Not entirely relevant...

But mainstream and cheesy, oh oui! Singing along this one also counts as a pride-busting spiritual exercise.

Fais-moi une place
Au fond d' ta bulle
Et si j' t'agace
Si j'suis trop nul
Je deviendrai
Tout pâle, tout muet, tout p'tit
Pour que tu m'oublies

Fais-moi une place
Au fond d' ton cœur
Pour que j' t'embrasse
Lorsque tu pleures
Je deviendrai
Tout fou, tout clown, gentil
Pour qu' tu souries

J' veux q' t'aies jamais mal
Q' t'aies jamais froid
Et tout m'est égal
Tout, à part toi
Je t'aime

Fais-moi une place
Dans ton av'nir
Pour que j'ressasse
Moins mes souvenirs
Je s'rais jamais
Eteint hautain lointain
Pour qu'tu sois bien

Fais-moi une place
Dans tes urgences
Dans tes audaces
Dans ta confiance
Je s'rai jamais
Distant, distrait, cruel
Pour q' tu sois belle

J' veux pas q' tu t'ennuies
J' veux pas q' t'aies peur
J' voudrais q' tu oublies
L' goût du malheur
Je t'aime

Une petite place
Ici, maintenant
Car le temps passe
À pas d' géant
Je me ferai
Tout neuf, tout beau, tout ça...
Pour être à toi

"Fais moi une place" by Julien Clerc.

Keeping busy on a Tuesday night

J. John is visiting the North East of England. He will be speaking for ten subsequent weeks in Gateshead and Stockton. I do not plan to attend. And yet maybe I should, because it is proving very popular, drawing crowds in the thousands, and certainly drawing the very crowds that would find our local bishop's sermon series pretty boring. Meanwhile, for some reason, these same crowds are not turning up to the cathedral's concerts of pre-reformation sixteenth century choral music, I just have to wonder why.

Still, I can't help but think that the J. John thingy only serves as an opportunity for parishionners to "finally do something exciting" on a Tuesday night. As time goes, I tend to trust less and less in the spoken word (fequently known as "bullshit"), and I am drawn again and again to quiet people-lover types who walk humbly with God.

The two are not incompatible. I am reminded of a ghetto preacher who justified his two-hours-long Sunday services by saying that his parishioners were made to feel like scum for most of the week. He needed at least two hours every Sunday to undo the damage, and to convince his congregation that they were precisely not "scum", but beloved children of God. -I think I got that story out of one of the Hauervas and Willimon books, but for a fine example of this kind of life-giving proclamation, do check this obscure individual-.

But really I'm not sure of what can be gotten out of two hours with J. John, beyond the warm glow of being a part of the right crowd, that is. Still, truth be told, I'm quite curious to find out. So maybe I'll dig out my notebook, digital recorder, and go interview some of the punters. And I'm definitely going to this cosy little event by the way, hopefully armed with some big bad smart-arsed questions. Do feel free to leave your own in the comments below and I'll try to quizz some answers out of the prelate. But I've got to be careful, because by the sounds of it he might be planning to attend J. John's too!

This made me laugh

"And once every great while, the desire to make [things] will find expression in making friendship bracelets. You know what I’m talking about, right? Well, maybe if you didn’t go to a pinko-commie-Quaker-pacifist-hippy-dippy-crunchy-granola college, you didn’t come across them. They’re those colorful little ribbons of macrame, made with embroidery thread."

From this blog, found through a random Google search.

Positive

" Now I know that the old 'self esteem building' has been beat into the ground, but I still want you to stop and think about how this can apply to our adopted kids in particular, but all of our kids and even others around us. Most of us adoptive parents have children that have experienced the absolute worst side of humanity. They basically started life with no value at all. They were inconvenient, instead of cherished. They were pushed aside instead of cuddled. They were left to fend for themselves instead of protected. What type of core image does that establish?

Think also of the early environments our kids had. We learn with all of our senses....what we see, hear, taste, touch, smell and do. My kids have seen lots of violence. I know one of my sib groups witnessed their birth father try to kill their birthmother. I know they witnessed many men pass through their front doors. They've seen police come to their homes. They've heard lots of loud angry voices. They heard their sibs and others,sometimes themselves, scream as they were beat. They've tasted emptiness. They've had to dig through garbage to find food and try to eat uncooked noodles.They've felt belts, boards, and sticks ripping open their flesh. They've felt the pain of unattended wounds that became infected. They've felt cold and they've felt insects crawling over them as they tried to sleep. They've smelled drugs burning in the room next door. They've smelled feces and urine from unchanged diapers. They've smelled rotting garbage in their houses. And the things they've had to do.......lie, steal, manipulate, and other things that I won't mention here as I want to keep this at least PG rated. That's an awful lot to overcome. [...]

