Storyteller’s World

I spent some time today at a meeting with the Appointments Secretaries to the Crown Nominations Commission, who were consulting clergy in the diocese about the kind of person we would like as the next Bishop of Oxford.

It was a depressing experience, as what emerged clearly was the degree of division and hurt that still remains after the Jeffrey John affair, and all its accompanying controversy. The secretaries assumed we need someone who will be able to heal those hurts, rather than sweep them under the carpet. But I was left feeling that’s not so much like a job spec for the Archangel Gabriel, as for someone slightly superior to God. The reason it’s been “swept under the carpet” is that there probably is no way of resolving those differences.

Still, God is supposed to be able to surprise us, and perhaps he will this time.

Never having been on the receiving end of a vicar-type vacancy, because it’s always been me that’s moving on, I discover something of what it must be like, as we face the episcopal vacancy. Total paranoia sets in, and the conviction that what’s to come is bound to be the End of the World. Experience teaches us that it never is; and the more different the new regime is, the more it can be the same. Back to our knees, then.

I haven’t even tried to rate Proust in the sidebar. How can you presume to rate a work that has been called “the greatest novel of the 20th century”?

It turns out, as so many people have said, to be strangely compelling and addictive, once you overcome the obstacle of the long, convoluted sentences (perhaps, like Barth’s Church Dogmatics, they are easier to read with understanding in the original language?) and the paragraphs that go on for page after page. It’s like entering a complete alternative world that the author creates and summons up before your imagination.

But still, I’m finding it hard to like Proust or his alter ego narrator of this huge work. He describes himself in the work as someone who is amazingly sought after and loved by the other characters in the story, and Alain de Botton has written his How Proust Can Change Your Life on the premise that Proust is some kind of guru who can teach us wisdom for life.

I haven’t read Botton, though I’m always attracted to the idea of gurus; but it seems to me the one area where Proust has little to teach us, is one of the key themes of the whole book. It’s Love. Is there a single love in the book which is not in some way pathological? Leaving aside the narrator’s downright peculiar dependence on his mother and grandmother, every single person who falls in love seems intent on doing it in the most unhealthy way imaginable. Whether this is Swann in his relationship with Odette, Robert de Saint-Loup with “Rachel when from the Lord”, the narrator in his various loves with Gilberte, Mme de Guermantes, Albertine, and whoever else still lies ahead (I’m only at the start of volume V) - Proust doesn’t seem to know any kind of love except one-sided, unrequited passion.

There’s no idea that love could be, not an overwhelming elemental power, but something freely and joyfully entered into by two people who consent, and agree to love one another, to return the other’s love, to work together at a shared enterprise of life. In Proust’s work, it seems that as soon as the beloved looks likely to return your love, you inevitably stop loving him/her. When the narrator is embroiled in his affair with Albertine, he has no thought of marrying her until he discovers that she is “a practised and professional Sapphist”, when he immediately informs his astonished mother that he absolutely must marry this woman, whom he no longer loves, but of whose relationships with other women he is permanently jealous. This is nothing but a kind of emotional masochism.

And then I find his hatred of women hard to forgive. The narrator is deeply misogynistic:

…Albertine had developed to an astonishing degree. This was a matter of complete indifference to me, a woman’s intellectual qualities having always interested me so little that if I pointed them out to some woman or other it was solely out of politeness.

Perhaps we will be told that this is just the way a man of his age and class would think and speak. But I say, it stinks.

I don’t like to say this too loud (because It can hear, you know) but since I set up the new computer yesterday, the wireless router has been working fine without needing to be kicked - sorry, rebooted - once. This is the longest time it’s been up since, well, for ever.

Apart from that, MacOS X (Tiger) has been an interesting and bright and very large (17 inch monitor instead of the 12 inch iBook screen) experience. Apparently some bright sparks have hacked the new Apple Intel chips so that they can run Windows on a Mac. You’ve got to ask: Why would they?

It’s kind of like adapting your Rolls Royce so that it can run with a Mini engine. The reason, “Because we could”, doesn’t go far towards an explanation.

I’ve been hanging on to my hard-saved money for months, not sure whether to take the plunge or not; then finally decided the end of the tax year was as a good a time as any, so I can claim it as a working expense for this year.

Yes, I bought a new G5 iMac. And it’s beautiful. And it’s mine.

It’s going to take days deciding which apps I need to have on the new box, that I’ve got so used to I just can’t live without. In the mean time, I’m getting used to the speed and elegance of Tiger, and all the other stuff the iMac has with it.

Things may be a bit quiet around here for a while.

BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | Afghan convert freed from prison

I suppose this is the inevitable and only way out of this desperate corner the Afghan courts and legal system had painted themselves into.

But it leaves so many questions needing to be answered.

