Storyteller’s World

I’d planned to go out and do my few errands this morning, but in the end stayed in and wrote an article for Dave’s Leaving Fundamentalism site, and did a couple of other things around the office.

So it was afternoon when I walked into town, just as the overcast day was turning into hot and sunny. The whole of Oxford seemed to be out of doors. In the University Parks, they were playing games I didn’t know existed when I was young: lacrosse with mixed teams, egad! Male and female undergraduates talking to each other without chaperones! All manner of formal and informal football and other ball games, but no cricket, much to one gentleman’s disgust. Walking and running and punting and sitting around on the riverbank. There was even a little group playing a fiddle and a banjo.

In Cornmarket the thousands were out too, in holiday mood, enjoying the warmth and the wealth of street entertainment. This gets confusing because each group obviously has a limited time at any one pitch before they have to make way for someone else. So on the way down towards Carfax, I passed the Oxford Mission Church (Korean Christians who worship at Wesley Mem.) singing desultorily in a tongue not understanded of the people (though it may have been English), a man in a wheelchair playing a keyboard, who I think is the same chap who used to stand and tap dance to recorded music, a group urging me to Take a look at the Cross, and a Scottish piper. On the way back I thought the Koreans had livened up their act a lot, only to find they had been replaced by a drum band beating out their stuff with great enthusiasm, in support of the STOP DETENTION protest.

Guess who were causing the most congestion, with the biggest crowd of onlookers? No folks, it wasn’t any of the Christians. It was the Stop Detention drummers. Why is Christian outdoor witness so dull dull dull?

Under the late April sun my brain got slightly fried. That’s probably the last time this spring/summer I shall be allowed out without Protection.

You might have missed it: Ali@Uni responded to that Books Meme.

Coming across a word in a book that I don’t know the meaning of is one thing. Coming across a word I’ve never even heard of is unsettling. (Well, OK, I’ve stopped reading those kind of books that are full of words I’ve never met before.) But in Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind, I find the word copacetic. Which COED defines thus:

copacetic, adj. N.Amer. informal in excellent order

A Google search reveals even more interesting things from World Wide Words, this extract from the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, and - well, I don’t know how to categorise copacetic zine.

Do any American readers ever use this word?

A week or two ago I alluded to the problems we have sometimes had in Oxford, with our mail deliveries.

So when I saw this headline in today’s Oxford Times: TSAR’S POST DELAYED, my first thought was that someone had found, in the bowels of the Oxford sorting office, a lost letter posted over 80 years ago to the Last of the Romanovs.

Sadly, the real story is much more mundane: “Oxfordshire is dragging its feet over plans to appoint a £100,000-a-year so-called Children’s Tsar to protect thousands of vulnerable youngsters.”

It’s another instance where I prefer my version of the story. And in any case, remembering the way some of those old autocrats used to behave, I’m not sure the title ‘Children’s Tsar’ creates quite the right impression.

According to the Church Times interview with John Flack, the director of the Anglican Centre in Rome, he has seen Pope Benedict XVI many times as Cardinal Ratzinger, but was never introduced to him.

I don’t think this is good enough, actually. I reckon Ratzinger (when he was) should have taken the trouble to meet the director of the Anglican Centre, who is the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Representative to the Holy See, and I certainly hope he has done so now, when he was meeting Rowan and the other Anglican bishops there.

At what point can you be completely sure you have been driven too far and the only way is out?

Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian: Now there’s no chance of moving on describes how the Attorney General came to decide the war was legal:

The result was a surreal circularity, whereby the attorney ruled that war would be legal if Downing Street was sure Saddam was not complying. Downing Street said it was sure and so the attorney was satisfied. The war was legal - because Tony Blair said it was legal.

It’s not a great surprise, but there’s something desperately wounding about the bright light that shines on it now.