So, what does this mean to us as parents? It means that we need to be constantly vigilant about what input our kids are receiving and making sure that the positive, positive, positive, positive is what our kids are bombarded with. Positive, uplifting, encouraging tv, music, books, videos, computer programs, and friends that will build up the values and morals that you want you children to absorb should be the norm rather than the exception. And the input that they get from us needs to be concentrated on the good. Cheerleading 101 might be a great course for all of us adoptive parents. Our kids need us to stay positive. [...]

Often, when we gather for dinner, I will pose a question to my kids and they'll all take turns answering it. A few weeks ago I asked them to tell me something nice that someone had said to them recently. Not a one of them could come up with an answer. So I switched it up and asked them to tell me something hurtful or not nice that someone had said to them......they all had huge lists! It was very eye opening for both me and them to realize how much they had all been dwelling on the negative. And this is after I'd just shared with them very nice comments that I had heard from adults two days before. I've heard it said that for every negative thing that a person hears, they need to hear eight positives to compensate for the impact the one negative has had. I'm starting to think it might take 100 positives for every negative. "

From North of Reality

On EU export subsidies...

This info is a bit dated, but still very relevant: it doesn’t matter that food is "cheap" if you haven’t got a mean of making money because you can never compete with dumped agricultural products from the EU. Of course, if food stops being cheap then it's all the more difficult...

"The so-called gains for developing countries, duty and quota free access to markets, are just little crumbs that will not make up for the price millions of farmers, fishermen, Indigenous Peoples and others in the developing world will have to pay as a result of the rest of the deal. Proposals to open markets in farming and natural-resource sectors, including forests, fisheries and minerals, will benefit the world's largest corporations, but are likely to have a devastating impact on millions of the world's poorest people, who rely on access to natural resources for their livelihoods, food and medicines."

"Export subsidies will be abolished by 2013 - but only if poor countries agree to open up their industrial and service sectors, something most developing countries had strongly resisted." From this website.

Just because

Gay wedding rocks....

Picture credit: this website (Warning: most of the site shows pictures of weddings, but the bottom of the page also shows extremely disturbing pictures of the conflict in the Middle East.)

Extreme grace

"Extreme repentance requires extreme grace. For most churches, grace usually turns out to just mean that God overlooks sin. But for those who actually want to leave sin, grace needs to mean more".

Methinks this guy should post more often.

Mais ma môme elle a vingt-cinq berges
Et j'crois bien qu'la Sainte Vierge
Des églises
N'a pas plus d'amour dans les yeux
Et ne sourit pas mieux
Quoi qu'on dise

Jean Ferrat, Ma Mome

On charity shops

The other night I was having a conversation with a young professor who is also the father of two boys. I was worried that kids would tend to be quite conformist and unsure what to do when, inevitably, they'll start wanting the same toys and branded toys as their friends do. He replied that he did not get that much stuff, got most things second hand anyway, and that kids do indeed end up picking up your values, so there was nothing to worry about.

Then I thought about charity shops. One of my closest friends and I cruise them from time to time hunting for stylish vintage items (he's an art history major so he's got one hell of an eye). But my professor friend getting kids' stuff from them, somehow that felt wrong. Hang on a minute -I thought- You're on more than 50k (in pounds!) and you get stuff from charity shops? Why don't you stay the hell out of them! How are the single mothers going to cope if you grab the best stuff?

And the sad thing is, the items were probably bought new by struggling parents who get into intractable debt because they want to give the best to their kids. I love capitalism.

Conversion, Incrementalism and Confirmation

Right this minute, I’m writing from a room full of irreflexive, very privileged, privately educated 19 years old. I think they’re sweet. Are they horribly selfish? Should someone use violence against them in an effort to bring the realities of the world closer to where they are?

If some of these students are Christians, I’ve no idea how to make committed, compassionate "radicals" out of them. I’m not even 100% sure whether it’s needed. I can’t decide whether I’m in favour of radical conversions or of meaningful incrementalism.

My partner thinks that conversion is a process, with some important moments in that process, but a process nevertheless. I tend to think that conversion is a one-off plunge which you take or do not take (and I don't think I have).

To be precise, in theory I’m in favour of "one-off" conversions, but in practice I expect no more than (significant) incrementalism from my friends and from my young students.

If this were to tie into ecclesiology, then I think that Christians get confirmed way too soon, and without being overly reflexive. In my opinion, confirmation should be undergone much later -I’d say 25 or above-.

