The times, they are a’changin’

I read an article this week in which a journalist began by lamenting the sense of her life ebbing away having reached the age of 44. Having moved on to the idea of ‘mid-life crisis’, she concluded that ‘mid-life’ takes different meanings for different people. It set me thinking – and not for the first time – about changes that I’ve seen during my lifetime.

It has become common-place to hear people speak of the exponential nature of change. This is usually quoted with regard to technological change and it is certainly true that the number of transistors that can be fitted on a integrated circuit has doubled every two years. The layperson might quibble that commercial supersonic flights have been curtailed as have manned lunar missions, however, the general point seems well-made and it is extraordinary to think that less than 70 years after the first manned aeroplane flight Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. A friend who works in the aerospace industry has told me that it is almost a certainty that within 200 years there will be a Mars-based human colony.

My grandparents were born into a world in which no one had flown in a plane and Victoria was still on the throne. Two of them died having seen a man step on to the moon. I presume that any grandchildren I might have will see even greater changes in their lives and yet change is still hard to accept …. and especially at a trivial level.

The goal celebrations of modern footballers is often in the news. Long gone are the days when Denis Law acknowledged the crowd by walking back to his own half with one hand in the air.

Two players were criticised for dedicating their goals to respectively a friend and a relative in prison by running around with a wrists-together-in-handcuffs gesture. A Brentford player was initially included in this criticism, until he revealed that it was aimed at his young son who is a fan of X Factor.

Referees customary now give out yellow cards for over exuberant celebrations – such as when a 15 year-old playing for Wycombe Wanderers was carded for running to where his parents were sitting in the crowd. This somewhat stingy response wasn’t repeated when Bill Sharp scored for Doncaster against Middlesbrough recently. Sharp’s baby son had just died at two days old and when the player scored he pulled off his shirt to reveal a tee-shirt dedicating the goal to his boy. It’s hard not to feel for a man having suffered such a loss, but removing one’s shirt doesn’t seem the most natural way of celebrating anything.

Until the advent of TV close-ups it was impossible to know what players said to one another, but the recent furore over what John Terry did or did not say to Anton Ferdinand was an eye-opener. The argument seems to hinge on whether Terry referred to the opposing defender as a f****** blind c*** or a f****** black c***. Racism has no place in football or anywhere else, but the general way in which one player’s feelings were expressed to another might still shock some. Educating Essex, the documentary about a high-achieving school in Harlow, showed that such language is not unusual in schools when a teacher and a female pupil were seen discussing whether the pupil had called a member of staff a f****** p**** or just an ordinary p****.

How does one react to these changes in the world? One way is to embrace it. Not that I’m suggesting that we should all join Terry et al in their use of English, but perhaps we should work with change rather than resisting it.

This has implications for Christian people in that while we believe that we should follow in the footsteps of Jesus, there are many areas of life about which Jesus made little comment. Many areas of Christian lifestyle are dependent on tradition and so are open to pressure to change. There are also instances when the Biblical witness is challenged. For example, few people still accept that the earth is the centre of the solar system, despite the Biblical understanding of the universe. The same is not quite true regarding Creationism, as this still exercises a hold on many Christians.

The issue, it seems, is which tenets of our faith are temporal and which are eternal. I wonder whether this is, and perhaps has always been, one of the Church’s most significant challenges.

The recent tragedies which caused the deaths of four miners at the Gleision Colliery near Cilybebyll, Pontardawe, and one miner at Kellingley, North Yorkshire, were a reminder that there are still UK mines producing coal and that men risk their lives to bring that coal to the surface.

Some of us will remember the Aberfan disaster in which a colliery spoil tip collapsed causing a landslide which buried a Primary School, killing 116 children. This was an unusual sort of mining disaster. The ‘usual’ kind involved the men who worked underground. Mining is safer now that it once was and there are far fewer working mines than there were 60 years ago. Over the course of 65 years from 1844, there were 16 separate incidents that caused loss of life – that’s one every four years. 918 men lost their lives in those accidents, all except two incidents having been caused by gas explosions. These statistics are not relating to national mining disasters, but are only those that took place in the Rhondda Valley coalfield.

