Storyteller’s World

Here’s a fun thing:

Thanks to Librarian in Black for the link.

Site log reveals that last week one of my pages, Fifteen Useful Things To Give Up For Lent, which I wrote for the Marston Times two years ago, received 2,316 hits. Somewhere, somehow, people must be finding it on Google. Hope they find it useful …

We’ve now completed 8 alcohol-free days out of the 40 (Hope UK’s target), or 46 that make up a full Lent.

Sure enough, this week has brought a few more hard challenges.

1. The Bishop’s visit, and that bottle of Glenfiddich someone brought to the bring-and-share supper.
2. Tuesday: my first day off in Lent. Day off is always a time when it’s nice to have a beer at lunchtime or a glass of wine in the evening.
3. Last night: Deanery Synod meeting about TEA (Transference of Episcopal Authority) - the proposals for dealing with people and parishes who can’t accept women bishops. Dull dull dull. And depressing. I could have murdered a double scotch when I got home.

But. I’m standing firm.

Labyrinths are all the rage, spiritually speaking (though I’m not sure I don’t always end up thinking of Jerome K. Jerome’s visit to the Hampton Court Maze). I don’t know that there’s much about spirituality that couldn’t be improved by a good laugh. In fact, has anyone done a study of The Spirituality of Laughter? Hmm.

Anyway, Labyrinthos looks like a pretty comprehensive website on the subject.

At MFSITWU yesterday, I was exchanging some of my surviving Christmas book tokens for titles in the Everyman’s Library series. Everyman’s Library is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, and there is a 3 for 2 offer in Blackwell’s and possibly elsewhere on selected titles - probably not including all the ones you or I might want.

It’s a beautiful and necessary idea for as much as possible of the world’s great literature to be available in affordable and obtainable hardback editions, and this is the great strength of Everyman’s. So one of my New Day resolutions is to buy lots more of them; and to read them!

I picked up a copy of their handsome centenary catalogue and am poring (not to say drooling) over it, thinking about what titles I want to get next.

One of my brothers-in-law (I have 4 real ones and 2 who are married to sisters-in-law - do they count?) sends me a link to his blog, in which he wonders whether Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth is not a novel at all, but a true story.

Comments on this to him, please.

After all those bitterly cold, bright dry days, and before them weeks of grey cloudy skies, promising and not delivering rain, today Oxford is visited with a cold steady downpour. In addition to the usual street hazards - to survive in Oxford you have to assume that nearly ever other road user, pedestrian, cyclist, or driver, is trying to kill you - there are couples ambling along under umbrellas, huge puddles by the kerb waiting for stopping buses to cascade them over the feet of people on the pavement, gouts of water dropping from broken gutters high overhead.

The Sunday evening before last, following all the scare stories about impending drought, we prayed from the Book of Common Prayer, for Rain:

O GOD, heavenly Father, who by thy Son Jesus Christ hast promised to all those who seek thy kingdom, and the righteousness thereof, all things necessary to their bodily sustenance; Send us, we beseech thee, in this our necessity, such moderate rain and showers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth to our comfort, and to thy honour; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Anyone who prayed that prayer in real faith, would not leave their house in the following days, without taking their umbrella. I obviously haven’t that much faith (it is my day off, after all), and duly got soaked.

The Book of Common Prayer, interestingly, does have that much faith; indeed, it assumes its prayer for Rain may be answered too abundantly, for it is followed immediately by the prayer for Fair Weather:

O ALMIGHTY Lord God, who for the sin of man didst once drown all the world, except eight persons, and afterward of thy great mercy didst promise never to destroy it so again; We humbly beseech thee, that although we for our iniquities have worthily deserved a plague of rain and waters, yet upon our true repentance thou wilt send us such weather, as that we may receive the fruits of the earth in due season; and learn both by thy punishment to amend our lives, and for thy clemency to give thee praise and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Ah, they don’t write prayers like that any more.

Milan wrote about his surprise at the amount of attention paid to Lent in this country. I don’t know if this reflects the kind of people he mixes with, or the blogs he reads, or something peculiar about the Oxford environment. If it’s true, it surprises me too. Perhaps it has a higher profile in the folk memory here in the UK, than in Canada. Perhaps Lent is even experiencing a kind of revival because of the extraordinary amount of attention that has been given to Ramadan in recent years - TV news broadcasts inform us when it is taking place - and perhaps people are saying, Well, we have something like that too, in the Christian tradition.

At any rate, I thought I’d blog a few thoughts about what I reckon the discipline of Lent is about.

