>World Book Day

David Herbert1 Comment

>When Prince Charming married Cinderella – it was World Book Day. I’ve just waved Jeanette off to her school in her Willie Wonka outfit – no doubt going to see all the oompa-lumpas. It’s World Book Day – when children will be dressing up as characters from well loved books. I don’t think I’ve seen anybody in a costume other than what that is derived from film, which shows how dependant we are on those who can visualise and transfer a character from one media to another. Some schools will be having a bookstall and some will be having authors coming into school.

I wonder what everybody will be reading today in the cafes, tubes or stretched out on the settee. One blogger, Sonya Worthy, spends her time asking people what they’re reading – her blog, People Reading, is a real celebration of books. As for me, I shall be reading more from What is the Point of being a Christian? because I promised myself that for Lent – and today I have already come across this lovely quote from Salman Rushdie’s article Is Nothing Sacred?:

I grew up kissing books and bread. In our house, whenever anyone dropped a book or let fall a chapatti … the fallen object was required not only to be picked up but also kissed, by way of apology for the act of clumsy disrespect. I was a s careless and butter-fingered as any child and, accordingly, during my childhood years, i kissed a large number of ‘slices and also my fair share of books. Devout households in India often contained, and still cotain, persons in the habit of kissing holy books. But we kissed everything. We kissed dictionaries and atlases. We kissed Enid Blyton novels and Superman comics. If i’d ever have dropped the telephone directory I’d probably have kissed that too. All this happened before I ever kissed a girl. In fact it would be true, true enough for a fiction writer, anyhow, to say that once I started kissing girls, my activities with regard to bread and books lost some of their special excitement. But one never forgets one’s first loves. Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul – what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

That’s from Granta 31:1990

>Mothering Sunday

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>Highlighting Mothering Sunday was a brief encounter with a family I knew in a previous parish. I remember Victoria being born. She is very disabled. I have met her and her wonderful Mum Robina only a few times over the years. Victoria is wheelchair bound and uses sign language. She is so cheerful – yesterday admiring the beard. What an achievement for all the family – fought for not just day by day, but hour by hour for 27 years through I am sure tension, tiredness, anger and frustration. Robina gets my Mothering Sunday prize for “Mum of the Year”. Victoria gets the prize for being the “most cheerful”.

Otherwise friend Ron used Michelangelo’s Pieta when he was preaching about motherhood – the sculpture appealing to him because of mother and child being sculpted from the one piece of marble – which sounds a lot better than “a chip off the old block”.

>Sexuality and lust

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> “This is my body which is given for you.” Any Christian worshipper will recognise these words of Jesus by which he declares his love for the world because they are central to the Christian gathering. We meet round the table and celebrate that Jesus gave his body for us. The words are repeated by lovers who give themselves to one another. They could be words used in the marriage service – that would hot things up well wouldn’t it? Tim Radcliffe – in What is the Point of Being a Christian? – underlines the importance of the body in love and sexuality, and in so doing manages to distinguish between love and lust, and between erotic and pornographic art. (Rodin’s kiss is lovely. It’s erotic and it’s good because both partners are lost in their mutual self-giving).

We give ourselves in love. With lust we make of the other an object of desire for our own pleasure. Often the focus of desire is one part of the body, so the object of our desire is dismembered before our very eyes. Interestingly Jesus says “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.” (Matt 5:29) presumably to help us to understand that if we dismember others we ought to dismember ourselves. Radcliffe refers to the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland who wouldn’t let Alice eat the mutton to which she had been introduced. “It isn’t etiquette to eat anyone you’ve been introduced to.” she says.
The cure for lust is not chopping off our hand or plucking out our eye – and it’s good that very few have tested that theory – the first step, according to radcliife’s wise words “is not to abolish desire, but to restore it, liberate it, discover that it is for a person and not an object.”

Room at the Inn

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>

An interesting day yesterday at our local George and Dragon (linked as a thank you for their hospitality and for the benefit of those reading this blog in New Zealand who might want somewhere to stay in tarvin!). We’ve tried various things this Lent – one of which is a group meeting in the pub. Thanks to friend Hazel’s suggestion we’ve called it Room at the Inn and that’s caught people’s imagination. We gather every Tuesday morning at 9.30, each week starting with one of the four great questions of human being;

Who am I?
Where do I come from?
Where do I belong?
Where am I going?
Group members go where they like with the questions – but we’ve been returning to Psalm 139 at the end. It’s a great time and what we have shared has been really valuable. Friend Jinty came up with a really thought provoking quote from Penelope Lively:

We are all conditioned in a sense by those to whom we are bound; my real-life husband affected the person that I have become. Without him, with someone else, who knows what twists of personality might not have come about. I am a rather pragmatic and organized person. I was about to write “naturally pragmatic and organized” – but is that the case? Are such tendencies innate, or honed by circumstance?

