Storyteller’s World

She had a friend write it, on New Year’s Eve, on his list of Things To Do this year: Propose to Sun.

And this evening she phones to say he has done it, asked her to marry him. Not just any old who or how or when, mind you. But on a romantic weekend in Paris.

Oh, I forgot to say what her answer was. Yes, apparently.

Lots of the Christian bloggers I read are also keen Greenbelters. Every year at around that time of late summer, I feel sheepish and guilty about not being a knowledgeable and committed part of that exciting scene. But the truth is, I feel a little like those hapless characters on the TV adverts, who can’t apply for a Mint credit card because of some traumatic experience in their past.

Yes, I went to Greenbelt once. And I’ve never been back.

It was 1980. I had been a curate for just over a year. In those days, young curates were expected to lead the youth group. (What, nothing has changed? Surely not?!) So I duly went off to Greenbelt, which was somewhere in the green fields of Bedfordshire that year, I seem to remember, together with our CYFA group, and the assistant leader who did all the actual work of cooking and supervising, putting up tents, keeping discipline and just about everything else.

What was so traumatic about it, then? It wasn’t the mud, the crowded and smelly loos, the sleeping on the ground, (even though it brought back all the horrors of camping as a Cub even more years ago). No, it was the fact that, having left Alison behind at home with two small children, Tom aged 2 and Martha just over 1, I discovered that Tom spent the whole weekend being really very ill with measles, and Alison was desperate the whole weekend having to cope on her own. In spite of having had the measles jab, Tom really was poorly, even delirious for much of the time. And Alison was having to worry about all this and the anxiety of it, while imagining me having a good time at the festival. Since this was before the days of mobile phones (yes, children, in the old days you had to queue up to use a telephone in a ‘phone box’ - and because this was a crowded festival all the phone boxes were either in use, or out of order, the whole time.) I ended up knocking on the vicarage door like a vagrant, telling my tale of woe, and begging as a fellow-clergyman (yes, children, in those days there were only clergymen) to use his phone to find out how they were at home.

Alison and I both remember it as such a painful time, that I’ve never even thought of going to Greenbelt again.

This is the question Alison poses in Quantum Tea: Fresh Brewed Weblog.

And wouldn’t you know it? It seems that, while TypePad, Blogger etc. insist in their terms of service that you the blogger are entirely responsible for everything you post to the blogs they host, and you remain the owner of the content … Microsoft appear to claim (though it’s not entirely clear, because Alison hasn’t been able to find the terms of service for MSN Spaces) that they have the right to use anything and everything you may post there. So do they think they ‘own’ it?

Looks like anyone who uses Microsoft products is stealthily signing their life away to the Company.

Patent Pending - Inventions and Technology Updates: One of Those Days

Did you ever have one of those days?

And from the same site, this is pretty funny too.

I’m glad that Charles and Camilla are to get married. (And about time too, some would say.) And I wish them well. They’ve had a terrible life and relationship, the sort of thing they used to write great love stories about (cf. Tristan and Isolde): lovers unable to marry because of - what was it, I’m not quite sure: she was a commoner? After all that, they deserve some happiness.

But I think they got it wrong when they decided on Camilla’s future title. She’s to be called Princess Consort, because the idea is the General Public (who s/he?) won’t accept her being Queen Camilla. The problem is not that too many will object to her being queen: the question is whether they will accept him as king.

Well, it’s not the Tories any more, according to today’s Observer. They are in full cry about the evils of speed cameras, which they claim are the Government waging ‘war against the motorist‘ (try telling that to the parents of all the children killed by speeding car drivers). Are they really saying they want more scope for people to be able to break the law? Well, probably yes. Because in the same issue there’s a report of the police investigation into how Michael Howard, when he was Home Secretary, gave a pardon to two of Liverpool’s most notorious gangsters. There’s no suggestion that Howard was guilty of wrongdoing, but it sure looks odd that one of the gangsters who walked free just happens to be an associate of a cousin of Michael Howard…

Oh, and then there’s the hunting ban which the police say is unenforcable, because there will continue to be so much unrest about it in the countryside - where not everyone is a Tory. This is the one point here that I agree with them about. As I blogged before (The Civil War has never ended) this is not the right battle, nor the right place to fight it. If the Labour Government and the urban majority really want to finish what the Civil War began, let them do it about something that matters. Though as the vicar of one country parish, I’d rather the battle wasn’t one in which the ordinary people of the countryside feel themselves attacked too.

