Month: July 2020

A pleasant morning today…

A fair morning, with one or two small bits of rain in the offing.

The Lectionary for Sunday includes Jesus’ references to a mustard seed and yeast. These are things that grow. The Kingdom of God is like small things that have a big effect. The seed contains the genes of the plant/tree. The yeast contains the genes of the organism that will divide and grow exponentially. The Kingdom of God, I believe, is founded on memetic, not genetic, information – the ‘word’ which can change everything.

A beautiful morning today….

Nice to see yesterday that the football team belonging to the town where I last worked beat the high-flying Baggies to ensure they escape relegation (barring a spectacular goal-difference accident). Also they did their West Yorkshire neighbours a favour by making sure they go up. I guess some of the fans will be less chuffed about that.

In competitions like this, when one side wins another loses; when one side goes up, another goes down. In life, with limited resources, it’s the same – the more land I have, the less you have. But it’s not quite as simple as that. Wealth an also be created – human ingenuity and labour working to convert natural resources into goods and services that benefit people. … although it seems to me that many people who claim to be creating wealth seem only to be reallocating existing wealth to themselves. And then there’s the Kingdom of God, in which the last shall be first and the first last. Are there losers in the Kingdom? Read the Magnificat with a bit of anger in your voice and it would seem so. However, there’s also the imperatives of love, forgiveness, justice and mercy – building a community in which everyone has something.

Dear God,
I often feel like a loser,
I often want to be a winner.
Then I feel ashamed that someone else has lost.
I am glad that now (at least) my country has
ventilators, PPE.
But I am sad that many nations go without,
and many people will die.
God forgive us the mess we get into
and inspire us to navigate a way out.

From Isaiah in the Lectionary, “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god.” People of all the monotheistic religions earnestly assert that there is no god but God. But how seriously do we mean it? It’s hard to live in a society which has to sell stuff in order to continue working, without worshipping money at least a little bit, or aspiring to be rich. Just saying…

Returning from this morning’s walk I passed a house with a bright yellow car parked outside. Noticing the reflection of the car in the window, I instinctively looked in the window; then felt a bit ashamed to have invaded someone’s privacy. This is the third, maybe fourth, time this has happened. It is the same every time – I was just working on autopilot. It can sometimes be hard to get out of routines, especially if you are thinking about something else. This example is trivial, but what about those whose tramlines lead them into seriously destructive behaviour? It’s not that the people are not responsible, but sometimes habits need serious effort and maybe help to get out of. Otherwise you may need to go all the way to Bispham before you can turn round.

A theme in the Lectionary for Sunday (in Romans) is ‘freedom’ – a slippery word if ever I heard one. Never trust anyone who promises freedom. Last night we watched on catch-up an episode of Alan Bennett’s funny and serious ‘Talking Heads’. Remembering roughly, I think the speaker said how free she felt gardening with her friend in prison, compared to being at home in her marriage. Hooray, we are free from the EU, free to do whatever Trump and Putin tell us to do.

And yet there is a sense of freedom in feeling that God’s love is not conditional on us fulfilling every strictest part of an impossible set of rules. At the same time, that love itself binds us. We love, as we have been loved. We forgive, as we have been forgiven.

It’s great being on the west-facing slopes. but it has its disadvantages, and today is one of them. A small difference in wind direction and it rains on Snowdonia but not on us. As it is, it seems to be raining on us (and Snowdonia too I assume). It might clear up a bit I suppose.

It’s good to walk in the rain, though – the ways are quieter. The hard rocky landscape is softened by mist and a hill-clinging cloudbase. The only real snag is having to look at the scenery through damp glasses. You can be in more of a world of your own in the rain, and your thoughts can go anywhere. Not that mine went anywhere very interesting this morning, but there you go.

We thank you God for things that are surplus,
surplus energy, surplus imagination, surplus fun,
singing and colour and joy.

PS. If ‘the science’ has only recently said it’s a good idea to wear a face covering in enclosed public spaces to save other people from your potential infection, why have I been wearing one for over two months?

The Lectionary passages for next Sunday begin with the story of Jacob’s Ladder. Now another Jacob’s Ladder, as many people know, is part of the uphill which begins the Pennine Way, from Edale to Kinder Scout. ISTR the route used to be Grinds Brook, which was a bit scrambly for my taste.

Jacob recalls his dream, and declares that God is in that place. How convenient for those who assembled the OT scriptures that this experience of God was accompanied by the promise of an inheritance – the land. I could be cynical about this, but however you spin it, I’m left with the question, how do we know God is in the place or that place? Is it enough to have a dream that serves our dynastic ambitions? Is it enough to have a feeling? I have walked up the Derbyshire Jacob’s Ladder and wandered around that almost alien landscape of Kinder, with the mist coming and going, and felt, God is in this place. But is God really in that place in any sense that he wouldn’t be in any other place, like our street, or Golgotha? Kinder feels natural, unpeopled, unruined by human actions. But it’s not like that. The moors in general are managed land. And there is evidence in the darkening of the rocks for the past sooty/acidic excesses of Sheffield and Manchester. And God, in some sense – if only in suffering – but I would add love and inspiration and more – is also present in human life.

Even though I am now much more one for the flat walking, I still sometimes feel the power of the high places, and if I’m alone I might even launch into a verse or two of a Psalm-based hymn. I know it’s only a feeling. I know God doesn’t live in these places to the exclusion of more humdrum places. But knowing it’s only a feeling, can I nevertheless knowingly and thankfully accept the inspiration and energy these experiences give me?

The Gospel reading also mentions angels. It might be interesting sometime to know how the meaning of that word has changed over time, and that’s just the English version, let alone Hebrew or Greek. The reading is the story of the wheat and the weeds. You don’t know which is which until they have borne fruit – in the human case – had an impact on the world. Sometimes my morning walks take me along the Longdendale Trail. Since May half term, the way has been decorated with some beautifully painted creatures made out of stones – something to entertain families out in the open. But vandals or maybe equestrians have struck, and degraded the displays. The head has been removed from the snail. I used to know someone who told me that when he was young his mates would feed calcium carbide to pigeons, so that the water in the pigeons’ digestion would react with the chemical and make acetylene, causing them to explode. It is said that cruelty to animals when young is something of a predictor of violent behaviour in later life. Childhood deprivation and family stresses make people more likely to offend in later life. Some of these factors can be measured. Would it then be more efficient for the justice system to concentrate of these people? No way – you can’t do that – it’s against their basic human rights to discriminate in this way. Also you don’t know what’s going to happen until it actually happens, which is why it connects to that story about the wheat and the weeds. Also if deprivation leads to criminality sometimes, why not just fix the deprivation instead of p***ing away our national resources on stamp duty holidays for the rich?

The pressure has risen and it is a lovely morning, the reservoirs in the valley beautifully reflective. But the rainfall of the past few weeks has also filled the reservoirs that can be filled, and some are spilling over. Everywhere you go in the valley you can hear the sound of rushing water.

Also, good zoom this morning, ‘The Sower’.