5 years, 1 month, 11 days

It's been a while. In fact, it's been a long while, and many things have changed. Back in the days when I used to update this blog (fairly) regularly, I stuck by the tagline that this isn't a "niche" blog, because there's no such thing as a "niche" person. We are all who we are, good and bad, hopeful and hopeless, misguided, misdirected or just plain missing.

Back in the days when I used to write about all sorts of things, there were some things that I didn't mention. I probably hinted, obliquely, that my mind, attention or affection was sometimes not where it should have been, but I wasn't explicit. I complained a lot about being tired, and as Samuel Johnson nearly said, when a man is tired all the time he probably has things weighing him down.

Why am I here again? Because I am still me. This is still Steve, older and with the potential to be wiser, still the same person who is different every day, every hour; still learning who I am while being me way better than anyone else could be.

So maybe I'll write about that. I might even write regularly.

Well, fairly regularly.

Being Dad

Rachel was getting very fed up with me giving her suggestions on the way to the festival this morning; I was only trying to give her reminders about putting lots of energy into her performance etc, but she had clearly had enough of me going on at her. I had a sudden moment of insight, and explained to her that because I'm her Dad I really want to do the best I can for her, but since I can't sing and I can't dance all I can do is try to give advice, even though she may not want it and almost certainly doesn't need it.

I guess that's the fate of Dads: we watch our children getting more and more capable and talented, and suddenly realise that they've gone past the point where we can do anything useful to help. Watching and supporting is great, but Dads long to feel useful... and sometimes it's hard to let go of that.

Theodore Roosevelt

Another pointed Roosevelt quotation: “If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.”

I've been reading a couple of Art of Manliness articles (here and here) about Roosevelt, and I have to say I do like his style. I'd heard the story before of him being shot in the chest, reassuring himself that it wasn't going to be fatal and going on to give a 90 minute speech, but although I agree with the commenter on one of the articles that it "makes me tired just reading about him", he's a pretty darn inspirational guy.

"Searching For God Knows What" by Donald Miller

After enthusing over "Blue Like Jazz" and getting everyone I could to read it, I thought I'd put a bit on here about "Searching For God Knows What". Quite often I'll read a book I really like through once quickly and then again more slowly, but I have to admit that I had to read "Searching..." again from the beginning before I understood some bits of it. This has a lot to to with Donald Miller's style: he offers lots of fragmentary episodes and thoughts and it's only after picking up quite a lot of the pieces and looking at them that I was able to get an idea of the whole picture. Then again, one of the clear aims of the book is to talk about why Christian self-help books, or a theology of three easy steps, are missing the point, so there's an (I guess) conscious avoidance of that kind of formula. Basically he expands on some of the ideas in "Blue..." and looks in more depth at what it means to have a relationship with God as a person, rather than as some kind of heavenly vending machine, giving out miracles and tickets for heaven in return for the appropriate amounts of faith and prayers. There's an assumption that, as an unregenerate social constructionist, I was happy to go along with, that we are created so that someone or something else tells us who we are. So we're intended to find our identity through the first and only perfect relationship: with God, in Eden. But then sin spoils this, and from then on we're spending all our time looking for someone or something else to tell us who we are. Miller uses a couple of different analogies to talk about the effect of sin: Chernobyl and Mount St Helens. Both are examples of a one-off catastrophe that has ongoing effects, and Miller says that this is like the effect that sin has on the human heart: we're conscious that we've become imperfect, and so we get into one of the main themes of the book: the lifeboat game. This is the game that still often gets played with small children and at team-building events - you have to imagine that there are certain people in a lifeboat, and one of them must die if the others are to live. How to make the decision about who is to die; in other words, how do we make decisions about other people's (and our own) worth? Miller goes into a lot of depth about the different ways that this game gets played out, and in how many areas of life we compare ourselves and others; how putting others down, establishing who is "in" or "out", distinguishing between one kind of person and another, are all part of the lifeboat game. We may know we're doing it, but we still do it as long as we're aware that sin has somehow ruined us, has separated us from the one perfect relationship that lets us know who we are. We still try to find our place in a pecking order, desperate not to be down at the bottom and having our worst fears about ourselves confirmed by a jury of our peers. The message of Jesus, in this context is this: Stop playing the lifeboat game. Give up trying to be rich - give away your goods to the poor. Give up trying to be in with the right crowd - go and spend time with the people nobody else wants. Be small, be last, be as unimportant as a little child in a grown-up world. And do this, not because it's a step in a four-step programme, or because it's a spiritual discipline, but because Jesus through the cross has taken away the sin that scarred and disfigured you, and through the resurrection has opened up the way to a relationship with the Father that can truly let you know who you are, and through the Spirit is transforming you more and more into the likeness of the One in whose image you are made.

Now this (especially the last bit) is my understanding of "Searching..." rather than an accurate precis, and is more a statement of how it is fitting in with my thinking at the moment anyway. As Miller points out, in this book and elsewhere, relationships with real people are much scarier than interacting with a vending machine, and I suspect that a lot of the time I still think of God as some kind of unpredictable/benificent/powerful vending machine, rather than as a person whom I would like to get to know better. I'm encouraged, however, by this book and others, to keep taking steps towards finding out more about who God is, and finding myself more in him.

Me in a nutshell

I read hopeful, inspiring books on Christian spirituality so that I can spot myself in the negative descriptions of what not to do or what happens when things go wrong; so I can think "Yep, that's me. Wow, am I messed up!"