A good friend confided in me recently, that as a girl she had a mental image of God as a cross old man on a cloud. I guess this was not altogether uncommon. But as I was reminded of it, the enormous tragedy of it struck me all over again. Whatever did God have to be cross with little children about? And where did their parents and other adults get this need, or the nerve, to give that impression?

The friend in question naturally long ago grew out of the notion that God is an old man on a cloud. But I suspect that somewhere deep down, the idea of crossness remains. She has great problems with believing altogether. And I’d hazard a guess it’s to do with the impossibility of loving an angry God. But why don’t we grow out of the image of an angry God, at the same time as the image of the man on the cloud?

I’ve been pleased that in the past few years, since I took up telling Bible stories (using the ‘text telling’ method promoted by NOBS and the Telling Place) quite a few members of the church have wanted to have a go at it. Several of them have told one-off, stand-alone stories, while others have taken part in the group tellings at Christmas, and of the Passion Gospel on Palm Sunday. This year we’re planning to tell Matthew’s Passion, and today we had our first meeting to read through the text, begin to think about how we’re going to approach it, start to allocate sections of the story, etc.

First reaction: it’s long. 128 verses. If there are 8 of us - and it’s not yet certain we’ll have that many - that means 16 verses each to internalise and tell. It’s going to be a testing, spiritual, discipline.

I’ve been enjoying A Natural History of Latin by Tore Janson, and thinking (as so often before) what fun it would be to brush up my Latin so as to be proficient in it. Be able to read Augustine, or Bede, or the Vulgate, in the original. While surfing around for Latin links on the Web, I find that you can actually read or even listen to the news in Latin at this Finnish radio web site.

So you can learn, e.g. Quid Condoleezza Rice dixerit.

BBC News says, in The pleasure and pain of Ikea

Indeed, if you bump into a Briton under the age of 50 who has never visited Ikea, it is not unlikely that they are either from the Hebrides, or a member of the aristocracy.

OK, I’m just over the age of 50. Well, 5 years over, to be precise. But I’ve never visited IKEA and I am definitely not from the Hebrides or an aristo. In fact, I made the decision a few years ago to boycott them when there was that ridiculous flimflam about them barring men with beards from their stores.

At that time I was a proud beard-wearer, and objected to being discriminated against on the grounds of my facial hair choices. Since then the beard has gone. But the resentment and the boycott remain. In view of the discomfort that seems to accompany shopping at IKEA, I don’t think I’ll be making any plans to change that in the very near future.

My old home town is in the news again today. Six weeks ago it was serial stabbings in the streets. Now it’s mayhem at the opening of the huge new IKEA store, the largest in the UK.

All I can say is, living in Edmonton was never this exciting when I was there. It was an evening at the Baptist Church youth club, a film at the Regal cinema, and (if you were really ambitious) a dance at the Mecca Ball Room, that provided the high spots of our early years.

Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Turn away from sin, and be faithful to Christ.

The solemn words that accompany the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday are wonderfully cheering. They are a great leveller. In the face of this judgement, this certain dissolution, all are equal: from pope to pimp, from queen to commoner. They concentrate the mind wonderfully, sketching your fears, hopes, ambitions and anxieties in the searching perspective of eternity.

I reckon there’s no point my trying to give anything up for the whole six and a half weeks, unless it’s something I’m not really likely to do during that time anyway (like travel by air, or go clothes shopping). Instead, I’m going to go without a meal on certain days. It’s still hard work, but more doable because it’s done quicker.

Started today. And remembered how very cold fasting makes you. And tired. And irritable. Is this really a path to spiritual improvement?

To my surprise, when I looked in the log of my website, I found last year’s Lenten message in the local parish newsletter, Fifteen Useful Things to Give Up for Lent, is getting a load of hits. Don’t know where they’re coming from, but it’s always nice to get readers!

I’ve become a fan of Abebooks since searching their database for a book I read a couple of years ago at St Deiniol’s Library, and have never seen before or since: Romulus Linney’s Jesus Tales. I think it was never published over here, and is now out of print in the States. Anyway, there were a number of copies listed in US bookshops, so I chose the cheapest / nicest-sounding copy. It was going to cost something like £4.90 (hardback) with a similar charge for postage and packing. And it arrived today: still under £10. You can’t beat that, I reckon.

I’ve known about Philip K. Dick’s classic sci-fi novel The Man in the High Castle for many years, but never got around to reading it before. Philip K. Dick (1928-82) is now considered one of the leading figures of 20th century SF, though in his lifetime he was more highly regarded in Europe than in his native America. Somehow, whenever I picked this book up in a shop, it never cried out for me to read it.

