Another cool blog

Sounds like this one is going to make it into the regulars.

Sell all you have, in one go, on E-bay!

A man has auctioned his life, including his home, car and friends, for £200,000. Ian Usher, a British man who emigrated to Australia six years ago, decided to put his entire life up for sale when his marriage broke up, because his belongings reminded him off his ex-wife.

The items were valued at £210,000 but Mr Usher insisted the money is not an important factor. He said: "I am relatively pleased but I thought it would go a bit higher, if I'm honest. "But I've no regrets. What's done is done and I'm looking forward to sorting this all out."

The auction included Mr Usher's three-bedroom home in Perth and everything inside it, including his Mazda car, motorbike, jet ski and parachuting gear. He also sold an introduction to his friends and a trial run in his sales assistant job at a rug shop. Taken from this website.

Jack Keller on petitionary prayer

I wasn't taken by the answers the author provides, but the guy surely raises some good questions. See excerpts below (full text here):

"[The view that God can and does intervene directly in the world for the sake of particular individuals] contains much that is appealing. It surely echoes important voices from Scripture that testify to God's ongoing involvement with the creation, and especially with the people of Israel and with those who follow Jesus. It helps us grasp in concrete ways the basic Christian affirmation that God cares for us and actively seeks our well being. It encourages us to place our concerns and needs before God prayerfully and boldly, assured that God is not indifferent to our plights and that requests made in good faith will be honored.

Yet the reality of innocent suffering has made sensitive people suspicious of this formulation of the doctrine of providence and the corresponding view of prayer. Some months ago Nashville newspapers gave extensive coverage to country-music entertainer Barbara Mandrell's auto accident, in which she suffered a broken leg but escaped serious injury. President Reagan's get-well greetings to Mandrell exemplified the understandings of providence described above: "God must have been watching over you." I wondered when I read that, as I am sure many others did, whether Reagan was aware of the implication of his statement: that God did not care providentially for the young man driving the other vehicle, who was killed instantly in the collision.

More generally, any case of innocent suffering (especially when hundreds, thousands, even millions are victimized) raises the question: what happened to God's providential care? If God can and does respond to prayers by intervening directly in the world for the sake of persons and peoples, why do we run into so many situations in which God does not intervene to prevent evil?

The perception of innocent suffering is the chief factor pushing many Christians to the other side of the theological watershed. Even more than a world view shaped by Newtonian science, the magnitude of evil that falls upon individuals and peoples rules out for these Christians any easy confidence in God's direct control of creation. They see the universe as self-sustaining, law abiding and religiously neutral. The sun rises alike on the evil and the good. The rain falls on the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45). As Jesus tells us, God allows persons to suffer the violence of evil and the havoc of accidents without regard to virtues or vices (Luke 13:1-5). God is personal, but paradoxically has placed us in an impersonal universe. Religiously speaking, the best that can be made of such a world is to see it, as John Hick proposes, as a "vale of soul-making." [...]

This view of providence undermines the practice of petitionary prayers. Once you are convinced that pleas for divine aid are merely soliloquies that serve to clarify your own motives and perhaps to summon up your resolution to act, prayer as a genuine dialogue, a pleading before God, evaporates. Why bother to pray for your needs and those of others -when you know that God does not care enough to do anything about those, needs ? Why not simply think them over by yourself? [...]

If we hold fast to the biblical witness that God does care for us, individually as well as corporately, what must we infer about God and the world that would account for the fact that petitionary prayer sometimes seems futile?

One option would be to suppose that it only seems that God has not answered our prayers; God always answers, but frequently says No. There are times, perhaps, when that is the case. We do not always ask wisely, and God, to be truly loving, must then refuse our requests. But that explanation will not account for the many occasions when there can be virtually no doubt that our requests coincide with God's will. Surely, God intends children to be healthy and happy, yet our prayers for the deliverance of our children from injury or illness do not always bring deliverance. Should we suppose that God's perfect will is sometimes to wreak havoc and misery upon the innocent? There must be a better answer."

Maybe I can postface those excerpts with a few of my own thoughts on petitionary prayer. Basically I don't know how petitionary prayer works, but Scripture tells us to pray for bread and for the recovery of our sick, and that's what I do. I do this in full knowledge that it may never be granted, but I'm not above praying to find my keys when I've lost them (to H.'s absolute horror). After that, I must accept that God knows what God is doing, no matter how incredibly hard it is to walk into Durham Cathedral only to read of countless 14-year-olds whose bodies were crushed in mining accidents.

