postmodernbible

Nick Hornby and my ruminations on the church...

I finished Nick Hornby's latest this morning in the bath!

Basically four people meet up on a rooftop and New Year's Eve.  They survive the experience and the book explores the next ninety days with them...

It's stark reading in places.  I never did find myself lost in mirth!  But I enjoyed the book and would certainly recommend it.

The thing that has stuck with me is Maureen's last comments.  She is a Catholic, with a paraplegic, brain-damaged son.  She frequently refers to his vegetative state and has spent her whole adult life caring for him, nurturing him, clearing up his mess.  Her plight is truly dreadful.  But she is a Catholic - she attends church.  But clearly although the church know of her and her son, they do nothing for her.  There is no support structure, nothing.  In the end, when she goes back to Church and confesses the sin of despair, she is awarded with fifteen Decades of Hail Marys and the priest asks if they can help - of course, by now, Maureen says that they cannot...she has another community of friends.  What were they doing?

Here is what Maureen writes:

And I said, 'Thank you, Father, but I have friends who are helping.'  I didn't tell him what sort of community these friends belonged to, though.  I didn't tell him that they were all despairing sinners.

Do you remember Psalm 50? 'Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.'  I went to Toppers' House because I had called and called and called, and there was no delivery, and my days of trouble seemed to have lasted too long and showed no signs of ending.  But He did hear me, in the end, and He sent me Martin and JJ and Jess, and then He sent me Stephen and Sean and the quiz, and then He send me Jack and the newsagent's.  In other words, He proved to me that He was listening.  How could I have carried on doubting Him, with all that evidence?  So I'd better glorify Him, as best I can.

You see, all the people that help her from outside the Church.  Theologically, I can hack that.  God can easily use non-Christians to provide sustenance for the saints.  But why weren't the church there for her?  Why were her own community not there?  I can't get that!

At Easter People I met a good friend whose husband died two years ago now.  In all that time, she told me, it was the non-Church people who had been of such help to her.  They had supported her, cared for her, loved her.  She was unable to talk of the Church in the same way!  Why!  What is that all about?  Are we as a Church so uncaring as that?  As what Hornby records...and it is not just here but in How to be Good as well!

I'm glad God is better at caring for people than his people are!

Pete

emerging R oui!

This is just wonderful...I fit the bill for some but not for others...how emerging are you!

http://purgatorio1.blogspot.com/2005/11/you-might-be-emerging-if.html

Thanks James for the h.u.!

Pete

Foucault on Deleuze...

Foucault's preface to the English edition of Gilles Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus is just wonderful...

Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia
Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality.  Prefer what is positive and multiple: difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems.  Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.  It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its reatreat into the forms of representation) that posseses revolutionary force.
Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought.  Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
Do not demand of politics that it restore the 'rights' of the individual, as philosophy has defined them.  The individual is the product of power.  What is needed is to 'de-individualize' by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations.  The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.
Do not become enamoured of power.

Wow!

Pete

Update

Apologies to anyone who thought I might have dropped off the face of the earth. 

I haven't. 

Things got a little hectic at College towards the end of term and so I had to get my head down and process a lot of work - including starting a revamp to the website. 

Then, last week I was down in Minehead speaking at Spring Harvest.  I had a great time - speaking with Dotha Blackwood from Moorlands in a seminar zone - repeated twice each morning which was a bizarre experience - then involved in the Celebration planning group for the evenings in the Big Top (5000+!!!).  That was a big learning curve!  I was working with Dotha, Rachel Orrell and Steve Chalke.  All three are on SH's leadership or Council of Management and all three were on the event leadership team.  Then there was me - learning the ropes and trying to be creative and open to see what God as doing and all that.  Good time!  I thought the worship was fantastic - led by Tim Hughes (see below) - did you see Songs of Praise - people keep coming up and saying they spotted me and Theresa!  Ha!

I was shocked by the way in which the meeting is a bit of a juggernaut - they have so much to put into the event and I was pretty amazed that they had any time for worship or spirituality!  But they did!  Tim Hughes was worship leader and made a fantastic job of it.  One night he was even assisted by Daniel Beddingfield!!!

Saturday night, I preached in the Big Top - huge experience for me and I think it went OK - put it this way, I was happy enough to watch it on the TV afterwards in the chalet!  I preached on Psalm 42/43 and developed the concept of seasons of the soul - that like the psalmist we are not expected to be triumphalistically joyous all the time.  I even managed to get some Hebrew into it!  One thing - I preached too long!  Oh well!

This week I am in Scarborough for Easter People - doing an interactive bible study slot each morning which seems to require no bible study (!!!basically I am hosting a chat show where all the other guests do the input!!!) and then preaching in the Spa Hall Celebration on Saturday evening - the way of salvation.  I think I am going to explore the difference between justification and sanctification and two separate elements of salvation - one in the aorist, one in the imperfect!  Guess which is which!

Oh well, that brings you up to date...that is if anyone still reads this...

Pete