Watching life win

Becoming a parent really messes with my brain... Every moment is a mixture of extreme thankfulness and extreme hatred. I'm pathetically thankful for every bottle my son drinks and extremely hateful towards anything or anyone that keeps food away from anyone else's child. To me, buying food as part of the Red Cross' Horn of Africa Appeal is as essential as buying milk for my little one. And, somewhere, to an extent, life is winning.

As my son fights off the weakened germs of all the diseases he's being inoculated against, he's hot and he smells different. Something smells off. The smell of lots of diseases that are going to lose their battle. And I hate them. Meanwhile, they're being wiped off away from my son's body and off the surface of the planet. Right here, life is winning.



you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be

Charles Bukowski

Starting the kiddo on baroque music...

Sheep May Safely Graze by Bach/Petri (BWV 208)

Corelli: Pastorale, op. 6 no. 8 (from Christmas Concerto)

My two months old only cries... when that music stops! Still, like probably the entire population of the Western world, his favourite work is Pachelbel's bloody Cannon in D. he's also partial to a bit of Haendel. I wonder why.

Our accepted codified culture is getting real dodgy

Somedays I wish more people were actually familiar with the catechism of the catholic church. Stand where you will on contraception and gay marriage, that document's got a lot of good things in there too.

There is a huge watering down of morals and people are engaging in their own reasoning about what they think is moral. I'm appaled by what's out in print these days:

So it's no longer that killing is always wrong, it's not even that killing that is always wrong unless absolutely necessary in very exceptional circumstances, it's not even that you can't kill without a due process of law, but apparently the new moral standard is that people deserve some privacy in death.

Forget all life is sacred; forget that abortion should be safe, legal and rare; forget abortion for medical reasons; now you can just let a twin pregnancy develop long enough for a doctor to reduce it to a singleton pregnancy (by aiming a needle into the chest of a 14 weeks old viable fetus) because you only want one kid.

It's no longer that all people are of equal and infinite value. It's not even that you should try in public to pay lip service to the belief that people are of equal value. In the new DIY moral, life has a pecking order and you should spend your formative years fighting your way up its ranks.

Seriously, my son is going to know that little black book like the back of his hand by the time he is twelve.

Just don't trust me.

In this post a few weeks ago, I wondered what humility was. My brand of it, it struck me, was just a brand of reverse snubbery. I feel so rich and so loved that I don't even need any pride. Too bad for those of us who do need pride (and need it desperately at times).

On the other hand I've been confronted again and again with my own mediocrity and a few spectacular failures on the relational front. I've tried to be better than I am and I could not sustain it. I've now come to the conclusion that I simply cannot be trusted. The spirit might be willing, but my motives are flawed, my determination is flaky, I harbour massive doubts about God and heaps of formless resentment about I don't even know what.

I've tried to rise above all of those dozens and dozens of times, only to fall desperately short almost every time. Like 99% of the time. Given this rate of failure, I've concluded that I simply cannot be trusted. It's amazing that this realisation should have taken me that long.

This changes nothing to my reverse snubbery though. In itself this reverse subbery is not a bad thing. I still feel rich and beloved without bounds. There is a form of prayer which I invented years ago which I used to call the car boot sale. If you've been to car boot sales you realised that people's crap gets exposed in the morning sun, in the hope to be loved again. So I would expose all of my own crap, for hours on end or until I got tired, to see if I could still get loved by God. God loved me with all of my crap, all of the time. So like a lizzard enjoys the rays of the sun, I would sometime come out of the darkness from time to time to sunbathe in God's love.

But back to my topic. I cannot be trusted to deliver what I wish I could deliver. Whether I like it or not it's a fact. It's taken me ten years to look it in the face but I cannot rely on my own character, and I cannot even rely on God sorting out my character and turning me into someone who does not fail so much. I know. I've tried. I give up.

My friend Dan, in his comment to my original post, made the following contribution:

Basically, I've come to the conclusion that humility is the deeply-rooted realization of one's absolute and total insignificance and the utter futility and meaninglessness of pretty much everything one does.



And still, a few sayings float around in my mind, which beg to bear on this state of affair:

They are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit (Matt 15)

Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me (John 15)

Evangelism is just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread (D.T. Niles)

A saint is someone the light shines through (source unknown)

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit (John 3)

What these sayings have in common, it strikes me, is the relative absence of self-reliance they imply.

The first one seems targetted at self-reliant teachers. The second one is possibly an attack on the very notion of the individual as individual, the third one seems to want to circumvent any cult of personality and questions the importance of person-to-person relationships when it takes up the space of the God-to-person relationship. The fourth one shifts the onus of sainthood to "the light" who shines where the heck it wants, as the fifth saying makes clear.

