Storyteller’s World

Ah, those old undergraduate diaries! From them I learn that 35 years ago today, May 17th, 1970, was Whit Sunday, and I was in Heidelberg visiting college friends Paul, Dick and Andy. We spent most of the day in one or other of their student rooms, or riding the tram between Heidelberg and Handschuhsheim on the other side of the Neckar. (The only excuse I can think of for so thoroughly wasting a visit to Heidelberg was inertia, a hangover, or lack of money - all of which seem highly probable.)

In the evening I ate a large pizza and we went to a late night showing, in English, of Easy Rider. Ever the assiduous film critic, I recorded that it was “a good and very horrible film”.

The truth is that in the intervening years I have never been able to sit through the whole of it again, either for lack of opportunity, or sheer willpower. It is so desperately a film of its time that it leaves me asking, What on earth is the point? Which, I suppose, says it all.

By the time the movie finished the trams had stopped running (it was Sunday, after all) and we had to walk home.

Third generation mobile technology, 3G, came off the worst in a report into people’s understanding and take-up of technologies.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Technology ‘baffles old and poor’

Surely the main reason for this is that it’s a technology too far. Most people haven’t taken it up because most people just don’t need it. I don’t want one electronic device that does everything from take photos to fill my hot water bottle: I would rather have a mobile phone that just makes phone calls, a camera that takes pictures, a computer that accesses the Internet, a diary (yes, made out of paper) that keeps track of my engagements, a car that takes me from A to B without talking to me. The more complicated technology becomes, the more things can go wrong with it. The more dependent I become on one gadget (I speak as a techno-junkie) the more helpless I am when there’s a power cut.

Let’s simplify, and seek technology that meets the users’ needs, rather than those of the tech industry for ever more and more sales and profits.

Our favourite eco-concerned PhD student, nomad of the blogosphere, currently residing at Satsuma, confesses to eating a pot noodle, as if it were some heinous misdemeanour. In the spirit of never thinking ill of another without looking deep into my own heart of darkness, I suddenly realise that I have never eaten a pot noodle. Not that I claim any special virtue on that account - I’m as fond of the occasional Big Mac as any other carnivore with a death-wish - it’s just that I have never been attracted, or never had the temptation, the peer group pressure, or the opportunity.

I am, to borrow a phrase from one of the grosser current TV commercials, a pot noodle virgin. This conjures up visions of some ghastly woman accosting me, forcing pot noodle between my gritted teeth, and asking, “How was it for you? Not so bad, eh?” “Ooh, no. I think I’ll have another…” No, let’s not even go there.

Alternative idea. How about this for a proposal: a Pot Noodle Meme. Post a piece to your blog about some experience you have had with a pot noodle. Don’t forget to link back here, and pass it on to someone else.

My contribution to the Pentecost Grid Blog: not a learned or spiritual meditation on the Holy Spirit, but a simple testimony to the Spirit working in an (extra)ordinary parish church.

This evening our Tuesday evening fellowship group led ‘Wild Goose and Justice’: a Celtic-style service for Pentecost and the start of Christian Aid Week. Several gifted lay people did things they have never done before in worship: led a meditation, told a story, preached. (The preacher was quite sure it was God’s idea, because at the planning meeting she had spoken the words, “I’ll give the talk”, before she knew she was going to volunteer it.)

And the vicar let them do it without even needing to be at the planning meeting, or vet what they were proposing to do. A few years ago this would not have happened. Back then, the control freak in me would have wanted to hold on to everything that was being done. And the lay people would not have had the confidence, or felt they had the permission, to do it. The Spirit really is moving in our midst. God bless her!

Dr Who is either losing his grip completely, or deliberately choosing to flirt with extreme danger, or else he’s so besotted with that Rose that he’s lost all sense of temporal propriety.

I mean, every time-traveller, even an armchair one, knows there are certain rules of time travel that you just don’t mess with.

