time.

Or rather, I sort of knew… Because I did not dig up the topic all that much. I sort of knew that there was a famine going on. Terrible stuff, but like I said, I was busy. There is a scene in The Pianist where the main character manages to emerge from the ghetto in which he’d been hiding, alone, everybody else having been deported. When he gets into the normal streets, people are buying bread, cheese, flowers, life goes on normally. Don’t find out. Don’t find out. Don’t look too closely. Stay safe. It’s none of our business.

By the looks of it, I have the moral fibre of a N*zi-supporter. I’m worried that God will never forgive me the death of Robert and my refusal to find out whether the stuff Robert went through is happening right now to someone else. I’m worried that God will never set me free me from the sin of indifference. I’m actually letting my Lord starve, knowingly. I haven’t yet taken any significant steps to demonstrate solidarity with those who, like Robert, are excluded from the capitalist project.

Small steps yes. I have taken lots of small steps. Tiny steps which serve as a smoke screen to hide the callousness of my indifference but still make me look all nice and spiritual to outsiders. I'm sure the devil loves those outrightly disobedient small steps. I would if I were him. The truth is that I don’t even dare to pray. So I try to hold prayer in but I can't. I cry for the mercy of God on my life. I'm crazy to even hope.

More Skype weirdness...

D. Hey Olivia, how are you? We haven’t spoken in ages!

O. Hi Dany! I'm in Kigali. I’ve been living and working in Rwanda for the past five months.

D. Woa! How's that going?

O. Okay, but to be honest I'm struggling, I don’t really like it.

D. Why?

O. I can’t get through to Rwandans at all. They all see me as a rich white girl, they ask for money all the time. Then they shut me out.

D. Wait, my best friend is from Rwanda, he had to flee to Germany in 1994 and stayed with a family there. You can probably hang out with his friends and family. Can I give him your number?

O. That would be great, I would really love that. I've been here for months. I haven't met anyone from Rwanda except superficially. I hang out with German colleagues all the time, it's really weird.

Missing Glastonbury

For the past few months, I was quietly convinced that I had “done” Glastonbury. I’d been a few times, I knew what to expect, I knew what Glastonbury was all about. I did not want to end up an old hippie who “does festivals” all summer. Then tonight I stuck a CD in the player. I had bought that CD at a late night concert in the Green Fields –the Green Fields is that permaculture hippie-ish part of the festival with tiny little acts held in dozens of colourful tents.

Each year, I would snub the big bands to hear what’s going on in the Green Fields. This year was fantastic because the festival was soaked by heavy-hitting rain. I actually like Glastonbury in the rain; it’s got this amazing “Spirit of the Blitz” to it. Instead of lounging in the sun, the Green Fields enthusiasts sneak in the first tent that takes their fancy, and sip some chai together.

The reason I love Glastonbury so much is that it fills your cup in a way nothing else does. You know the feeling after a great night out, some drinks and an amazing concert. Well Glastonbury puts 1000’s of concerts, plays, parties, films and books your way, for four days and four nights. Glastonbury fills you with art, with beauty, with music, with poetry to the point where you don’t yearn for art anymore.

The nation’s best performing art is all around you. You’re like a kid in a candy shop and so is everybody else. There is nothing you want. There is no time for wanting. You’re being subjugated by all this. Come with any sort of expectations, Glastonbury will beat them by very far. Glastonbury is life * 1000.

The performers are just as taken by the general excitement as the punters are. They too have had their fill of amazing concerts and, carried by the Glastonbury atmosphere, they give you their absolute best.

I remember this amazing performance by Celeste Lovick. She was alone with a guitar, at one in the morning on the tiny new world stage. The rain was pounding on the tent ceiling, but the inside was not wet, it was warm and beautifully lit. There were about ten people in the audience, two of whom were asleep. The others were awestruck by Lovick’s sheer poetry. She had this little Amish air, and was sharing her songs almost prayerfully in a dimly lit tent. It was the last night of the festival, people were tired yet happy and mellow, they had tanked up on music for at least a month.

