Storyteller’s World

Great Scott! I always thought there was nothing personal about it! But now I learn they can actually be malicious, not just tedious, poorly produced, a sorry substitute for real thought in presentations, etc. etc.:

Microsoft is investigating new public reports of limited “zero-day” attacks using a vulnerability in Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 for Mac, and Microsoft PowerPoint v. X for Mac.

In order for this attack to be carried out, a user must first open a malicious PowerPoint file attached to an e-mail or otherwise provided to them by an attacker.

Microsoft Security Advisory (925984): Vulnerability in PowerPoint Could Allow Remote Code Execution

The other morning I woke up with my right ear feeling as if it, along with the whole of that side of my head, was stuffed with cotton wool. I have a dainty little ear, and every few years it just gets bunged up with wax and nothing but syringing will cure it. (Though I very much admired Shrek’s knack of screwing out an earful and using it as a candle, I haven’t been able to emulate it.) So I’ve had to embark on the regime of putting in olive oil ear drops for ten days before going to submit to the attentions of the practice nurse and her instruments of torture. An ear full of olive oil is even harder to hear through, and it tickles and scratches and clicks into the bargain.

This is my just punishment for getting impatient with the growing numbers of folk in the congregation who have nothing wrong with their hearing, it’s just that everyone else has started mumbling, and who then all talk at the same time during meetings, and have to have everything repeated, so the meeting that should end at 9.30 goes on till 11.15. In other words, they’re all just human.

Well, it seems I’ve now joined the human race.

What’s that you say? No, it came down the chimney.

Wow! If I’d known you could be a librarian and a superhero, I might never have given it up to become a vicar!

No one could ever accuse me of not being a creature of habit. It’s something to do with the whole Anglican / Benedictine ethos, stability, faithful continuity and perseverance, and so on. And not feeling a need to fix anything that ain’t broke.

So I find I have developed a favourite routine for Tuesday / Day Off, whenever I’m in Oxford rather than elsewhere for it. It consists of going into the city centre in the morning - by bike if it’s dry - browsing in Blackwells and Borders and maybe even buying something, dealing with any other small errands, buying a Pret sandwich and cycling home again to enjoy it at lunchtime with a can of ale.

The other day I realised that this was making me a prime target for assassins, and I needed to change my usual pattern. No, actually I found that Pret were more and more often not having a full range of sandwiches ready by the time I arrived. There are other sandwich shops in Oxford!

So I decided to try Heroes in Ship Street. The thing that has put me off until now has been the waggish alteration of their name, on the storefront awning. One small brush stroke for man has changed it to Herpes.

Heroes is much more of a hand-made place. No hard-working chefs in an upstairs room. Here you place your order and it is filled on the spot. Very hands on: in fact you see the guy’s hand pressed down on the sandwich before your eyes, as he cuts it in half, and wraps it in its bag.

It was OK. I think I still prefer Pret; but there are one or two other options to try first.

There are still people using Internet Explorer?!?!

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft patches bad browser bug

Change to Firefox, or if you have a Mac (why not?) Camino, or Safari - anything!

Following my somewhat angry comments about reactions to the Pope’s speech, I thought I ought to try and brush up my knowledge of Islam, and have been reading Malise Ruthven’s Very Short Introduction to Islam (OUP). This is, seemingly, a sympathetic treatment by a Scottish academic, a lecturer in comparative religion at Aberdeen University, specialising in Islamic affairs. Yet it contains more than enough deeply disturbing passages, that indicate the difficulty of religious understanding or harmony.

Like this sidebar which I presume is supposed to illustrate Muslim teaching on birth control:

We took some women captives, and when we had sex with them we practised withdrawal so as not to have children with them. We asked the Messenger of God about this and he said, “Is that what you did?” Then he repeated three times: “There is not a soul who is to be born for the day of resurrection, but that he will be born.”

From the hadith of Al-Bukhari, considered one of the sound ones.

Now, we’re supposed to believe that all comparisons between religions are invidious. But it’s hard to imagine Jesus, or indeed any teacher in the Christian tradition, instructing their followers exactly where to ejaculate when they rape someone. Or have I missed some notable Conciliar pronouncement?

Here’s a bit of fun: the Warning Sign Generator. (Thanks to LibrarianInBlack.)

Just the thing to pin up above my desk.

From the Talmud:

In the world to come, each of us will be called to account for all the good things God put on earth which we refused to enjoy.

