Rue du Pont Louis Philippe

I should remove my blog from google. I already feel for the random web surfer googling "Rue du Pont Louis Philippe" and landing on my bizarre musings, but anyway...

Rue du Pont Louis Philippe is one of my favourite streets in Paris. Not far from it, on the Rue des Barres, there's a cool little tea-shop, l'Ebouillante, where I go back every time and where I've got memories of some fantastic brunches surrounded by friends, and of rainy afternoons reading Zola.

On the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe, there is also a small craft shop, kept by a monastic order. The way it works is that Paris has got so many churches by square mile that some of them have been "given" to monastic orders for them to bring life to the building with whatever it is that they do. So the St Gervais church is run by the Fraternites de Jerusalem. From what I gather, they're a pretty benign bunch, a far cry from the acerbic conservative catholicism that regularly invades the streets of Paris.

I spent a few days there in January and the communaute's shop had some beautiful santon-like statues. The most impressive one, however, was a shepherd, about 50 cm high, which they had displayed right at the centre of their vindow shop, with almost nothing surrounding it. It was so stunning it beckoned you to stop, and for a moment it filled me with longing. For all I know it could have been a solemn shepherd carrying a sheep, but it could also have been a visual depiction of the parable of the lost sheep. There was such tenderness in that little statue that I could never forget it, and it propped up in a number of conversations, notably with my dad.

I walked past that shop-window again in August with H., the santon had been replaced by an angel (which looked almost as good) but the shop itself was closed. Then last week, while visiting my best friend and looking for a present, I walked back there, hoping to get one of those if I could. To my delight the shepherd which had been displayed in the window several months before was still there, tucked away in a corner. Trembling with excitement, it took me about 30 seconds to purchase it. My best friend and I were both quite excited because we both found the statue stunning. And, because she's nice and because it's true, she said it reminded her of my lovely fiance, who is also full of that same tenderness.

A day later, H. unpacked it, and loved it. But strangely I found it less jaw-droppingly stunning in H.'s living room than I had when it was at the centre of a shop window on the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe. And I felt a bit strange for having brought it into private ownership, it seemed to belong on the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe where it had literally glowed. In H.'s living room it was just a pretty statue, which looked a little sterner, and a little bored. I'm sure shop lighting had a bit to do with it.

Then I thought about all the other passer-bys on that street, who maybe had once interacted with the statue of a good shepherd who would leave behind ninety-nine sheeps to go look out for a lost one. Jesus for once not depicted dying on a cross, but tenderly caring for the oddball sheep. I thought about Rue du Pont Louis Philippe, a street which had been the centre of the jewish community, and from whose flats children and adults had been sent out to die, less than seventy years ago. The Rue du Pont Louis Philippe, in whose letterboxes came the last postcards of young dads who knew that they would never see their families again, and who hoped against hope, and prayed to God, for their wife and children to live.

The Rue du Pont Louis Philippe finally, now at the centre of the fashionable gay district, a pretty posh street, but I could imagine quite a few sad souls, me included, walking past on some nondescript days, wondering if God's tenderness was for them also.

I wasn't the worst person to take the little statue out of the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe. For one, it was no longer on display in that window. It might be produced as part of a series and there might be several more of it. And then of course I gave it to an Anglican priest. I wonder if someone will interact with it again. I'm really not into auras and things like that, and it's embarassing to write this, but that little statue seems to say, sadly almost, "I was the good shepherd statue of the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe". And this gives art, and material culture, a whole new angle.

(grrrr... I'm ambivalent about this post. I don't like writing cute reflexions that end up sounding like Zondervan fodder, but I'm unwilling to take the post off, because it's got something in it that is quite important and that I like, though I don't really know what it is. I wish I could postface it with Hemingway's scathing observations of the way in which the rich and comfortable kill art. It's at the end of A Moveable Feast. But I don't have the text with me and it's not available online.)

Late capitalist "harvest festival"

1. A capitalist venture is viable if it costs you less to make your product than to sell it.

2. A capitalist venture is viable if you are able to sell products that are either of better quality, altogether cheaper or for some other reason more desirable than those your competitors are making.

3. The curent order rewards individuals primarily for making their workforce available or for investing their assets. In some countries, the system will also reward individuals who are unable to find work or who do not have assets. This is by no means a universal provision, and countless individuals are unable to find work and do not have assets. To these individuals, employment in slave-like conditions is arguably more desirable than no employment at all, though not desirable in absolute terms.