1. When travelling back in time, you don’t change your own history. This could lead to the distressing and painful fate of vanishing up your own non-existence.
2. You especially don’t want to encounter yourself, if you happen to be paying two visits to exactly the same time and space co-ordinates.
3. And, don’t touch the baby! if the baby is yourself when younger.

Yet in yesterday’s episode, the Doctor allowed his comely assistant to break all these rules. First she saved her own father, whom she never knew, from being killed in a hit-and-run accident. This leads to a wound in time which the Reapers (don’t ask!) have to come and heal, destroying the whole earth in the process. Then she gets locked in a church with her own parents and self when younger, in the course of which it’s inevitable that she touches the baby when she’s given it to hold, which creates a dangerous “paradox” (you could say), thus allowing the Reapers to get in, destroy the Tardis and kill the Doctor.

Get out of that, then! Well, they do, of course; but not without some strange seesawing between moments of extreme jeopardy, and lulls in the action when they sit around having relaxed metaphysical and philosophical conversations about the nature of love, family, and life, the universe and everything. “This wouldn’t be allowed to happen, if the Time Lords were still around.” You said it, Doc!

Mind, it’s gripping stuff and I stand by what I said about this being a Dr Who for grown-ups. But does anyone else wonder whether it’s been taken over by those Christians? I mean, last night we had

• even ordinary people being important and special
• the church, as the oldest building around, being the one refuge where the last survivors of Earth were safe from death and destruction
• a loving father (on the BBC website he even has a capital F) going out to suffer, even unto death, to save his child.

Perhaps others noticed even more tell-tale clues that there might be a sinister, Narnia-inspired conspiracy here?

I can’t say I managed to do much more than stifle a yawn when it was reported the other week that the number of the beast was not, after all, 666 but a niggardly 616. (Reported at ReligionNewsBlog.) Though it did perhaps explain why I’ve always had such trouble getting through to him (or, in a spirit of inclusiveness, her).

But what’s much more interesting than whether the Beast turns out to have been Nero or Caligula or Hitler or Stalin or John Kerry or whoever the current hate figure is, is this perfectly serious and scholarly link to our respected Prime Minister. It’s not numerology, Jim; it’s just anagrams:

Although our system of numerals does not lend itself to word-puzzles in the Greek style, we are still very Greek in our use of anagrams. Just as NERON = IDIAN METERA APEKTEINE, so ‘Tony Blair MP’ = ‘I’m Tory Plan B’ - with similar polemical intent.

See POxy Oxyrhynchus Online.

There’s a quite extraordinary story in the Church Times, about a parish near Rochdale where they had to hold their Ascension Day Eucharist in the Vicarage because gangs of youths make it impossible for them to worship in the church. These gangs hang around the churchyard drinking and using drugs, run in and out of church during evening services, damage stained glass windows and other parts of the building, and generally intimidate worshippers.

You can’t help musing about what would happen if gangs were to similarly disrupt prayers at a mosque, synagogue or gurdwara. The answer is: Something, Pretty Damn Quick. But because it’s the parish church, there’s somehow a hand-wringing, shrugging, sense of What ya gonna do about it?

I don’t know who’s to blame for this defeatism. The local police? The vicar and congregation? Why aren’t they kicking up hell, writing to the Chief Constable and insisting that their freedom to practice their religion be protected? Their MP? That nice Mr Blair who’s so keen on combatting yob culture?

Heavens, it even looks as if it could be a case for Melanie Phillips.

asperges, bletherskate, contrarian, debridement, ergophobia, flaunching, geniculate, hypogeal, ithyphallic, joypad, knowbot, leptomeninges, mystagogy, necrology, orgone, placet, quean, remuage, squamous, tribade, ululant, vocable, winceyette, xerophyte, yatra, zucchetto

I’m sure that some of my more catholic brothers and sisters have used at least one of these, and quite a few of the others sound at least potentially theological. As for the rest: now that I’ve found them, all I can say is, I’m sorely tempted to find texts that will enable me, nonchalantly, to slip them in. All suggestions or experiences of how they were received (if you have used them) will be welcomed.

