Month: February 2019

Forgiveness is like
bread, a daily need: to give
and to be received.

…not sure that medium fits that message.

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Just been to the tip – now I know what the people of Huddersfield do on Sunday mornings.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. One of the good things about living here is that the Park is nearby. And lots of people came to enjoy the park, which is good. Mostly unaware of the 370, 371, 372, 373, 901, 537, 360, 501, 302 and 301 buses, they came by car and parked in Quarry Road, which makes things a little less convenient for us. There were times yesterday when a fire engine would have struggled to get through to the flats at the top of the street.

But the real offenders for antisocial parking are the students at Greenhead College. As the school year advances, more of them learn to drive, and they start ending up parked on our street. It only takes a few weeks to learn how to drive, but it takes a lifetime to learn how not to be a plonker. I’m sure I am not there yet.

I doubt whether all the miscreants are young men, but ISTR the insurance companies would tell you that men are generally worse drivers than women. There seems to be a particular kind of stupidity that afflicts people of my gender. Sometimes it’s destructive of others, sometimes not. There was a character in the film The Tall Guy who comes to nurse Emma Thompson for treatment after his dalliance with a vacuum cleaner. The story of this hoover abuser is not untypical of real men. Who hasn’t experienced penile dementia?

So what am I saying… if people have lost their wisdom it’s probably not hysteria (caused by the womb) – it’s far more likely to be the opposite.

Note on language – what I’m trying to talk about is that thing which is the opposite of wisdom – not the opposite of intelligence, or the opposite of mental good health. You can have learning difficulties and still be wise. You can have mental ill health and still be wise. I’ve heard it said that people with depression have a more realistic assessment of themselves and their situation than people without depression. If that is the case, then maybe if more people in politics were afflicted by the ‘black dog’, we might not now be pursuing a unicorn-based Brexit policy. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, though.

God save us
from being too puffed up
with self-importance.
God save us
from thinking that we are the bees knees.
God show us the truth
of our infirmities, our foolishness.
And speak to us gently and tell us
that we are forgiven,
and it’s alright now.

I’m still finding stuff from the past – I’d almost forgotten what my mother’s handwriting looked like.

Mustn’t be distracted, though.

It’s a lovely morning, but Job 2:10 sounds like wisdom… “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”. What sounds less like wisdom to my ears is association of being a woman with foolishness. Still, it’s not very easy to be wise when you’re under stress as Job was. There’s lots of voices in the Job story (including the voice of God) – and it can be tricky knowing what its messages are.

One of the difficult things about sorting out is that things we would use (if we had time and energy and the space to store them) probably aren’t in a good enough condition for someone else to use.

When I started this, I disabled comments because I didn’t want loads of spam. Now I’ve changed my mind, and I’ll test the water and see how much stuff comes in to be moderated. However, having disabled the comments, I can’t see how to re-enable them! I’ll make another attempt when moving doesn’t seem quite so hectic.

We had a bit of a setback yesterday for family reasons, but we’re still going today, and I hope for a productive day bagging up more stuff for the shredder.

1 Corinthians 15:12-20

…These words of encouragement from Paul can now be heard more as words of confusion by some. What did he mean by ‘resurrection of the dead’?

We think about this near our own deaths, or after the deaths of friends – and it can’t always be understood. And yet we derive comfort from believing that we live again in some way. It is mystery.

Some more bits of furniture gone now, many to go. Piece by piece we are saying goodbye to life here. Good to have dinner yesterday with Janet’s father and friends. I tried to do some physics and find a way to transport a dish of hot roasting potatoes half a km. Many thanks to all involved. I still like physics, though I’ve forgotten a lot.

I’m going to miss the places, the people.

Janet’s been working like a lion: thank you Janet! We still have a lot of papers to sort before the shredder’s van comes on Friday. I think we may have more than we said originally. I’ll weigh them on the bathroom scales to clear up any ambiguity about how much a ‘bag’ is.

We use furniture and clothes to the point of destruction – there is much of our stuff that is too knackered to be any use to anyone else. And there was a time when I thought the same might be true of us – but no.

For the readings…

God give us grace
to hear,
and understand,
and do…
even when it is hard.

Blessing for the poor,
trouble for the rich –
it’s hard to take for those of us
who fear we may be more on the rich side
than the poor side.

Give us faith, we pray,
to find new blessings
in community,
in love,
in shared pain and joy,
in Christ.

More sorting and moving yesterday. I couldn’t keep going all of the time.

The readings for this Sunday coming…

Jeremiah / Psalm 1 … trees, water,deserts – I wonder what metaphors are more suited to our economy and climate?

1 Corinthians … A logician might have fun with Paul’s argument – he has made much of Jesus being same as us / different from us – which of those applies in this case? etc. etc.. Can this passage nevertheless challenge us?

a poster from 1999 as found on Wikipedia

Luke… “Blessed are the poor…” Not “the poor in spirit” as in Matthew 5, but “the poor”. And later “Woe to you who are rich…”. So what do you think of that!!

Great yesterday to see my brother, and later nephew, both with subsets of their families, who will be the new stewards of the Dickens and and of the Dictionaries. We did some good catching up.

There are a number of old family photos and Janet and I have many of these – next autumn I hope to get them into digital form so different branches of the next generation can see them (if they want to … big if).

I guess that for both Janet and me over the next few years there will be some ‘passing on’ (transitive) to do.

Over the generations, technology has influenced how this is done.

The development of speech helped us to pass on stories (the way some of the Bible started), painting, carving, writing, printing, film, sound recording, digital media, now much stored in the cloud. And so on.

But the amount of information (and disinformation) can be overwhelming. When the whole world of information is at our fingertips, how do we know what we need to know?

We have to leave the selection in the hands of machines. The machines are very good at the job. The algorithms by which, say, Google photos finds what we’re looking for are brilliant at doing what they are asked to do.

The question is, who decides what these machines are asked to do for us? Is our freedom of choice anything more than an illusion? In advanced capitalist culture, money talks louder and in more ways than we can ever possibly understand.

So much for the diversion – to return to the point – I feel driven to pass some family culture on to the next generation. But it is naive to think that anyone will notice very much, amid the welter of information that is already flowing into their heads.

Abundant dampness,
reservoirs full to the brim:
blessing for the town.

God of truth,
as we read the Bible,
help us see ourselves
as part of its developing story.

The story goes on;
and neither has our understanding
stopped changing.

By your Spirit,
give us the joy of reading
new things in those old pages
and new discoveries in our lives.

Also we moved some bookcases around to try and get the most efficient use of space here … the work goes on!!

Tip run and Oxfam run yesterday, more sorting and moving about. Now at our house for a day off (and a bit more rearranging and moving stuff around). Much encouraged by yesterday’s spam fritter and chips, and Co-op scrounge bin strawberry trifle.

The entrance to the loft here is – like buses, class 14x DMUs, olde pubs with low beams and Stromness AFAIR – designed for small people: I am not small.

The gale unravels
landscapes, flight plans, minds, all gone
random in the wind.

Help us, God,
when we hear your call
to be willing to go,
even before we know exactly
what the plan is.
Give us faith, we pray…

We are making progress – stuff is being sorted, moved to different destinations…

…but it doesn’t feel like that. There’s still a lot of clutter, some of it loved.

My retirement balloon is still buoyant – a reminder of where we’re going.

Sunday’s three readings all mention moments of vision, in different ways. What the Bible is less full of is the bits in between, the bits where it’s harder to see where you’re going, and you are preoccupied with the demands of the day.

If I had a pound for every time someone told me, “we keep plodding along”, I’d have quite a lot of pounds.