Painting by Henri O. Tanner

On heaven

My grandad died a couple of weeks ago. At the funeral I was pretty serene. Grief always hits me unexpectedly some time later, on the day itself I barely shed a tear. My family noticed this trait on a number of occasions and while they are a bit surprised, they don't resent it, in fact they admire how strong and level-headed I can remain.

So I get stuck with accompanying my grandad's lifelong best friend as he walks, alone, to lay some flowers on the altar. Then I get stuck with welcoming everybody else while the rest of the family sits sheltered away. Then I get to read all the readings, because "I'm the only one that can keep my countenance".

I genuinely don't mind death. I'm hugely curious about what happens next, but I'm pretty sure it's great, fantastic news. As H. pointed out, there is one Anglican liturgy in which at the burial proper, you cite some passage along the lines of "we stand in front of the open grave laughing".

Laughing is the right word. It's not a defiant laugh, it's a giddy laugh, like a child in a candy shop, its face lit with an irrepressible smile. I always have a very strong sense of this when there's a death. There we stand, laughing.

My grandfather and I were not very close. No major problem, we just didn't see each other all that much. To my surprise I dreamt about him. He was swimming in the sea surrounded by his family, and he was very happy. His family and friends were his heaven back then, and they still are his heaven now. Getting involved in our messy lives, being part of it. That made him happy then and it does now.

I wondered, but does he not resent the mess? I mean sometimes when someone drags me into their messy problems, I resent it, it's hard work, how could this be heaven? Could someone, somewhere, really choose this muddled pile of intractable mess over and above singing hymns on some cloud.

ANYTIME! LOVING YOU IS HEAVEN!

I woke up, pretty blown away. You know that daily pile of shit? Well I want to go away from it. The socially incompetent lonely hearts down at the pub, I find them hard to cope with. But loving them could be my heaven. One day I browsed the cyberhymnal for fun. I found a hymn that said that the angels are jealous of our bodies, our eyes, our arms. If they had them they'd use them to love people so tangibly. It wasn't a preachy hymn. It conveyed real-deal envy.

Maybe even God is jealous of our bodies, our eyes, our arms, our tears. He'd use them as a channel to convey love tangibly, by holding hands and shedding tears. And in Jesus that's just what God did.

She likes it

I got into a pretty bad verbal conflict recently. One blogger I had been reading for a while started occasionally posting some fiction on her blog. While I preferred her day-to-day gossip, I liked her texts, because she was really good at encapsulating awkward situations that many people have been in, and there is something really warming when you read a thing like that. As C.S. Lewis once said, we read to know that we are not alone.

In her last piece, she was telling the story of a 16 year old girl who is asleep in a train when a stranger starts to caress her sexual parts. The story goes on with the girl being a bit repelled, but actually liking the stimulation. Since this was a blog on which I often leave a comment, I commented that in my opinion she should not write a thing like this, at least not on such a mainstream forum, because there is a risk of banalising the notion that the victim “likes it”. I don’t really object to erotic writing per se, but I did object to such banalising.

The reason I reacted like this is that the aggression she depicts actually did happen to me. When it did, I felt disgusted and I physically had to hold back vomiting. Until then I had always taken it for granted that strangers would never invade my body. But some stranger had considered that my body was at his disposal. Suddenly, strangers around me were no longer the decent human beings to whom I could call for help if something happened on the street. They could be people capable of such behaviour. The world became a hostile place. The bubble of nurturing love created for me by my friends and family imploded, I lost the impression of being surrounded by a warm glow. I hadn’t realised that I was living in such a cosy, secure glow until I lost it. It took me weeks to recover it.

Back to my blogging conflict. My first comment was to say that writing something like this was fairly irresponsible. That what sounds sexy on the page actually feels horrible in real life and that nobody should romanticize assaults! The reply was baffling: “you, Dany, really mean that you personally find my story disturbing?”. I continued by saying that something fairly similar had actually happened to me, and that when it does, the victim does not “like it”, the ground opens below her feet and she looses all her sense of security.

The blogger then sent me a very placating e-mail, nominally saying that she was sorry something had happened to me but that my emotions were my own responsibility, that she did not want that kind of story propping up on her blog, and that one is responsible for one’s reaction when assaulted and that I could have chosen to… “like it”!