What will be the fate of any other Afghans who have converted, or will convert, to Christianity?

Is it possible to conform to both the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and to Sharia law? According to the BBC News website:

The Afghan constitution enshrines personal freedom and recognises the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But it also says the country’s laws are based on Islamic Sharia law and there is an explicit article which says no one has the right to contravene Islam.

It is deliberately ambiguous because it attempted to address Western concerns over democracy as well as placate domestic hardliners who favour an Islamic state, our correspondent says.

If these are not compatible, it really does create a tension which it’s impossible for the international community to live with, and which must be resolved.

What future is there for a legal system which has to conclude that dissenters are not criminals, but mentally ill (which is far from limited to Afghanistan)?

What can it mean, that there is “insufficient evidence” that Abdul Rahman had converted to Christianity? It reminds me of that challenge beloved of evangelists in my youth (and maybe still): “If you were arrested and charged with being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”

Perhaps in many parts of the world, the natural answer from now on will have to be, “I hope not.”

I was invited to tell stories in a couple of slots at an evangelistic family fun day at Kingston Bagpuize (and got paid a more than princely professional rate for it (thanks, guys! Any time you want to invite me back …)

One of the craft activities was badge making, so I thought I’d make myself a badge with a suitable slogan for a Storyteller: TRUST THE STORY.

It was only after a number of strange looks in my direction that I realised the inital letters had come out much less striking than the rest of the words, so that my innocuous little slogan seemed instead to make a strident political statement: RUST THE TORY.

“Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance, kindness and integrity. That is why we have told [Abdul Rahman] if he regrets what he did, then we will forgive him,” [Ansarullah Mawlafizada, the trial judge] told the BBC News website.

… And if he doesn’t regret it, and remains obdurate, we shall just have to kill him.

Can’t you just hear the good judge saying “This is going to hurt us more than it will hurt you”?

If only religious people would listen to themselves speaking, and had the imagination to see the effect their words have on others. It’s pretty loud and clear what this case is saying to the world about Islam.

While, according to CNN news, it’s now a situation of, “In order to save him it became necessary to destroy him”:

Senior Muslim clerics are demanding that an Afghan man on trial for converting from Islam to Christianity be executed, warning that if the government caves in to Western pressure and frees him, they will incite people to “pull him into pieces.”

So, execution as the humane (compassionate) option, is it?

Today is the anniversary we celebrated yesterday; and thinking back over 32 years of marriage I remember the latest slip to come out of the Journalling Jar, which has been sitting on my desk for weeks while I’ve been avoiding writing about it:

Best memory of early marriage.

What’s so difficult about this? Well, it’s very personal and private. And it’s such a long time ago. Most of the best memories I have are much more recent; which either means that early marriage was quite difficult (and isn’t it bound to be, since it is the clash of two selfish individuals trying to turn their two lives into one? Continental drift throws up the Himalayas - isn’t marriage going to create some cliffs of fall too?) or that it was just long long ago.

Being first married was like an emotional maelstrom for me. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to understand it and describe it - but maybe not as publicly as in a blog. By the time we’d been married 8 years, we had three children under four, were trying to survive on a curate’s stipend, and life was hard. After that, things could only get better; but that didn’t happen overnight. And even when it was hard, there were always the joys of having those beautiful children. I don’t suppose we succeeded well enough in letting them know how beautiful and loved they were.

Best memory of early marriage? What I want to say right now is: Driving in our first car, a Morris Minor 1000, and singing together. I can’t remember much of what it was we sang; but it was a real sharing and harmony. We don’t sing together enough, any more.

The feast of St Deogratias was a wee bit muted by the crockiness of the participants: Alison still getting over the cold she brought back from her weekend, me with a sore throat. But we did our best with a meal at the Xi’an Restaurant, washed down with a nice bottle of Gewurztraminer.

And still so cold! I keep reminding myself that in three months or less, it will be so hot in church that the choir will be complaining and asking if they really have to wear their robes for the service. I know, I find it hard to believe, too.

It’s Day 21 of Lent, and we’re still alcohol free. The only exceptions have been communion wine, which obviously doesn’t count, and one sip of champagne to drink a toast to a friend at his birthday party. I’m sure that’s allowed: it was a Sunday, anyway, which many people don’t reckon to be part of the Lenten fast.

Not that we’re not looking forward to the feast of St Megingaud (for which information, grateful thanks to maggi dawn) which properly falls on March 16, but which we have transferred to the 22nd this year, the eve of our wedding anniversary. Due to some diary mishap, a PCC meeting was arranged for the day of our anniversary itself. You can imagine this was not the most popular thing for me to have done, and I had to make extravagant promises about the much better evening out we would be able to have the day before.

