Misty and Zak have been off, too, over hills and mountains
high with Debbie. In the course of Thursday, Friday and Saturday this week,
they did a total of 42 miles, mostly over the moors around Wessenden. Ellie’s little legs can’t cope with that sort
of thing, as we have discovered, so generally she’s been staying here with me,
either snoring away in the chair (on a strangely basso profundo note for such a small, white dog) or pottering
around the park with Granny.
It was Debbie’s birthday this week, so we did at least sort
of take Friday off, although we didn’t do anything special, other than welcome
her sister, on a flying weekend visit from Southampton, and the whole family
went out for a celebratory meal on Friday night while I did the dog-sitting.
I’ve been trying to progress my “rampside” garden of plants
in tubs, and this week I made significant progress, getting the tubs in place
on their stacks of bricks, with the hurdle currently balanced above them, but
sadly, today, I ran out of topsoil, so I am still unable to finish it. Having said that, the plug plants in their
trays are still progressing well, so with a bit of luck, maybe, this week I’ll
get them planted out.
Gardening is therapeutic, at any rate, certainly when
compared to watching the news. Mr Cameron was quick to warn us that if Labour
got into power at the next election, almost the first thing they would do would
be to get in cahoots with the dangerous extremists of the SNP. So this week, he
set off for Scotland,
to, er, hold talks with the dangerous extremists of the SNP.
The SNP are a very principled party, led by a very
principled leader, who makes it clear what she stands for. Mind you, the last
time we had one of those, it was Mrs Thatcher, and we all know where that
led. Still, it’s good to know the SNP
has principles, such as, for instance, the principle of agreeing to abstain in
a vote on the restoration of fox hunting in return for an extra thirty pieces
of silver for Scotland.
It must be nice to have principles.
Mr Cameron has also been brandishing his principles in
public. Especially his Christian
principles. He isn’t the first Tory
leader to seek to appropriate Christianity to his own ends, of course, Mrs
Thatcher (I need to be careful here, I’ve mentioned her twice – one more time
and she might appear!) was fond of saying words to the effect that it was only
because the Good Samaritan had invested wisely and bought British Gas shares
and his own council house that he had enough money to help the man who fell
among thieves: if the parable were to be translated to the modern-day
xenophobic rat-hole which the UK has been turned into by the Blight Brigade and
their ilk, the Good Samaritan would probably be deported, assuming he managed
to get into the country in the first place.
Actually, that would be a good place to start. Perhaps Mr
Cameron can explain what, precisely, is “Christian” about his proposed
alternative to offering sanctuary to a quota of the Mediterranean refugees:
bombing the boats of the people traffickers at their North African moorings.
Or what, specifically, is “Christian” about presiding over
policies which deliberately set out to damage the poor, bearing in mind that
the meek shall apparently inherit the earth? What is “Christian” about making
the rich richer and the poor poorer, when it says in the Bible that it is
harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to
pass through the eye of a needle?
As a “Christian”, David Cameron should know that “we’re all
in this together” means you’re supposed to love your neighbour as yourself –
unless, of course, your neighbour happens to be ill, disabled, or, worst of
all, on benefits, because then, according to the Blight Brigade, you cease to
be worthy of love and become instead an object of derision, a scapegoat for all
of society’s ills.
I recommend Mr Cameron reinforces his new-found faith by
some judicious Bible study. The texts to
which I would direct his attention are as follows:
Woe unto you, scribes
and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and
have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith:
these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain at a
gnat, and swallow a camel. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but
within they are full of extortion and excess. Thou blind Pharisee,
cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of
them may be clean also. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear
beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all
uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men,
but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. Woe unto you,
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets,
and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous,
It’s Matthew 23: 23-29, if you want to look it up, Prime
Minister. I am sure Mr Cameron won’t
mind me pointing these out to him, because, after all, he did say that he wants
Christians in this country to be more “evangelical”. Because, after all,
“evangelical” always works well, just ask the Westboro Baptist
Church. Or Isis, for that matter. But, says Mr Cameron, apparently
unconscious of the old joke that “if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s
intolerance”, and totally impervious to irony, he thinks that we’ve all been too
tolerant for too long. I disagree. The
one thing that still, just about, differentiates us from the bad guys is the
last shreds of our once tolerant, respectful and caring society. Take that
away, and you can’t fit a fag paper between us and the idiots who stone people,
or cut off their hands, or whip them in public, because it is the will of
Allah. Or God. Or whoever.
