Bob Warwicker's blog

Here’s next Sunday’s Lectionary. It starts like this… (Acts 7:55) ‘But filled with the Holy Spirit, he [Stephen] gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him’.

And then they killed him. They covered their ears, because they did not want to hear what they saw as blasphemy. They didn’t want to hear. Of course, many Christians see the crowd as the ‘baddies’ in this. I want us to consider that there are people all over the world today, ‘covering their ears’. There are books being burnt. According to Wikipedia, ‘The name “Boko Haram” is usually translated as “Western education is forbidden”. Haram is from the Arabic حَرَام (ḥarām, “forbidden”); and the Hausa word boko (the first vowel is long, the second pronounced in a low tone), meaning “fake” which is used to refer to secular Western education.’ Certain kinds of knowledge are outlawed. There are Christians who want to censor what people can read about, hear about or think about. And that’s not necessarily completely out of order. Most people agree it is right to come down hard against child porn, for instance, because of the way children are hurt in its production and the way it feeds the abuse of children.

But, if we Christians are secure enough in our faith (I don’t mean doubt -free), we will not be afraid or learning and knowledge, or of other people’s way of seeing things. The first decades of Christianity grew out of the cultural ferment of the eastern Mediterranean, and we should not be afraid of some cultural fermentation either.

Speaking of fermentation, I might try our last untried bit of old yeast today. It is old, but it’s a different kind from the previous failures, so you never know.

Another nice walk in the early morning, on the far side of the reservoirs, keeping to wide ways on which other people are easily avoided. There seems to be a kind of ‘otherness’ about the world I walk in on these early morning jaunts. It’s hard for people who only have streets.

Went to my first zoom service today. It was strange, but it was also good to be there. I was not always sure of the protocol, so it was a bit like normal church for someone not used to it! Also good to think again and learn about the Lectionary readings I’d poked at in the week.

I think I almost wore the carpet out walking to church.

A lovely morning, with some pastel clouds suggesting that some weather may take place later. I walked Rough Fields and some streets, and was able to keep my distance on a quiet Sunday morning. Later this morning I hope to go to zoom church, having discovered how I can add some GB to my broadband allowance for a month at a time. Anyway, the church thing will be a novelty, and I anticipate awkwardness at some points.

The Psalm today mentions the valley of death’s shadow. It doesn’t feel like that here, on a sunny morning. I am at a time of life when this pandemic has less impact. I’m done with work, so don’t risk a loss of income. There’s one or two local shops, and some others nearby that do delivery. I’m not old or infirm enough to have to stay away from all human contact. But through ties of family and friendship, through the media, I feel the disturbance, the hurt and he fear. I feel I ought to be doing something, but it’s not clear what or how.

No great surprise to find that people who are already poor and marginalised are suffering more. For instance, if your work is precarious and your pay poor, you will go in whatever the consequences. And once the disease gets into an informal settlement, it’ll be hard to stop it.

This is hard in our village Tesco, especially with a delivery lorry outside and shelves being filled inside. The shopping algorithm has changed too. Questions like is it nice, is it a good deal, is it local, even is it fair trade, start to take second place to is it here. Trying to negotiate the shelves in the right order and in reasonable time results in some suboptimal decisions. We can’t go far to find a coop because we can’t go far. This is life for a few months or a year or two yet. Better than even more people dying, though.

Janet suggested a walk together to the excellent Swallows Wood. This is further than usual for lockdown, at about 4 miles round trip, so we were hoping that early morning on a wet Friday would be relatively free of people. And so it proved. An excellent walk, and the paths aren’t too muddy yet. We experimented with a web page I’m working on, which should enable people to input prayers attached to places, for anyone to look at if they go the same way. The internet is wonderful in many ways, but there’s lots of things I don’t understand about how to use it.

Sunday’s Psalm is 23. I can get worn out by its familiarity, and it reminds me of funerals (unsurprising, that). It might be worth giving it a poke, though. For instance, verse 4, “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff– they comfort me.” The promise is not that God will excuse a person from the valley of the shadow of death, but that God will be there in the valley alongside the person, to offer comfort.

It’s been good to play Scrabble with relatives online, but I get confused by the app. It’s got all these brightly coloured buttons which I might press by accident, and a few times I’ve ended up on a full page ad with no obvious means of escape, except by closing the app. Also, in common with some others it covers up the top and bottom bars, so you have to drag a bit to find them again. I wish for more simple times.

The news is worrying on many fronts. It’s not just Michigan where the far right and libertarians are flexing their muscles. Money or life? It should be a no-brainer, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. That’s a balance we make as a society all the time, deciding how fast we should drive, how hard to come down on unsafe working practices, how much we can afford to spend on cancer treatments of marginal benefit, and so on. And where ‘life’ is in the equation is not obvious. Lockdown kills as well, through suicide and domestic violence, and above all through poverty. I fear this virus might be another ratchet thing – maybe it’s just me, but it seems that in every economic disturbance, the rich manage OK, and the poor get poorer. Anyway, FWIW in almost every actual case I’d lean more towards the ‘life’ side of the balance than most. The main exception might be some cancer treatments. There’s a selection bias in the media – we don’t hear of the times it didn’t work out. (Although I’m sure if I had cancer I’d see things differently!) I don’t know, but I have a suspicion that in some cases the money might be better spent dealing with poverty – or even in preparing properly for a pandemic: God save us from optimists!

God bless every child of this planet,
in sickness and in health,
in wealth and in poverty,
in happiness and in grief,
but especially in sickness, poverty and grief.