What I'm really coming at, and what gave me enough hope to write this post, is an intuition that if I can't trust myself, maybe I can trust something else instead.

This is hardly a scoop. Christians are no supposed to trust themselves but God. We know. Thing is, I've tried several understandings of that. I oscillated between the two extremes of calling in God's support in my projects, or getting completely despondent and doing nothing at all of my own accord. Still all about me me me.

But I'm getting rambly, let's cut to the core. My conclusion is don't trust me. I can't be trusted. Don't rely on me, I can't be relied on. Seriously, I'll fail. I failed before, and I'll fail again, we'll all get hurt. Maybe the kingdom of God is just more fluid. Sainthood is fluid too. It doesn't attach itself to a person but to a people. There is a thing called grace and it works, but we don't know where and we don't know how. By rubbing shoulders with God's family you'll come across some of it some of the time. Not a whole lot. Sometime in you, sometime in others. There is no rule. But if you are going to trust anything, trust in the dynamics of the Kingdom of God.

Now this really cracked me up...

From the B movie catechism.

Towards a theology of disaster

It's Monday morning and I'm reading blogs in bed. I can't believe that this gorgeous baby is sleeping next to me in his Moses basket, making baby snuffles. His life is so right! So fundamentally good! The love that engulfs new parents is so pure that it must be close to heaven's.

If I had been born 150 years ago, or in this day and age in a place where state-of-the-art obstetrics is not available, I would have been very likely to die in childbirth together with my baby. The pregnancy went overdue with no signs of labour. Given the size of my bump on my decidedly petite frame, doctors suspected cephalopelvic disproportion and booked me in for an elective C-section. Our child weighted in at 9lbs 10 oz.

By the time the operation was performed, he was swimming in grade III meconium-stained amniotic fluid. His AGPAR score the first minute was just 3 out of 10 and he needed heavy-handed intrusive resuscitation.

So now, theologically speaking, how does one handle this kind of information? Is it a case of simply thanking God for a fabulous outcome to what looked like a very hairy birth? Do we give thanks for modern medicine and the skills acquired by men and women over centuries which now regularly turn potential disasters into routine non-disasters?

If I'm being honest, I'm not very good at giving thanks. I've always got survivor's guilt because I can't help thinking of others who are not so lucky. In this instance, the 350 000 women who die in childbirth each year around the world. And I get incredibly angry with God. You're telling me that I and these hundreds of thousands of women were "intelligently designed" to die in childbirth? If nature was left to run its course without intervention our beautiful babies would never even have taken their first breath.

What kind of God designs such a f*cked up plan? A plan that could have killed me and my unborn baby? I'm not a bad person. I do my best to love my neighbours in all the ways I can. And my baby is surely the most innocent being in the entire universe. What kind of a f*cked up intelligent design is that?

I can't help myself. I'm no good at blocking out the negative. If we give thanks to God for nice things that happen to us why don't we blame God for the bad things? As this was unfolding in the last days of my pregnancy, I googled like a maniac about the whys of unqualified evils. Why cancer? Why AIDS? Why all this s**t?

I'm sad to say that the only answer that gave me any solace was someone typing in that either God is a sick b*stard, or there is no God. I knew I'd have to move on from this eventually, but right then cognitively this is where I was, and I was not prepared to pretend that this wasn't how I genuinely felt.

Now I'm thinking that we need a theology of disaster. And a good one at that. Not the usual lame-a**ed theodicies you come across. Christianity strikes me as one of the only religions that can handle disaster, although I don't yet know how. The cross is the ultimate disaste.

I must say that I do tremendously respect those authors who try to provide the best theology and pastoral care they can come up with. Even if they still don't convince me, I find their attempts incredibly moving. Harold Kushner's is case in point. I wish I had the inspiration to write the most pastoral book ever. Nowhere is good theology more needed. And good theology starts with the truth, all the truth and nothing but the truth, no matter how unpalatable.

And I'm starting to think that good theology also starts with the wonderful smell of my baby's hair. ´

I used to think that if you had not experienced disaster, you had no right to talk about it. But then disaster has a tendency to stun you and destroy your better faculties. So it might be that a new division of labour means that those who are still able to connect to the smell of heaven have a role to play. It takes joy, it takes ecstasy, to delve that deep. And I've got both of them lying in a Moses basket next to me.

New arrival!

We love this little guy so much it hurts! Needless to say, I'm an emotional mess of crazy postpartum hormones but it feels awesome. More soon!