First and most important of all, it’s about getting us to think about God. If we embrace some kind of Lenten discipline, it is for love of God, and not out of fear or loathing, or to try and curry favour. A strict Lenten observance does not earn us any merits, as if we scored Nectar points in heaven for every pleasure we forego on earth. But there is an intention that it should bring us nearer to God, and that we should be “holier” when we finish, than when we began. As such, a major emphasis is “repentance”: the Greek word meant changing your mind, but we quite often talk about turning around or changing direction. At times this might involve a 180 degree about-turn, when we’ve been moving away from our goal completely. But there may also be times when it’s more accurate to think of just changing or adjusting course, if our bearings have gone awry.

What we do in Lent, to achieve this, can take various forms. Abstinence; almsgiving; service; adopting some new devotional practice.

If we give something up, it’s not meant to be something trivial. It should be some good thing which we enjoy and really wonder whether we can do without it. That’s why, after many years of avoiding the issue, I decided I really would give up alcohol this year. Partly it is a test of one’s will power: is this something I can give up if I choose, or have I become dependent on it? Believing in God is about freedom, certainly freedom from anything like a physical or emotional dependence on any worldly thing. Many world faiths talk about detachment, and this is an opportunity to practise and test that.

Of course there may be physical and material benefits from abstinence: more money in the bank account at the end of the month, or inches off the waistline. Someone on the radio was fulminating against this: “Lent is not about a diet or detox; it’s about confronting our mortality!” But I don’t believe you can polarise these things, that would be some kind of gnosticism. Of course you don’t fast or abstain in order to lose weight, you do it in order to grow towards God. If the weight-loss, or mental acuity that comes from being sober more of the time, are by-products of this, that is no bad thing.

How does this work? I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m thinking about what I’ve given up quite a lot of the time. When I know my next drink may be this evening, I don’t spend that many moments during the day thinking about it. When I know my next drink will be on April 16, Easter Day, I think about it many times a day. But this is a good thing, rather than not. Because every time I think about the next drink, I get to think about God. “Why am I doing this, anyway?” “Because I’ve promised this thing, out of love for God.” In other words, it’s like any other serious undertaking you make for the sake of a loved one: the thought is often more important than what is undertaken, because it’s the thought of one you love.

And then, in this case, the one you love is a lot of help in fulfilling what you’ve promised. If it gets tough, you can say “Help”; and that’s yet more thinking about God. This evening was one of those tough times, when the Bishop came for his farewell visit to the parish, with a Eucharist and bring-and-share supper. What one good soul had brought to share was a large bottle of Glenfiddich, which I had to decline. I tried to persuade him to save mine till Easter; but I don’t suppose he will.

The broadband access saga continues. After Milan’s innocent question revealed the existence of a forgotten telephone socket in the far reaches of the vicarage (now plugged with a filter), the connection was going strong for the rest of the afternoon and evening. I was just writing in my notebook that the problem was completely resolved (thank you, Milan!) when down it went.

Who says computers and other high tech artefacts have not yet developed Artificial Intelligence? I know they can read your thoughts before you commit them to screen or paper, and are just waiting for that hubristic moment to show you that You Are Not In Control.

But I also found a way of dealing with the situation, which is: Give the router a kick, or even a kicking. I much prefer this translation of the expression Reboot Router. Of course, you shouldn’t have to reboot your router several times a day. But people are quite used to doing this with Windows, so perhaps it’s a part of normal computer living. In any case, since I can do it remotely, without actually walking into the room where the router is, it’s not so bad.

(To be continued - no doubt.)

So today is the fifth alcohol-free day. (Some people don’t count Sundays as part of Lent, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that Sundays are feast-, not fast-days, and you’re therefore allowed to indulge, on the Lord’s day, in whatever you have given up the rest of the time - but I think this is kind of Jesuitical…) I’ve been quite surprised to find it’s relatively easy, and not the hugely cold turkey experience I was dreading. Or maybe the body only really begins to crave alcohol after a week or so? No, surely not. So this is a good sign, suggesting that alcohol isn’t an addiction in the meaning of the term, but only an intensely desirable and pleasurable addition to social and relationship situations.

Thinking of when we usually like to have a drink, it’s at the end of the day when, whatever we’ve been busy with at work or in the early part of the evening, we sit down together, usually to watch an hour of TV, and open a bottle of wine. Since Ash Wednesday, we’ve been pretty busy with evening meetings and other activities, and there haven’t been many of those opportunities. So maybe the testing time will be, if we’re at any real social occasions at which others are drinking.

Alison has been away for her Ministry Course this weekend, and these are another kind of occasion when, at the end of the evening, I might have a drink on my own (yes, I know: bad sign!) But I kept the faith.