I wrote back saying that I found her comments and her e-mail extremely placating and unbelievably insensitive. Meanwhile, on the blog itself she stated that ONE SHOULD BE ABLE TO WRITE WHAT ONE WANTS! There followed quite a number of people assenting to that point stating: yay, nobody has a right to tell us what to do! One guy said he loves fiction and looks forward to someone writing up the story of a girl being gang-raped “who really actually was begging for it”. Everyone else seemed to agree. A woman left a comment recommending to the author that she try to listen to what was being said by me. The comment got deleted.

Because I hate an open conflict in my life, and because I think that it is my duty to forgive, I replied to the author's e-mail trying to picture her in the best possible light while maintaining my point of view. She wrote back with one line saying I’d disrupted her peace of mind, fouled the atmosphere on her blog and implying that I was no longer welcome (“speak soon… or not”). I'm stuck as to what I should do now.

Outreach problem number one: numbers

Last year, I sort of ressented my college chaplain. He was friendly enough, but he seemed over-stretched. He would go through the motions of smiling and being helpful and he would seem interetested in you... for the whole of two minutes. He was always looking like he wanted to escape. Fair enough, fair enough, I got really good at giving him a fraction-of-a-second cheery hello and getting out of his way quick. He seemed grateful for that.

This year, I got to know him a little bit better, but I was still pretty miffed. See, now I was the girlfriend of one of his colleagues, so he extended invitations to the bar to "you and Danielle". Boy did I hate that.

Then there was the end of year service at my college (the guy is leaving). Forward came a dozen of teary-eyed students -and professors- telling our chaplain about what an amazing friend he'd been. They seemed to mean it too! I changed my lens: by the sounds of it he does sound like an amazing guy. Too bad he tuned me out all the time. I don't think he disliked me in any way, shape or form. Truth be told, it was quite the opposite, I was a friendly -and above all undemanding- presence, almost refreshing.

And then one of my favourite blogger took on the topic. When you're trying to do outreach, you cannot meaningfully relate to hundreds of people, it's simply not possible. This is especially true when you are reaching out to vulnerable people. What do you do when you swallow the red pill and now you realise how much loneliness and despair there is around you? If I reach out to someone who obviously could do with a listening ear, I sometimes become an instant best friend and get almost stalked when I give my phone number. I enjoy being a best friend, but I can't be a best friend to very many people at the same time. And I don't know how to scale down my involvement with someone that seems to want a lot more of my time and attention.

I honestly cannot deal with too much stuff right now because I just lost my grandad, and I've got a research council deadline from hell to attend to. In short, I'm crazy busy. I can tell my sister that I'm busy. But to a severely isolated individual it can sound like an excuse, no matter how true it is. Blame it on my crap communication and obvious lack of Christian love, that's still only one part of the story: there's the message sent and there is the message received. To people who have been rejected all their lives, my occasionally being busy sounds like yet another rejection. I learned it the hard way, as I mentionned in the comments on one of poseroprophet's posts.

This is also the reason why I chose to re-post this very important message a couple of weeks ago: vulnerable people can be EXTREMELY sensitive to the slightest criticism on their behaviour or to shifts in your level of interest. Some of your friends may have broad shoulders, they can take a bit of shit and it doesn't matter (I love such friends, thank the Lord for them!). But someone who hasn't had a friend for the last 10 years often does not have such broad shoulders at all, so thread carefully: you're gonna have to be the one with the shoulders. This is especially true if you're not interacting within a structure in which there is some continuity. But even if you are within such a structure, some people are so insecure and transcient that they might never be seen there again if you fuck up.

Never overextend yourselves and hurt people in the process. Friendly indifference is a hell of a lot better than rushed best-friend-ness. Hell, I feel like going on a one girl crusade for friendly indifference, because friendly indifference is a fertile ground for organically grown friendships: the ones in which trust has the time to develop incrementally. I'll discuss incrementalism in my next post, I told you I had stuff to say.

Why do I hate this article?

" I won't even try to describe all of the maddening details of finding a HUD apartment for a homeless, no-income family that consists of a mother, five kids under the age of nine, and a nurturing father. It suffices to say that after three weeks of slogging through that kind of absurdity and ugliness, I began to understand why the mother, our friend Jaleena, tried to kill herself when her original building got condemned. Even with all that, we barely managed an awful apartment, and by the time we did, most of the furniture Jaleena had left in the old place had been stolen by her former landlord.