In fact, Cameron said something that would not have been out
of place had it emanated from the mouth of a mad Mullah in Saudi Arabia. Basically, obeying the law is no longer
enough to keep you from the attention of the authorities. From now on, presumably, you will be watched
for a variety of reasons, including failing to join the Tory party, or failing
to cheer enthusiastically enough at torchlight parades. They’re going to have a problem with me,
because this week I joined not the Blue Rinse Set, but the Labour Party. This
may well be a mistake, but at least I have done it by direct debit, which is
cancellable without doing too much financial damage. I joined online with a
heavy heart, and in the “reason for joining” field I put that “someone has to
sort out the shambles that has saddled us with another five years of Tory
nuclear winter”. I have previously resisted being a member of any organised
political party, on the grounds that it makes it easy for your opponents then
to turn around and say “well, you would say that, wouldn’t you, because you’re
a Labour supporter”. I haven’t joined the Labour Party to support the Labour
Party, right or wrong. I have joined it
so that I will at least have a voice that might be listened to in the
post-disaster inquest, and a say in how it goes forwards from this point. They certainly didn’t listen to me before the
election, even when I emailed them it, with links. And if they don’t listen
afterwards, the direct debit will be cancelled faster than you can say Tolpuddle
Martyr.
Prince Charles also knows what it’s like to be ignored by
the political classes, at least from the evidence of his so-called “black
spider” letters which were finally published this week in response to a lengthy
freedom of information request dispute. Personally, I don’t see what the fuss
was about: it would have been much more of a surprise if Prince Charles, as a
member of a family that actively enjoys “field sports” (which is what rich
people call ripping animals to pieces with a pack of dogs) wasn’t in favour of the badger cull. Still, it’s good that we live in a Christian
country, one where Tesco, for instance, can instigate a prosecution against
people who were forced to scavenge for discarded food in the bins outside the
back of one of those stores. Fortunately, the judge threw the case out, but as
Joanna Blythman wrote about it in The Guardian:
Paul and Kerry Barker
fit the label of “hardworking families” that politicians bandy about. Or they
did, that is, until Paul Barker had to quit his job after breaking his back while
working as a scaffolder, and post-natal depression forced Kerry to give up her
job at Durham
county council. They finally became desperate enough to steal food from bins
when her benefits were stopped after she missed a meeting earlier in the year.
The couple’s two children now live with their grandparents because their
parents can’t afford to feed them. That’s how grim things are for the Barkers.
No doubt Mr Cameron has matters in hand, probably with a
plan which involves five loaves and two fishes.
For such a pleasant week, at least at home, if not in the
country at large, today has proved to be a complete and utter disaster. I didn’t have enough topsoil to finish
planting out my tubs, and the axle of the front bogie wheel on the wheelchair
came loose yet again and almost tipped me out on the ramp. I just made it back
inside and boarded out of the chair in time to fix it with the Allen key. Why,
when we allegedly have a national health service that is supposed to fix
wheelchairs, are they unable to do so? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question. I
know. It’s because the entire country, including the NHS – especially the NHS,
under the Blight Brigade – is going to hell in a handcart. In those
circumstances, the wheel coming off is actually quite an appropriate metaphor. And yes, I know, these, along with idiot
couriers who can’t tell the time or read a map, and stupid Epson printers that
don’t scan properly and can’t print labels or postcards, are very much first
world problems. At least I haven’t had to watch my kid die from cholera or seen
all my animals starve because the crops failed.
Anyway, I’ve had it with today. Today, a day when I felt both ill and out of
sorts with the world, a day when I have struggled and fought the good fight to
no avail, is the Sunday after Ascension Day. Ascension Day, when Christ was
taken up bodily into heaven, was Thursday, but I largely missed it owing to
spending the day grappling with idiot couriers, see above. In any case, following my brief flirtation
with her last week, I have been exposing myself more fully to Julian of Norwich
(quiet at the back, there.)
No one knows her real name, and she was only designated
Julian of Norwich because she set up as an anchoress in St Julian’s Church, in
that flat East Anglian town. But
whatever her real name was, it is as Julian of Norwich that she has come down
to us.
After briefly revising her writings for last week’s blog, I
actually invested in a copy of The
Revelations of Divine Love, and read it from cover to cover. It’s not that
long. I read most of it at one sitting,
in the driveway, on the end of my wheelchair ramp, on Thursday morning, while
waiting to ambush the dustmen to make sure they took the bin. I contend
strongly that I must have been the only person in England who was simultaneously
engaged in those two particular activities.
Anyway, re-reading Julian of Norwich, several things jumped
out at me straight away, which I’d forgotten, or may not even have noticed,
when I first read it, many years ago, as an adjunct to studying the works of T
S Eliot. The most obvious one was
re-reading the famous passage about the hazel nut.
Also in this he showed
a little thing the quantity of a hazel nut lying in the palm of my hand, as it
had seemed to me, This little thing that is made that is beneath our Lady Saint
Mary, God showed me as little as it had been a hazel nut, and to my
understanding, and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye
of my understanding and thought, 'What
may this be?' And it was generally answered thus, 'It is all that is made'. I marveled how it
might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nought for
littleness. And I was answered in my understanding, 'It lasts and ever shall,
for God loves it'.
The thing that I know now, of course, that I didn’t know
then, is about the concept of the singularity. The science behind black holes
and the big bang was largely unformed back in the 1970s, though since then it
has been developed and published and even re-gurgitated by people like John
Gribben for the “popular reader”, ie me.