Then recently I was thinking about works of fiction in which the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, features. I could think readily of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, and Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife; then more recently it crops up in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, where, however, it is not used as an oracle, but as the key to a cypher in the encrypted correspondence between Leibniz and Eliza. It also features prominently in Dick’s novel, where many of the characters use it as an oracle, often basing all their decisions on its guidance.

The Man in the High Castle is set in an alternate world in which the Allies lost the Second World War, and the whole world is controlled by Germany and Japan. By 1962, the former United States is divided into three zones in which the independent Rocky Mountain States form a buffer zone between the Pacific States of America, controlled by Japan, and the German-controlled eastern states. The central action of the book concerns not the major historical events of this scenario, but a number of ordinary people trying to live their ordinary lives against this background. The Japanese influence, which is treated throughout the book as far more humane than that of the paranoid and internecine regime of Nazi Germany, has introduced the I Ching to an enormous population, to the extent that it has become a scripture and a guide to many, and particularly the central characters of this novel.

But whereas I find Hesse’s use of it in The Glass Bead Game attractive and inviting curiosity, Dick’s book doesn’t have that effect. The guidance of the oracle in this novel is just as enigmatic, confusing and irrelevant as it is if you turn to the text of the I Ching itself. It has just the same feel as those Christians who try to use the Book of Revelation, or Daniel and the Old Testament prophets, to provide a detailed road map of future events. (What you might call the Old Moore’s Almanac school of biblical scholarship.)

In the novel, the eponymous man in the High Castle is an author who has written a novel set in an alternate universe, in which the Second World War was not won by Germany and Japan, but by the Allies. In the last chapter it turns out that he did not so much write this novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, but have it written by the I Ching. Every setting, character, plot development, was decided by tossing coins and consulting the oracle. (I wonder whether that was how Philip Dick wrote TMITHC? It’s conceivable, given the ambiguity of parts of this plot…) When they ask the oracle, Why did you write this novel? it answers that the alternative world of the Grasshopper is in fact the real world. The world of the characters in the story is not the real world. Which leaves them - where, exactly?

This Alice-in-Wonderland idea is more than a little bit too hokey for me, and may be why I’m picky about what SF and fantasy I read.

I’m intrigued by what it is that makes us recognise, or fail to recognise, people we know. There must be certain striking characteristics by which we know people. Often it’s the way they walk: you know how you can recognise some people a long way down the road and walking away from you, without even being able to make out their face.

And this is me:

I’ve come to think that the way people recognise me, almost without fail, is by the splendid, almost Picardian (but not quite) expanse of skin on top. So that when I go into town wearing a hat or cap or, as this morning, a cycling helmet, it’s fairly common for people who know me really well to walk past without recognising or acknowledging me.

(Though I think the chin is pretty striking too.)

This happens so often, it’s tempting to feel I might be invisible, or at least unrecognisable. Could I get away with holding up a bank, or knocking off a policeman’s helmet, or some other naughty offence, because no one would know who I was or be able to pick me out in a police line-up?

I was pleased to come across this today, (with thanks to know::follow):
The Macintosh Biblioblog - φρονεῖς ἑτέρως
It offers

All things Macintosh for biblical scholarship. Providing news, help, and discussion for bible scholars using Macintosh technologies as a tool for doing their work.

Looks like a good addition to the blogroll.

I tried to get a day ahead of myself by burning palm crosses today, to make ash for the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. And reflected once again, as I have each year since I started doing this, that they never taught me how to do this at (my mostly evangelical) theological college. Nor in my training parish, which was even more low church than just plain evangelical. This leaves me convinced that there must be some arcane mystery about how to do it more easily than this, which the catholics know but are keeping to themselves, and I haven’t been able to work it out for myself.

The two women I live with would certainly throw a total wobbly if I were to burn palm crosses in the house. (The other two, who aren’t here right now, are both quite capable of doing it in their respective parts of the house, but I’m pretty sure appealing to the fact Sun or Tui would do it, just wouldn’t stand up in the domestic court.) So this leaves me sitting out in the near darkness of the garage, most of me almost freezing to death while the tips of my fingers are getting nicely scorched, holding palm crosses in a flame.

The main thing I have learned about this, is that it takes a looong time. The only way to cope with it is to approach it as a form of meditation. It’s just at the point when the dancing flames and sparks begin to mesmerise you, and you become aware of a bird endlessly twittering in the ash tree outside, and you realise you no longer hate and resent this chore, but could probably continue all day - that you find you’ve actually finished it.

