Right – now that I have established that this thing works – and, crucially, that I can use it from my mobile phone(!) – I plan to put all my frippery on here, and save the serious and the solemn for my main (Blogger) blog.
And a key element of the frippery is film reviews. Which I have stopped posting on the main blog because it occasioned too many comments from parishioners…
What a cracking little independent zombie film, with a sufficient amount of philosophical wit to make it memorable. Recommended for the non brain-dead, as opposed to those who simply enjoy watching the brain-dead.
If what we do now makes no difference in the end then all the seriousness of life is done away with.
If you accept a) that each person (including yourself!!) is capable of succumbing to evil – which is what the doctrine of original sin amounts to – and b) that an accumulation of power tends to corrupt, ie to increase the chances of that succumbing
A genuine question, and I’m trying to work out the answer (so here I’m thinking out loud).
If Greece defaults – which looks very likely very soon – then there are banks which have made loans to the Greek government which will then not have those loans repaid. This is on such a scale that it is likely that many banks would themselves become insolvent. There is thus great pressure on governments to ensure either that Greece does not default (they’ve lost that one) or, if it does, that the banks are ‘ring fenced’ from the consequences of their actions.
This doesn’t seem right to me.
Assuming Greece defaults (or the other PIIGS) why shouldn’t we let the banks go bust in consequence? After all, it is their decision making which such a fault would put to the test. What would be the malign consequences?
Well, for the ‘average person’ probably not very much. In the UK – and I guess elsewhere – there is deposit insurance, which means that most people’s bank accounts are protected. If one bank goes bust then their customer base is an asset which is then sold on by the auditors who are trying to maximise the asset value from the bankruptcy proceedings. So that side of things is covered.
Those who are richer will get a more or less severe financial haircut, in several ways. Firstly, there is a threshold to the deposit insurance, so deposits above that level would be lost. Second, those who have shareholdings in the bank will – largely – see that investment be destroyed. Thirdly, those who have pensions may be at risk of seeing those pensions lose value if those funds are invested in insolvent institutions.
The thing is, those latter malign consequences I do not see as being anybody else’s business. That is the nature of the free market. If you invest in a company that makes bad decisions then you will likely lose your money. What I most object to is a systemic bias towards privatising gains whilst socialising losses. Or, to put that more simply, I believe that it is shockingly immoral for general taxation to be used to subsidise incompetence and greed. To use an admirable politician’s latest catchphrase, this is simply crony capitalism, and it is corrupt.
At this point the spectre of ‘systemic risk’ is raised. If we don’t stop the banks going bust then civilisation will collapse – I paraphrase, but that is normally the gist. Civilisation is collapsing anyway – and not least because we have ignored the moral foundations of our communities and societies. My view, therefore, is that destroying the notion of moral hazard, making the rich invulnerable to the consequences of their own misjudgements, is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
So I say – let the bankrupt go bust. If we no longer bail out the venal and the incompetent then perhaps there will be a little bit of money left over to look after those in genuine need.
Make sense?
Perhaps Lisbeth can be my Beatrice, “La gloriosa donna della mia mente”, and guide me on.
State of present thinking is: Church is that community of people with whom you are serious about your discipleship of Christ.
What I’m exploring is something which doesn’t focus upon the various activities (worship, service, meetings etc) which end up being debated about and divided over in endless fashion. Rather, I’m wanting to emphasise what those things are for (formation in discipleship) and that this is necessarily a corporate and not an individual activity.
So, being serious about your discipleship of Christ necessarily entails: sacramental worship, mutual accountability, pastoral care, shared study and service and all the rest of it. Church is simply that group of people with whom you do this. In one sense I’m describing a ‘house church’ in that doing this properly can only be done in small numbers – but I don’t see a need to erect a barrier between small groups and the gathered assembly.
Another thing I’m pondering – I’m not sure I’m a member of one. I’m also not sure the role of ‘Church of England Rector’ is compatible with church membership, in the sense that I’ve described it here. All the elements are present in my life, but they are disparate and spread across a number of different groups. That’s not how it is meant to work.
I think the key barrier is one of authority. In what way can a Rector be vulnerable to members of their own congregation? It would mean setting aside the ‘role’ in order to be a Christian brother, which is tremendously attractive. I just can’t see a natural way in which to do that in my present context. Yet I’m more aware than I have been in a while that I need to do this, for my own spiritual health – and, probably, for the health of those communities in my care. Which throws up an interesting line of investigation into what the priest is for in a community – and whether the authority ‘role’ is compatible with what the priest is for.
Still much to think about on this one. It is a work in progress, as are we all.
After all, it would be a shame to let a mid-life crisis go completely to waste
(grin)
This is a line of thought following Sunday’s sermon (Mt 18.15-20), in which I said:
“When was the last time that one Christian in this church admonished another for sinning against them, for falling short of Christian standards? Note this isn’t a passage about one person saying to another ‘you’re not being good enough’ in any particular public way – it is about one person sinning against another. So all the fuss that the church ties itself up about, for example, homosexuality – that largely falls outside of this conversation. No, this is about one person hurting another, and the hurt person saying, not simply ‘you hurt me’ – which I am sure is a complaint that is often heard, but ‘you hurt me because you are sinning and failing in your faith’ – in other words, embedding the pain in a larger context and understanding. Because it is that larger context and understanding that enables transformation to take place, that stops the conversation being simply ‘you hurt me’, ‘you hurt me first’, ‘biff, bash, pow!’ If a community is to mature it needs to be have individuals within it who are strong enough to put aside their own feelings – their feelings of hurt, or betrayal, or broken trust – and see the bigger picture. It is only that larger context that allows God into the conversation.”
So often I see hurt feelings being used as a stick with which to beat other people into submission – we can’t do this because it will hurt so-and-so’s feelings. This is infantile. The spiritual path is about taking control of our feelings – or, better, letting God take charge and shape our feelings. We set aside our own inner responses in order to pursue a larger picture.
A while ago we had an evening reading (we use this great book) which was about our anger. It talked about a situation that provoked a disciple to anger, and then pointed out that in similar situations in the past, the disciple had not been provoked to anger. What had changed was not the external circumstances, but the internal spiritual state of the disciple. In such a situation the Christian response is to thank the person for making us aware of our own internal spiritual disorder, and resolve to improve matters.
This is why we are to use the language of sin, which presumes a shared faith. It means that we can put aside our feelings – that great oceanic and abyssal chaos – and instead set our minds on things above, things which are good, true and beautiful. This is the way in which we cultivate the gifts of the spirit – of love, peace, gentleness, self-control and all the rest. It makes all the sense in the world to point out when someone has sinned against us – for really, with a right understanding of sin, you are pointing out where someone is stabbing themselves in the eye. The escalation to the wider community is not really about establishing matters of justice so much as about establishing the correct diagnosis of what has gone wrong. It is not about blame – for we are not to judge one another – but about healing and transformation. This is why those who reject the community’s judgement are to be ‘pagan and tax-collector’ – in other words, people who are no longer a part of the community. This is a matter of logic, not jurisprudence.
So if people reject the community, and they reject the theology and discernment of the community, then there is no longer a shared language with which to share a common life. To reject that judgement is to reject the faith. I think this is what is meant by ‘what you bind on earth will be bound in heaven…’
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