Author Archives: Elizaphanian
TBTM20060416
“…for Christ our Morning Star has RISEN, never again to set…”
Steal this movie
More years ago than I care to remember I was staying with some academic friends at Columbia Uni in NY. They were the two of most left-wing people I’ve ever met – they had been friends with Abbie Hoffman in the 60’s, who if memory serves died whilst I was there, and they put across what seemed an incredibly plausible case that the FBI had poisoned him for his anti-social activities.
I didn’t take them 100% seriously at the time – didn’t really have any context from which to judge – but I take it more seriously these days.
An OK film, but very sad. I’ll have to get my ‘best of Abbie Hoffmann’ off the bookshelf again. He’s really quite an inspiring figure, although the drugs destroyed his mind.
Not conventionally good looking
I am the subject of a remarkably flattering interview in the Colchester Evening Gazette (certainly much nicer than the treatment I got from the Daily Mail!). Something of a ‘testimony’. Hope it does some good.
“The Rev Sam Norton sort of hits you between the eyes….”
he he he he 🙂
A slave to contentious discourses
This has been on my mind much in recent months (it was stuck to the wall above the kettle by my wife – a guarantee that it would come to my attention!):
“My son, in many things it is thy duty to be ignorant, and to esteem thyself as dead upon earth, and one to whom the whole world is crucified.
Thou must also pass by many things with a deaf ear, and rather think of those which belong unto thy peace.
It is more useful to turn away one’s eyes from unpleasing things, and to leave every one to his own opinion, than to be a slave to contentious discourses.
If all stand well betwixt thee and God, and if thou hast his judgement in thy mind, thou shalt the more easily endure to be overcome.”
(I think it’s Thomas a Kempis, but I’m not certain).
It has been on my mind for two main reasons. The first is that it is why I have left behind MD/MF. Losing my temper was a definite sign that I had taken a spiritual wrong turning, so I have resolved to ‘leave every one to his own opinion’ in that regard. I shall continue to outline my own opinions here. The second though, is about thinking of those things ‘which belong unto thy peace’ – which I’m still working on. I’ve been doing more research about 9/11 recently, reading David Ray Griffin’s books, which are excellent. Yet a friend pointed out that a) I will never be in a position to know the truth here, and b) there are many more spiritually fruitful avenues to explore.
So I shall continue to read as widely as I can, but I shall try to attain a little more humility in the face of the truth. Could be difficult. Time to rely on prayer and grace a little more.
TBTM20060415 Holy Saturday
A terrifically gloomy morning. Fog shrouded the beach and the wind blew straight into my face, making the lens of my camera condense drops of water. Hence the strange image. I thought about trying to wipe it and make something cleaner and nicer, and then I remembered what the day was.
How very fitting.
TBTM20060414
Mad vicar
My friends see me as the mad vicar, with a tendency to chase up strange phantoms (like 9/11 conspiracy theories and Peak Oil…)
Have a read of this. I enjoy Giles Fraser, even when I sometimes disagree with him (absolutely not the case on this occasion). I particularly liked this: “In exchange for a walk-on part during major family occasions and the opportunity to be custodian of the country’s most impressive collection of buildings, the vicar promised discretion in all things pertaining to faith: he agreed to treat God as a private matter. In a country exhausted by wars about religion, the creation of the nonreligious priest was a masterstroke of English inventiveness. And once the priest had been cut off from the source of his fire and reassigned to judge marrows at the village fete, his transformation from figure of fear to figure of fun was complete.”
It was precisely because that was my image of the priest that I had a struggle accepting my vocation (I still struggle with it). I think I have too much passion to fit into the establishment box. What encourages me is that the passion is finding an outlet, and seems to be sparking a response. I’m being profiled in the Colchester local paper tomorrow, and Channel 4 want me to take part in a documentary in the autumn.
God is up to something – the Spirit is restless and uprooting the old certainties. I’m more and more convinced that a real capital-R Revival is around the corner.
TBTM20060413
TBTM20060412