A day at CRE (Christian Resources Exhibition) is always an educational experience. What a diverse set of Christian humanity you meet here, in all sorts of shapes and sizes and shades of theological opinion. Here is God’s plenty, for sure!

Mind, it was a lot more fun when I first went years ago. Back then one of the amusements of the day was to see which stands were really looking uncomfortable next to each other. My favourite one was the time when they put the Protestant Truth Society right next door to Veritas.

Since then, they seem to have got much more careful. The only thing that made me smile today, was the John Metcalfe Publishing Trust right opposite Orthodox Christian Books Ltd, with their arrayed icons. John Metcalfe, as far as I can make out (having never heard of him before) is a Protestant prophet who writes tracts with titles like Female Priests?, Women Bishops? (the question marks tell it all, don’t you think?) John Metcalfe’s Testimony Against the Social Gospel, etc.

Which approach serves Christian unity better, I wonder? Keeping contraries apart as much as possible, so they can start to pretend they are the only Christians in the world, because they never meet any other kind? Or forcing them to be neighbours so they jolly well have to accept each other - and who knows, may even speak to each other some time in the course of four days? (Got to admit: I’m a blood-and-guts kind of ecumenist. I’d lock them up in the same room with just bread and wine and no Bibles until they were praying together.)

But perhaps there are indeed seething hostilities going on all the time; it’s just that, since the great majority of exhibitors seem to be of a principally Evangelical shade, I can no longer recognise the hidden undercurrents. The one thing you can be sure of, is people’s general niceness. They wait for others to go through the doors before them - even when there’s a perfectly good second door they could open as well. Grrr. And strangely I find that when I drop half the stuff out of my bags on the floor, (if you’ve ever been to CRE you’ll know exactly what I mean) instead of saying F**k or anything remotely like it, I have suddenly become Ned Flanders and think, Well, God bless me for a dropsical old soul! And sure enough, everyone else is going around lapped in the same Howdly Doodly Neighbour aura of good will.

It’s the kind of place you can spend far too much money. But I have set my face like flint, and spend a mere £30 or so, but bring home a lot of catalogues etc. so I can peruse them at leisure, order, in tranquillity, what I consider I might use, and not be swayed by a pretty face offering me a 10% discount if I buy today.

In a few weeks’ time, it will be my Silver Jubilee: that is, the 25th anniversary of my ordination as priest. It’s something I want to celebrate, and think is worth celebrating. It feels like a lot of water has flowed under a lot of bridges in that time, and I’m not the same person I was then, and the Church of England is also strangely the same and yet different. And yet, perverse and unlikely as it seems, I’m even more attached to the old thing than I was when I started. In spite of all the Church’s failings, and the lunacies of people who allegedly belong to it, and my own blowing hot and cold - in spite of all, I really want the good old C of E to survive and thrive and continue to be the glorious invention it has been, the best church in the world. (Come on, I have to believe that - if I didn’t, I should be getting up and changing ship, getting aboard the one that was the best.)

It all brings on a curious mood of recollection, and I find myself looking back over some of the diaries and journals which I kept on and off from 1977 to, well, I suppose 2003. (It’s OK, doctor, I’ve stopped now, really.) I’m not sure if this is an experience I recommend. It’s depressing to be reminded of how poor we were with four children on a curate’s pay, and what a struggle the simplest things often were. It makes me smile to be reminded of how earnest I was, how well-intentioned, and how much (as well as how little!) I knew.

This is definitely something you should ration yourself to small doses of.

(Ouch! I just found the record of the day in 1981 when, trying to live the good and simple and cheap life, we poisoned ourselves with inadequately boiled red kidney beans. If you want to lose half a stone in one afternoon, this - I can tell you from bitter personal experience - is the way to do it.)

Heard this on Quote, Unquote yesterday, allegedly an old Welsh story.

One Welsh woman tells another that Myfanwy is shortly to be married.

“Married? I didn’t even know she was pregnant!”

“She’s not pregnant.”