In my ignorance, and lack of faith in maggi, I had assumed that Megingaud was a fictitious saint fabricated at Robinson College. But I discover from Google that he was a real person, a German Benedictine monk, abbot of Fritzlar and Bishop of Wurzburg in the 8th century. I had been straight-facedly telling Li that there were several different Megingauds, and everyone could celebrate their own Megingaud some time in the middle of Lent, according to their choice. In fact, if we want a real feast day on March 22 there are several we can choose from, and I’m reckoning that our Megingaud substitute would be the delightfully named Deogratias of Carthage on March 22, or we could observe the Eve of Benedict of Campagna who is commemorated on the 23rd. (”Captured by Totila the Goth he was thrown in a fire to die; he stayed in the flames until the next day when he miraculously emerged unharmed.” If the weather stays as cold as it has been, I may be feeling like doing the same.)

The Lenten abstinence really does seem to be bearing fruit. That constant thinking about the next drink has abated; and even without deliberate effort, I’m feeling what I can only describe as a hunger for “a closer walk” with God, and maybe the truth of those old words, “You would not seek me, unless you had found me”. A visit to Anamchara yesterday felt like a great time of repentance, cleansing, forgiveness, and refilling. I even felt my back was healed; though it’s not yet 100% better, so we don’t want to stop praying or taking the tablets just yet.

Never having given up anything serious for Lent before, I’m really pleased with the results so far of this experiment in faith.

… but the latest story lines are harrowing and distressing beyond belief, almost impossible to watch. Beyond all probability and reason, Abby has fallen into bed again with Luka Kovac, and actually got pregnant by him.

It’s almost too much for me to bear, seeing this woman of such delicate and mature beauty wrestling with the decision she needs to make. What to do with the baby? Sure, her biological clock has been ticking so long, it looks as if it’s about to explode. But if she needs a baby that badly, almost any other male member of the cast would be preferable as the father, rather than the Croatian Lothario, who’s slept with so many people around the hospital you’d think he must be carrying every STD known to man. (We never seem to get story lines about that.) The stupidity of his relationship with pathological victim Sam Taggart, and his manifest inability to commit to anyone, clearly disqualifies him as a viable supplier of any genes you’d want your child to have.

This is worse than Doctor Who: I spend each episode hiding behind the sofa covering my eyes with my hands, saying, “Tell me when it stops.”

Here’s how not to do it, in news from Afghanistan that a Christian Convert Faces The Death Penalty.

It’s not so much a question of trying to bring some parts of the Muslim world into the 21st century, as trying to bring them into the human race.

A few days ago John Naughton blogged about the famous Internet spoof imagining what would happen if Microsoft redesigned iPod’s minimalist packaging. Turns out the spoof was a joke concocted by some folks at Microsoft against themselves.

In today’s Observer he recycles this for his Networker column:

It’s a clever, beautifully crafted, funny spoof, and we all laughed our heads off. Until a blog called ‘The iPod Observer’ revealed that the film was, in fact, an internal Microsoft production created to sensitise employees to the idea that their approach to product packaging lacks a certain aesthetic sense. Could it be that the irony has entered Microsoft’s soul?

The irony entering its soul?

I wonder how many of Naughton’s readers recognised the source of his pun, here?

It’s from Miles Coverdale’s incomparable rendering of Psalm 105, in the Book of Common Prayer:

But he had sent a man before them : even Joseph, who was sold to be a bond-servant;
Whose feet they hurt in the stocks : the iron entered into his soul.

It’s good to see John Naughton (nearly) quoting the BCP.

Phyllis Chesler warns about The Failure of Feminism in the face of reactionary Islam.

Islamic terrorists have declared jihad against the “infidel West” and against all of us who yearn for freedom. Women in the Islamic world are treated as subhumans. Although some feminists have sounded the alarm about this, a much larger number have remained silent. Why is it that many have misguidedly romanticized terrorists as freedom fighters and condemned both America and Israel as the real terrorists or as the root cause of terrorism? In the name of multicultural correctness (all cultures are equal, formerly colonized cultures are more equal), the feminist academy and media appear to have all but abandoned vulnerable people - Muslims, as well as Christians, Jews, and Hindus - to the forces of reactionary Islamism.

It’s a hard balance to maintain. How can we promote respect between religions and cultures, while at the same time maintaining that there are differences of quality and value? Some cultures - and the religious views that reinforce them - are objectively worse than others. For example, those which deny the values and freedoms of women, those which promote hatred and violence against gay people; or those - like the cults of Kali which were in the news the other week - which still, in some backward villages, practise human sacrifice.