While the UK coal mining industry is much smaller than it was, coal continues to be mined in large quantities elsewhere. China, the largest coal producer in the world, has 5 million workers in the industry. It also has the highest number of deaths. In 2006 in China, 4,749 miners died in thousands of separate accidents.

The reality is that working underground, in a cramped and hostile environment, is unpleasant at best and highly dangerous at worst. People will often choose to do this work because it is either well-paid, or the only work to be found where they live. Perhaps we have forgotten that mining is like this, perhaps because of those Chilean men who escaped from their collapsed mine unscathed last year. We rejoiced with them, but perhaps it made us imagine that this is what will always happen. That this is how it will always be.

I’m sure that there were as many prayers offered for those four men at Gleision Colliery as there were for those 33 men at Copiapo in Chile last year, but miracles would not be miracles if they happened in every circumstance. Everybody knows that everybody dies, but some times, just some times, a miracle occurs. Then, we should not ask why or why not death does not visit. We should simply rejoice.

What happens if nobody dies?

I’ve been watching Torchwood: Miracle Day, the latest series in the spin-off from Doctor Who. When it started, Torchwood was advertised as ‘Doctor Who for grown-ups’, although many grown-ups think that Doctor Who is also for grown-ups. The difference is probably in some of its adult themes and its post-watershed timeslot. ‘Adult themes’ in the context of Torchwood tends to mean that Captain Jack Harkness gets the opportunity to allow his sexuality free rein. Otherwise, Torchwood – an anagram of Doctor Who – has given its creator, Russell T. Davies, a platform to play around with political and philosophical ideas that are present in Doctor Who, but less appropriate for a younger audience and a format in which the world has to be saved every 40 minutes.

The premise of Torchwood: Miracle Day is that for a reason yet to be disclosed no one has died since a day the media dubbed ‘Miracle Day’. While this seemed at first to be a good thing, it has quickly been found to be a bad thing. The world’s population has begun to spiral out of control. Hospitals can’t cope with people who are sick, but who are not dying, thereby freeing up beds for others. A&E triage has had to be reassessed in that minor injuries get to be treated first because there is no ‘30 minute window’ to treat serious cases before they die, because no one dies. Foetuses with severe impairments that would normally auto-abort go full term and are born. In other words, there is an unexpected downside to immortality.

Just as an aside, there has been no mention so far of the impossibility of abortion. If this were real, it would also prompt questions about how and when life begins. But perhaps this will come out in future episodes.

This theme of immortality is one that has frequently occurred in Doctor Who. The Doctor is effectively immortal and the spin-off character Captain Jack shares this trait. On the other hand death is ever present. In ‘Forest of the Dead’, an episode in series four, a voice-over, River Song, one of the Doctor’s companions says: When you run with the Doctor, it feels like it'll never end. But however hard you try you can't run forever. Everybody knows that everybody dies and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever for one moment, accepts it. Everybody knows that everybody dies. But not every day. Not today. Some days are special. Some days are so, so blessed. Some days, nobody dies at all. The context of this quotation is of interest to those who like to look for faith issues in Doctor Who in that it takes the idea of being saved in an unusual new direction and offers a suggestion regarding the nature of an after-life.

If we bring together these story-lines from Torchwood and Doctor Who, we get an interesting starting point to consider the importance of death and dying. ‘Everybody knows that everybody dies’, but the Doctor refuses to give in to death. ‘Everybody knows that everybody dies, but not every day and not today’, is the starting point for Torchwood: Miracle Day. But how much of a miracle would this be? How important is it for humanity, that we die? How important is it that life is framed by birth and death?

The point of praying for healing and, the much rarer, praying for the dead to be raised is not so that no one dies it is so that some days are ‘blessed’. It is also a demonstration that God does not accept death, in the sense that he does not bow to the inevitability of death. God controls death, because God allows death to happen. One might even say that God has created death in the same way that he has created life. Without death life is not eternal, it is interminable.

I like the idea – John Polkinghorne’s, I believe – that human beings have hardware and software. The hardware dies, but the software can live on. It can be saved. Perhaps our destiny is not to live with God in the clouds, but in The Cloud.