I did not want this to end. As each year, I only wished I could take a little bit of this moment into the rest of my year. I picked up the CD. While it is still very good, it is miles away from the performance. For one it’s got a lot of side instruments, effects and even extra voices. I listen to it in a room full of books. It is a mere shadow of what Glastonbury had been. I feel like I’m spending the rest of the year living in Plato’s cave, listening to shadows of the real. As always, real beauty can’t be frozen and unfortunately you can never take bits of Glastonbury with you!

Žižek's "ethically cornered agent"

Let me put it this way. Bernard Williams, the English moral philosopher, develops, in a wonderful way, the difference between `must' and `have to.' He opposes the logic of positive injunction - in the sense of "you should do this" - with another logic of injunction, a more fundamental sense, of "I just cannot do it otherwise." The first logic is simply that of the ideal. You should do it, but never can do it. You never can live up to your ideal. But the more shattering, radical, ethical experience is that of "I cannot do it otherwise."

For example - this is one of the old partisan myths in Yugoslavia - Yugoslavian rebels killed some Germans, so the Germans did the usual thing. They encircled the village and decided to shoot all the civilians. But, one ordinary German soldier stood up and said, "Sorry, I just cannot do it." The officer in charge said, "No problem, you can join them," and the German soldier did. This is what I mean by sacrifice. There's nothing pathetic about it. This honest German soldier, his point was not, "Oooooh, what a nice, ideal role for me." He was just ethically cornered. You cannot do it otherwise. Politically, it's the same. It's not a sacrificial situation where you're secretly in love with your role of being sacrificed and you're seeking to be admired. It's a terrible, ethical, existential deadlock; you find yourself in a position in which you say, "I cannot do it otherwise."

Žižek, in the Rasmussen Interview.

Everything is a side activity

After posting an entry on "delayed action" -and how I'm struggling with it-, I came across a strange thought by Žižek, who was talking about belief and discussing Palestinian suicide bombers: -It's a strange logic in which the bombers themselves have doubts, and their suicide becomes a way of confirming their belief. 'If I kill myself in this way, I can calm my doubts and prove, even to me, that I do believe'-. Full text here.

I liked the idea for its sheer wrongness: how eagerness to prove oneself can become a paradoxical way of demonstrating unbelief. So on one level this stillness is killing me. On another level, it's "building some character", as Bill Watterson would have it. I want to step out of this confusion, and yet everything seems to say: more confusion, more tension! You'd betray now if you were to leap into some virtuous course of action as a way of avoiding confusion.

As this puzzling confusion settles in, everything else becomes a side interest. My PhD is something I do on the side, my relating to others is something I do on the side. Yet, both of them are going great. The PhD writes itself, I'm much closer to people than I used to be, and my decisions are more solid -and all of it seems to be happening "on the side". Maybe this will never go. Maybe, as the confusion deepens, the side activities -even significant ones- will solidify as well, in a strange dynamic equilibrium...

French time is secular time!

In less than one week, I'll be in France. In all likelihood, that means no (outspoken) religion for a while. We've pushed religion very, very far into the private sphere of individuals and particular congregations. It doesn't get discussed in public at all, unless you're in a very specific context, or with close friends at the end of the night.

That doesn't mean we don't believe, it means we don't talk about it. In France, nearly all my friends are fiercely secular. In France, a great many of my friends are gay -and I can't wait for that new year's eve party!-. In France, all of my friends are idealistic little buggers who try to keep our country humane and give Sarkozy a hard time. In France, nearly all of these friends pray. Alternate soteriology or not, I love our common weal and I love France.

I hate to delay action!

Sometimes you have to wait a while before you make a move. You need to wait and discern whether what you’re thinking about really is the best move at that time. This process can take ages and meanwhile you’re not doing anything.

And the worse thing about this is that it feels so unfaithful! Honestly, as long as I haven’t moved, how do I know if I really mean it? Maybe it’s just fantasies, maybe when the hour comes to make the move I’ll tail off. I don’t know for sure!