Continuous nagging pain is completely absorbing. It swallows up everything else around it, like an aggressive virus or an evil empire wiping out its smaller neighbours. Nothing about my daily work - not even the stress of conducting a funeral, and all the pastoral concentration that requires - is quite distracting enough to take my mind off the lower back. And so the cycle continues of holding yourself awkwardly, and so transmitting the muscle tension round and round to other different parts of the back, neck, shoulders, arms and legs. There’s not a lot of your body that isn’t affected by your back. At least I haven’t been getting headaches. And my finger and toenails don’t seem to be suffering, so that’s something.

On the plus side, the imperialistic nature of back pain does render many of the usual daily aches and pains null and void. The dry itchy skin which is such an annoyance in winter (well, it should be improving about now anyway, if only spring would come… ), the mild paranoia always hovering in the wings, the insomnia (now unnecessary, because there’s something real to keep me awake at night) have hardly been any trouble at all.

[Hey, just a minute, Storyteller: I thought you were claiming the other day that reading Proust had cured you of most of this stuff?

Well yes, that’s true. But it’s all relative, anyway. And in any case, now that I’ve got on to Proust’s long expositions on the subject of what he calls “inversion”, I’m so shocked by the whole thing that the curative effect of earlier volumes has worn off.]

Pain is a kind of Lenten discipline all by itself. It concentrates the mind - sadly on itself, rather than on God. It forces you to Slow down, which is always a good thing. I don’t find it immensely sanctifying, on account of all the swearing and general irritability. Maybe there just isn’t enough pain yet, it’s all too mild, and it’s only when you get severe pain for weeks and months on end that you break through a kind of barrier into patience and tranquillity? I hope I never find out if this is the case.

But today is slightly better. I tried sleeping last night with a spare pillow under my knees, or between them when lying on my side (as recommended in the Back book), and had a much better night. Moving the furniture around in bed is difficult when you’re sharing with someone; but with Alison away for the weekend, I can move as much as I like. So I’m hoping the continued regimen of painkillers, stretches, cold compresses (not the most welcome treatment, in this weather) and frequent changes of posture and activity, will go on bringing improvement.

Ouch. All that sitting and driving over the last couple of days has resulted in the worst lower back pain I’ve had for nearly three years. It was, after all, a big big mistake not to climb the Long Mynd, even though that looked very much as if it would result in death by exposure. Preferable to a bad back, anyway.

So far it hasn’t yielded to ibuprofen, cold compresses or muscle stretches, and another night of agony threatens. It’s one of those pains where your whole body goes into spasm all over the place, in an attempt to avoid pain, and ends up making it worse by spreading it to every part of the body, including strange places you didn’t know you had. The thought of a course of visits to the chiropractor, who will no doubt want to see me twice a week for four weeks followed by weekly for the next month etc., all at £36 a go, is a mighty powerful incentive to try and sort it myself.

But constant nagging pain isn’t at all conducive to action, creativity, decision-making, let alone godliness. (I’ve never been hot on the sanctifying effects of suffering.) The cat is in danger of getting kicked again… Or the bottle of being hit hard.

Just back from a flying visit to the Flat, to make sure it’s still there, and to have that would-be once-a-month quiet day of reading, prayer, reflection, planning, away from the phone.

I was afraid it wasn’t going to happen, when the weather forecast promised heavy snow across Scotland, northern England and Wales on Sunday. We didn’t have any in Oxford, and it was only when I got as far along the A44 as Bromyard Down that there were any traces by the roadside. By the time I got to Craven Arms and Church Stretton, they had obviously had several inches, and getting into our close at that end was tricky.

It was cold in the Flat, in spite of having the heating left on low; I ended up leaving it on all night, and it wasn’t until well on the following morning that the place was starting to feel warm. I went for a short walk round the town, in biting winds that pierced through skin and bone, and decided that I was not going to get up on the Long Mynd, to see how much snow there was up there. Looking out of the window at it would suffice.

This is called living in a temperate climate. But at least we don’t have the kind of adventures with weird weather that Priscilla describes.

Overheard in the street, this Thursday. A woman talking to a small child, who was whining along behind her:

“Well, piss off then. Find someone else to go and live with. You’re not coming home with me.”

It’s not easy, being a parent. Or a child: even people who have had the happiest of childhoods, have their hurts and wounds that parents may have unwittingly been responsible for. God knows, I’m not someone who has any right to judge or condemn. But my heart went out to that child, thinking of the damage being done to it, word by word and one slow thoughtlessness or cruelty after another, over the years. You don’t need physical abuse. That child is already a broken human being.

A good friend of mine reckons the David Mills affair is an open and shut case.

“You only have to tell me he has £350,000, and I know he’s a crook. No one can have that much money, without being guilty of something.”

Seems to me this is a very common sense attitude which has sadly gone missing from our society. How long would it take a nurse or a teacher to earn that much? Something between 10 and 20 years? And this man gets given it for giving evidence in some trial?

You put it like that, and it does sound kind of shady.