I’m feeling like I suppose a betrayed and disappointed spouse feels. For years they have put up with their partner’s cruelties, slights, infidelities, betrayals; and justified it by the possibility of it not being as bad as it looks; maybe it never really happened; maybe it will never happen again; maybe the future will bring healing for all the wounds of the past. And then something happens which brings everything out into the light, makes denial impossible. You’re left asking yourself over and over again, “Why? Why did they do it?” And all the possible reasons seem equally bad and impossible to live with. So do you walk out, or kick the betrayer out? Even if it means you might have no choice but to fall prey to an even more unsuitable partner? Or one who just looks too inexperienced to be any use to you?

According to Arts & Letters Daily, there was an article in the Independent recently about exciting new developments in deciphering the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Sadly the Independent think they can make money out of the Internet by charging for their articles, so I’ve no way of knowing what they reported. (An anathema upon them!) At the moment I haven’t come across many other references to what looks like becoming one of the stories of the century for the world of Classics: possibly previously unknown works by Sophocles, Hesiod, Euripides, who all else. (What about that famous Aristotle Poetics that features in Name of the Rose?) There may even be “other Christian Gospels”: by which I suppose they mean primarily earlier MSS than any previously known.

(On the other hand, it looks as if an awful lot of the stuff is the equivalent of laundry lists, doodles, and fliers.)

See what’s happening at POxy: Oxyrhynchus Online
Wikipedia on Oxyrhynchus
Classics at Oxford

Just when I think I’ve more or less decided how I’m going to vote, that nice Mr Howard says something that makes me change my mind again.

BBC NEWS | Election 2005 | Election 2005 | Election fight getting personal

You’d think that after 8 years in opposition, the Tories might have come up with a new idea to rub together. But no, it’s the same morally bankrupt mix of greed, paranoia, selfishness, and contempt for the electorate, who they constantly assume are just as greedy, paranoid and selfish as they are.

Mind you, the one thing you can’t fault the Tories on is, that they keep their election promises. They have always made it quite clear that they’re going to run down public services and introduce tax cuts that chiefly benefit their own cronies (how much did the Thatcher fortune increase by during Maggie’s premiership?) and by God, they’ve always done exactly what it says on the tin.

Missed Vocations #7

If I hadn’t been a priest, a storyteller, a linguist, a writer, a classicist, a diplomat, an academic, or a bum - I should have liked to be a mathematician. As real life would have it, I actually gave up Maths after O-Level (I got an A) because it was obvious to me that I had reached the absolute limit of what I could achieve by luck and rote-learning, and I had long since passed the point of being able to understand what maths was about, even if I ever did.

But there is something about the genius of the real mathematician, the detachment from real life, the fascination with abstract thought, that I find romantic and appealing, and not entirely foreign to my nature.

I think my children must recognise something of that in me; for one of them gave me Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind the Christmas before last (or earlier?) and it’s been waiting on my shelf of Books To Read ever since. This week I picked it up and found it full of fascinating anecdotes about the academic eccentrics at Princeton in the 1940s and 50s. It makes the world of mathematics sound like fantasy (except that fantasy is easier to understand). Like this:

Steenrod was an entirely different character from flamboyant, domineering types like Lefschetz and Bochner, whose lectures, it was said, were “exciting but 90 percent wrong”. Steenrod was a careful, methodical man who chose his suits and sports coats according to a mathematical formula and had a mania for thinking up highly logical, if impractical, solutions to social problems like crime.

Or,

Most of the graduate students were slightly odd ducks themselves, beset by shyness, awkwardness, strange mannerisms, and all kinds of physical and psychological tics, but they collectively felt that Nash was even odder. “Nash was out of the ordinary”, said a former graduate student from his time. “If he was in a room with twenty people, and they were talking, if you asked an observer who struck you as odd, it would have been Nash.”

Sounds like the kind of world I dream of being at home in.

