Storyteller’s World

My baby sister is 50 today.

Just why Inter-Faith Understanding, the work of AIFES, and the like, are so essential and frustratingly ineffective, was illustrated by an interview on this morning’s Today Programme on Radio 4, in which a Muslim woman was seriously expressing the view that what the West is doing to Muslims today (of which insulting the Prophet is the latest example) is comparable to the Holocaust.

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is responding to the need for understanding between the world’s religions, through AIFES: the Ashmolean Inter-Faith Exhibition Service.

The first exhibition it has organised is Pilgrimage, which can be seen until April 2. It’s a relatively small exhibition, because the Ashmolean is undergoing extensive rebuilding (when is it not?) but includes many fascinating examples from all the major world religions. They are arranged thematically and chronologically under the headings of Departure, The Journey, Sacred Space, The Central Shrine, and The Return.

Some of my favourite exhibits were a 15th century illuminated manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, a 14th century pilgrim’s map of the Holy Land, a Buddhist reliquary in the form of a stupa, containing possibly a bone of the Buddha, and a Hindu pilgrim’s map of Varanasa, which looks like nothing so much as the Mappa Mundi, yet down in the right hand corner there is a clearly drawn railway line with a little engine and carriages travelling along it - from the early 20th century.

A handsome catalogue accompanying the exhibition is really a collection of essays on different aspects of pilgrimage, worth having in its own right.

As a local “religious leader”, I was one of those invited to a junket yesterday evening in the form of a reception and viewing, no doubt to try and drum up support from the local religious communities. A free copy of the catalogue, and a glass of wine - but no nibbles, with the result I was so peckish that I succumbed to the lure of a cheeseburger at McDonalds in the Cornmarket, on the way home.

Here’s something I really need to take note of - and have the courage and stamina and determination and discipline to act upon:

Recap: Becoming an Email Ninja | 43 Folders

I am definitely not an Email Ninja. I am an Email Mouse. I get overwhelmed by my inbox, and don’t reply to things for months on end, and delete stuff I shouldn’t, and put off decisions. Perhaps a Lenten discipline this year: To empty my Inbox each night before going to bed.

After all those grey days and gloomy mornings, the light creeps up on you: suddenly, going to church at 7.15 in the morning, it was daylight. It was even almost light, getting up half an hour before that.

I can recognise people at the bus stop, and know who it is I’m waving at.

It’s like being alive again.

I was really excited when this week’s Balderdash and Piffle featured words beginning with B. I thought, I’ll be able to look up boak, the mystery word I found in Mrs Miniver. But no such luck: it’s not there in the online version of OED.

In Glasgow, apparently, boke means vomit. So maybe Jan Struther is using it in the familiar sense of “a person who makes me sick”?

Most difficult situations in the life of the Church could be resolved a lot more easily, if only people knew a little more church history. The same is probably true of life, and history, in general.

The Iconoclastic Controversy troubled the Eastern Church for over a hundred years during the eighth and ninth centuries. At this time the veneration of icons had become excessive in parts of the Church, and the Emperor Leo III, the Isaurian, came to believe that this was the chief obstacle to the conversion of Jews and Muslims (interesting that even 1300 years ago the Church was anxious about Muslim sensibilities.) He published an edict declaring that all images were idols, and must be destroyed. The Synod of Hieria confirmed this diktat, and inaugurated the official State persecution of believers who clung to the use of icons.

The persecution and controversy continued through several of Leo’s successors, with the debate raging back and forth, and only ended in 843 when the regent Theodora appointed Methodius as patriarch, and the first Sunday in Lent was celebrated in honour of the icons; and is still remembered as the “Feast of Orthodoxy”.

Orthodox Christianity maintained and maintains that it is permissible to make images of the saints, and of Christ, because the second Person of the Trinity took flesh, and lived on earth in human likeness. It is even permissible to represent God in human form, because we believe that human beings are created in the image of God. The doctrines of creation and of the Incarnation both affirm the goodness of matter, that the physical creation is sanctified by the fact that God made it and shares in it.

Of course those images and likenesses do not really define or represent God, who is beyond our power to imagine or describe. But they’re the best we can do. They are helpful in reminding us of the goodness and godlikeness of being human, provided we do not idolise them.

What’s wrong with the Muslim absolute prohibition of images, is that it only tells half the truth. It’s right about what it affirms: the majesty and incomprehensibility of God; but it’s wrong about what it denies: that God can be imagined in human likeness. The Christian view tells both sides of it: both that you may represent God in human form, because it’s the form he embraced; and that you cannot represent God, because he is God.

With all images, we say: This is True; yet this is also not all the Truth.

