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Advent 2015 – 30th November

advent, Other cool stuff, random thoughts

‘How beautiful on the mountain are the feet of those who bring good news.’

feet Feet are not, generally, all that beautiful. Especially those who have been walking extensively on mountains. Celebrating feast of St Andrew the Apostle, we celebrate that the good news is shared by the faithful walking of the way of discipleship and mission, and that beauty comes not from protecting ourselves from the damage that the world may inflict as we tread out path through it, but from our engagement with the world around us as we bring the love of God to those who do not yet know it.

On that basis, every wrinkle on Mother Teresa’s face (and I’m sure her feet were just as wrinkled) was a mark of beauty, because they were the product of a lifetime of smiling God’s love on others.

The signs of our life’s journey can be traced on our own bodies and minds. The marks that mar our physical beauty can often be the very things that reveal the beauty of our actions – the sacrifices we have made, the ways that we have been hurt and healed, the burdens we have carried either for ourselves or others.

May we walk faithfully and courageously the path that God sets before us, so that all that makes our feet ugly also makes them beautiful.

Advent Sunday

advent, Other cool stuff, random thoughts

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening
into the house and gate of heaven
to enter into that gate and dwell in that house,
where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light;
no noise nor silence, but one equal music;
no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession;
no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity;
in the habitations of thy glory and dominion, world without end. Amen.

So wrote the poet John Donne (1572-1631) in a vision for the ultimate reconciliation between God and God’s creation, especially his beloved and often wayward people. The poem speaks of a unity that we seek and long for, but may only catch a glimpse of in the here and now. So as we look forward to Christmas, when the birth of Jesus ‘draws us to kneel in wonder at heaven touching earth’, the season of Advent invites us to experience the reality of contrast and distance. Advent is a season of contrast: between light and darkness, hope and fear, now and not yet. It is the long night that takes us up to the moment just before dawn when everything is as dark and cold as it can be.

And yet, all through Advent we are invited to look for the ways in which God’s reconciliation is chipping away at the world’s hard-heartedness, the ways that the light of God is shining through the cracks in the world’s darkness. Some years it’s really easy to spot the darkness and hard-heartedness, and really hard to spot the light and the reconciliation. This is undoubtedly one of those years. But we must continue to look for the moments of redemption, and to contribute towards the making of more moments, that others may recognise them. For it is these moments, when we perceive them, that remind us that, against the odds, the trajectory of the relationship between earth and heaven is – ultimately – one of reconciliation.

May this season be for us and for the world a time for the power of God’s ultimate reconciliation to break into the conflict and darkness of our time.

Just a second…

random thoughts

On 30th June, just before midnight (GMT) we all get an extra second – this happens every so often because the rotation of the earth doesn’t take exactly 24 hours (just like the orbit of the earth doesn’t take exactly 365 days, requiring us to have leap years to get back in sync). Brilliantly, there is an international body responsible for monitoring the rotation of the earth and deciding when we need a leap second. You can read all about that here.

This means I will have to wait slightly longer for it to be my birthday – but as a bonus, it means I get to spend slightly longer being in my 30s before I become middle aged.

The question I ask myself, though, is what could we do with that extra second? A second is not a long time, but here are some suggestions (you can always do them earlier in the day if you’re planning on being asleep during the extra second):

Do nothing. Actually nothing – take a conscious, if only tiny, pause, to see what it’s like. If you like it, try a longer one.
Smell the roses. Or whatever – have some sort of sensory experience of beauty that will last beyond the second it takes to do it.
Tell someone you love that you love them.
Kiss someone you love.
Send up an arrow prayer for world peace.
Take a photograph of something beautiful, or interesting.
Smile at someone.
Think of someone you haven’t seen for a while.
Switch your computer off.
Sign a petition.
Store up your spare second and use it to vote in the next election (yes, I know it takes longer than that to vote, if you take into account the queuing up and travelling to the polling station, but to put the cross in the box does just take one second, and has a lasting impact).

Here are some things that take about a second to do, that the world could do without – they’re the ones that came to the front of my mind first:

It takes about a second to strike a match. What if people stopped setting fire to predominantly black churches in the USA?
It takes about a second for a bullet to travel 2500 feet. What if people stopped shooting each other?
You can insult someone or swear at them, or belittle them with a glance, in under a second. That’s a second that could be better spent.
And while we’re at it, it probably takes about a second to throw a punch. We could not do that, too.
Do we ever make judgments about people by the way they look, or dress? That probably takes less than a second. What would happen if we didn’t? Keeping an open mind takes longer.