Cited in James Limburg, Encountering Ecclesiastes

As we enter into the final straight before the Next Wedding, Tom has just posted some of his pictures of Sun & Rufus’s wedding on Flickr.

Some kind person has also set up a group for pictures of Weddings@Old Marston, that anyone can post their pictures to, of any weddings past or present celebrated at the church.

A new BBC dramatisation of Jane Eyre starts this coming Sunday: BBC - Drama - Jane Eyre. From the initial information and screenshots it looks as if it’s going to be very faithful. Jane certainly looks as plain as she claims to be, and Rochester as rough and rugged.

I’m hoping for a treat in store. Children of my generation will never forget the Sunday tea-time serialisation back in the late 1950s or early 60s (anyone remember exactly which?) which first taught us the true meaning of fear. Ever since then, the Madwoman in the Attic has been for me the archetypal Horror. It could even explain why I now live in a house with a flat roof, where what roof space there is, is so tiny that there’s only sufficient headroom to accommodate a Mad Midget.

It isn’t often I find myself agreeing with the Pope, but this brouhaha about his remarks on Islam and jihad have me cheering for more. Hanging on his next words, in fact - unless they should turn out to be an apology…

I would love to be able to be a whole-hearted advocate of religious understanding; and I know my personal faith is weakened whenever believers in God, of whatever religion, behave in an ungodly way, or contrary to the best tenets of their faith. But every time I feel we are in danger of making some progress towards that understanding, some new enormity scuppers it. And the present world-wide anger of Muslims, complaining about the Pope’s speech, is just the latest of these. It illustrates nothing so much as the moral and spiritual weakness of Islam today.

What about the widespread anger that non-Muslims might feel about them and their religion? Let’s just list some of the possible areas where we might be angry:

1. Their intolerance of other religions: that it’s a capital offence to convert from Islam to another faith. That, as we’ve been told in the last few days, it is also a capital offence under sharia law to “insult Islam”, meaning, to say anything that Muslims don’t want to hear. (Kind of confirms what the Pope was saying, doesn’t it?) That religious minorities in Muslim countries are persecuted in a way that no longer happens in most other countries.
2. Their oppression of women. The economic and intellectual weakness of many Islamic states has a lot to do with the fact that they squander the gifts of half the population by denying them any use except within the narrow confines of the home and family, that the men in power relegate them to.
3. Not just oppression, but also physical and sexual abuse of women and children. The way in which the faith colludes with domestic violence, permits genital mutilation of women by female circumcision, sanctions sexual abuse of children in the name of God, in that sharia law (again!) permits girls to be married at the age of 9. The same law permits adulterers to be killed by stoning, though oddly enough, it is usually women who face this penalty - as if they somehow managed to commit adultery by themselves.
4. Sharia law as a whole is something for the rest of us to be angry about. Most of the world grew out of this kind of state-sanctioned barbarism centuries ago. It’s time Islam did the same.
5. Their rejection of democracy. OK, democracy may only be the least worst form of government, but it’s better than the tyrannies of many Islamic states, to say nothing of the monstrous regime of the Taliban.
6. Their scorn for truth. There can be no hope for religious dialogue and understanding if we refuse to face facts and listen to truth-speaking. Christians have confessed that the Crusades were wrong, and indeed contrary to the teaching of Christ. When will Muslims acknowledge that the spreading of their faith by armed force is just as wrong - and even if that is in fact what the Prophet taught, it’s still wrong?
7. Their support for violence in the name of God. Of course, most Muslims say they want peace. Nevertheless, in the whole spectrum of world terrorist movements, it is those driven by extremist Muslim beliefs that are the most violent, dangerous and inhumane. Just adding 9/11, the insurgency in Iraq (Muslim violence against Muslims!), and the suicide bombings against Israel, gives the highest terrorist death toll of all.

And Muslims are angry with the Pope for mentioning that some of all this catalogue of crimes against what the rest of us understand to be God’s way, seems to be enshrined in the founding tenets of their faith? Maybe even taught by their Prophet?

If what he said is wrong, if that’s not the case, then Muslims have to prove it. Most of what has happened since the Pope’s remarks, seems rather to confirm it. In fact, most of it (death threats, murders of Italian nuns) shows that he was actually being rather restrained in what he said.

A colleague at the most recent BAP I took part in expressed the view that one of the weaknesses of many of the candidates taking part, was their ignorance of the wider Church of England and the Anglican Communion.