So there I was last Saturday, along with our friend Kwami (the nurturing boyfriend), loading and unloading a truckload of secondhand bunk beds and bureaus, wondering how long my surgically-repaired ankles and arthritic hands would hold up. I could have found somebody else to do it, of course, but no one I trust enough to do it right. Strange as it sounds, moving donated furniture into a family's worn-out HUD apartment is a delicate job.

It wasn't about the furniture, after all. It wasn't about all the phone calls, waiting in line, sidewalk hot dogs, application fees, and driving all over town. That stuff is valuable sometimes, but it sure isn't enough to keep us here in this neighborhood on a bad day. No, the real job - the job that keeps us here - is about communicating genuine, garden-variety love to vulnerable, poor people who may feel that they aren't worthy of your interest, let alone your friendship.

To do that well, you can't act too cheerful about giving up your Saturday. On the contrary, you have to whine about the heat and swear out loud when your thumb gets crushed between the couch and the doorjamb, like you would if you were moving your sister's stuff. You take the beer if they offer it, and hint around if they don't. Either way, you let the guy know he'll be helping you move some of your stuff soon enough. There's a lot more to it than that, of course, but I can't really explain it to you. Nobody can. That's the problem.

These days I encounter lots of people who want to love poor people, just like Shane Claiborne or John Perkins or Dorothy Day or some other radical Jesus-follower they've heard of or read about. Some of them want to move to the inner-city, or to an African slum, or an Indian orphanage, or a Native American reservation. Others want to reach out right where they are. Either way, their enthusiasm for serving God's people in need is positively thrilling to me. And yet...my first instinct is to keep them away from Jaleena and Kwami.

Perhaps it would be easier for us to welcome these people if we were running a soup kitchen or a shelter, but we have no program standing between us and our neighbors here. We have no clients, after all, only friends, and given all the differences and fears and brokenness among us, keeping those friendships genuine is a tricky business indeed. I am often amazed at the beauty of our little fellowship, but I am always aware that it must be protected.

So then, forgive me if I complain about my sore ankles and aching hands, but then won't let anybody but Kwami help me with the furniture. It's my job after all, and I'm glad to have it." Article by Bart Campolo in Sojourners.

There, I positively hate that article because I fear that it's the most condescending thing I've ever read. I think that imposing "friendship" on people you barely know is dangerous, because you might harm them if you let go later. I think that no-strings-attached anonymity (yes, the soup kitchen type) is a fantastic way to start off, that friendships must be organic -things that happen or don't happen- but certainly not that self-righteous "I'm going to be a friend to you" bullshit.

I'm way more impressed by the humility of David Hilficker (Not all of us are saints), who acknowledges that he very rarely managed to be friends with any of his inner city patients and that at best he was no more than a dependable friendly presence to most.

Anyway, I sit here and this article is driving me nuts, but I can't explain why. I've got something to say on the matter and I don't know what it is yet. I hate being "pregnant" with something to say.

Can't snap out of it...

I picked up my Gospels tonight and I read about all the miracles of Jesus. And I want to say: what about us? Why do You allow kids to be crushed by buildings? Are our kids any less worthy to You than the ones you met two thousands years ago? We need miracles too, not so much so we can believe more, but maybe to know that You care, to know that You'll step in for us, that You're on our side, that You'll carry our kids like young lambs in Your arms.

On the back of my mind, a song which I used to love. "He's got the whole world in his hands". Now it just hurts. What kind of Love is that that lets kids be crushed by buildings? Do You ever step in? Do You ever say: "No, I don't want five-year-olds to agonise for days"?

Oh unhappy mortals! Oh wretched earth!

Oh dreadful gathering of so many dead!

The eternal sport of fruitless griefs!

Mistaken philosophers who cry: "All is well",

Approach, look upon these frightful ruins,

This debris, these shreds, these unhappy ashes,

These scattered limbs beneath these broken marbles;

A hundred thousand wretches swallowed by the earth,

Bleeding, torn, with hearts still beating,

Buried beneath their roofs, ended without help

Their lamentable days in the horrors of their suffering!

Are you going to say in the face of the semi-formed cries

Of their expiring voices, in the face of the spectacle

Of their smouldering remains: "It is the effect of necessary laws

That require this choice of a God that is free and good"?

Will you say, on seeing this pile of victims:

"God is avenged, their death is the price of their crimes"?

What crime, what fault have these children committed

Broken and bleeding on their mother's breast?