Sadly, I dropped physics in the third year, like a red hot brick, never
to pick it up again, so I have a lot of catching up to do. But I do know that apparently at the core of
every black hole there is a point where time stops, according to Einstein at
any rate – the very small, very dense core. Seemingly every galaxy has a black
hole at its centre. It was also,
apparently, supposedly, a singularity such as this, an incredibly small,
incredibly dense particle of matter that was the origin of everything, at the
big bang.
I don’t know what lies on the other side of the singularity,
or indeed if any of the boffins have any idea.
To the puzzled layman (that’s me, folks) physics seems to be stuck at
the moment for want of something to unify the theories of all the big stuff
with all the theories of the small stuff, and take into account string theory
and multiverses as well. I realise
that’s a horrendous over generalisation, which will have physicists and people
of a more scientific bent than myself throwing up their hands in horror, but
just hold that thought, because in a moment I am going to come out with a real
lulu that will have you reaching for your pearl-handled Luger.
I ask this from a standpoint of pure ignorance, so feel free
to shoot the idea down in flames, but why can’t the singularities at the centre
of each galaxy be the portals to the multiverse. You get the other side of the
singularity, and everything starts up again, except you’re in a slightly
different universe, and that universe also contains galaxies with a black hole
at their centre, and so on.
Very good, I hear you cry, but what has this to do with
religion? Well, if God really is this “thing” outside of time and space which encompasses
everything that ever was, is, and shall be, world without end, amen, including
all of the possible permutations of all of the possible universes, where God
has all eternity to listen to the momentary prayer of the dying airman, as C S
Lewis said, the model of the universe I’ve just described would not be
incompatible with this, necessarily. In fact, one could even go further and
posit that it might be infused with an intelligence which would gradually
direct you through several portals until you arrived at an alternative universe
where everything was joy and light eternal and there was no pain and suffering,
where, as Julian of Norwich puts it, “all shall be well and all manner of thing
shall be well” – or “heaven”, as it’s sometimes known.
I realise I am getting into some pretty strange theology
here, and I feel a bit like Galilleo (Figaro Magnifico-oh-oh-oh-oh) must have
felt when he had the temerity to suggest that the earth went round the sun
rather than vice versa. But the more
modern science explores the physics behind reality, the less “real” reality
becomes, and you have to ask yourself, if everything that we think of as being
solid, reliable, and durable, is actually just some sort of flickering
flim-flam of electrical energy, then what is actually real? What’s behind it
all? It could be that the entire
universe is being run by a bloke with a home-made Van-Der-Graaf Generator in a
shed in Droitwich. It could be an old bloke on a throne, with a flowing beard,
and a penchant for hurling thunderbolts – or it could be something so far
beyond our comprehension that we find ourselves in the position of a
Neanderthal hunter-gatherer trying to think of, and describe, a computer.
The problem with this view of religion, of the universe, of
God being in and around everything, is that it doesn’t really allow for any
moral guidance or, indeed, any organisation.
When I have had my occasional thoughts that “all shall be well and all
manner of thing shall be well”, it’s rarely if ever been in the context of a
formal church service. Once, I felt it
in the church at Little Gidding, but I was alone there at the time, and not
exactly taking part in a service – and, given the location, I have to allow for
the fact that I may just have “grafted” the experience onto the moment, because
I was there, in Eliot’s words, “to kneel, where prayer has been valid,” and
that was what was expected of me, “in the draughty church, at smokefall.”
But organised religion has much to say about morality, and
how we should live our lives, and this advice, although based on a 2000-year
old desert survival manual for the Children of Israel, plus the teachings of
Jesus written down for the first time up to a century after his death, is
sometimes apposite. It would undoubtedly be a better world if we loved our
neighbour as ourselves. But it’s also open to abuse, coercion and manipulation,
and justifying bad things because someone somewhere has decided with absolutely
no authority or compassion, that this act, whatever it is, is the will of God,
or Allah, or whoever.
I wrote last week about Julian of Norwich’s attitude to sin,
which can be (very crudely) summed up as being that sin is a learning process
from which we grow nearer to God. I said
last week that I had difficulty with this. There are some people who seem so
deliberately evil that it is almost impossible for me to believe that their
conduct is simply mistaken. But on the
other hand, if you do allow for the fact that we all have a spark of the
divine, the good, call it God or whatever, inside us, and that we are trying to
get back to that happy state of childhood innocence and purity of heart, which
is what the 17th-century Neo-Platonists believed, then there is a
case to be advanced for “sin”, whatever its causes, to be the thing that
obfuscates that process, that sets us back on the journey. This still leaves
unresolved, though, the larger questions of what sin is, where it originates,
and who decides what is a sin and what isn’t, and whether some sins are worse
than others.
Either way, given the “Christian” values apparently espoused
by our political leaders, and the curious absence of any correction from the
Church of England, given how vocal they were before the election, I feel more
than ever now that my church should be a grove of trees, and my choir the
birds, and my holy water the rain that raineth every day. George Fox had the
right idea, and if I could, I’d go up on the moors and shout alongside him,
“Woe unto the Bloody Country of England!”
Who knows what next week will bring. Tomorrow can only be
better, but to be honest, right now, I’m too tired to care.
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