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.

In lieu of a cheesy midi file

Your first hebrew psalm!!! Come on readers, you can do it and even post the MP3, I dare you... You can listen to the psalm by clicking on one of the "Mizmor l'David" on this list -Rosalie Gerut's has the best pronunciation- and you'll need RealPlayer.

Mizmor l'David Hashem ro'i lo echsar
Bin'ot deshe yarbitzeni, al me m'nuchot y'nahaleni
(A Psalm of David. Hashem is my shepherd, I shall not want
He makes me lie down in green pastures, He leads me beside still waters)

Nafshi y'shovev
Yancheni b'ma'agle tzedek l'ma'an sh'mo
(He restores my soul
He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name's sake)

Gam ki elech b'ge tzalmavet
Lo ira ra, ki atah imadi
Shivt'cha umish'antecha hema y'nachamuni
(Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I fear no evil, for You are with me
Your rod and Your staff comfort me)

Ta'aroch l'fanai shulchan neged tzor'rai
Dishanta vashemen roshi
Kosi r'vaya
(You set a table before me in the presence of my enemies
You anoint my head with oil
My cup overflows)

Ach tov vachesed yird'funi kol y'me chayai
V'shavti b'vet Hashem l'orech yamim
(Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life
And I shall dwell in the House of Hashem forever)

On the "Third Way"

I can't help recalling J K Galbraith's reply when he was asked what he thought about the middle way. 'Do you mean the middle way between right and wrong? What exactly are the first and second ways the Third Way is supposed to be transcending or getting away from? The terminology smacks to me of spin-doctor hype.

-David Marquand. Cited on this (helpful) website.

Reproduced from this website

Un peu d'amour et quelques cendres

We stay out of Your church most of the time, at Easter too. But we never wanted to be less than saints. We wanted to love each other so bad that everyone would know we were Your disciples, here and now, in 2008. Please help us. Please don't leave us.

We tried, we thought about all of it real hard, we took the first hesitant steps and now we're lousy and confused. We fail all the time. We don't know shit. Right now, it feels like we're giving up, another generation of uninspired losers, we're signing up to almost fail. Signing up to leave behind "a bit of love and a few ashes". We never wanted to be less than saints. We wanted You to shine among us. And You do! You do shine among broken losers. Please stay, our Lord and our God, please stay.

Sans l'espoir d'apprendre à leur apprendre
à ne pas compter les heures
qui s'enroulent et qui meurent
que leur dire ? Qu'ils viennent sur terre juste pour y répandre
un peu d'amour et quelques cendres.

Les Innocents, Un Homme Extraordinaire.

The angel and the beast

The French have a saying which states that whoever wants to be an angel, ends up being a beast. I think there’s some truth in it, but maybe I should start with an example: it is easy enough to say “alright then, the Great Commission, I’m going to go out and visit people at the local hospital”. But if one jumps into this kind of thing without reflexivity, it can turn nasty: you could end up burning out, or even resenting the people you visit in that way – and down at the bottom, cases of outright abuses by primary caretakers are not unheard of.

I’ve been having this question of “deliberativeness” at the back of my mind for a while, mainly because the notion is almost foreign to a good friend of mine. See, for my part I want to be “faithful”, and to obey Jesus’ commandments and all that. I wouldn’t mind re-enacting a little St Francis jig in the 21st century. I wish I was surrounded by people who were really good at being faithful and could socialise me into it, and turn me into a pretty serious little fighter.

But that motivation is full of shit, because the other person, the one I would “reach out to”, is not even part of the picture. Maybe they’d enter the picture for the whole of five minutes, when Cecile hands out a fresh-out-of-the-oven brioche to a couple of starving kids. And “they looked so happy”, and “they gave us a hug”, yeah. You see sometime the recipients are quite graceful: they let you feel like you’re a nice person. Sometime they’re grumpy because they know you don’t really care. And that’s okay, they don’t really care for you either. There we are.

So now I’m wary, wary of those churches that go hand out bread rolls in some difficult neighbourhood on Saturday morning thinking they’re feeding the hungry. See there’s a catch. Most of the time, the people weren’t truly hungry for food –other options do exist- but they might have been hungry for friendship. Friendship, now what? They’re weird, they’re fucked up, they’re dependent, they’ve got issues, they don’t share my taste in music and there’s no way I’m letting them near the kids.

So drop it, I tell myself. Drop that shitty motivation from the pit of hell. There is only one skill I need, that of falling in love, over and over again, with pretty much everyone. I mean falling in love. And let that stupid deliberativeness dissolve into thin air like the stinky fart that it is.

There’s a line in Bonhoeffer in which he wryly states that you can never really know if you’re being a Christian: the minute you love your enemies, they’re not enemies anymore, so it doesn’t feel very heroic. The minute you fall in love with people, you’re not “feeding the hungry” anymore, you’re hanging out with your buddies and even the pagans do the same. If faithfulness doesn’t permanently elude you, you’re just not living on the right edge.

This said, if I heard about a famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, I would simply forget about "relationship" for a while and just write a cheque to a really efficient organisation. This is not an either/or.