It is pride, you say, seditious pride

Which pretends that in our fallen state we can be better.

Go, interrogate the banks of the Tagus,

Dig in the debris of this bloody ravage;

Ask the dying, in this moment of terror,

If it is pride that cries: "Oh heaven, help me!

Oh heaven, have pity on poor humanity!"

"All is well, you say, and all is necessary."

What! The whole universe, without this hellish gulf,

Without a Lisbon swallowed up, would have been even worse?

I respect God, but I love the universe.

When man dares complain of a scourge so dreadful,

It is not pride that speaks, alas, but his very soul.

Will the sad dwellers on these desolated reaches,

In the horror of their sufferings, will they be consoled

If someone said to them: "Fall, die quietly;

For the happiness of the world your refuges have been destroyed;

Other hands will build your burnt out palaces,

Other people will be born within your shattered walls;

The North will enrich itself from your fated losses;

All your misfortunes are a good within the general law;

God will see you with the same eye as he sees the vile worms

Of which you will be the prey in the depths of your tombs"?

What dreadful language to address the unfortunate!

Cruel! Do not now add outrage to all my grief.

No, do not present again to my agitated heart

Those immutable laws of necessity,

That chain of bodies, spirits and worlds.

Oh dreams of savants! Oh chimerical profundities!

God holds the chain in his hand; he is not enchained;

Everything is determined by his beneficent choice:

He is free, he is just, he is not implacable.

Why then do we suffer under a righteous master?

Here is the fatal knot that has to be untied.

But how can one conceive a God, goodness itself,

Who lavishes blessings on the children he loves,

And yet pours wrongs upon them by the handful?

What eye can penetrate his deep designs?

From a Being all perfect, evil cannot be born;

It cannot come from anyone else, for God alone is master.

Yet it exists. O sad truth!

Oh astonishing mixture of contrarieties!

A God comes to console our afflicted race;

He visits earth and nothing has changed!

An arrogant sophist tells us that he cannot do it;

"He could do it, says another, and just didn't want to:

He did want to, without doubt"; and, while they argue,

Subterranean lightening swallows Lisbon,

And scatters the debris of thirty cities

From the bloody shores of the Tagus to the sea of Cadiz.

Either man is born guilty, and God is punishing his race,

Or this absolute master of being and space,

Without rage, without pity, quietly, indifferently,

Tracks the endless stream of his first decrees;

Or unformed matter, rebellious to its master,

Carries in itself faults as necessary as itself;

Or perhaps God tests us, and this mortal stay

Is no more than a narrow passage to an eternal world.

We suffer here but passing sorrows;

Death is a blessing that finishes all our misery.

But when we emerge from this dreadful passage,

Which of us will pretend to deserve to be happy?

Whatever position one takes, one must suffer, without doubt.

There is nothing that one can know, and nothing that one can dread.

Nature is mute, one questions her in vain;

There is need of a God who speaks to human kind.

It pertains to him alone to explain his works,

To console the weak and elucidate the wise.

Man, in doubt, in error, abandoned without him

Seeks in vain the reeds that might support him.

Leibniz teaches me not at all by what invisible knots,

In the best ordered of possible universes,

An eternal disorder, a chaos of misfortunes,

Mingles with our empty pleasures such real distress,

Nor why the innocent, the same as the guilty,

Suffer equally inevitable pain.

I can no longer conceive how everything is well:

I am like a doctor; alas! I know nothing.

What then can the widest stretch of spirit do?

Nothing: the book of fate is closed to our sight.

Man, a stranger to himself, is unknown to man.

What am I, where am I, where am I going, from where do I come?

Tormented atoms on a mound of mud,

Which death swallows, and with which destiny plays,

But thinking atoms, atoms whose eyes,

Guided by thought, have measured the skies;

To the heart of the infinite we hurl our being,

Without being able for a moment to see ourselves or know ourselves.

This world, this theatre of pride and error,

Is full of unfortunates who speak of happiness.

Everyone complains, everyone groans in search for well being:

No-one wants to die, no-one wants to be reborn.

Sometimes, in our days dedicated to grief,

We staunch our tears with the hand of pleasure;

But the pleasure flees, and passes like a shadow;

Our disappointments, our regrets, our losses, are without number.

The past is for us nothing but a sad memory;

The present is terrible if there is no future,

If the night of the tomb destroys the being that thinks.

One day all will be well, here is our hope;

Everything is fine today, here is the illusion.

The wise are mistaken, and only God is right.