“Getting married, and not pregnant! There’s posh!”

Alas, alas: I can think of no conceivable way I will ever be able to use this. Not even if I am ever asked to be a best man. And certainly not when conducting a wedding.

Don’t know if it was that I’m not sure about calling myself an Evangelical any more - certainly not to the extent that I’d want to sign up to anything that had it as part of the title - but I missed out on Accepting Evangelicals until today. They are “a new open network of Evangelical Christians who believe the time has come to move towards the acceptance of faithful, loving same-sex partnerships at every level of church life, and the development of a positive Christian ethic for gay and lesbian people”.

One interesting link is George Hopper’s Reluctant Journey: a personal account of his own “change of mind” from homophobia to inclusiveness and acceptance. We need testimonies from people; we need stories more than argument.

Our lovely West Papuan family have just had a new baby daughter. It’s customary for them not to bring baby out, until he or she has been to church; so this morning was her first appearance at Parish Communion, to the usual accompaniment of cooing adoration and babyolatry. Some brief form of prayer at the end of the service seemed necessary, and what came to hand was The Churching of Women from BCP.

I have only ever used this once before (and not that long ago, either.) I suppose I’ve never particularly encouraged it, and it fell out of general use, because people superstitiously thought it was an Old Testament observance that was about cleansing from the “ritual uncleanness” of childbirth. In fact, there’s nothing of that in the BCP words. They are all about giving thanks, especially for deliverance “from the great pain and peril of child-birth”, and seeing that thanks as an offering to God.

Not doing that seems like another symptom of behaving as if we were above Nature, and immune to all its risks. That’s why so many people think of suing someone if any medical procedure goes wrong - in the absence of any address to which we could serve writs upon God. Thanksgiving is a much healthier alternative.

Natalie Knodel has written a paper, from a feminist perspective, on the Churching of Women.

Tui is 20 today, and Alison and Li have gone Up North to take her out for lunch and then shopping. This was so obviously a Girls’ Day Out that I realised I would not only be superfluous but even a nuisance, so I sacrificially agreed to stay at home rather than schlepp round clothes shops with them.

It’s a funny feeling, when the last of your babies stops being a teenager. Twenty years ago we were living in Stewartby. We took the 3 older children to school in the morning, then drove Alison to the maternity hospital in Bedford, where Tui came into this world around 4 in the afternoon. She was quite a big baby, and there were a few moments of concern because she had turned and got the cord wrapped round her neck. But in the end all was well, and she is the only one of our four who never left our sight, so we are absolutely sure she’s ours.

I went home to get Tom, Sun and Li from the friend who had collected them from school, then took them into Bedford for tea at McDonalds, followed by a visit to mum and baby sister. I’m pretty sure they were more excited about the Happy Meals, and thought whatever promotional toy was on offer at the time was a birthday gift from Tui, specially for them. The toy is long forgotten, but Tui is still with us, a precious part of our lives, one of our (four) finest achievements, a gift from God to the world.

A Nazi SS trooper accosts an old rabbi, points a gun at his head, and demands, “Tell me, who’s to blame for all the world’s troubles?”

The old rabbi knows the right answer, and trembling he admits, “The Jews.”

The SS man smiles and nods.

“And the pretzel bakers,” adds the rabbi.

“Why the pretzel bakers?” demands the Nazi.

“Why the Jews?”

From Because God Loves Stories: an anthology of Jewish storytelling, edited by Steve Zeitlin.

It’s really true: standards at British universities have declined woefully. Even here in Oxford there has been a catastrophic decline in the IQ of undergraduates. At last week’s May Day celebration, around 100 revellers leaped from Magdalen Bridge and 40 were more or less seriously injured in the shallow water, sustaining broken legs, ankles and the like. This in spite of a security fence, stewards warning them not to jump, a police presence, etc. etc.

So today’s Oxford Times has the headline: HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? and blames the Council, the security contractors, and so on (why not the teachers? the Church? the pretzel-bakers? Looks like journalists have been dumbed down, too.)