The African Evangelist was out in Cornmarket again this morning, exercising a fine pair of lungs that could be heard from the other end of the street. I didn’t think I would hear “I am the way, the truth and the life” fired in anger, so soon after my sermon on Sunday, nor the intriguing text, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that anyone who is going (sic) to believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

He was meeting with the usual amused or apathetic response from passers-by. Until - amazingly - a passing middle-aged woman answered him back as he was in full flow of “The Bible says, Come to the Lord Jesus Christ. Everyone of you must come to him”, with: “I don’t believe in him! He took my mother. I’m never going to believe in him.”

AE: “God didn’t take your mother, it was [I didn’t catch this bit.]”

MAW: “Oh yes, he did take her. And I don’t believe in him.”

Over in seconds, as they passed and walked away from each other, but it will haunt me.

I just don’t know how you would begin to do the theology or apologetics or downright education you would need, to reach either of these two. The whole situation presupposes an unwillingness to listen to the Other, because you’ve already made your mind up. (But isn’t that what street-corner evangelism sets itself up for, in its very nature?) I wish I had heard AE’s account of who it was who had taken the mother. Sin? Death? The Devil? The natural course of events? Surely any of these answers indicates a dualism or a deism at odds with orthodoxy?

And what does this say about Believing? You don’t believe in God, yet you assume an identity between God and Jesus? And that those who die are “taken” by this entity that doesn’t exist? Or is “believing” synonymous with “trusting, committing to, adhering to”, which I would have said is more sophisticated than you usually meet in common usage.

As usual, trying to do theology about what I meet in daily life leaves me with far more questions than answers.

Postlude: MAW follows me into W.H.Smith, where she can be heard asking in a loud voice, “Can you buy cigarettes in this shop?” I wonder who, or what, it was that might have taken her mother?

Dave proposed a meme about editing other people’s drafts: The Grace Pages: On the pain of second drafts (and a suggestion for a new meme). The rules: you can edit my piece and post the edited version in Comments: but you have to republish one of your favourite pieces and let others have a go at it with the red pencil.

The piece I’m willing to put up as an Aunt Sally (one of my favourites), originally here, is:

Always Keep the Lid Closed

All morning an enormous, great yellow monstrosity of a vehicle was parked in front of the church. It’s a good job this didn’t happen yesterday, while we were having our big funeral. It was the sewer cleaning engine from Environmental Services, shaped like a tanker but as big as a juggernaut, with pipes and ladders, and things for getting stones out of very large horses’ hooves, all over it.

After lurking like this throughout the morning, waiting no doubt for the tide to be flowing in the right direction, it began its work. I thought Li had got up from her bed of sickness, and was hoovering her room with the Dyson - so tremendous was the noise. This seemed more than a little improbable, since yesterday she was barely able to stand. And sure enough, she told me it was ‘them outside’. I imagined they were responding to some report of a blocked drain, by sucking out the underground pipes along the road.

Until I went to the downstairs loo, to be met by a scene of lavatory carnage. There was a sewer-like smell, a centimetre of water on the floor, and water splashed over a metre up the walls. Without waiting for a full damage assessment, I rushed out of the house ready to do battle with workmen: “Is this something you’ve been doing?” It was - for apparently this engine doesn’t suck, it blows, in a big way - but they were very apologetic, and immediately came in to clean up the mess. It was, fortunately, not the contents of the sewer projected into the house, but just the water from the toilet bowl. Perhaps the men are used to this. Maybe it happens all the time. The trouble is, if the manhole is too ’shallow’ or something. And this when the thing was only ‘ticking over’, rather than on full power, according to the man.

I used to think it was just a bit of female chauvinism. But I’ve learned, guys, that the women are absolutely right. You should always not only put the seat down when you leave, but the lid too.

This just in from the Department of Counting Your Blessings: Think how much worse it could have been. You could have been sitting there at the time.

Remember last year, and the whole saga of the Vicarage being saved from falling down? Part of the continuing work was to reduce the size of the ash tree outside my study window, which is drinking too much water from the ground. But this has to be done slowly, because if you take the tree down at once, you get a nasty case of heave as the water is retained in the clay.