That or we would need a further milestone, sometime around 30, whenever people have started having jobs, mortgages, and adult responsibilities in general. As a kind of comprehensive general life overhaul, I think it would be helpful.

The little red post

Marx thought that capitalism would destroy itself, and be replaced with a harmonious society.

It would happen when exploitation got too dire, and the working class would organise itself and launch a revolution

In order to avoid this (exploitation getting too dire), it made sense to organise the working class as soon as possible – this is political communism, which didn’t really work.

Nowadays exploitation (and deprivation) are getting dire.

And instead of organising themselves as a class and unpicking the mechanisms of global capitalism, people just think that the other tribe is the enemy.

All wars start because the other tribe is doing supposedly something so wrong that it justifies violence, or even eradication. The others are “cockroaches” who oppress us, thus our “liberation” means getting rid of them, as a step towards the utopia that we’re going to build.

And all of this starts because people (collectively) have no access to resources. And they do want access to these resources.

The problem is that they want it from people who think that the resources they have are too scarce to share. And sometimes this is objectively true. If there’s a drought in your country but the next country is less affected, the other country is by no means affluent, it is struggling too!

The West depicts the warring parties as “savages”. And in any case, it’s their problem.

Class did not organise itself. Evidence suggests that scapegoating takes place instead. When exploitation and deprivation get dire, we’ll blame the neighbouring tribe. Not the pension funds.

Thus capitalism doesn’t get challenged. And it keeps on doing its thing: concentrating resources in the hands of the few, and not giving a rat’s that some people are left with no land, no job, no money and no food.

If you’re left with no land, no job, no money and no food, and there is not obvious enemy, you can always migrate to the cities.

There, if you’re lucky, you’ll find an institution that organises solidarity among its members. There, if you’re lucky, those who still have a job will share their stuff with you.

Every now and again, developers will see your community as “a slum”, they will blame your community for all sorts of social evils and threaten to rase it, sometimes successfully.

And the world will wait for Western Christians to decide that they, too, may want to be members of that institution which organises solidarity among its members.

Duo of quotes

I do not mean for a moment that we ought not to think, and think hard, about improvements in our socio-economic system. What I do mean is that all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realise that nothing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly. - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

The aim is "to bring about the kind of society where it is easier to be good.'' - The Catholic Worker.

Return of the Bossy Bitch

We're taking a group of 50 second years to Glasgow on a fieldtrip next week. The fieldtrip leader is making it clear that we'll be co-responsible for running the thing and I need to be able to step in and take charge some of the time. Right now I've got to get all psyched up for it and think up some structure, structure, structure. There better not be any "difficult types" in the student contingent :-)

And the week after that I've got to run the catering for my Church's regional meet up. Morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea for 80 people. Doom. Doom.

Intractable?

But modern human aspirations include not only liberation from exterior pressures which prevent fulfillement as a member of a certain social class, country, or society. Persons seek likewise an interior liberation, in an individual and intimate dimension; they seek liberation not only on a social plane but also on a psychological. -Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation.

On Friday I was at the pub with some friends. In that pub, there was a guy that most everyone avoids like the plague: he smells and he is "too far gone". Upon bumping into him, that was my thinking too: "OMG, he's a goner".

This type of encounters always leads me into big metaphysical reflections: Why does God let that happen? Why do we have such hellish alienation in our midst? Why is it that even the nice guys I was with avoid him like the plague? Why do I want to run away too?

I dwelled in my own thoughts for a while, half an hour or so. Quakers have a policy of always "waiting for leadings" anyway, they're very wary of premature action. So there I was. It was the twentieth such guy I've encountered, and I did not want to engage. I wanted to stay out.

At some point, I did feel able to engage, but I knew I had to have rock solid boundaries in place. I don't mean boundaries as in not allowing myself to like the guy. I mean boundaries as in being able to step out before it started feeling wrong, to step out while I was still unconditionally supportive. And it would start feeling wrong. Hell, this guy "felt wrong" to the entire pub!

So I did that. I flirted with the guy for fifteen minutes, sending out my "love vibes" and sustaining eye contact. It sounds like a tiny achievement, and God knows it is, but this guy hadn't looked anyone in the eye for -what do I know?- a week?

There's a human being underneath it all, and damn it, if we're not giving out any love, is he to blame? One's got to start somewhere. And if that somewhere is sustaining unjudging eye contact for ten minutes, then so be it!

"Stay tuned to what you feel", I thought. And I could feel my jedi powers starting to run dry. Time to exit. You can never "carry the whole guy". You can't even fully carry your friends for very long, let alone alcoholic strangers. "Great to meet you" I said.