A Modern Parable

There was once a poor man who had a prized lamb. She was so tame that she had become part of the family. There was also a rich man who had lots of everything, but he was jealous of the poor man and his lamb. The rich man was very powerful and he took the poor man’s lamb, leaving the poor man bereft and distraught.

What was the poor man to do? He loved his lamb, but he didn’t have much money. How could he get the rich man to return his pet lamb? Then he had an idea. He would set up a number of websites in which he would give details of what the rich man had done. He would contact the rich man’s clients and ask them if they knew what sort of man they were dealing with. He would post videos of the rich man playing with the poor man’s lamb, so that everyone would know what the rich man was really like and what he had done to the poor man.

Although the lamb rather liked living with the rich man, as she got a better class of food, she eventually returned to the poor man’s home where they hoped to live happily ever after. However, the police knocked at the poor man’s door and accused the poor man of being mean to the rich man and causing him psychological harm. But the poor man insisted he was within his rights to do what he did. Eventually the poor man was asked to tell his story to a wise old prophet, called a Judge. The Judge decided that the poor man had been right all along and that the rich man couldn’t expect to get away with doing such a thing, after all, who did he think he was, an Old Testament King?

This is, roughly speaking, the story of Ian Puddick, accused of harassing Timothy Haynes, a wealthy City boss, via the internet, after he discovered that Mr Haynes was having an affair with his wife. It is hard to know quite how Mr and Mrs Puddick’s relationship has survived Mr Puddick’s onslaught against Mr Haynes, but apparently it has done so. Mr Puddick’s argument was not specifically related to his wife’s affair, but to the reaction of the authorities to Mr Haynes’s wealth and power. His own attitude to his wife’s part in the affair is less clear.

The day after Ian Puddick was found not guilty, it was reported that Brian Haw had died. Brian Haw was the peace campaigner who set up camp on the pavement outside the Houses Parliament in 2001, where he continued to live until hospitalised at the beginning of this year. On hearing of his death Tony Benn said:

“Brian sacrificed his life in his work for peace and against the Iraq war, and although he did not succeed in stopping it, what he did and said and the many hours of the day and night he devoted to it kept alive a flicker of hope in the hearts and minds of people who shared his view. Brian did not stop the Iraq war, but he will be remembered as a man who stood against it and put his life at the disposal of those who were against that hideous operation.”

Mr Haw’s father had been one of the first British soldiers to enter Belsen Concentration Camp at the end of the War. A committed Christian, Mr Haw Senior was traumatised by what he had seen and he took his own life in the church kitchen when Brian Haw was 13. Brian Haw was also a devout Christian and at one time spent 6 months training to be an evangelist. This led to his aim to bring peace to the world. In the 1970s he sang carols in the most hardened Loyalist and Republican districts in Northern Ireland. At the end of the 1980s, inspired by John Pilger’s documentaries, he went to the ‘Killing Fields’ of Cambodia. He was there for three months, but when he returned home, he was disappointed to find a lack of interest in what he had witnessed: “My church gave me 10 minutes in a midweek prayer meeting to talk about genocide.”

His next enterprise was to use his minivan to take disadvantaged young people on day trips, but this was met with abuse – verbal and physical – by other local residents. Finally, in 2001, he set up the Peace Camp, decorated with pictures of bloated Iraqi children and placards with wild accusations which were notable for their somewhat erratic spelling.

Brian Haw divided opinion. There were those, like Tony Benn, who supported him, but there were others who considered that there was little to choose between him and the rats and mice that infested the camp.

The modern parable doesn’t really work as a comparison for either Ian Puddick or Brian Haw. If Mr Puddick had come up against King David, he wouldn’t have been around to have fought back. If we were looking for a Biblical comparison for Brian Haw, it could be John the Baptist. Except, if Brian Haw had faced Herod Antipas, rather than Tony Blair, he may not have survived to have died in his bed.