I guess that for some people projected action can feel quite good: “I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this, I really want to do this”. But in my experience projected action can also feel pretty awful: “Maybe I’m deluding myself, maybe I’m full of shit, maybe when I start taking the steps I’ll realise that I never meant it”.

Hey Danygirl, why don’t you just bite the bullet then? I hear you cry. Quite simply, because I don’t know which bullet to bite. I can think of at least six or seven options and I really don’t know which one to go for.

On some level, this unknowing is great. See, I walk around with the knowledge that I have, once, said an outright “no” to God. And for all I know, I might very well do that again. The memory of it is like an open wound. But it is a forgiven open wound and that is a great thing to carry around -and I’m fucking crazy to blog this. So anyway, now I really hate to delay action because I’m so scared that I could be unfaithful again. Yet on some level I know that I need to trust God even with the future.

Disciplopedia

Is there a wiki somewhere on the web with lots of cool ideas on how to be better disciples? Right now I'm poring through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Quaker Faith and Practice, the lives of the saints, some books and some websites.

But really I'm just re-inventing the wheel. There's something to be said for that, of course: when you come out with the ideas yourself, you end up a lot more convinced. Yada yada. As a budding academic I should not owe up to this, but if there was such thing as a (good) disciplopedia, I'd be using it all the time.

Favourite mug

If the Tories had a soul, they would sell it!

1992 slogan of British Labour in response to the privatisation of some segments of health and education advocated by conservatives.

The Brits are catching up!

If you've been following this blog for a little while, you probably know about my spending some time trying to locate radical-ish Bristish folks. We've got no shortage of very outspoken (and may I add, very annoying) evangelical types, but there are comparatively fewer serious warriors. This makes it quite hard to find the real thing behind the huge smokescreen of people who are very good at talking about things. But anyway, the first neomonastic community I ever did manage to find on this small island of ours is alive and well. They don't know it, but I already love them. Go check them out.

In some corner of England II

Rich is this flamed up young man. A combination of a lot of suffering and a lot of faith have turned him into the most exciting 20 year old I know. Theo is a retired CoE minister who comes to our church because it's pretty laid back, but basically he's a sarcastic grumpy old chap. Three weeks ago, I was taking Theo out for dinner and Rich joined us. Now each time I see Rich, he tells me how much he liked Theo: "Theo knows so much, and he's got so much wisdom" and so on and so forth. Each time I see Theo, he always asks me lots and lots about Rich. Sounds like we're going to do dinner again soon.

In some corner of England

A few days after meeting Lynne, I was down to make the soup for our church’s common lunch instead of attending the worship. I was hoping we’d be finished with the soup quite early so we could join the worship; the thought of chopping celery sticks with some random middle-aged lady from my church could only be so much fun. While we were chopping the stuff, Margaret asked me how I was. I was still bugged by the encounter with Lynne, so I told her what was on my mind.

I had hesitated to tell Maggie because I did not want to draw the conversation topic to myself, I wanted to be attentive, self-effacing, that sort of stuff. It turned out that Maggie had quite a lot to say on the topic: it got her started like nobody’s business. She told me about her time working as a social worker (I never knew), how she totally burnt out, the concepts she used to help her feel better, a lot of twelve-steppy stuff and pop psychology. I was fascinated. I still wanted to go worship of course, but by then the atmosphere in the kitchen was getting emotional.

By now the soup was cooked, we still had twenty minutes to join the worship, but we somehow decided that the soup needed more attention: make sure it did not burn or something. And we agreed that the cheddar really needed to be added at the last minute otherwise it would curdle into yucky little bits instead of the creamy consistency we were aiming for.

I had been hoping for some quiet worship time and we got the over emotional “so how did you handle your burnout?” kind of talk. By the end of it, I was even more bugged than when I had first walked in. That weird feeling of being exposed way beyond what you’re comfortable with, that rushed emotional proximity… Hell, did I deserve a cigarette after that!!!

Maggie and I got along pretty well in the following weeks. We did not talk that much; we just greeted each other at coffee. I had a renewed admiration for her: she had given so very much. I was proud of her, I wanted to hug her, but we’re in Britain, so that doesn’t usually happen.