And nine times out of ten if I see someone I know in Tesco I look the other way and pretend I haven't seen them.

On the other hand...

I've just seen the following quotation here, and it fits beautifully with some thinking I've been doing about the idea of pilgrimage. If I ever get asked to do a talk at church again, that's what I'll talk about.

"To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and be transformed is to be a pilgrim." – Mark Nepo

WWJD

I think that one of the problems with asking what Jesus would do in any given situation is that we often don't know. For one thing, Jesus was a little unpredictable. People were surprised, even scandalised by his actions. So what we usually ask is "What do I think Jesus would do?" which comes down to our perception of Jesus and our own morality. I think that the honest version of the question is to ask what I would do if I was more like the person I think Jesus wants me to be. And that is what's been occupying my mind: moving away from asking how I can become different or better or nicer or holier, and moving towards asking what might happen if I allowed Christ to form me into his planned version of me. There's a whole lot of other stuff too about God wanting us to be ourselves, not some kind of holy clone; and what being made in the image of God is all about. But I'll try to put down those thoughts more clearly another time.

Caffeine and Christ

I'm still feeling ill after drinking way too much coffee at last night's Conversation. I was still hyped when we got to the pub but started a comedown during the quiz, which wasn't fun: when we got there I put seven or eight names on the picture sheet as soon as I looked at it; by the time we got to the results I didn't care if we won or not, I just wanted to go home and curl up in a ball. Of course when I did get home and go to bed, I still couldn't sleep for hours.

Had an interesting few moments during Conversation, when PV asked me how I thought my talk had gone, and other people around the table shared what they thought of it - or more specifically what it had been about. I know that people never hear exactly what I think I'm saying - on account of them not being me - and I'm sure that God uses what I say in order to push different people in different directions, but it was a shock to hear not only what people thought I'd said, but how they had made changes in response to it. A real "the medium is the message" moment: just because I was standing at the front, people attributed more importance to my words than I expected them to. PV also mentioned that he wants the new curate to do some "sermon training" with me, Si V, Jon Kitching and Anthony Scammell, which I think I feel enthusiastic about: at least I feel moderately enthusiastic about the chance to learn some stuff and try it out in practice, though less enthusiastic about the time commitment.

There's also a nagging worry for me that this is a big temptation to fall into Pride; another chance to start thinking how amazingly good I am at doing stuff for God: I know it's a very short step from there to doing stuff for me and my benefit. Being high on caffeine is a bit like being drunk, in that it does bring out the less nice side of me, and I suspect that I was coming across last night as more than a bit opinionated; I certainly think I was saying stuff that would make people think I was clever rather than help people to feel I was listening to them and trying to join them where they were.

At the moment my feeling is that if I can be brave enough and unselfish enough to genuinely give myself and my life to Christ, then he will help me to become who I am, far better than if I try to change myself. And if I truly become myself in Christ by relinquishing all claim on my own life, then (and only then) can I genuinely and effectively use who I am to serve God and others without being afraid that I'm still a spoilt child shoulting "Look at me! Look at me!"

Choice, identity, Kingdom

Some quick and not necessarily coherent thoughts. C.S. Lewis, in The Problem Of Pain, says “There is no reason to suppose that self-consciousness, the recognition of a creature by itself as a ‘self’, can exist except in contrast with an ‘other’”, which is a much better way of putting some of the ideas in my previous post. Combined with the idea that a choice-driven society, by reducing frustration of desires, reduces our ability to relate to or even conceive of the ‘other’, it’s not an enormous step to suppose that living in a consumer society leads to the erosion of the self, and that such erosion is shown through features of contemporary culture such as identification with celebrities in an increasingly cultic fashion, a makeover culture that focuses on constant renewal and reinvention of the self through possessions and environment, and a paradoxical presentation of violent and erotic objectification as both abhorrent and universally pervasive.

The other idea that I’ve been thinking about, motivated partly by discussions on Luke in our small group, is the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven. What does this mean? How does it differ from ideas about heaven as a place we go when we die? Well, the Kingdom of Heaven is a phenomenon that produces both an affective and a behavioural response – like someone finding treasure in a field: they change what they are doing with their life (they go and sell everything they have to buy the field), but they do this related to an emotional response. This isn’t a business decision, made with an eye to the balance sheet. This is a sequel to an emotional response, to a feeling that is literally life-changing. Lots of parables talk about rejoicing and throwing a party as the normal response to the Kingdom of Heaven impacting on your life. And just as an aside, how often does evangelism try to reason people into Christianity, as if the response to finding a lost possession was to sit down and think “Hmmm… I reckon that this is worth throwing a small-to-medium sized party”? And how often is joy the defining characteristic of Christians?

Crucially, it seems that the Kingdom of Heaven is something that changes us profoundly, at an identity level, yet also remains separate from us. It is a “present-but-not-fulfilled” entity, an essentially ungraspable fact. Living in the Kingdom requires that we be perfect, as God is perfect – that we strive for the unattainable. Living in the Kingdom means that I am made in the image of the Other; that my identity is derived from that which is ultimately unknowable, that I find myself as I grow closer to the Other, rather than finding the Other as I look more closely at myself. Living in the Kingdom requires that we love our enemies, pray for our persecutors, forgive those who hurt us; not because these are sensible things to do, but because they are precisely the things that are most likely to produce a response of “It’s not really me”. It means that the more intimately I become involved with and connected to that which is not-me, the more I discover myself, until one day I become one with all that is not me, and I become truly who I am.