A nice morning for going out on a short people-avoiding walk around the block.

Just been looking at the BBC website, and stuff about the virus Reproduction Rate. Apparently, R is about 3 with no restrictions, and 0.7 with lockdown. So, if we’re still in the exponential phase (which we will be until there’s a vaccine, or most people get it), then at a rough calculation(*) you need 3 days of lockdown for every day of freedom, in order to maintain parity – and obviously you would want to maintain parity at much much lower levels than the current horrifying total.

It’s not as simple as that of course. The good news is that when numbers are lower, you can make an attempt at contact tracing and perhaps get a clean sweep in some areas. Things are patchy, too. The spread of the virus in different populations is different. Once it gets in a care home, it’s very difficult to get it out again. Protective measures can be applied in a way that responds to conditions.

But all in all, it’s a horrible time, and decisions are hard.

* 0.7^3 * 3 = 1.029 (i.e. near enough 1)

God of love,
we pray for the people of this nation
and all nations.
Bring healing for the sick,
comfort those who grieve.
Give wisdom and strength
to people with hard decisions to make.
Help us all to deal with what we face now.
May all people who suffer
know the companionship of Christ.

Strange but wonderful yesterday to see our government marking International Workers’ Memorial Day.

At the same time the grim reality comes home to thousands of families.

God protect your children
in our coming out and our going in,
in sickness and in health,
in conviviality and in isolation.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Just a reminder that today is Workers’ Memorial Day. Today there is to be a one minute silence at 11am, to remember workers who have died because of their work, particularly, in this virus outbreak, the bus drivers, care workers, workers in the NHS and GIG, and other key workers who have lost their lives because of the virus.

The clouds have changed, but it’s not raining here. Judging by the fire crews congregating at the Bottoms environmental centre, the fire on the moors is still going on its fifth day.

I’m just starting to read a book about neurotheology. I’ve always wondered does religion trump science or does science trump religion? I reckon it must be both. For a person of faith like me, the study of nature is part of wanting to get to know what the Creator is like. Also there is the ethical question – so how do we decide what to do with our knowledge? Plus there are also ethical questions about the getting of knowledge itself. But OTOH, faith is also a phenomenon within nature, and a legitimate object of study … just don’t be like those patronising so-and-sos who don’t want to deal with the content of faith.

As for the Lectionary, Jesus says, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep…” I don’t know how well that metaphor stands the test of time. I think I know what that is like, but I have a picture in my head of a bloke standing between two hurdles with a stick in his hand to make himself look bigger, derived from distant memories of ‘one man and his dog’. And I’m not sure that picture really applies to first century Palestine. And what will a twenty-third century shepherd be like? The question then must’ve been something like, “who is the true shepherd?”, “who is the real prophet?” – and that question hasn’t gone away. Whom do we trust with our lives? Is the real Jesus to be found in churches? Do we hear the real voice of Jesus in the pronouncements of church, and are its leaders to be trusted as ‘shepherds’? Speaking as a someone who’s just retired from being a minister – i.e. a leader in the church, I think these are real questions.
Also from Acts 2:44f… “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” This doesn’t seem to have been adopted as a model by the majority of churchgoers (including me); so the right wing can sleep easy in their beds. This seditious literature is not going to be a danger to twenty first century capitalism. But deep inside somewhere, I wish it could be.

On my morning ‘exercise’-walk I passed our local industrial estate and saw a plate on the wall that said ‘BAY 24’. It was actually reversed, what they call ‘horizontal flip’ in image processing software. I guess that was so a lorry driver could see it correctly in a door mirror. The firm had taken care to make sure the driver saw the ‘correct’ image – though in order to do so, it had to turn things round. The other day I saw a TV show about the Hubble space telescope, and the trouble people went to to make sure it gave a correct and clear image. I wear glasses for long distance, because my eyes don’t give a clear image. Even what we see ‘directly’, though, is a nerve signal from an upside-down image on our retinas which has gone through a load of processes before we know what it means. I don’t think there is anything we can know directly. It’s all just a welter of different signals that (usually) we manage to fit into a world-model. Sometimes our processing goes awry: when I am very tired, I imagine I can discern voices in the sound of the sea or the wind for instance.

Why do I mention this? Perception is a slippery thing – I don’t think there’s any such thing as direct knowing – it’s all indirect, and mediated through a load of pathways outside and inside the body. Last Sunday’s reading, about Thomas recognising the risen Jesus after being invited to touch him, seems so real, it hits me with a kind of sledgehammer force (although I should point out the story doesn’t mention whether Thomas actually touched Jesus). But perception is a slippery thing. So I believe even this seemingly straightforward story is infused with mystery…. as, more obviously, is today’s reading, about the road to Emmaus.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” – though intravenous bleach probably isn’t one of them.

Also on the image front, our house nearly got into a picture on the BBC Derbyshire website, a long shot of the smoke from the moorland fire I mentioned a couple of days ago: modest excitement there, I think. BTW, whoever started the fire, what were they doing up there? Maybe it’s a selective lockdown.

I still don’t really know where I belong. My bus pass says Derbyshire, my council tax bill says High Peak (Derbyshire), the police are Derbyshire – but the trains all go to Manchester – that’s our TTWA (not that we work now). One consequence of the lockdown is that the pendulum swings towards the local, which is Derbyshire. Obviously I know I live in Derbyshire, but I’m not sure if the whole of my life belongs here.

God of love,
help us care for this earth,
this peat, this planet.
Help us care for one another,
taking care for each other’s lives.