Other people referred to the likes of Nelson Mandela and Terry Waite raising the question of why we react as we do, and what makes some reactions exemplary?
Note to me: see what happens when you only say the first words and then let people get on with it!

>More words

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>With emails, weekly newsletters, sermons, magazine articles mouth and keyboard are in overdrive on communications. I wonder what coomes over. It’s intriguing to have someone play back what I’ve said often with a completely different interpretation of what I have meant to say. Sometimes that means I’ve not expressed myself very clearly, and sometimes it means that the reader or listener has focussed clearly – but their minds might have gone in a different direction altogether. That’s OK. Often what people come back with is far more interesting than the original version.
Of course, we can say too much. Woodrow Wilson said “If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”
This song by Boney M is the prayer that ends Psalm 19. A catchy number which doesn’t capture the desolation of the exiles by the Rivers of Babylon who couldn’t bring themselves to sing in a strange land. Oh well.

http://www.youtube.com/get_player

>Prayer for the Stressed

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>Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I cannot accept,
and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill today because they got on my nerves.
And also, help me to be careful of the toes I step on today, as they may be connected to the feet I may have to kiss tomorrow.
Help me always to give 100% at work…
12% on Monday,
23% on Tuesday,
40% on Wednesday,
20% on Thursday
and 5% on Friday
And help me to remember…
when I’m having a bad day and it seems that people are trying to wind me up, it takes 42 muscles to frown, 28 to smile and only 4 to extend my arm and smack someone in the mouth! Amen
Author unknown

>Public theology

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>Public theology is a funny expression suggesting that there is a choice between private and public theologies, or rather between bad theology (theology that remains private is not Christian theology) and good theology.

Public theology is what is happening when Archbishops etc make their reflections public and relevant. How difficult it is though – and that was illustrated at a meeting of clergy today. A neighbouring clergybod said how she felt she didn’t know enough to comment on various bits of church news when people ask her – in so saying, she was doing a bit of public theology by making her concerns public. She was jumped on by someone with the “right” answer. (Heaven preserve us from those who’ve got the last word!) I reckon theology to be a process to be undertaken publicly as the church through collaboration. Theologies develop through interaction with others and through prayer – never the finished article because there is always an OTHER to be heard from somewhere.

It is very difficult being Christian in public and doing theology in public. There are always those ready to twist what is said and done – whether it is my friend Jane, Rowan or Jesus – and the public aren’t always very interested in finding out what we really meant. Jesus did not try “that’s not what I meant”. He just suffered the consequences of public theology.

And this isn’t public theology – I don’t think – but it’s Spike Milligan.

http://www.youtube.com/get_player

Second best

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>There are some very good bloggers out there. I wish I could be as amusing (or write/draw as well) as Bishop Alan and Dave Walker – but what the hell! I don’t do it to amuse anyone but myself. Anyone’s welcome to look over my shoulder, so long as they remember that it is me who is amused – it’s far better keeping all my thoughts in one blog than scattered all over the hard drive. I never could remember what they were all filed as. Someone who wanted to sing was told that she didn’t have the best voice in the world but it dodn’t stop her singing. I’m not the fastest runner/jogger/shuffler in the world, but that doesn’t stop me jogging/shuffling (running isn’t an option!). This may not be the best blog in the world but that’s not going to stop me blogging.

>Sharia and the Archbishop

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> The width of the gap between what we say and what gets reported depends on what the reporters of a conversation want to make of it in grabbing a story. Happens all the time, even to the most local conversation. We hear what we want to hear and see what we want to see.

It’s particularly true of our leaders as their comments are continually (mis)construed. Apparently Archbishop Rowan was acknowledging “as a matter of fact certain provisions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law” – he wasn’t proposing a parallel system of law, but was instead exploring ways in which reasonable accommodation might be made within existing arrangements for religious conscience. The issue affects everyone with a conascience – he raised the example of the Christian doctor who would like to assert his/her right not to conduct abortions in the context of a secular legal system which permits abortion. Orthodox Jews already have their own system of Beth Din over, for example, dietary laws, divorce and tenancy disputes.

The media has portrayed Rowan as “gone barmy”. In fact, his comments were part of a lecture given to over 1000 people at a lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice chaired by the Lord Chief Justice. Presumably amongs this 1000 there are some pretty good judges (!) who would presumably have been protesting more loudly if they thought it was all barmy.

Maybe the Archbishop was articulating what is a real challenge to our society. If he was to keep silent he would be abdicating his leadership. Here’s what he actually said. And here’s what Bishop Alan has to say about Abdul the Bogeyman.