Reading this through, it’s a load of idealistic sanctimonious rubbish, really, but if having an extra second makes us think about the split second actions (and failures to act) that have a lasting impact, then that’s got to be a good thing. We have the extra seconds every so often (even though they’re a nuisance for certain technological infrastructures) because otherwise future generations would have to make much bigger adjustments. It’s one of the (few) ways in which our current generation is being responsible about the future. Maybe the best use of the extra second is to do something in keeping with that responsibility to the future, that ‘reorientation’ towards the world being at ease with itself.

Set in stone

Other cool stuff, random thoughts

The great sculptor, Michaelangelo, who created some of the most beautiful figures ever to be carved from marble was once asked about his method. He replied, “I simply work on the block of marble, removing all that is not part of the sculpture until only the sculpture remains.”

Nowhere is this process more in evidence than in his unfinished ‘slave’ sculptures. Michaelangelo was commissioned to create them in 1505 by Pope Julius, for the Pope’s own tomb – there were supposed to be thirty in total, but the Pope died soon after planning his own tomb, and the project was never completed. If you ever go to see Michaelangelo’s famous and very perfect statue of David, as you walk through the gallery leading to it you will pass some of these unfinished slaves, exhibited precisely because in their unfinished state, and in the shadow of David, they seem to say something profound about humanity.

They seem to emerge from the rock, some gracefully, some full of struggle, desperate to gain their freedom. And in them we can see Michaelangelo’s process at work. His own expressed intention of freeing the figures that already exist within the stone is reflected in his technique. Almost all sculptors who work in stone tend to block out the main shapes of the whole sculpture roughly, and then gradually fill in the details. Michaelangelo, though, chiselled away at the stone, bringing individual parts of the sculpture to a perfect finish before moving on. That’s what makes the unfinished slaves seem to be freeing themselves from the rock that keeps them captive.

So, on the way to see the chiseled, muscled, perfect, naked manhood of David, you walk through the corridor of the half-emancipated, equally muscled and naked, slaves.

Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to spend some time in Washington D.C. and was able to visit some of the monuments there.

All the capital’s memorials are designed to impress: Lincoln and Jefferson, in particular, are vast figures, and the long view down the mall to the National monument is an exercise in grandeur. You can practically hear the Copland fanfare playing in the background.

And, of course, there is the more recent memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. And this is just the famous ones, in the capital. There are plenty of others, including Mount Rushmore’s faces emerging from the stone of the cliff. All of these memorials set in stone something of the past – figures whose importance was such that their likenesses were considered worth preserving in keeping with their influence – a lasting and substantial tribute to match their lasting and substantial impact. The real shocker is that it took so long for the memorial to MLK Jr to be commissioned, funded, and installed in its rightful place alongside the others.

But there is more to the MLK mem0rial than simply a matter of saying ‘about time!’ The shape of the sculpture reflects words from his “I have a dream” speech: ‘Out of the Mountain of Despair, a Stone of Hope’. The larger rock stands behind the statue, and indeed the figure himself is still emerging from the smaller rock in which it is carved.

It can be no accident that the ‘mountain of despair’ is part of the finished monument, and the figure of MLK Jr, the great champion of equality and civil rights, appears still part-trapped in the stone from which he emerges. Like the unfinished slave sculptures of many centuries before, those parts of the figure that have emerged from the stone are perfectly finished, but much remains to be done. If MLK had lived, he might have echoed that sentiment: freedom and equality have started to emerge, but there is much to be done.

And just as Michaelangelo’s unfinished slaves line the path to the completed David, and, like him, are naked and muscled even in their emergent state, so also the MLK statue occupies a place on the pilgrimage-like route through the many D.C. memorials, and like his fellows, Lincoln and Jefferson, Martin Luther King emerges from the rock as a statesman. His memorial, at least to my eye, portrays him as the greatest president that the USA never had.

A memorial such as this sets something in stone, quite literally. But in this case, what is set in stone is something unfinished, something dynamic, something of the struggle which is still, many decades after MLK’s assassination, ongoing. What better way to celebrate a man’s legacy than in a way that draws our attention to the continuing responsibility on all of us to work on making his dream a reality in our own lifetime.

Minecraft World, Minecraft Church

random thoughts

I am a minecraft novice. There are many things that I know I do not know, and many more that I do not know that I do not know. But I have a world, and I have started to build. Selecting ‘creative mode’ (because ‘survival’ sounded like too much effort), I found myself in a primordial forest, surrounded by trees and vines.

Something hopped past (I have since learned to recognize it as a chicken – so if you were wondering whether the chicken or the egg came first, now you know). I pottered around in the undergrowth for a while, working out how the controls worked. I walked into a few trees. I build a very small hut, put a bed in it. I looked around in the gathering darkness, and thought, ‘this is pretty cool’.