Today was the last service before everyone starts disappearing off to be with family at Christmas. At the end of the service, Maggie grabbed me, with a huge smile she declared: “Dany you’ve inspired me, I’ve taken up volunteering again”. The thing is, I had done nothing at all, zilch, zero, nothing. Nothing beyond sharing how distressed I was that Lynne hadn’t called me.

Kiss me for I have sinned

I wish they had the power to simultaneously rebuke me and yet embrace me. What happens instead is that I’m so demanding that I scare people off. Because I’m not wrong.

Without their presence, I imagine what could be, I imagine another kingdom. It has colours, it has textures, it has shapes, it is only barely out of reach. And it drives me crazy, like a chocolate cake in a shop window when I've forgotten my purse at home. I wish someone would hold me. The title is taken from a T-shirt by nakedpastor. You can even buy it here.

Let down by a book

You place your hopes in yet another book: the book that is going to expound it all, the book that is going to serve as a manifesto. A book so Christ-infused that light would shine forth from its pages.

You wait for that book. When it comes out, you devour it. Turns out that it’s not bad. You type a few concepts into your files of notes. But your eyes hurt from the tears of frustration that you don’t quite dare to shed. Not realising that this frustration is giving birth to something in you. Your voice maybe. Still too big for you.

(umm... that's a lot of blogging these days. Whatever happened to last week's reverential silence)

Bakunin's "aristocracy of labour"

In Marxist theory, those workers (proletarians) in developed countries who benefit from the superprofits extracted from the impoverished workers of underdeveloped countries form an "aristocracy of labor." The phrase was popularised by Karl Kautsky in 1901 and theorised by Vladimir Lenin. Lenin's theory contends that companies in the developed world exploit workers in the developing world (where wages are much lower), resulting in increased profits. Because of these increased profits, the companies are able to pay higher wages to their employees "at home" (that is, in the developed world), thus creating a working class satisfied with their standard of living and not inclined to proletarian revolution. Lenin thus contended that imperialism had prevented increasing class polarization in the developed world. Wikipedia's entry on Labor Aristocracy

John Holloway online

"Our scream is a refusal to accept. A refusal to accept that the spider will eat us, a refusal to accept that we shall be killed on the rocks, a refusal to accept the unacceptable. A refusal to accept the inevitability of increasing inequality, misery, exploitation and violence. A refusal to accept the truth of the untrue, a refusal to accept closure. Our scream is a refusal to wallow in being victims of oppression, a refusal to immerse ourselves in that 'left-wing melancholy' which is so characteristic of oppositional thought. It is a refusal to accept the role of Cassandra so readily adopted by left-wing intellectuals: predicting the downfall of the world while accepting that there is nothing we can do about it. Our scream is a scream to break windows, a refusal to be contained, an overflowing, a going beyond the pale, beyond the bounds of polite society". -John Holloway. How to Change the World Without Taking Power.

For variations on a theme, I'm including Faithless' "Bombs" in the radioblog box. I realise that this (edgy text + edgy song) is a lot of data for one post, maybe I should have written two. Still, I really like the tension of that tune, so here goes:

We never teach

Thanks to all of you who thought that I was a really useless Christian when they read my post about Lynne and yet refrained from commenting or pointing out the screaming inconsistencies of this blog.

That afternoon with Lynne really did get me thinking. Or rather it confused me for a week in which I was just numb and unable to process information. Of course, Lynne was protective of her violent boyfriend –and therefore wary of those of us in the mainstream who think otherwise and who might have taken action against him. But there was more, and again it is related to something I learned through teaching.

At the beginning of my teaching career I received an excellent piece of advice: “We never teach, we make it easy for students to steal from us”. I sat back as this sunk in. The initiative must come from them; we just do our thing and make it easy for people to steal from us. I think of all the theology I’ve picked up in the past few months just by “stealing” if from blogs. At one point I was getting so good at stealing that I almost resented direct advice.