For this short time, I was truly starting to like the guy, it just didn't last very long. I knew it wouldn't: the guy is not easy to love, practically everyone else has given up, and this is a very friendly pub that usually welcomes strangers into its social dynamics.

I got myself a pint and went back to my group of friends. I knew what would happen then. The guy would want more. A hell of a lot more. At this point stay firm. Supportive but firm. Convey that you want time with your friends and that's it.

Maybe start again next time. Say "hi", strike a chat, move out before you run out of jedi powers, remain supportive and start again a week later. Give little. Give very little. But give cheerfully. Genuine pleasure in the company of others. If that's not "love", then at least it comes pretty close, or so I tell myself.

Today's cheesy midi tune (in English)

For those at the back of the class who are still struggling with the Hebrew psalm, here’s a new (and long awaited) cheesy midi tune in plain English. And the best news, dear readers, is that you can even choose your own tune from this list or this one, so have fun with this lefty sort of hymn purloined from the Anglo-catholic socialism website!

O Hope of all the lowly!
To thirsting souls how kind!
What grace to all who seek you!
What bliss to all who find!

My tongue but feebly praises,
Yet praise be my employ;
Love makes me bold to praise you,
For you are all my joy.

Dwell with us, and our darkness
Will flee before your light;
Scatter the world's deep midnight,
And fill it with delight.

Oh humankind, behold him,
And seek his love to learn;
And let your hearts, in seeking,
Be fired with love and burn.

O come, O Sun of Justice!
Eternal judge and kind,
The longing world awaits you:
Arise, arise, and shine.

Coffee number nine: irrelevant

H. You guys are an irrelevance, you can't talk to the Prime Minister, you can't talk to Bill Gates, but the mainstream church can. If the Bishop criticises the government, it's front page news for a week, talk about leverage.

D. Well, I think that Jesus was an irrelevance to Rome too.

H. Absolutely! Jesus could not speak to Rome, but his followers could and that's a great thing! Constantine turning to Christianity is the best news since the Resurrection. What would we have been if this had not happen, another obscure sect that would have never taken on? Have you got any idea how many lives have been changed because of Constantinian Christianity?

D. In my opinion Jesus was clever enough to have a friendly chat with Pilates, it that had been what he was on about. But that was not it. I think he was on creating a new way of being together, quite apart from the structures of Empire. We're meant to be new creations. You've read the Costly Grace chapter right?

H. Your thing, your "discipleship and solidarity" thing, it sounds good over a glass of wine, but it will never work, it will never take on. I mean, I take it back, maybe it will for twenty people, and those twenty people will still be an irrelevance.

D. Bloody hell, I never thought we'd enact The Grand Inquisitor right in your living room. This is so existential, I feel like it's the biggest question ever asked. I don't know, I was looking for something else, the pearl of great value for which you would sell anything.

H. But you're not consistent! Just today you asked me to get a salad from the shop. Maybe that's from Kenya you know. You're not consistent. It's a rich kids' concern your stuff. It's not even real. You remind me of the college kids that set up a socialist workers' stand in the street. It's not real. Your ideals are too far removed from practice.

D. You're right I'm not consistent, and I don't even know anyone who is. But I know some who try, who try their hardestest, and I think that's beautiful. So I'm not committed? I say it's a continuum, I know people who are 85% consistent. While your conservative congregation, we're happy if they're 1% committed. Have they ever engaged with the stuff?

H. Don't criticise my people. I'm grateful that they're 1% committed, that pays the bills.

D. What bills? Your fucking leaking roof? Their investments are literally killing people in other parts of the world.

H. Yeah, the church's leaking roof. If that's all I achieve, then that's all I achieve. And anyway, a lot of people who are 1% committed will achieve a hell of a lot more than your handful of 20 weirdos who are 85% committed.

D. I'm not sure, but you might be depriving them of the Gospel.

H. No YOU are betraying the Gospel by turning it into an elitist club for saintly middle class freaks and implying that everybody else is out.

D. But hell H, we need the saintly freaks! More than ever. I don't know what drives you, but I think I really like that Leon Bloy quote that "Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig". And you know what? That church structure you've got, I don't like it. You say you've got lots of people knocking on the door asking for food or petrol money and that you do what you can. My point is, they shouldn't all be knocking on YOUR door. What's the congregation doing? What solidarity exists between your folks? Are we all locked into a liberal panopticon of sorts? I need to be challenged.

H. You're right, in a way, you're right and I do challenge them. But you walking about blatantly hating their guts is not the way to do it.

D. So civilised dining with the conservative members of your church is the way forward.

H. Oh yes, it is.