Evening came, and morning came: the first day.

On the second day, I put a roof on my hut, using the same blocks, and managed to build a little pen on the roof for my chicken friend. It laid an egg. I planted a rose bush in the hut (because you can, on Minecraft, as long as you make your floor out of dirt or grass). I pottered around some more. My son pointed out that I could achieve more if I switched to ‘flying’ instead of walking about. I decided to build a tree house, at the top of the tree where I’d built my little hut. I had just laid the floor, when it began to get dark again. I made myself a new bed, rather than bothering to fly all the way down to my hut, because you can, on Minecraft. I looked around and thought, ‘I really like this, it’s fun.’

Evening came, and morning came: the second day. On the third day, I worked on my tree house. I found out how to do windows, and my son showed me how to do doors. To be hospitable, I put in a whole row of beds. And a staircase, and a second storey! I added book cases, a furnace (in case the perfect weather on Minecraft ever changed), and some torches on the walls. I added another chicken coup on the roof (because you can- and even with several chickens it was only quite a small coup and it was confined to the roof – they didn’t take over the whole world or anything). I clicked, and it was so. I looked around at my hut, my tree house, and my chickens, and I thought, ‘this is great – my own little world!’

Evening came, and morning came: the third day.

On the fourth day, my son and my daughter joined me in my world. They built tree houses of their own, and my tree house was designated the community centre. The kids decided that there would be a community rule that you have to spend every other day working on community projects – the alternate days you could work on your own treehouse. So they worked on the community centre, and built connecting paths between the centre and their huts. I made them put fences along the paths, because I’m so rubbish at controlling where I go that I kept falling off. They built a swimming pool, that anyone could use, and some public restrooms (really!). They added a spiral staircase all the way down the community centre’s tree and spawned some pigs in a pen at the bottom of the tree. As it began to get dark I looked around and I thought, ‘you know what? this is awesome, I am interacting with my kids (and showing that I’m not a dinosaur), they turn out to be pretty community minded, and we entertained ourselves all day without fighting’.

Evening came, and morning: the fourth day.

On the fifth day, we had a new rule. We’d sort of been doing it anyway, but we decided it was a Good Thing if we didn’t disturb the natural Minecraft environment any more than we really had to. We decided to stick to using ‘jungle blocks’ because they blended in with the natural environment, and that if we stuck to building in the treetops we wouldn’t have to cut down any trees or dig up the ground. I looked around and was really proud of my little world. As it began to get dark, I realised what was missing – there weren’t any people! Apart from us, the creators, of course. Never mind, it was all still awesome.

Evening came, and morning: the fifth day.

On the sixth day, I raised the subject of people (or ‘villagers’, as my son tells me they are called). He advised against it. He said they’d get everywhere, and ruin it all. He was probably right. So we decided against people. But we did train a couple of wolves into dogs. Later that day, the subject of church was raised. Should our treetop community have a church? The kids said they would get right on that project once they’d finished the swimming pool. I looked at some pictures on the internet of churches built on minecraft and was mind-blown. They were considerably more advanced than anything we had done so far. There was even a replica of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. As night fell, I doubted that our church would be quite on that level of awesomeness. But it was all still great. Especially without the people.

Evening came, and morning: the sixth day.

On the seventh day, it wasn’t a snow day after all, so with much complaining the kids donned their cold weather gear and headed off to school. I thought I might have a break from Minecraft, but it was just too tempting. I thought, ‘I know, I’ll start work on the church.’ That was an error. Without really thinking, I started building. My first step was to fly high up so I could find the biggest area – after all, a church has to be big and impressive, doesn’t it? And then I thought, ‘Which kind of stone shall I use? Sandstone is nice, but this nice grey stone will look more churchy.’ I started laying foundations in the treetops for a massive, stone church.

And then I stopped and looked at what I’d done. ‘Idiot!’ I berated myself (silently, because I am not alone in the house today, despite the children being at school). Why are you building a massive stone cathedral? Everything else here is small and made of jungle blocks. And why are you building a massive stone cathedral when you’ve not even spawned any people to use it? And having suffered cold, stone churches with uncomfortable seating for much of your life, why use your completely free choice about what a church might be like to perpetuate something that doesn’t even fit with the local landscape and, frankly, isn’t the sort of church that the community might need? And are there not other ways to make a building that could point to God? Plus, if you think it’s hard getting a wheelchair ramp put in a real medieval church, just try making one out of Minecraft blocks. But that’s another story (and if you know how to do it, please tell me in a comment!)

So I decided that perhaps today might be a rest day after all. I deleted my vast stone foundation and breathed a sigh of relief. We’ll have another think about the people, and the church, but for the time being, it’s still a pretty good world.

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