However, both of these men are examples of people who have exercised a prophetic voice: one for his own ends and the other for what he saw as the good of humanity. What links both men is that neither worried about what anyone else thought of him. This is also what links these people with their Biblical counterparts. The means may be different, but Brian Haw’s words should challenge us: “My church gave me 10 minutes in a midweek prayer meeting to talk about genocide.”

I feel that I can’t ignore this week’s big news story, which is that the West’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, was shot dead in his home in Pakistan in the early hours of Monday morning. How we were supposed to react to this news? Bin Laden was the leader of an organisation that was responsible for the deaths of many thousands of people not just in the USA and Europe, but also in the Middle East and in Pakistan. Yet I’m sure I’m not alone amongst you in finding some of the scenes of rejoicing at his death rather hard to stomach. A quotation from Martin Luther King has been doing the round this week:

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. ... The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

Jesus seemed to understand this idea of hate begetting hate and, I suspect inadvertently, Hillary Clinton, put her finger on the same point in a speech in Italy on Thursday:

Osama bin Laden's death sent an unmistakable message from the international community in its stand against extremism, the battle to stop al Qaeda and its affiliates. It does not end with one death and we have to resolve and redouble our efforts not only in Pakistan but around the world.

“It doesn’t end with one death,” said Mrs Clinton, and how right she is, because it never does.

I’m not going to argue that bin Laden’s death was wrong, or any way illegal, because I’m not sure that I would be able to argue that killing Hitler would have been wrong if it could have prevented the deaths of millions of innocents in the 1930s and 40s, but nor can I argue that either man’s death is the way of Jesus.

Wonders of the Universe

I’ve been enjoying Brian Cox’s latest science series Wonders of the Universe. Having studied Physics as part of a joint honours degree, albeit a long time ago, I feel ashamed that so much of the first programme on ‘Time’ came fresh to me. If it left me with nothing else, my time studying Physics has given me an interest in what we now call ‘popular’ science. What struck me most about Prof. Cox’s TV lecture was the immensity of both time and space – yes, of course I already had an idea that the universe was big and that light from stars can take hundreds of years to reach us. I just hadn’t realised quite how big the universe is, or how young it is.

It seems that the universe is 13.7 billion years old – I knew that – but I didn’t know that there is a calculation that says that the universe is likely to last for 1x10¹⁵⁰ years. In a similar vein, if we took away every star and galaxy that we can see we our most powerful galaxy it would make not discernable difference to the mass of the universe.I'm not sure whether or not this includes dark matter and dark energy, but it doesn't seeem to matter a lot in the general scheme of things.

The place of life in this universe is interesting. It is an issue which Christians have debated with non-believers, because of the need for certain conditions to pertain for life to exist. Is this evidence of design or 'just the way it is'? What is certain – at least I think it is – is that it is only life that can reflect on the universe and – and this is my own thought – only life that can move outside the mechanisms of chance or cause and effect.

I guess that the biggest ‘I hadn’t thought of that’ moment came afterwards when I realised what a big deal Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres is in the history of science and faith. I don’t think that Christian people think too much about it and I understand that it took some years for the Church to grasp the import it had. Copernicus’s theory that the earth is only the centre of itself and that just the moon revolves around it is a very big deal. Copernicus argued that our sun is the centre of the universe and that we are on just one among a number of planets that orbit it. In proposing this theory Copernicus was undermining the idea that human beings are special… and I’m not sure that Christian people have ever really got to grips with that.

Sidney Carter wrote a carol in which he questioned whether there might be other mangers on other planets. It’s not one that gets sung too often, but it poses an interesting question and, if Christian people are to seriously engage with the ‘new atheists’ it – and its wider implications – need to be addressed.

I’m still wrestling with these issues and would welcome comments from Christians and others with a view.

This site offers some interesting observations: http://www.faithinterface.com.au/science-christianity/christianity-and-science-natural-links

A Good Samaritan - or just a decent bloke?

2,000 years after Jesus first coined the expressions, we still speak of turning the other cheek and going the extra mile. So, does this mean that we taken onboard this teaching of Jesus?

I don’t think that it does, because the problem with these expressions having become proverbial is that they have also been watered down.