So today the tree surgeons arrive to reduce the crown by a third. They are going to return in 2008 and take out another third. Then in 2011 to remove the rest of the tree. Since this is a conservation area, you need Permission to mess with trees. They have obtained this, to do phases 1 and 2. But they haven’t yet got permission for phase 3 because the tree authority (wherever that may be) isn’t working that far ahead.

I do hope the tree men have good tickler files or whatever else, to remind them of what needs to be done in the future. And I do hope the Authority won’t change its policies, and refuse to give Permission in 2011.

Meanwhile, in the churchyard, there is a eucalyptus tree. (Please don’t ask me why; it seems a pretty unsuitable object for a churchyard; perhaps it was put there to remind a previous incumbent of Ooty.) Now that we have - finally - agreed to go ahead with the vestry extension, our architect advises us it would be a good idea to cut off a branch of this eucalyptus, and reduce the height of its crown, before building work begins. Estimated cost: £280. However, the Authority will not permit this, on the grounds that it will unbalance the tree. (And we can’t have anything unbalanced around the church: the vicar’s state of mind is bad enough.) So he will only give permission to remove the tree completely. Estimated cost: £460.

Isn’t bureaucracy incredible? “In order to preserve the tree, it became necessary to destroy it.”

I preached this morning on John 14.6, trying to reclaim it for thoughtful Christians, but at the same time to challenge us about whether the Jesus we offer really is a true and life-giving way.

In the course of it I read a paragraph from C.S.Lewis’ The Last Battle, where Emeth the “good Calormene”, who has spent all his life seeking his god Tash, describes his meeting with Aslan.

In the evening David, one of our Readers, came and preached on Heaven. And, without having heard my morning sermon, read a different passage from The Last Battle. Not that there’s anything very unusual, in Oxford, about preachers quoting St Jack. But it felt like a peculiar coincidence today. Is God telling the congregation - or me - that we could do with re-reading some of the Master’s opera?

The phone just rang and it was a nice American gentleman from the Labour Party asking me if I could donate £100 to help them during these crucial last 12 days of the Election campaign, so that they can make about 100 phone calls to voters in marginal seats, impressing on them the need to vote Labour and stop the Tories getting in. Hmmm. I couldn’t, though I didn’t have the energy to say why I wouldn’t. But instead of saving the Party’s time and money so they could make some of those necessary calls, he proceeded to suggest that I might do what lots of people are doing (sic) and donate £50 or £20. We didn’t quite get as far as, “If you haven’t got a penny, a halfpenny will do; if you haven’t got a halfpenny …”

God bless you too, Mr Blair.

Afterthought: Why American - or maybe Canadian - anyway? Was he recycled from the American Presidential election campaign? Are these guys like those travelling sheep shearers who go from farm to farm fleecing the supporters for a few weeks before they move on to the next place?

My word, this is going to be an interesting election. I have this vision of millions of people walking to the polling stations thinking they’ll vote for X and finding themselves voting for Y. That’ll confuse the pundits.

Here’s a restaurant recommendation for those living within reach of Fyfield, on the A420 in Oxfordshire. It’s the White Hart, where we took our friend and ex-churchwarden out to dinner yesterday - yes, in spite of the fact she has given up as warden and moved away!

It’s a nice old pub, now a smoke-free restaurant, and the cuisine is stunning. The menu on their website is not quite current but gives you an idea. Prices for a three-course meal: around £25 a head, not including wine. It’s not cheap, but this is Oxfordshire, after all.

I went wild and ate more meat than I get at home in about two years (having fallen among vegetarians, as regular readers will recall, and empathically grieve with me). The meat was beautifully tender, and the vegetables done to crunchy perfection.

Here’s the site I needed to find: Backing Blair :: UK General Election 2005
Thanks to John for the link!