Is this the most objectionable, pernicious, and dangerous verse in the whole Bible? The verse that has done more harm to the Church and the world than any other?

Revelation 14.4: (Speaking of the 144,000 redeemed who are companions of the Lamb)

It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins; these follow the Lamb wherever he goes. They have been redeemed from humankind as first fruits for God and the Lamb.

I’m all in favour of virginity in its place, i.e. before marriage. But to exalt it per se, as a higher good than marriage - which God himself declares a Good Thing in Genesis - was surely one of the worst wrong turnings the Church ever took. From it flow the whole global catastrophe of a celibate priesthood, and the appalling consequence of the general denigration of human sexuality in official Christian teaching.

To say nothing of the offensive idea that only men are among the number of the Lamb’s companions, and the misogyny that teaches that contact with women defiles a man. Admittedly, I have known clergy who actually instructed the male members of the church youth group along those lines, but they were probably the kind of repressed and self-denying gays for whom their denial took the form of hating women.

Anyway, thanks to this verse I only just made it through Morning Prayer this morning.

Have a look at Rhys Morgan’s 10 commandments for the clergy !

I’m sure they must be relevant for a lot of other people in stressful people-oriented professions too.

The story of how St Peter lost his hair went down very well as an introduction to the Transfiguration at our Family Service cum Baptism this morning. Sadly I forgot the highly topical pancake allusion to Shrove Tuesday this week, and also the health warning: don’t try this at home, children (or dads).

The general point of the introduction, that even church leaders are fallible human beings with weaknesses, was well-timed, as I then proceeded to cock up bits of the service. Hadn’t checked there was anyone ready to lead intercessions, and the warden who normally is responsible for this was away, consequently had to do them myself off the cuff, got rattled about this and left out the third hymn so we ended up singing it and the fourth hymn back to back. No one else seemed to mind much about this: I got upset ’cause it just felt slipshod and unworthy of worship.

Then came home to find an e-mail from a valued member of the congregation informing me s/he has become a Buddhist and is no longer a Christian, so feels unable to come to church any more. Part of me wants to explore whether you can be a Christian at the same time as a Buddhist? After all, I’m a quasi-Taoist as well as being a Christian. But I guess there’s no mileage in this for someone who takes their spirituality as seriously as this person. So that leaves just the sense of failure: bad enough when one of our members leaves to join another church; hugely compounded when s/he wants to go off to another faith altogether.

In just over 24 hours, Spam Karma has already blocked 50 spam comments. After every ten, it sends me a little note saying:

10 comments digested since last report (mmm, yummy!):

and then lists them, just in case there are any errors. I’m coming to trust this as highly accurate: all the blocked spam is promoting online poker sites. What is it about readers of this blog, that they are assumed to be inveterate online gamblers? Or is this entirely chance?

Anyway, God bless Dr Dave! If there’s a way of nominating people for weblog canonisation, he’d surely get my vote!

Father to small son: “Come on, let’s go and get a sandwich for lunch. What kind of sandwich would you like?”

Son: “A marmite sandwich.”

Father: “I don’t think they sell marmite sandwiches. What about a chicken sandwich? Cheese? Cheese and pickle?”

Son: “No, I only want a marmite sandwich!”

Now, there’s one discerning young man.

There is nothing else like this phenomenon in the entire consumer culture. If anything else performed as horribly as Windows, and on such a global scale, consumers would scream bloody murder and demand their money back and there would be some sort of investigation, class-action litigation, a demand for Bill Gates’ cute little geeky head on a platter.

Read the whole article: Why Does Windows Still Suck? / Why do PC users put up with so many viruses and worms? Why isn’t everyone on a Mac?

Yes, this is still STORYTELLER’S WORLD. But it felt like time for a new look: courtesy of Alex King’s excellent collection of designs and stylesheets for WordPress. This one is the design called ‘Rubric’.

I’m still thinking about last Monday’s Start the Week programme on Radio 4, much of which was either over my head, or too out of focus to connect with it. It had Michio Kaku, the Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York, talking about the excitement there is in the world of physics, about the huge amount of dark matter that exists in the universe. Apparently most of the universe is not atoms at all, as Einstein et al. led us to believe, but this dark matter. And though this sounds like something out of Philip Pullman - maybe it’s where he got his ideas - it is leading physicists to think about God big time. (Physicists are the only scientists, Michio claimed, who talk about God and a new religion / theology they are discovering. Though, like the proverbial hospital consultant, you suspect that ‘God’ in this context means themselves.)