4. Manufacturing of hard commodities is mostly done in countries able to offer cheap labour. CEOs of western companies who wish to uphold the welfare of their western workforce (SIEMENS is a case in point) neverthless delocalise some of their production to countries where labour is cheaper in order to remain competitive and able to sell their products and services globally.

5. Using the phrase of Charles Leadbeater, a sizeable portion of Westerners are "living on thin air", by largely working in the service and knowledge economy.

6. Even in the knowledge economy, productivity is essential, thus employees work long hours with excessive dedication as the need to be competitive is pressed on them by management. Many young and committed professionals are tempted to throw in the towel under the pressure.

7. In a recession, a number of sincere theologians advocate investing instead of giving. The argument is that many jobs, and the welfare of those who hold them, are dependent of a non-essential economy of luxury. This "non-essential economy of luxury" is the first to suffer in a recession as people scale back their expenses. According to them, it follows that the right thing to do is to invest in these businesses who struggle to sell their services and, in these economic circumstances, do not have easy access to credit

(cf. http://www.dur.ac.uk/StChads/docs/golden-cassidy.pdf ).

8. We are in a world full of abundance, yet the way in which we make this abundance available is seriously flawed. We simply cannot continue to reward only those individuals who have assets or who are able to find employment, because this leaves a huge number of people out and it is not getting better.

Perfect contrition vs. perfect despair

At some point in the past year, I really thought that God was asking me to walk away from my Ph.D. thesis, burn all my bridges professionally and start anew somewhere in India. It would have been a ballsy thing to do, because failing to submit would have had very serious repercussions for my department - basically, the department cannot receive funding for two years if more than 40% of funded candidates do not submit, and we were already fairly close to those 40%. I would have been blacklisted forever if I did that, but in my mind it was a bit of an Abraham and Isaac moment.

I ended up not walking away from my Ph.D. and passing my defense a few months later. I was never really sure that this was a real call from God, but I wasn't entirely sure that it wasn't. I tried to discern whether I should have taken this seriously, but deep down I knew I probably wouldn't have done it anyway. At some point I sort-of-prayed that I could not even repent it, since I had no intention of altering my trajectory, or "converting".

I was walking from one place to the other chewing things around in my mind, and I thought that St Peter would probably have given anything to undo his denial, he would have cut off a limb for a chance to undo it, surely he must have had perfect contrition... But we are forced to observe that he did not alter his trajectory when the cock crowed, he did not run after the maid, saying "umm, sorry, I made a mistake, I do know this guy after all", Peter did not have perfect contrition, he weeped out of perfect despair.

I realise that I'm on shaky grounds here. There is undeniably infinite value in "perfect contrition" which is a Roman Catholic concept which states that basically you really should resolve to never sin again, and do everything you can to undo the sin as soon as you can when this is possible. But by the time Peter was forgiven he probably still didn't have perfect contrition, and he had no idea whether, given the chance, he would have the courage not to deny his Lord again. My guess is that he lived with perfect despair for a while. A man in perfect despair who loved Jesus and knew himself to be loved, not insignificantly. A man who was given the power to forgive or retain sins. The one stone on which the church was built.

H. and I got engaged last night. I sort of envy the unchurched types for whom the pre-wedding period is also a church-going high and a spirirtual awakening. For Revd H. and I, church-going is about as exotic as your own backgarden. I guess we get a lifetime of a church-going high!

Tom Wright's overconfidence is rubbing me the wrong way

This guy clearly thinks that he's personally got a direct access to God's own mind and has an unparalleled personal grasp of the One and Only Correct Understanding of the One and Only Biblical Narrative. It drives me nuts.

Here is his latest appearance in the British media.

Life in the mainstream: Office at night

I love this painting by Edward Hopper. The guy is a genius at depicting 20th century urban loneliness and the people's humanity nevertheless springing out, vulnerable and beautiful. And I like the bizarre atmosphere of an office at night, when you're working with someone you don't really know all that well, the camaraderie that emerges as we offer each other a cup of tea.

I should really stop posting quotes

... but I like collecting them. So here comes the next one:

"Dwellers live in a stable place and feel secure within its territory; for them the sacred is fixed and spirituality is cultivated though habitual practive within the familiar world of a particular tradition. Not that they are untouched by social change, but they are relatively well anchore amid the flux. By contrast seekers explore new vistas and negotiate among alternative, and at time confusing, systems of belief and practice; for them the sacred is fluid and portable, and spirituality is likened unto a process or state of becoming. The language of the journey fits their experience"

Jackson Carroll and Wade Clark Roof "Bridging divided worlds: Generational cultures in congregations"