There was one interesting spin-off from this, about the association between drinking the glass of wine or whisky, and watching the TV or video. I’ve sometimes thought the entertainment was the pretext for the drink. And what I found was that, without the drink, there was no real interest in the entertainment. Watching CSI: NY (which I usually enjoy) without the help of the wine, I suddenly found myself thinking, “I’m not sure I’m really interested in this; maybe I’ll read some Proust.” (!) In the end, something happened to make it more interesting, and I sat it through - after all, Proust would still be there afterwards - and then went to bed early to read a few more pages of The Guermantes Way. Which is, incidentally, a wonderful sleep inducer.

It’s proving a strange experience.

The bells! The bells rang out again this morning over Marston, following the successful fitting of a new clapper to the number 2.

Frankly, I was amazed at such a quick repair, after so many recent experiences of things breaking or going wrong, and taking weeks or months to put right. Perhaps some of the more essential services could take a leaf out of Whites of Appleton’s book. This is the company, based in Abingdon, which looks after the servicing and maintenance of our bells, with the active co-operation of our own tower members. It was two of our guys who removed the broken clapper, and then installed the new one, so that we saved Whites’ call-out charge.

It’s not too surprising that a piece of metal which day after day, week after week is struck against another piece of metal, should eventually suffer fatigue and just break. The surprise may be that it doesn’t happen more often. At any rate, I was delighted that less than a week after last Sunday evening’s disruption of service, all the bells were back on line again.

Tantalus was the king of Argos, and intimate friend of Zeus, often invited to parties on Mount Olympus. But his intimacy with this high society went to his head, and he tittle-tattled some of Zeus’s secrets, as well as stealing divine food and sharing it among his mortal friends. Yet more heinous crimes followed: when he was obliged to return the Olympians’ hospitality, he found he had not bought in enough meat for their appetites, and in order to make the stew go further he cut up his son Pelops and popped him into the pot. The gods, apparently, can tell their beef and mutton from their human flesh, even when served with a nice chianti. They were horrified by this hospitality, and Tantalus was sentenced to an agonising eternal punishment.

He hangs from the bough of a fruit-tree, covered to his waist by the waters of a marshy lake, eternally consumed by thirst and hunger. But whenever he bends down to satisfy his thirst, the waters recede, leaving only brackish mud at his feet. And when he reaches up to take some of the fruit, the wind blows the laden branches out of his reach.

This is something like my broadband experience at present. After 24 hours when the new wireless router worked fine, since Thursday it has been very patchy, more off than on. Naturally it’s one of those situations where all the helplines involved claim it’s the responsibility of someone else. BT test the braodband signal and say it’s fine: it must be the router that’s not functioning. Netgear say the router is working fine: it’s the BT broadband signal that is faulty.

After tasting the freedom of wireless connectivity - to have it snatched away like that! And I’ve never served up my son to any visiting gods, honest guv’nor.

It’s enough to drive you to drink.

Ali asked if I fast on Ash Wednesday. The answer is No, not usually; but I forgot to mention that I did forego a great gastronomic pleasure yesterday, since Ash Wednesday fell on St David’s Day. That’s the traditional occasion of the Kellogg College Founders Day dinner, which we have attended for the last several years, and this year had to decline because we were in church receiving the Lenten imposition of ashes.

Who should turn out to have been one of the guests of honour, but the Bishop! I wonder if he turned up with an ashen cross on his forehead?

A much better idea might have been to give up the Internet for Lent. It only takes a wobbly broadband connection at unpredictable intervals today to reduce me to gibbering frustration and impatience, as I realise that I am a Web junkie.

Compared with this, going alcohol-free is a doddle. Nearly 48 hours into it, I’m not even twitching yet and have only kicked the cat four or five times. (Since lunchtime.)

Not a good day for the beginning of the Lenten observance. Most of our younger members, families etc., are not great keepers of Lent, while many of our older members have reached the point where coming out in the cold dark evening in sub-zero temperatures is beyond them. Attendances disappointingly low.

So the ash I prepared this morning was more than plenty. I had forgotten Tom’s helpful instructions from last year, and had neither obtained the charcoal he recommends, nor anything to burn it in if I had. So it was back to charring my finger ends with holding bits of palm cross in a candle flame, while freezing the rest of me and my hands in the garage. Even though it’s double glazed, it was still pretty chilly this morning.

Had lunch in my newly-refurbished local with Li and Alex, who are researching venues for their wedding reception and just may have found one.

Then had to collect my new bicycle from its first service (did you know modern bikes are now so technologically advanced that they have to be regularly serviced, particularly during the first year?) This was just at the time when the heavens opened and poured down wind and hail - all in my face, so that I was white from chin to middle, while cyclists coming the other way looked completely dry. According to the weather forecast, today was supposed to be mostly sunny. Well, it was, in the sense that I could see bright blue sky beyond the edges of the black cloud that was so conscientiously dropping its frozen contents on me.

Still, George Herbert’s Lent was a joy to reflect on as our introduction to the season.