Humble in my sighing, submissive in my suffering,

I do not raise myself against Providence.

In a tone less lugubrious one saw me in former times

Sing the seductive laws of sweet pleasures:

Other times, other fashions taught by old age,

Sharing the weakness of straying humans,

Searching to illuminate myself in a thick night,

I only know how to suffer, and not complain.
Once a caliph, in his last hour,

Uttered as his only prayer to the God he adored:

"I bring you, Oh sole King, sole unlimited Being,

All that you do not have in your immensity,

Faults, regrets, ills and ignorance.

"But he might have added further -- hope.

Votaire, A Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, translation from this website.

The best macaroni necklace

Our efforts are so inadequate that we might as well do our best, our best remains inadequate but it has intrinsic value.

Somehow the harder we try, the more we realise that we’re ridiculous. Our worship is like offering up a macaroni necklace in a jewellery box. But in our eyes it is the very best.

Les bigotes

Elles vieillissent à petits pas
De petits chiens en petits chats
Les bigotes
Elles vieillissent d'autant plus vite
Qu'elles confondent l'amour et l'eau bénite
Comme toutes les bigotes

Si j'étais diable en les voyant parfois
Je crois que je me ferais châtrer
Si j'étais Dieu en les voyant prier
Je crois que je perdrais la foi
Par les bigotes

Elles processionnent à petits pas
De bénitier en bénitier
Les bigotes
Et patati et patata
Mes oreilles commencent à siffler
Les bigotes

Vêtues de noir comme Monsieur le Curé
Qui est trop bon avec les créatures
Elles s'embigotent les yeux baissés
Comme si Dieu dormait sous leurs chaussures
De bigotes

Le samedi soir après le turbin
On voit l'ouvrier parisien
Mais pas de bigotes
Car c'est au fond de leur maison
Qu'elles se préservent des garçons
Les bigotes

Qui préfèrent se ratatiner
De vêpres en vêpres de messe en messe
Toutes fières d'avoir pu conserver
Le diamant qui dort entre leurs f...s
De bigotes

Puis elles meurent à petits pas
A petit feu en petit tas
Les bigotes
Qui cimetièrent à petits pas
Au petit jour d'un petit froid
De bigotes [...]

Jacques Brel

This guy has got a beautiful sensibility and is probably one of my favourite French poets, read also: La chanson des vieux amants, Qu'avons-nous fait, bonnes gens?, Jaurès, Quand on n'a que l'amour, Voir un ami pleurer, Prière païenne, Pardons I could go on and on...

John 9:1-3

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind"?

"Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life".

For sister death

The title refers to the last stanza of the Canticle of Brother Sun, composed by St Francis of Assisi, in which Francis thanks God "for sister death".

About a year ago, I remember searching the web for an illustration of a plaque in Edinburgh's cathedral thanking God for the discovery of chloroform anaesthesia. I think that anaesthesia is one of the best discoveries ever and I find that plaque very touching.

I entered the text of the plaque into Google and someone, on some blog, was also commenting on it, saying that those Christians must be the stupidest species on the planet, why don't they thank God for creating all those diseases and conditions for which we need anaesthesia in the first place???

These days, I ressent creation. I think it's too fucked up. If God is involved enough to lead us to the people we love, then God is probably involved enough to unleash a horrible, degenerative illness on my Grandmother. And there is no way in hell I'm thanking God for creating Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, or even for allowing it around. To say nothing of children agonising for days under collapsed buildings. Enough of that shit already!

There are aspects of creation I love and there are aspects of it I hate. On the whole, I think that life is beautiful, and I'll have it anyday. But I feel like I'm closing off half of my brain whenever I thank God for the positives and never ever raise the negatives. We thank God for our daily bread, for our friends, for the people we love, but we don't dwell all to long into the issue of suffering.

Sometimes I want to add: "God I'm not thanking you for PSP. I don't understand why you would let that happen to us. I'm afraid that if You can do something about it and don't, I don't really like You at all, and don't want to pray to You. Whatever happened to the Heavenly Father of Luke 11? If we ask for a fish do You give us degenerative illnesses? I'll have a snake instead"

[...] En cherchant l'oeil de Dieu, je n'ai vu qu'une orbite
Vaste, noir et sans fond, d'où la nuit qui l'habite
Rayonne sur le monde et s'épaissit toujours;
Un arc-en-ciel étrange entoure ce puits sombre,
Seuil de l'ancien chaos dont le néant est l'ombre,
Spirale engloutissant les Mondes et les Jours!