Alan Bartlett’s Humane Christianity is a worthwhile, thought-provoking, and often depressing read. Here’s a taste:

When surveys of the clergy reveal what tiny amounts of time they are spending in prayer, then it is not an exaggeration to say that both externally and internally there is a crisis of spirituality in the Church. It is, in part, that we are not asked to speak of the deep things of God. It is, in part, that when we do speak, we can sound shrill and shallow. And it is, in part, that we may be trying to speak too much. One of Cardinal Basil Hume’s great gifts was not just communicating a sense of a person rooted in the presence of God, but also rationing his public statements.

And the reference to that time spent in prayer reads:

According to an Evangelical Alliance survey in 1990, it is 38 minutes per week compared to 22 hours on admin.

Now, I don’t want to sound smug or complacent, but it does just cross my mind that those of us who are Anglicans are tremendously fortunate in having the obligation of saying the Daily Office. It’s true that it’s possible to say it without the right intention or spirit of prayer. But at least it gives us the framework, chains us, as it were, to the (prayer) desk, and means that we more or less have to pray for about an hour each day, whatever else we do.

Didn’t the EA interview any Anglicans? Or could it be - God forbid! - that Evangelical Anglicans don’t say the Office? (Shock horror) Or maybe, I’m sure this is it, they didn’t count it as real prayer, and the survey was only about ‘proper’, ‘personal’, prayer.

Here’s some good advice about taking notes at meetings: even if only to stay awake and engaged. I sure need something to help at Deanery Synod, etc. etc.

Working Smart: Recovering the Lost Art of Note-Taking

(I love the title ‘Work Smart’. Could do with that …)

I’m still so much exercised about how to vote, that I contemplated doing something I haven’t done for years: actually getting hold of and reading some of the manifestos. The last time I did this, they were selling them at W.H.Smith, so that was naturally where I looked today. The only one they had on the shelves bore the slogan, ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ (sic) - which was the very one I was not thinking of reading at all, having decided I’d rather emigrate to Guantanamo Bay than vote C*ns*rv*t*ve.

For one wild, extravagant moment I thought of demanding to see the manager and insisting that he withdraw these from sale, unless the other parties’ manifestos were also available. Then I thought, “Nah, I just can’t be bothered.” But it might have helped clear up this intriguing question I’m left with. Was there only one party’s manifesto on sale because of a sinister plot by W.H.Smith to censor the views of the other parties? Or because the others had all sold out, but no one wanted to buy this one? I almost love this question too much to want to actually know the answer.

On the other hand …

Pope Benedict XVI (great name!) promises that he will work to restore the unity of the whole Church. I do hope that doesn’t carry any connotations of, “Whether they like it or not!” Some of us who are quite proud of being described as ‘Catholics without the Pope’ may, most unreconstructedly I admit, think there are still certain issues of truth and practice to be sorted out, before we rush back into the bosom of Mother Rome.

Afterthought: What’s pretty scary is suddenly realising I’m now on my sixth Pope. Not that I even remember good Pope Pius. But it makes you feel the weight of years, somehow.

The arrival of Google Maps for the UK! Blows all the rest out of the water!

Some people seem disappointed or depressed.

But I’m kind of taking the long view, and pinning my hopes on the Holy Spirit (who has been known to do astonishing things, even with those who seem to be the “safest pairs of hands”)

1. He is 78, so I don’t think we’re going to get another generational pontificate.
2. And in any case: Remember Oscar Romero
3. And Thomas A Becket
4. etc.

God might surprise us yet.

Tui went back to her northern university on Sunday. (Sorry, that’s probably South Midlands, for you, Tom.) It doesn’t matter how often it’s happened before, or that by the time you get to the fourth and baby you should be pretty used to it, or that even when she’s here we don’t see much of her because she’s either out with friends (or we are) or untidying her bedroom: I still feel that pang when there are only three of us at the meal table again, and it’s because one has gone away. I have never quite got over that shock of bereftness.

