Graeme at Oxford

The 24 hour news channels fail to cover themselves in glory at this kind of event.  They are after information for the sake of being watched and being interesting.  If they can't be exclusive, then they must deny the exclusivity of the other channels.  They keep referring to these horrific events as a "story" - "this has been a long 'story' for the peopel of Rothbury" said one news anchor last night.  There is greed to be near to the "story" - these events are happening "only 100m behind me"; "we have been moved further back by the police".  This conversion of crisis "news product" is doubly troubling.  It belittles human pain, and it is guilty of hypocrisy.  It masks its true intentions in the false cloak of urgent concern and the public's "right to know".

The primary "news product" is conflict.  Peace is a terrible thing because it is dull.  Thus, one news reporter at 6.30am this morning said "the question that is being asked around Rothbury this morning is 'Why did it take so long for the police to find Raoul Moat?'".  You want to question this in so many ways.  Firstly, a mere four hours after Raoul Moat's final act of annihiliation, during which most of the people of Rothbury would have been in their beds, did this reporter really have the ability in four hours to crystallise the complex and diverse thoughts of an entire village, into "the question that is being asked".  One suspects that this is code for "the question that we journalists are going to ask to get more mileage out of this 'story' is..."

Was sent this famous essay by C.S. Lewis on the need for punishment to be thought of retribution - if it is thought of as cure it diminishes the personhood of the perpetrator and is open to horrific abuse by the "silky tongued" therapists; if it is thought of as deterrent then the guilt or innocence of the perpetrator is of less importance, they are punished as an example to others.

Behind all this (like a vast mountain on whose side this argument is built) is that we live in a moral universe, that there is such a thing as natural law, and that it was placed here by God.  Speaking of mountains, a great quote from the end of the article on the relationship between love and mercy.

Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice; transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same name as the mountain variety. But we ought long ago to have learned our lesson. We should be too old now to be deceived by those humane pretensions which have served to usher in every cruelty of the revolutionary period in which we live. These are the ‘precious balms’ which will ‘break our heads’.

We've got this huge challenge in the Church of Scotland at the moment, reducing our ministry posts from 1244 (not 1400 as it was in Life and Work this month) down to 1000.  In Glasgow, that's a reduction from 160 down to 132.

How to make these reductions involves crossing an intricate minefield of Church legislation, local needs, wider considerations, transparent processes and the fact that it is very difficult to get hold of what a Church is, and make a fair decision about whether it needs a minister or a deacon more than the Church up the road.  Too much goes in congregations that is invisible, only God knows what goes in the corner of every Church - we don't have the eyesight required to make those assessments.  And yet we have to.

One problem is blindness.

The other is competition.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that whenever you got more than two disciples together, there would arise "a reckoning amongst them" - a competition to work out who is the greatest.  When we read the that the disciples were arguing about "Who was the greatest?", we can't believe the baldness of the discussion, the brazen-ness of a Peter turning to Thomas and saying "here's why I am greater than you?".

I was deeply moved on Wednesday at a meeting I was at in the Episcopalian Church in Possilpark - St. Matthew's.

In the car on the way up I had been listening to Mike Breaux at Menlo Park (24th May 2010) speaking on pausing to enjoy the present moment:

"Yesterday is history

Tomorrow is a mystery

Today is a gift, which is why it is called the Present".

Breaux commented that This is the day that the Lord has made (Psalm 118).

So at St. Matthews, during a moving celebration of the Eucharist, in an icon-laden oasis in an area of Glasgow not renowned for its tourist attractions (I know this having lived in neighbouring Springburn) Fr. David spoke about the feeding of the 5,000.  In addition to the well-known four movements of taking, blessing, breaking and sharing, there is a fifth movement "Picking up the scraps".

Was just sent this in response to Len Sweet on Kindness:

"It may be more important to be right than to be kind, but if you're not kind, you're not right".

- Brian McLaren

...Didn't Vote For The Christian Party

One of the reasons for the existence of the Christian Party, according to leader George Hargreaves, is that Christian MPs in other parties often have to vote for policies they don't agree with.  Ironically, I think any Christian MP of the Christian Party would often finding themselves voting for policies they found abhorrent.  The ideas of the Christian Party sound scarily like the US Republican Christian Right - small government and a low flat tax regime.  I must have been distracted when Jesus mentioned those in the Sermon on the Mount.