So yeah, I had lots of relatively good ideas, but I totally robbed Lynne of the initiative. I think I was mistaken to think in “Good Samaritan” terms. This could have been an improvement from just tossing a coin, but we needed a further improvement. That of not forcing things. That of letting Lynne “steal” whatever she needed from me, over a period of time -and meanwhile I would also get to learn from her wisdom. Of course, for this to happen it would have been useful for us to live in the same part of town. But hang on a sec, did I just steal that from poserorprophet?

Pride-busting spiritual exercise!

It has been a while since I provided my dear readers with one of my fearsomely effective tools of spiritual warfare. So today we're dealing with pride, the sin from which all others arise. But fear not, faithful pilgrim, for this dreadful capital sin can be succesfully overcome with just one little dose of Italian kitsch.

All one needs to succesfully overcome pride is to emulate Laura Pausini's soulful 1993 performance of La Solitudine. Yeah, it's really uncool, but that's um... the point. So come on, yell your heart out! Extra brownie points if your flatmates pass by rolling their eyes.

Marco se n'è andato e non ritorna più
Il treno delle 7:30 senza lui
È un cuore di metallo senza l'anima
Nel freddo del matino grigio di città

A scuola il banco è vuoto, Marco è dentro me
È dolce il suo respiro fra i pensieri miei
Distanze enormi sembrno dividerci
Ma il cuore batte forte dentro me

Chissà se tu mi penserai
Se con i tuoi non parli mai
Se ti nascondi come me
Sfuggi gli sguardi e te ne stai

Rinchiuso in camera e non vuoi mangiare
Stringi forte al te il cuscino
Piangi non lo sai
Quanto altro male ti farà la solitudine

Marco nel mio diario ho una fotografia
Hai gli occhi di bambino un poco timido
La stringo forte al cuore e sento che ci sei
Fra i compiti d'inglese e mathematica

Tuo padre e suoi consigli che monotonia
Lui con i suoi lavoro ti ha portato via
Di certo il tuo parere non l'ha chiesto mai
Ha detto un giorno tu mi capirai

Chissà se tu mi penserai
Se con gli amici parlerai
Per non soffrire più per me
Ma non è facile lo sai

A scuola non ne posso più
E i pommeriggi seza te
Studiare è inutile tutte le idee
Si affolano su te

Non è possibile dividere
La vita di noi due
Ti prego aspettami amore mio
Ma illuderti non so

La solitudine fra noi
Questo silenzio dentro me
È l'inquetudine di vivere
La vita senza te

Ti prego aspettami perché
Non posso stare senza te
Non è possibile dividere
La storia di noi due
La solitudine

Will Brown on politics-beyond-the-state

What if the church focussed on everything except politics? No matter who is president or how slow the Democratic strategists are to “get it,” much else can happen: communities can organize, non-corporatized food can be grown on church lots, fossil fuels can be avoided en masse, churches can greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, enemies can be boldly loved, massive consumer pressure can be exerted on the bad boys of business, and Christians can be a calming, defiant presence in places of violence. Of course policy changes would help in many cases but the point is that there is more power to be discovered and shared at the bottom than grasped for at the top. That’s the paradox. - Will Brown A letter to progressive Christians in the USA.

(I seem to come across this idea a lot these days, so I could link quite a few sources. Brown gets my vote for being both very clear and very succint.)

Poverty: a residual state of affairs?

One of the earliest and most notable casualties of this resurgent 19th-century liberalism was poverty. Governments of a new-right persuasion effectively defined it out of existence [...]. Ironically, this terminological 'eradication' of poverty found a distorted echo in the views of north-west European states that believed that their highly developed social protection systems had actually eradicated poverty. For instance the European Commission (1992) pointed out that in the 1970s many member-states assumed that poverty had been reduced to a "residual state of affairs which would disappear with progress and growth".

Rob Atkinson in: Combating Social Exclusion in Europe: The New Urban Policy Challenge.