So today (day off) Dad had to drive up there with a carload of all her stuff. I can think of things I prefer doing, to spending 4 hours on motorways. Today was pretty spectacular: the return journey brought me through, not so much April showers as April hail- and thunder-storms. I don’t remember seeing horizontal lightning before. It’s unnerving, slowing down to 50 m.p.h. because you can’t see more than a few yards in front of you, and then having HGVs roaring past you in the middle lane.

So, one of those days when you feel that surviving a car journey is something to return thanks to God for, like 17th century travellers used to when they had safely crossed the Atlantic.

It’s said to be #1 fear for the majority of people: standing up in front of a group and giving any kind of speech or presentation.

Those of us who do it for a living, week in week out, may smile and feel pretty smug about being such courageous types, able to face this huge fear and wrestle it into submission. So it’s fascinating to me, to find that I still have vestiges of it - and not only when speaking to a roomful of strangers, but even when addressing my familiar audience.

Last night we had our Annual Parochial Church Meeting (the Anglican clergy among you will know what I mean and all have your own thoughts about that). Often I write out my Vicar’s Report for the benefit of the secretary, so he can append it to the minutes; but last night I was speaking more ad lib from scribbled notes. At some length - as tends to happen when you haven’t got a full script. Outlining some of my ideas for a few (quite minor) changes in the way we do things in worship and decision making. I am not a revolutionary, and generally espouse the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school. It’s just that I’ve recently become more conscious of a few things that, even if not quite broke, aren’t working as well as they oughta. It was all very well received, and gave me the usual buzz I get from fluent speaking.

So where was the fear? It was afterwards: when I came home and poured the obligatory glass, and suddenly found myself thinking: Did any of that make any sort of sense at all? Or have I just made a complete prat of myself? Even asking Alison for reassurance didn’t help much. She’s learned that effusive reassurance doesn’t convince; non-committal isn’t enough; and damning scorn - well, she’s too much of an educator to do that.

So that’s what I’ve been doing all this time…

Here is Jill Walker’s final version of the definition of weblog.

This week is British Chiropractic Awareness Week. I wasn’t actually aware of that, till I visited my chiropractor this morning. He’s not as gorgeous as Elizabeth, my previous chiropractor, so the healing process depends much more entirely on his skill and treatment; but I swear by ‘em all. Chiropractic is more or less what keeps me going between treatments, when the whole unhealthy and unbalanced way I live my life (too much computer, too little exercise) would leave me twisted and in pain in a matter of months.

Some of my mean and pedantic criticisms of Neal Stephenson’s language have given a wrong impression about his Baroque Cycle, and maybe put some people off reading it.

It is, in fact, an amazing achievement and a fantastic read. Bear in mind that I vowed long ago never to read another trilogy (the last one was Lord of the Rings, about 30 years ago. Oh, I don’t count Robertson Davies’ trilogies, which are an altogether different kettle of fish). And that even a single volume of more than 400 pages weighs in too heavy for me. So for me to read a trilogy, each volume of which is about 900 pages, is only going to be feasible if it’s pretty darn good. And Neal Stephenson is.

What’s it about? So many things:

British and European history from 1649 to 1714.
Alchemy and science, and the origins of modern science from alchemical roots.
The birth of the Royal Society.
Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, and their dispute about who first invented the calculus.
The British royal succession, and how the Stuarts gave way to the Hanovers.
Currency, the shifting importance of gold and silver in 17th century world trade, and the origins of the Bank of England.
The beginnings of technology: Newcomen’s steam engine.
The prehistory of computing.
London, and the Great Fire.
The religious disputes of the 17th and early 18th century: Puritans, Anglicans and Catholics.

Stephenson’s research into all these is amazing; yet the whole work, far from being dryasdust scholarship, is a rattling good yarn. The tale is told in gripping, contemporary language which is both compelling and funny. It’s historical science fiction: both fiction that is concerned with the history of science, and historical fiction with a scientific theme.

Read it!

For another opinion, see Glenn Harlan Reynolds’ review.

And it has its own wiki: the Metaweb.