In his book, Parallel Worlds, Michio argues that the universe is dying, but says that there is good physical evidence to prove the existence of parallel universes which exist in different dimensions. For Michio, the logical solution to the problem of our dying planet is to find a way of crossing dimensions so that we can escape our universe and set up life on another one.

The idea is that we will shortly be able to send nano-bots through these black holes, to seed life in some of these alternate universes, thus doing what may well have been done to originate life in our own universe.

Pardon me for my naivety, but I really couldn’t understand how any of this had anything to do with the notion of ‘human survival’ by this means, which the man was so excited about. In what sense would it mean that ‘we’, let alone ‘I’, would survive?

I find C.S.Lewis’ old idea, mooted as long ago as Mere Christianity (1952), much more plausible. According to Lewis, the ‘Next Step’ of evolution is the spiritual one, initiated by Jesus the Second Adam, who has inaugurated a new humanity of all people who are ‘in Christ’, and have a new kind of life in a spiritual ‘alternate universe’.

Overnight some 20 spam comments arrive. They don’t appear on the blog, because they are automatically placed in the ‘moderation queue’, but even this is a pain because they then have to be deleted manually. They are all from these bloody online poker sites. I’m sure if Dante were still consigning people to the Inferno, there would be some special place in the 10th ditch of the 8th circle, among falsifiers, counterfeiters and liars, for spammers.

If there is some trifling level of interest, it is that some of the spam-bots occasionally include something that looks remotely like a comment; and sometimes it even bears some relation to the content, or what’s perceived (somehow?) as the content of this blog. But one of them, in the last few days, didn’t only refer to Christ but was distinctly, and objectionably, antisemitic. Is there anyone out there, familiar with US ‘law’, who can advise me whether there is some possibility of action being taken against these people not for spamming, which is naturally completely legal, but for inciting religious hatred?

Anyway, I’m fed up with it. The next step may be to disallow all comments, which would be a shame. In the mean time I’ve installed something called Spam Karma, a WordPress plugin which I hope will do some good. (I feel a little bit like a desperate pill-popper at the stage of clutching at any previously untried bottle.) Watch this space!

Storytelling is such an essentially live, immediate, eyeball-to-eyeball event, that it’s hard to capture much of it in the more static (even where it’s interactive) world of the Web. Still, there are some good resources for storytellers out there.

One of the most useful that I’ve come across, is Tim Sheppard’s Storytelling Resources for Storytellers. It’s a vast collection of articles, links, stories and stuff. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Tim has been able to collect here. Every time I dip into it, I find new treasures.

Sur la Lune by Heidi Anne Heiner is a beautiful and comprehensive site specialising in fairy tales. It includes texts, many of them annotated, of the central fairy tales from the tradition, wonderful illustrations from some of the best artists and collections (Rackham, Nielsen, Heath Robinson, Dulac and many others), and much much more.

Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts is one of D.L.Ashliman’s great pages, a collection of many tales from all over the world, arranged by themes. So that you can find out, for example, one of my favourites: How St Peter lost his hair. Good old Simon Peter! Another of us Jean-Luc Picard wannabes.

It’s astounding, no matter how many years I live, how different the beginning of February feels. More alive. Like waking from a long, painful sleep, filled with distressing dreams.

It’s light when I say the Daily Office. Even coming home from Evening Prayer, there is a remnant of twilight hanging around. You almost feel like singing, or dancing. Suddenly it feels as if there is a God after all. Well, that doesn’t give the right impression: I don’t ever get to the point of being like the fool who says There is no God. But certainly there are long tracts of time when none of it seems to connect very much with me. And then there comes a time when I say the words, and there’s actually Someone There. And then I realise again just how costly this SAD thing is, that it is a kind of cross I’m nailed to for three months of the year. That November to January is like a waste land, a lost quarter of my life.

And I think: Next year, I really need to remember that this isn’t something I just have to put up with. I could try using the light-box, instead of thinking it won’t make any difference, and in any case, it might not be all that bad, this year. Better still, get the Church (or the NHS, on health grounds?) to stump up for me to do a winter chaplaincy in the Greek Islands, or somewhere else bright. There must be someone I can exchange with, who needs a cold damp climate for their health, three months of the year?