A good article on trade liberalisation

This article (and comments) on The Guardian website -a newspaper sometimes affectionately referred to as "The Grauniad" by the British public- offers a succint overview of some of the issues related to trade liberalisation between the EU and developing countries. I'm linking it as part of a process of gathering various bits and pieces on capitalism, so I can weave them together later on.

Lynne

It took me more than two months to write about Lynne. In this case, failure just hurts too much. I had gone up to Edinburgh for my friend's birthday. We were supposed to meet at 6.30 but I made sure I would arrive in the early afternoon: I wanted to see if I could find the blue-eyed kid again. This time I had a plan. The blue-eyed kid really did not seem to have been on the street for very long. He did not seem addicted either. I thought that I was going to help "Good Samaritan style": if I could find him, I was going to try to be his friend until he recovered from that situation (and possibly beyond).

I knew Edinburgh quite well, I even knew a pretty nice backpacker’s hotel that served as the point of first call for Australians who were starting out on a working holiday visa, but who did not necessarily have jobs yet. It was clean, very friendly, and a great resource to get back on one’s feet, as the guests would usually trade their tricks about finding jobs and generally support each other. I was going to pay for a couple of months and make some money available to him. That, I thought, would be pretty awesome.

I never found the blue-eyed kid again. But I could not justify walking past one girl who was begging on Princes street so I stopped to invite her up for coffee. She replied that she couldn't, as she needed to raise money for a night at the hostel. I gave her that money, and asked again if she really would not consider coffee.

She smiled and said yes. She asked if we could go to MacDonald’s. I told her a bit about myself so she could place me and then Lynne started telling me her story: parents who abandoned her and verbally abused her, a violent boyfriend (she had quite a few big scars and even an untreated fracture!!! Part of her finger was coming up perpendicularly on the wrong side, it was yellow and infected). She told me about her kids, who stay at her mother’s and whom she never sees. How she misses them everyday. At this point she was very close to tears.

I realised that the backpacker’s was not going to work. Lynne did not have the confidence to mix with a crowd of loud Aussie travellers. She would totally freak out and that would destroy her instead of empowering her. Lynne did not need temporary assistance (even of the comprehensive type). Lynne needed a sibling.

I had just finished looking for rooms in Durham and I’d seen quite a few affordable ones (about £35 per week). But I could not plug Lynne with students unless I was living in the house too. I’d just taken up a room in a shared place, but there was no room left in it.

We kept talking, went for some fags, and then it was time for me to go to my friend’s birthday. I asked Lynne if she wanted to come but she really wasn’t keen, and to be frank, I was more than a bit apprehensive about that too. I asked her if she wanted to meet the next day. She said yes. So I gave her my number and she said she would phone me from one day-care centre that had a phone. She explained to me how to get to the pub I was looking for and walked with me part of the way. Then she thanked me for "making her day" and gave me a hug. She was crying. "Call me tomorrow" I said, "we can spend all day sipping cappuccinos and doing nothing".

The night at the pub was a bit surreal. The picture of Lynne’s quasi-gangrenous untreated fracture kept popping through my mind. Also, I did not have a solution. I was hoping to sleep on it and that the Allmighty Lord Creator of the Universe would help me come up with something the next morning. I decided against drinking alcohol on that night, my emotions were far too volatile, so I stuck to sparkling water. I also felt a bit stupid for exposing myself to this hardcore stuff before attending my friend’s birthday. You’re meant to have a long bath and indulge a bit before a party, so you can be relaxed and help turn your friend's birthday into an awesome party. Instead I was worried. I really did not have a plan laid up for the next day.

The next morning I woke up quite apprehensive: now the phone could ring anytime. My new plan was to get a phone for Lynne, try to get a feel for her existing support system, take her to the doctor's for an appointment, introduce her to the vegan activists who run a bookshop near St Edmund's church so she would have someone to call, maybe invite her up to Durham for a couple of days away from it all, I'd show her our cathedral and the old town. But really these were just ideas: I would dive in and "see how it went".