Most worryingly in his broadcast here, Hargreaves describes an encounter with Nick Griffin in a televised debate.  Hargreaves uses this as an example of Christian love in action, winning and wooing opponents to our point of view.  According to Hargreaves, Griffin had been transformed through an encounter with Christian love.  I was eager to hear of how Nick Griffin had renounced his pallid monoculturalism, and the nasty hatreds that lie underneath his newly smartened presentation.

Here's Griffin's testimony:

A special event that happened recently has changed my outlook... That event was the peaceful, sensible, mature debate with the Christian Party leader George Hargreaves.  It made me think long and hard about a new dimension of our struggle: our Christian religion, culture and traditions.  In the past, too much emphasis has been placed on the ethnic aspect of our present national dilemma, whilst the longest running feature of our identity has been overlooked: the fact that our country has been held together and guided, for millenia [not sure about the use of the plural 'millenia'], by our common ancient religion Christianity.

This doesn't seem like the Damascus Road experience one might have hoped for, but rather a fascism based on religious rather than ethnic separation.  Either Hargreaves doesn't realise this, or doesn't think it such a bad thing.

There are two reasons why the Big Society was never going to work.

The first is because David Cameron was never going to be able to defend it within a week of taking office.  The Big Society was the centrepiece of the Conservative Manifesto (this I know because I had to read the thing, was about to say "wretched thing", but actually it wasn't that bad) - pages of attractive graphics and slogans like "Small Government - Big Society".  But it didn't even last four weeks on the campaign.  It hardly lasted a week on the campaign.  How bad must your judgement be if your big idea, your central philosophy, doesn't even last a week in the campaign?  And if it can't last a week on the campaign, it won't last a day in government.

So the first reason it wasn't going to work was that David Cameron was defending it like an injured Rio Ferdinand.

Secondly, David Cameron has clearly never tried to organise a volunteers rota.  James Delingpole (I hate to quote Delingpole approvingly) characterises the "Big Society" as

Dave’s bouncy new “Big Society” plan for teenagers and grandmothers to be compelled every other week to whitewash their local community centre.

In our Church, when there are strong faith-based reasons to do big things voluntarily, like collect for Christian Aid, we struggle for volunteers.  What chance was Dave going to have cajoling a chronologically-impoverished, disinvested populace to replace paid carers with voluntary labour.  It was crazy.  Getting volunteers is tough when you're fishing in a warm pool.  What chance in the frozen ice-lakes of stress-dense dormitory towns?  Dave never had a chance.  It was only ever going to be way of Dave being able to live with himself when he had just shut down 200 day-care centres.

I was at a fantastic wedding in Fife on Saturday.  There we thought about a three days that happen in a marriage:

1. The wedding day, when love is easy

2. The day when you wonder if the wedding day is a good idea, when love is hanging-on-in-there tough.

3. The day of resurrrection, when love is seen in all its worth.

This is the ending:

And we look back on life of love we will say that the best of energy was given to the noblest of callings

When we discover that a thousand small kindnesses amounted to an edifice of magnificent beauty

That in the choice to love, we touch the very fibres of the meaning of life

That in the giving to the other we discover the joy of cherishing, passionately holding, being bound to someone other than ourselves.

That love did not shirk sacrifice, did not aver pain, but always emerged victorious.

That love forged us, birthed us, hewed us, renewed us in a better likeness of our maker

I am getting worried that the debates have not, in the end, stopped David Cameron getting into Downing Street.  There were a few happy hours after the first debate, when there were only a few points between the parties in the polls.  Having spent the last two years dreading a return to Conservatism (ever since the Brown bounce gave the prime minister vertigo when he might have called an election, and then landed on the northern rocks of the credit crunch) , the prospect of a hung parliament was a slither of hope.

However, Cameron has escaped through not doing too much at all: Clegg's tricks have become wearing (paradoxically, increased exposure has stolen his precious novelty) and Brown forgot to turn his mic off (or rather having failed to moderate his control-hungry sulkiness, had ensured that this was an accident waiting to happen).

So what are we left with: an attack on welfare dependency which sounds like an attack on the most vulnerable; a commitment to stem immigration which sounds like an attack on diversity; and a commitment to increase inheritance tax thresholds which seems like an attack on the poor.   I predict that in 12 month's time we will look back on Gordon Brown's premiership with nostalgia.

This is Mark Dever on the Sermon Audio podcast, speaking last year.  He notes the books that are sometimes published of Jesus' prayers.  He talks of the saccharine sweet stuff, some Hallmark like amusing things, some touching comments.

One common theme is that they view God as a bit like Santa Claus.

"Dear God, Please let dogs live as long as people - Nancy"

"Dear God, I would like these things

A new bicycle

A number three chemistry set

A dog

A movie camera