Immobile Destin, muette sentinelle,
Froide Nécessité! Hasard qui, t'avançant
Parmi les mondes morts sous la neige éternelle,
Refroidis, par degrés, l'univers pâlissant,

Sais-tu ce que tu fais, puissance originelle,
De tes soleils éteints, l'un l'autre se froissant...
Es-tu sûr de transmettre une haleine immortelle,
Entre un monde qui meurt et l'autre renaissant?

O mon père! est-ce toi que je sens en moi-même?
As-tu pouvoir de vivre et de vaincre la mort?
Aurais-tu succombé sous un dernier effort
De cet ange des nuits que frappa l'anathème?
Car je me sens tout seul à pleurer et souffrir;
Hélas! et, si je meurs, c'est que tout va mourir!"

Nul n'entendait gémir l'éternelle victime,
Livrant au monde en vain tout son coeur épanché;
Mais prêt à défaillir et sans force penché,
Il appela le seul - éveillé dans Solyme:

"Judas! lui cria-t-il, tu sais ce qu'on m'estime,
Hâte-toi de me vendre, et finis ce marché:
Je suis souffrant, ami! sur la terre couché...
Viens! ô toi qui, du moins, as la force du crime!"

Mais Judas s'en allait, mécontent et pensif,
Se trouvant mal payé, plein d'un remords si vif
Qu'il lisait ses noirceurs sur tous les murs écrites...
Enfin Pilate seul, qui veillait pour César,
Sentant quelque pitié, se tourna par hasard:
"Allez chercher ce fou!" dit-il aux satellites.

C'était bien lui, ce fou, cet insensé sublime...
Cet Icare oublié qui remontait les cieux,
Ce Phaéton perdu sous la foudre des dieux,
Ce bel Atys meurtri que Cybèle ranime!

L'augure interrogeait le flanc de la victime,
La terre s'enivrait de ce sang précieux...
L'univers étourdi penchait sur ses essieux,
Et l'Olympe un instant chancela vers l'abîme.

"Réponds! criait César à Jupiter Ammon,
Quel est ce nouveau dieu qu'on impose à la terre?
Et si ce n'est un dieu, c'est au moins un démon..."

Mais l'oracle invoqué pour jamais dut se taire;
Un seul pouvait au monde expliquer ce mystère:
Celui qui donna l'âme aux enfants du limon.

Gerard de Nerval

Loving you despite earthquakes…

The French are pretty good at metaphysical fiction. And I sort of like it. Not infrequently, they project their own views onto personages of the Bible and I say hell, go ahead! Project all you want! At the end of the day it tells me more about you than it tells me about those personages, but that’s okay, it’s your thinking I’m interested in.

In The Gospel According to Pilate, Jesus starts off as a pretty normal youth, albeit a very sensitive one. He’s going out with a very nice girl, and they go out to eat. At some point while they’re eating, a beggar woman and her child come to ask for food. The girl gets a bit exasperated at always being expected to "care" and tells them to come back later, she just wants to tune them out for a moment. Jesus understands that domestic happiness, (and maybe all happiness) is premised upon tuning out the needs of others, and he decides not to. If happiness means indifference he will give up happiness. He’ll jump into the hurt instead. He breaks off with the girl. From now on he’ll explore a way beyond indifference.

And I’m wondering whether all happiness is premised upon ignoring the plight of others. I used to be unable to snap out of my conciousness just because something pleasurable had come along. Now I recognise this as a survival skill. When I eat out, I’m quite good at forgetting the child that got crushed by an earthquake. I oscillate between caring and not caring. I’m either on the ball or I’m not. I got really good at tuning out people.

Life in the maintream: insurance

I was pointed towards these ads by a Thai insurance company. These ads reminded me once again that those who take part in the structures of capitalism are not assholes. Far from it.

I'm all for for the type of immediate solidarity that does without insurance, -although sometimes you'll need more than peer to peer, I'm thinking medical research for example, which simply must be done on a large scale. Or maybe for ethical mutualist insurance companies (of the type mentioned by Shane Claiborne). Anyway, this is what mainstream motivations look like:

Thai insurance one

Thai insurance two

Thai insurance three

And no doubt this is the type of insurance company that invests in some dodgy funds which maximise productivity by exploiting some folks or making others redundant. Talk about capitalising on the consummers' fears.