Lynne never called. I spent the whole day looking for her with another friend. We ended up learning quite a lot about the support systems for homeless people in Edinburgh, but we never found her. A couple of months afterwards, I sometimes picture Lynne and I watching telly, giving each other manicures, doing girly stuff... But this stuff really hurts because I know that it’s just a fantasy picture in my head and that it never did happen, nor will. I liked Lynne. It was irrational, almost an animal instinct. I really liked Lynne.

Oceanic prayer

"Certains se donnent tellement qu'ils parviennent à nager juste sous la surface... il n'y a presque plus rien entre eux et Dieu. Et lorsqu'ils meurent, Il n'a qu'à se baisser un petit peu pour les recueillir au creux de ses mains. C'est plus difficile d'aller chercher les hommes au fond de l'eau". Pierre Guy, Dans le ruisseau

"Some give so much of themselves that they end up swimming quite close to the surface... there is practically nothing between them and God. And when they die, He only needs to lean a little bit to scoop them out into his hands. It's harder to go and seek men at the bottom of the water".

Seneve is the catholic student newsletter of a university in central Paris. I sometimes read it to keep an eye on what French Catholic students come up with. In this funky little text, the author assimilates life on earth to life underwater, where the people living in a water stream try to imagine what life above the surface would be like.

I read this piece ages ago -several years back-. Yet somehow, this is how I still conceptualise sin: someone falls to the bottom of the stream and is far removed from the surface. The answer is to plunge to where they are. Prayer is a bit like being brought back to the surface after dwelling at the bottom of the pool for a bit too long.

I very nearly spat out my coffee onto the keyboard...

On holy stakhanovism and community

I was obsessed with trying hard, being good, meeting needs, pleasing God, and doing the right thing. There were so many good causes to join, so much knowledge to master, so many people to meet, so many relationships to build, so many obligations to fulfill, and so many opportunities to explore. But as I plunged into the whirlwind of possibility, I became systematically fragmented. -Charles E. Moore on joining the Bruderhof Community.

High Church for everyone!

It may be the world’s biggest cliché, but I learn a lot from teaching. I worry about empowering my shy students and, recently, I’ve come across a truly Machiavellian way of encouraging them. The answer it to force *everyone* to sit on the edge of their chair.

No discrimination kiddos, you’re all going to make fools of yourselves in my class, even the confident ones. Then, after I’ve let the confident ones trip over a couple of times and the world does not fall apart, I invite the shy ones to give it a go. And if they trip over, big deal! After a few sessions like that, I’ve got all of them in the learning zone.

This incidentally, is why I sometimes dislike churches that “reach out” to vulnerable populations. These are full of confident types that never really trip over. Rather, they do the “reaching out”. Picture this: what would it do to my class if I told my confident student: “you’re really really good, why don’t you go help my weak student?”. I don’t know about you, but just the thought of doing this drives me nuts. No! no! NO!

So there, I don’t often like touchy-feely churches as there can be much undercurrent condescension in them. My approach would rather be to take everyone to high church. Because high church is the home of every baptised Christian and we don’t need cheapo “relevant” versions for the riffraff. High church is so reverential that we’re all sitting on the edge of our chair. High church enables the poor and vulnerable to construe the middle class folks as a fairly useless bunch of Christians, because they don’t have to be on the receiving end of their awful condescension.

This said, I’m actually a bit ambivalent about stating this. To be honest I don’t really know what I think, this is just my gut feeling. There is a saying in German that I really like: “Die kochen alle nur mit Wasser”. It translates roughly as “Everybody boils [pasta] with water”. The Germans say this when someone idealises someone else, or wonders what someone else has that they haven’t got. The answer is nothing. They tag along like everybody else; it’s all in your head. I wish we made it clear, with sackcloth and ashes, that we’re just tagging along. If it weren’t for the grace and mercy of God, no human being would ever stand a chance.

Talk is cheap

I think I've overdone it this week. Right now, if I hear any more Christian conversation I might be tempted to leave and instead go take a little nap in the river. I feel like shutting up for all eternity, a phenomenon which does not happen very frequently on these pages, and -as you are bound to notice- does not usually last for very long either.

(Here for a reassuringly titled cheesy midi tune).