David Beckham was in the local news the other day because he was said to have been a Good Samaritan. This is how motorist Paul Long described his ordeal in the Daily Mail. ‘I was on my way to [take the children to] … school when the car packed up in the middle of a very busy roundabout in Hertfordshire, not far from the A10. I had two kids in the back. Some people were getting a bit angry. But no-one stopped [to help] for ten minutes. Then this car pulled over in lay-by and I saw this figure wearing a hoodie step out. As he came nearer, it became clear it was David Beckham. I was so shocked I just said: "You’re David Beckham." He nodded and then I said: "Can you give us a push over to the side? So he did." Afterwards, an indebted Mr Long said: ‘Thanks David – I love you.’ Mr Long also explained that he had telephoned his wife to ask her to come and help them. However, she only arrived after Beckham had left.

There are so many things that one could say about that story: I like the bit where he says, ‘you’re David Beckham’ as if Beckham is a confused old person in a nursing home, whose forgotten his own name. Then there’s that ‘Thanks David – I love you.’ And finally when the man’s wife turns up after Beckham has gone – he would be counting his good fortune that his wife hadn’t got to him first, bearing in mind that his man-crush on Becks would otherwise have been unfulfilled, but on the other hand, Mrs. Long would have been cursing her luck that she had missed him.

There is one bit of the story that first with the parable of the Good Samaritan, but most of it doesn’t. The bit that does is that when Mr Long saw a man in a hoodie coming towards him, he might have been expecting a car jacking, in the way that the Jew in the parable might have expected the Samaritan to pick up where the robbers had left off. We tend to forget that this story was intended to answer the question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ Mr Long’s neighbour was a man in a hoodie, but he found out that hoodies are people too.

The rest of the story rather undermines the point of the parable and diminishes the idea of what a Good Samaritan is. Now, the A10 is a busy road, but the dangers inherent in using it are not quite like travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho. The man in the parable was mugged and left for dead, Mr Long was stuck – sorry, according to the Daily Mail that should be stricken – in a car that wouldn’t start for 10 minutes. David Beckham stopped to help – and I’m not mocking him for that, as others had passed by on the other side – and then pushed his car off the road. Had Becks towed Mr Long to a garage and paid to have the car repaired, then taken the kids to school and called back to collect them in the evening, there might have been a greater sense of a legitimate comparison. I’m really not criticising David Beckham, as I believe that there is much to admire in the man, but to call him a Good Samaritan, that’s a bit much.

The Way

I recently attended a preview showing of a film that comes out in a few months time. The film is called The Way and it stars Martin Sheen and his son Emilio Estevez, who was also the director. Martin Sheen plays Tom Avery, a Californian ophthalmologist, whose son, Daniel, from whom he has become estranged, has gone off to travel the world. Tom receives a ‘phone call, while playing golf with some buddies and the caller, speaking in broken English, tells him his son has been killed in an accident in the French Pyrenees. Tom decides to go to France to collect his son’s body. After a spending the night in France, Tom changes his plan to have his son cremated. Having found that Daniel had died just as he was starting out on the Camino de Santiago, the 900km pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, Tom decided that he would walk where his son had planned to walk and take his ashes with him. The rest of the film tells the story of this journey and of some of the people he meets along the way.

Martin Sheen is a committed Roman Catholic who raised his son in the faith, but the film is far from being just an advert for the Catholic Church. The Way is an unusual film in that it takes religious practice seriously. While it is not uncritical, it shows that the practice of religion can still have a place in the developed world in the 21st century.

Those of us who have been raised as Non-Conformist Christians do not have activities like pilgrimage as part of our tradition. However, there are some practices with which we are familiar. Regular prayer and Bible study times – probably daily and either in the morning or at night – have been part of the practice of Baptist Christians for much of our history, but we tend to shy away from the word religion, preferring the word ‘faith’. Religion seems to imply doing and saying things by rote, rather than out of a desire to worship. The derivation of the word ‘religion’ is disputed, but one suggestion is that it has to do with being bound to God. John Fawcett’s hymn, Blest be the tie that binds, is referring to the bonds of fellowship, but often we also need help in keeping up our relationship with God and at such times religious practice can help. A 900km pilgrimage might be beyond us, but surely a pattern of regular readings and prayers are not.