So should we be recommending that everyone preparing to attend a BAP read OUP’s new Very Short Introduction to Anglicanism? I thought I’d better have a look and see, and I discover that I will probably be learning new slants, too. For example, already on page 2:

What was perhaps most important in shaping the Church of England was a vision of a Christian nation upheld by a Christian monarch. Uniformity and obedience were at the heart of the settlement. The Church of England owes as much to what one early 20th-century commentator called the ‘absurd theory’ of the Divine Right of Kings as to anything else. It was simple: kings had a right to rule over both their spiritual and temporal realm and no foreign potentate could usurp this power.

And there was I thinking that Anglicanism was really shaped by that trait which is nearest to the heart of the English character: the determination that no Johnny Foreigner is going to tell us what to do. So much so that we quite forgot that all the time it was Johnny Tyrant King (himself descended from someone called something suspiciously foreign sounding, Guillaume wasn’t it?) who was telling them Jump and they darn well jumped. Perhaps it’s the cold wet climate, or the diet of bread and ale, or living in close proximity to so many millions of sheep, that made it easy for kings and their cronies to pull the wool over our eyes for so long. “See: you’re not being governed by a foreign King are you?” (Ignoring all those that have been French, Scots, Dutch, German, etc.) “That means you’re FREE, as befits true-born Englishmen.”

The Levellers were some of the first to question this. Like Thomas Rainsborough:

I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore, truly, sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under.

And the outcome of all that democratic struggle, adventure and achievement?

That now we are governed not by the electorate, not even by politicians, but by the media telling us what to think, even deciding who’s to be Prime Minister. Three cheers for mediocracy!

Well, bring back the old mediocrity, I say. Things were better, when people that today’s media wouldn’t give air time to, people like Clem Attlee - people who actually had some intellect and policies - were running the show.

It’s amazing the difference the transposition of two tiny words can make, when it changes the interrogative into the affirmative.

On Sunday morning a nervous lesson reader, reading in church for the first time, subverted the whole meaning of James’ radical epistle when she asserted:

It is not the rich who oppress you. It is not they who drag you into court. It is not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you. (James 2.6-7, alt.)

I confess I was perplexed about what to do as this revisionist drama unfolded before my horrified ears. Leap up crying “NOOO! It is the rich who do all that! They always have! They still do! That’s why the Gospel is radically critical of them!”? But in the end my pastoral heart won out over my political will. Instead of covering the poor reader with shame and confusion, I let pass the public affirmation of a profoundly Tory, or un-Gospel-like, declaration.

Kathryn was meditating on some of the names she has applied to characters in her blog; and got me thinking about what I have called the folks who walk some of my pages.

It so happened that the three daughters got their names, Sun, Li and Tui almost by inevitable accident. (The only conceivable alternatives, in retrospect, would have been Tzeitel, Hodel and Chava.) I fully intended that the other significant people in my life should have attractive aliases too, but somehow it never happened. Tom remained Tom, never Chên, Alison was never anything other than her honest and straightforward self, rather than K’un, Annie was just that. Son-in-law no.1 did get to be called Rufus, but I never came up with an alias for Alex, so Alex he remains. And likewise Dave.

Tui once asked me, “Hey, why doesn’t Dave have a nickname in your blog?”

“Well, I’ve thought about it,” I said. “What about Shaggy?”

Tui (LOL): “That’s just what all his friends used to call him at school!”

So maybe I should have had the courage of my convictions.

As for the other characters. I did once write of someone I called Mme Cholet, but all the local readers knew exactly whom I meant. And since I don’t trust myself to write about her at the moment (Seal of the Blog, etc.), she has also disappeared from view.

Perhaps I’ll just have to start making people up, and writing about them. There’s no way they could be stranger than the reality, so no one would notice the difference.

We met to plan a special service celebrating Hildegard of Bingen, intending to use some of her illuminations and listen to some of the haunting melodies of her music.

It’s many years since I’ve looked at any of this. I bought some books in a fit of enthusiasm, back in 1990 or so, when I was under the influence of Matthew Fox and thought (as I still think) that Hildegard was an astonishing woman: prophet, writer, doctor, scientist, composer, administrator, and so on. Some of her illuminations make you think of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man - but she was living 400 years before Leonardo. Others look like something from Native American artists. Some of her visions make you think of Julian of Norwich - but she lived 300 years before Julian.

