The Rector’s self-image at the moment. He’s been holding off a cold all week, but today, with the benefit of the Saturday morning lie-in, it has descended upon his vital organs like Vogon poetry upon the ears.
This might mean more inane posting than usual.
Which puts into words what I have been trying to push with respect to Mersea vis-a-vis Tesco’s arrival. Wonderful stuff. (HT Purpose More Obscure)
This is by way of a follow-up to the Hauerwas quotation and my post on Tearing Down The Curtain.
This is from James Alison’s book ‘Undergoing God’:
“I’d like to close with a story which I think illustrates the elements of what I think True Worship in a violent world looks like, and is about. It is a story which I have gleaned from Chris Hedges’ book War is a force that gives us meaning… Hedges, a war correspondent who covered the Bosnian war extensively, tells of meeting the Soraks, a Bosnian Serb couple in a largely Muslim enclave. the couple had been largely indifferent to the nationalist propaganda of the Bosnian Serb leadership. But when the Serbs started to bomb their town, Gorazde, the Muslim leadership in the town became hostile to them, and eventually the Soraks lost their two sons to Muslim forces. One of their sons was a few months shy of becoming a father. In the city under siege, conditions got worse and worse, and in the midst of this Rosa Sorak’s widowed daughter-in-law gave birth to a baby girl. With the food shortages, the elderly and infants were dying in droves, and after a short time, the baby, given only tea to drink, began to fade. Meanwhile, on the eastern edge of Gorazde, Fadil Fejzic, an illiterate Muslim farmer, kept his cow, milking her by night so as to avoid Serbian snipers. On the fifth day of the baby having only tea, just before dawn, Fejzic appeard at the door with half a litre of milk for the baby. He refused money. He came back with milk every day for 442 days, until the daughter-in-law and granddaughter left for Serbia. During this time he never said anything. Other families in the street started to insult him, telling him to give his milk to Muslims and let the chetnik (the pejorative term for Serbs) die. But he did not relent.
Later the Soraks moved, and lost touch with Fejzic. But Hedges went and sought him out. The cow had been slaughtered for meat before the end of the siege, and Fejzic had fallen on hard times. But, as Hedges says: When I told him I had seen the Soraks, his eyes brightened. ‘And the baby?’ he asked. ‘How is she?’
This for me is the sign of True Worship: not only the complete lack of concern about his reputation within his own group; not only the refusal to believe the lies about the despised other whose fault it all was; not only the daily trudging, for fourteen and a half months, through the dawn with milk before the snipers could see well enough to shoot. But the brightening of the eyes at the contemplation of the baby in whose jagged-edged creation he had found himself playing a part.
This attempt of mine to dwell with you in the maior dissimilitudo leaves me with a certain fear. It is the fear that True Worship in a violent world is going on all around us, particularly unnoticed by those of us who have a strong interest in Worship and liturgy, and are thus particularly likely to succumb to the attractiveness of the similitudo and to be blinded to that of which it is supposed to be a sign. I ask you to pray with me that our deliberations and our liturgies be part of our being inducted, even if it be kicking and screaming, into finding our role in the jagged edge of creation and the brightening of the eyes.
(The full text of this chapter, with an explanation of the obscure terms at the end, is available here. Which I wish I had discovered before typing all of this out :o)
Paul Kingsnorth tells it like it is. Great cartoons as well (from here).
“Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.”
Go read the whole thing, it’s marvellous. Not just that, it is the medicine that my soul needs.
This is because yesterday’s picture may not have been the clearest.
“Remember remember the 5th of November, gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.”
So, for non-UK readers, it was a reference to the burning of a human effigy that will take place this weekend on this bonfire. Tho’ I understand he’s not called ‘Guy’ anymore, he’s called Osama.
Sorry to have been even more obscure than usual. But just because I’m on a roll:
Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to ______. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.
Discovered something interesting about Mersea tonight. The tide was up at 7:10pm, covering the Strood – which was extremely bizarre, as it shouldn’t have been, according to tide tables etc. But: mild westerly wind (25mph or so) and low pressure (1006) obviously count for more than the tidal movement itself (supposedly only 3.8m – and it covers the Strood from about 4.6m or so). Pressure is much more important than I thought.
Which means that when we get low pressure, strong wind AND an expected high tide – that’s when we get 1953. Which is going to come, at some point.
In his ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’ Hauerwas writes:
“… those who identify with a nonviolent stance are often challenged with ‘But what would you do if…?’ The dots are usually filled in with a description of a case where it seems absolutely essential, and certainly for the greatest good, to use rather than refrain from violence. Such cases are usually enough to convince others that nonviolence simply cannot be justified as an unqualified principle. It seems self-evident that violence at times is necessary. Of course everybody assumes that it is always better to avoid the use of force if possible, but it seems that something is decisively wrong with any ethic that rules out the legitimate or even tragic use of violence before the fact. Yet that seemingly self-evident presupposition ironically contains a deterministic view of our existence that I expect few of us would be willing to accept. For it is my contention that if we are genuinely nonviolent we can no more decide to use violence even if the situation seems to warrant it, than the courageous can decide under certain conditions, to be cowardly.”
A part of Hauerwas’ argument is precisely that we need to re-imagine what it means to act in the world, so that our own characters flow from a Christian narrative, not a narrative that has been predetermined by the (fallen) world. So the task of the Christian church is to shape people who are non-violent, who do not contribute to the cycle of violence that so defaces the image of God in our common humanity.
This I believe to be true.
It is a struggle that must, first and foremost, be won in our imaginations. For when a man entertains the conception of an evil which would seem to necessitate a violent response, that in itself is a corrupt use of the imagination. It is an imagination driven by fear; fear of pain and suffering for oneself or for another. It is also an imagination that is formed by worldly conceptions of what it is to be human – for example, that through the sharing of a genetic inheritance with violent chimpanzees, we too have a violent genetic inheritance.
This is my struggle. In particular, I need to strengthen my Christian imagination, so that I can bring a suitably Christian vision and hope to the expectations of imminent apocalypse.
Such an imagination is not a Christian imagination. To conquer violence without can only proceed from the conquering of violence within – and that means the conquering of the fear within. To achieve this, the imagination has to be taught and strengthened and fed through the contemplation of peace; and, principally, the prince of peace. For it is only through such contemplation and nourishment that the disposition to nonviolence is first formed and then established as a virtue within the faithful person. The imagination of the world must itself succumb to the imagination and the imaging of Christ.
What must be held before the heart of the faithful is the icon of death being conquered, so that the faithful no longer have any fear of death. Instead they have perfect love, which casts out fear.
A different way of saying this is to say that our image of God within must be awakened. For if our imaginations are formed by the world, then we will be formed as people in the image of the world – and that is the way of violence. If we allow our own divine image to emerge; if we feed the imagination with the image of the nonviolent God – then we shall become a nonviolent people.
Then we shall live out our vocation as Christians.
Which is my vocation too.
Lord, may we so know your peace in our hearts that we may ever trust in you to be our defence; our ever present shield in danger; through Christ our Lord, Amen.
(My thanks to Patrik, whose comment here has remained with me, and helped me greatly.)
Well- very readable, otherwise I wouldn’t have got them finished by now, but as novels, rather than as historical sketches, they are ultimately very disappointing. Totally arbitrary changes in characterisation in many places (that of Ishmael is the most gratuitous and striking); no development of some of the most interesting characters; much less exploration of the philosophical problems – they even start reproducing quotations used as chapter headings that they have used several times before. Not good.
Glad I’ve read them – they’ve re-introduced me to the Dune universe so I’ll now re-read the whole sequence again – but I can’t see myself re-reading these ones.