Treating the injured cost £40K, it says. I shouldn’t think there’s much here that couldn’t be cured by sending them (or their parents) the bill. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?

(End of BOF mode!)

So, Tony Blair has listened and learned, has he?
BBC NEWS | Election 2005 | Election 2005 | Blair: I’ve listened and learned
Like he listened when we told him we didn’t want to go to war? Or was it just that His Master’s Voice was louder? Will he remember, when we tell him we don’t want to support the rumoured attack on Iran, either?

I’m not holding my breath, since what he goes on to say he’s listened to leads to a pledge “to sort out immigration and re-establish respect in classrooms and on Britain’s streets”.

PS. That can’t be the same as what George Galloway means by Respect, surely? Maybe he really has listened and learned!

Stories have the magic that makes you run into the backyard at night and stare up into infinity to see what’s there.

Mark Twain (quoted in Bill Lucas, Discover Your Hidden Talents: the essential guide to lifelong learning).

I was impressed with Richard Sudworth’s article in Yes, the magazine of the Church Mission Society, which is available online (free of charge, God bless ‘em) in PDF format. It’s about the need, and the possibility, of finding a theology of hope rather than of fear, in dialogue between Christians and Muslims.

CMS’ priorities with regard to Islam (listed in the print mag rather than online), are:

• Faithful Presence: sustained, loving service without necessarily expecting anything in return
• Strengthening Christian Communities: encouraging ancient churches whose members form a minority in Islamic areas and learning from them.
• Fostering Scholars: encouraging young Christians to become life-long students of Islam - theoretical and applied.
• Creating Communities of Practice: networking among Christians called to work in Muslim areas.

I realised how little I know about Islam and thought I’d try reading one of the books I’ve got. I soon realised that a sermon I heard last year in which the preacher made all sorts of statements about Islam on the basis of what the Qur’an says, is rather like saying that Christianity is this or that because of something the Bible says. There’s a lot more besides …

But then I came across some of the curiosities on the WWW: Islamworld.net, and its many links which I haven’t the time or stomach to pursue. But I did rather like the Combat Kit against Bible Thumpers.

This well organised booklet is meant to serve the purpose of countering the narrow-minded Bible thumpers that visit the Muslim homes out in the West. Sheikh Deedat has written this book with the understanding and long term experience that logical reasoning with Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses etc is a futile attempt.

I especially liked the bit about Incest: the idea being, that because the Bible contains stories like Lot and his daughters, Absalom and the rape of Tamar, it is an immoral book; and this insight will confound the “Christians” knocking on your door. Contempt for the Bible sounds pretty un-Islamic to me; but then, I guess it only goes to show that the Internet can bring out the worst in all faiths, not just our own.

That’s a relief, then.

On the way home from voting I was stopped by a member of our local RC Church, who wanted to thank me for the “lovely homilies” I write for the parish magazine. They always give her something to think about. Which is the point of course. I’ve actually tried to stop being as controversial as I used to be, because it just turned people off; but just to skate near enough to it to get people thinking and discussing.

Isn’t that sweet? His Holiness might think the Anglican Communion isn’t quite the ticket and shouldn’t be described as a “sister church”; but here on the ground ecumenism is more generous: it’s alive and well and living among the grass roots.

… come back to haunt you.

If you can still remember exactly where you were when you first saw the opening titles of Barbarella (in the cinema, right?) you may, like me, not know quite what to make of this:
How I Was Saved — Beliefnet interviews Jane Fonda — Beliefnet.com

Jane Fonda is 67. Ah, me.

The trouble with the Webby Awards is you could spend forever and a day exploring the lists of nominees and winners, and not get any work done. (Which, I suspect, is one of the whole points of the Internet. It’s a vast system similar to subsidising farmers not to produce anything: you pay workers not to do their work, thus making sure that stuff doesn’t get done.)

Anyway, I did like The Meatrix, though it rather puts you off your food. (It’s meant to.) So I also recommend Bacontarian as an antidote.