Someone asked me: Did I think it might be something to do with the time of year I was born? Could be. A friend of mine says she actually likes November. Her birthday is St Andrew’s Day, November 30. And me? Well, I’m totally Leo. The months I love, are those without an R in them. But for real joy, it’s got to have a glorious, full-rounded G in it.

So MPs call for fairer credit card deals …

What a hypocrisy! We really can’t want growth in consumer spending to buoy up the economy, and then criticise the credit card companies and banks who supply all the credit that makes it possible.

Why would credit card companies want to make their terms clearer, and all the rest of it? They want people to get in debt, and remain in debt. That’s how they make their profits - and this is business, isn’t it? Not a bleeding hearts club.

And because of this greed - on all our parts, not just the credit card companies - we end up with a new class of the indebted, who end up working and working to pay off their debts, and never being free. They are effectively owned by their creditors. It’s more subtle than classic slavery. But it’s still an evil, and a blot on the character of the nation that, more than any other European country, tolerates and builds its economy on personal debt.

Gill Poole, one of our congregation, makes an appearance at
Uganda’s leading website, as a result of a recent visit to the country.

Would this man know the truth if it jumped up and bit him on the nose?

Robert Kilroy-Silk has launched a new political party called Veritas, Latin for “truth”.

I suppose he couldn’t really call it Porkies, derived from the Whole Hog (Latin: totus porcus). Though that’d be a lot nearer the mark.

But the quiz is fun to do, anyway.

It means:
Suggesting something supernatural; uncanny
(informal) very strange, bizarre
(archaic) connected with fate
It derives from OE wyrd = destiny.

It’s one of those words that is an exception to the spelling rule: I before E, except after C. You feel it’s got to be, in view of what it means.

It’s had me doubting, recently, because I keep coming across it spelt wierd, even by literate people, people involved in education - may be just a typo, of course. But then today I saw it similarly misspelt on the TV, on a trailer for something on Channel 4, in the reference to the related website. (It’s not actually misspelt in the URL itself, but I won’t provide a link, because if you’re using Firefox, as I was, it may do very strange things to your browser. It froze, playing a maddening fragment of a weird tune.) I even began to wonder if the spelling was actually evolving, in America, say. But no, Merriam-Webster Online confirms that even there it is, or should be, spelled W-E-I-R-D.

There’s nothing like being asked to give a Lenten talk on prayer, to make me feel the poverty of my own spiritual life. If I want to be something other than a fraud, I’d better get serious about this and do some real praying before I give the talk.

It occurs to me that this could be one of the greatest hopes for the world. What we need is to organise my dream Lenten series, which might include:
Tony Blair on Peacemaking.
Ian Paisley on Reconciliation, or Inter-faith understanding.
Philip Giddings on Building an inclusive church.
Bill Gates on Encouraging Open Source Software.
George W. Bush on - oh, such a feast of topics suggests itself, that you could get him to do a whole Lenten series another time, including: Fair Trade, Making Poverty History, Implementing the Kyoto Agreement, Protecting the Planet, Promoting human rights.

I think this really is an idea whose time has come, and I’m sure there must be lots of other good ideas out there for themes and speakers.

A man can dream, can’t he?

You can’t help smiling can you? It’ll be quite a while before you see me with an iPod - I can’t bear wearing earphones - but 16,000 Microsoft employees can’t be wrong.

Does anyone else think the present Archbishop’s taste in Lent books - insofar as you can judge, from the ones he endorses as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book - is becoming a trifle, well, medieval?

Crucifix (Pestkreuz), Cologne. 1304

Last year we had Stephen Cottrell’s I Thirst, a meditation on Jesus’ word from the cross in John 19.28. This year it is Christina Baxter’s The Wounds of Jesus, about which the Church House Bookshop write-up says:

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book for 2005 depicts the stark reality of the Passion. Jesus’ wounds are seldom mentioned except on Good Friday, and often not then. With a chapter for each week of Lent, Baxter makes amends for that neglect. The first chapter takes an unusual perspective, Jesus’ back. With which part of Jesus were his first followers most familiar? Bit by bit, we are given insights from the rear view: the scourging, the shoulders bearing our burdens, the back to the world each merit our attention. The chapter concludes, as do those that follow, with questions, ideas and prayers for group and personal use. This invitation to follow Jesus through his wounds is compelling.

I don’t know that I want to spend Lent brooding on this grim stuff. I think I need something a lot more jolly, especially after the January we’ve had, and with Lent coming so early. I think I’ll opt out of the official Lenten reading that’s on offer, and go back to the cheerful moderation of St Benedict and his Rule.