From Richard Shelton’s The Longshoreman:

The pink shrimps … make use of another survival trick, one which exploits the fact that it takes a great deal more energy to produce eggs than spermatozoa. It is therefore often possible for male animals to accumulate enough surplus energy - usually as fat - for them to achieve sexual maturity earlier in their lives than females. Pink shrimps maximize their chances of leaving offspring by maturing first as males and the following and any subsequent years (they rarely live for more than three) as females. In brown shrimps, the sexes remain separate throughout, perhaps because building up the muscle mass they require to shift sand leaves no spare energy to fuel two different bites at the reproductive cherry. What remarkable lives shrimps lead, and how little thought we give the matter as we eat them.

As I read this book I keep thinking: I don’t know why I’m finding this so compelling. And then up pops another intriguing fact I have never heard of, about the sex life of shrimps (two bites at the reproductive cherry?!?) and I know exactly why.

Isn’t Nature strange?

I know I don’t like dogs anyway, but there are lots of dog-owners I like even less. Like the ones who tie their mutts up outside the supermarket opposite the Flat, and leave them barking, whining and crying while they do their shopping.

I presume these owners would be mortified if the RSPCA came and took their dogs into care on the grounds of ill treatment. But causing this kind of distress sure looks like abuse to me.

To say nothing of driving me up the wall with the confounded noise.

Zealots of all religions seem to spend a lot of their time undermining the attempts of everyone else who is trying to make religion a source of unity, harmony and peace, rather than war.

Now it’s the Muslims who are doing it, with their protests about cartoons in a Danish newspaper, said to defame and insult Islam.

Some of the protests take the form of masked gunmen besieging a Danish embassy and firing off shots from guns. So, remind me what this is - People protesting about cartoons which supposedly imply that Islam is a religion of violence? Violently? Pardon me if I’m confused about the message, here.

Another spokesman said, “We are forbidden by our religion to make pictures of the Prophet or of God.” Right, so everyone else has to be governed by your rules?

Likewise, a “moderate” British Muslim spokesman regretted the publication of the cartoons because they played into the hands of the extremists, provoking them to violent actions against the West. I wasn’t sure how this was different from the assertion that women who dress provocatively are to blame when they get raped, or that people who own something the thieves don’t, are to blame when they get robbed.

Apparently the protesters are demanding apologies not only from the newspapers that have published these cartoons, but also from the governments that have allowed them to do it. They really don’t get it, do they? Freedom, the kind of freedom that has grown out of the western, Christian tradition, means that newspapers are not controlled by governments. That only happens under fascism, or communism. Oh, and maybe Islamic regimes. And New Labour, who complimented the British Press on not publishing the cartoons.

(I forget: Will I be allowed to express opinions like this under the new legislation? Or will it be illegal?)

I woke in alarm from a dream in which we (I and unspecified others) had agreed to take part in a performance in Brighton of Julius Caesar. Came the day, and it was time to set off for the south coast; but we still had not learned our parts, had a single rehearsal, or even re-read the script. The atmosphere in the car was a mix of panic alternating with unfounded optimism. It would either, somehow, be “all right on the night”. Or not.

Very much like Life, I suppose.

I wasn’t sure which was worse. That I was going to be performing in the role of Julius Caesar. Or that I had agreed to do this, as a personal favour to Patrick Stewart.

Richard Shelton’s The Longshoreman: A life at the water’s edge, is one of those books that takes you by surprise. Alan Coren writes

I relish those rare occasions when a book I think cannot at all be my sort of thing turns out to be exactly my sort of thing. I enjoyed The Longshoreman enormously. Richard Shelton is a fine writer.

And that’s just my experience too. There can’t be many things that appeal to me less than the outdoor life, even the thought of standing up to your thighs in cold water trying to catch fish or shoot wildfowl; but Shelton’s description of his life spent getting paid to do what he most wanted to, is a fascinating read. Why? Because his interest, enthusiasm, knowledge and passion for his subject make it compelling. You can’t help being interested.

The last church group I took part in compares rather unfavourably. It was clear that there were some members present, who felt apologetic about what goes on in church. “We’re afraid it will too boring to attract the children or the young people.”

It is a monstrous tragedy, the greatest and worst of Screwtape’s deceptions, that he has persuaded Christians that what they do in church is boring. We’re afraid it is, because somewhere inside we agree that it is. But I don’t agree! I love what we do in church. Meeting with the unimaginable, mysterious, beautiful, fascinating God,and entering into that Mystery and finding that the mystery that is me and that is my neighbour is already enfolded in, and made sense of by, the Mystery of God. And everything about encountering that - the words and music and movement and space and taste and smell and sights - is interesting.

If we could simply regain some of the nerve the Church has lost, it wouldn’t matter that people think they’re “not religious”, or that it is “not their kind of thing”. They couldn’t help being attracted by the interest and the passion we obviously have for it all. The fact that we are beloved, and lovers, of God.