A Thought for Epiphany

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.

Isaiah 9:2

One of the themes that connects the seasons either side of Christmas – Advent and Epiphany – is light. A number of artists in the 16th and 17th century painted a scene that was usually called The Adoration of the Shepherds. A common feature in all of these paintings is that the faces of the people crowding around the manger are illuminated by the light that emanates from the baby lying there. This use of light is striking although not all artistic representations of the birth of Jesus use light in quite that way. In many ways, light is comforting: the lights of port as a ship comes towards harbour; the lights of home after a long journey.

At the end of November a photograph was published in a newspaper that had been taken of the village Swaledale when the snow hit Scotland and the north of England. The photograph shows houses across a snowy landscape are lit by a warm glow as dusk settles over the valley and it looks a cosy and inviting scene.

The idea that people find cottages with lighted windows to be an attractive sight has made a fortune for Thomas Kincade. Kincade is the man who paints the scenes that have been printed an hung in thousands of homes and been put on thousands of jigsaws . An earlier American artist, Edward Hopper, painted Nighthawks, by an earlier American artist, Edward Hopper.

Both of these artists have used the attractive quality of light in their paintings – one of a rural cottage, the other of an urban all-night diner. Both paint their subjects in a stylised fashion, but while one presents a cosy, fairytale image that could be a still from a Walt Disney animated film, the other tells a different story. We wonder what brings together these four characters in Hopper’s Nighthawks. The couple have perhaps been out on the town, but what of the man sitting alone? What bills must the server have to pay that makes working alone through the night a necessity?

Victoria Wood made a documentary a few years ago about weight-loss dieting. She had a lot of interesting things to say about why people are large and want to be smaller. Her conclusion seemed to be that we eat to fill an inner emptiness. She said this: ‘It’s the burger bars that shine out into the darkness. It’s the Chinese chippies. It’s the kebab shop. Food and light and human contact. They are warm and it’s a cold world.’

It can be a cold world and I remember thinking at the time that it is a sorry reflection on us in our churches when the fast food outlets are the places that give the warmest welcome. Warmth, food and light and human contact – these wouldn’t be bad things to offer as part of a church’s mission statement.

But it’s light that I’m thinking about here and up until now I have been concentrating on lights that are warm and comforting, but there are other sorts of light.

Shining a light into dark corners doesn’t always go down well – just ask Julian Assange. Mr Assange is on bail awaiting extradition for charges filed against him in Sweden. However it’s probably safe to safe to say that other countries would like to get him into court, because Wikileaks, his website, has shone a torch on a lot of places that a lot of governments would have preferred to have kept out of the light. Now, I’m not sure that I want everything that our government says to any other government known. Just as it seems reasonable to have privacy in personal relationships, so it’s also reasonable that there should be privacy in international relationships. However, it does seem right that light be shone on the corrupt and unjust practices of governments and international business. I guess that what we need is someone who has unimpeachable integrity and who is willing to give himself completely in the cause of justice and whose very life – and death – radiates light. But where might we find such a person?

I guess that those artists from the classical period knew where to find that person. They saw that the child in the manger shines with a light that both warms and exposes. Maybe we might think of this light as the light that emanates from a lighthouse – warning mariners of dangerous rocks ahead.

There is one final picture that could combine both the warming and the warning elements of light. This is William Holman Hunt’s painting, The Light of the World, the original of which is hung in Keble College Chapel, while a life- size copy can be found in St Paul’s cathedral. The painting is based on a verse from Revelation: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will eat with him, and he with me.” I wonder if it would be wrong to rework the painting and even this verse. It’s just that as I see the figure of Jesus, standing at the door with a lamp, I can’t help thinking that as well as standing at the door and knocking to be admitted, Jesus also holds up a lamp to welcome us home where we will share a feast with him. In the words of Coldplay, “Lights will guide you home”. Jesus, who has walked the path that we walk holds a lamp to light our path and then waits with a lamp by the door to the home that he has prepared for us. If we are prepared to look, we will find our way home and there we will eat and drink with him.