What I found, though, was that very little of her writing, for example in Scivias, spoke to me. It was all just too alien, coming from such a different world - more different than most of the other lost and bygone worlds that do still speak to us across the centuries. It seemed strange, having been told that she was a kind of proto-feminist and celebrator of nature and humanity, to read sentences like these:

So too those of female sex should not approach the office of My altar; for they are an infirm and weak habitation, appointed to bear children and diligently nurture them. A woman conceives a child not by herself but through a man, as the ground is ploughed not by itself but by a farmer. Therefore, just as the earth cannot plough itself, a woman must not be a priest and do the work of consecrating the body and blood of My Son; though she can sing the praise of her Creator, as the earth can receive rain to water its fruits.

Obviously she was also a woman of her time, and you can’t hold that against her. But what it makes me realise, is that with all these spiritual fashions, whether it’s Hildegard or Celtic spirituality or whatever, we only take out of them what reflects our own image and desires, very little of what they are really about.

I became so disappointed and disillusioned about spiritual fashions, I started to think there was nothing for it but to join the Prayer Book Society. Except I know that if I did, that would become fashionable too.

Recent visitors (and commenters) on this site include:

Bobbie from emerging sideways

BB from Benedictine Baptist

Both well worth a visit. Thanks for dropping by, folks, and thanks for saying hello.

At Morning Prayer today the sun was shining so brightly through the east window, that I could hardly look towards the sanctuary without screwing up my eyes.

I lit a candle on the altar anyway, even though it didn’t make a scintilla of difference, and I couldn’t even see it against the glory of the sunlight.

Then I sat and reflected about whether that isn’t a fair picture of what the Church does all the time. All our hurry and activity, all our service and sacrifice, all our synods and revisions, all our prayers and silence. We might like to think we are lighting a small candle in the darkness. The truth is, we may be doing no more than lighting a candle in the sunlight.

Nevertheless, it is the only and necessary thing for us to do.

It is better to light a candle in the sunlight, than not to light anything at all.

It makes me feel like an unimaginative slacker, that all I do with mine is write in them…

The Sloth Ethic: The Art of Not Getting Things Done: All the moleskine hacks you can do that don’t involve getting things done - Archive

When I was writing the other day about finding copies of The Rhinegold & The Valkyries and Siegfried & The Twilight of the Gods, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, I had forgotten that these were the volumes which C. S. Lewis so admired as a teenager, and which he describes thus in Surprised by Joy:

There, on [my cousin’s] drawing-room table, I found the very book which had started the whole affair and which I had never dared to hope I should see, Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods illustrated by Arthur Rackham. His pictures, which seemed to me then to be the very music made visible, plunged me a few fathoms deeper into my delight. I have seldom coveted anything as I coveted that book; and when I heard that there was a cheaper edition at fifteen shillings (though the sum was to me almost mythological) I knew I could never rest till it was mine.

For those who can’t afford the £250 those editions now command, there’s a Dover Publications reprint of the illustrations: Rackham’s Color Illustrations for Wagner’s “Ring”. These come without the text, which the introduction describes (probably correctly) as “an English translation by Margaret Armour of a type then frequently encountered and now best forgotten.” But they do have captions which tell the story for those who, like me, don’t know Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

(I once sat, or rather slept through, a Wagner opera at the Berlin Operhaus. I was very tired, and the girl I was with had a very soft shoulder…)

Attending the Licensing of a new priest-in-charge in the deanery (whom I helped to appoint when I was acting area dean) I was hailed by a former ecumenical colleague whom I haven’t seen for several years.

“Hi,” he said. “Long time no see! Are you still at Old Nick’s?”

I’ve heard St Nicholas Old Marston called some interesting things, but this?

The magical days came round again this week, when the St Giles Fair closes the road to all vehicles. Here in the background is the Taylor Institute, where I learned most of what I’ve ever forgotten about Rilke, Kleist, Goethe, Hofmannsthal, Racine, Corneille, Stendhal, Taine, Renan and their cronies. And in front of it some of the roundabouts, a student sketching, and the gents’ toilets in the middle of the road, usually unreachable because of the streams of cars in both directions.

Mysteries of nature:

Why is it that only men can cook outdoors?

Why is it that men can only cook outdoors?

The news that Airfix has gone into administration marks the end of an era. I grew up with these things: not just the construction kits, but even more the armies of 1/72 scale soldiers.