Kasa no Hone

Lyrics in English:

The ribs of the umbrella

Have fallen apart;

The paper is also torn,

But with bamboo

Tied together.

Do not throw it away.

Though I

Also am torn,

Don't desert me.

Even His Own Brothers - A Poem

Jesus’ brothers said to him, “You ought to leave here and go to Judea, so that your disciples may see the miracles you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world.” For even his own brothers did not believe in him. (John 7:3-5)

1.

He shook off the taunts of the well intentioned:

The right time for me has not yet come.

Had he not said the same to his mother

A few months ago, when the wine had run dry

And the master of the wedding had asked

For assistance? Had he then, any more than now,

Been concerned with social niceties or

The demands of public life? Had he courted

Then, or now, the limelight?

Yet that day the best wine had flowed:

Wine to gladden the heart. Though

Evading the piercing glances of

A public who demanded to know each step he took,

Whose clothes he wore and which brands he would support

When he overthrew Rome, or those who poked him

With sticks and said, Show us a miracle, Christ,

He would not neglect the work he came to do:

The bringing of new wine, the birth of a new kingdom,

In and yet not of this world that he trod.

2.

For you any time is right,

Said the brother whom they did not understand,

The eldest, the crazed one, the public magician who

Refused to turn up to his most glamorous gigs.

The world cannot hate you,

but it hates me because…

By now they had tuned out. They played a flute for him

Yet he would not dance, a dirge but he would not mourn.

There was no pleasing this one.

Back to their homes they went,

To the regularity of wood shaped with chisel and plane,

While in Judea he hid himself until just the right time

To shake up the self-congratulating party with

The harsh, dissident cymbal of the truth.

Boxing Day Poem

A brief scan of Wikipedia to find out about the origins of Boxing Day led me to this interesting tidbit:

In the UK, it was a custom for tradesmen to collect "Christmas boxes" of money or presents on the first weekday after Christmas as thanks for good service throughout the year. This is mentioned in Samuel Pepys' diary entry for 19 December 1663. This custom is linked to an older English tradition: in exchange for ensuring that wealthy landowners' Christmases ran smoothly, their servants were allowed to take the 26th off to visit their families. The employers gave each servant a box containing gifts and bonuses (and sometimes leftover food).

Interested by this, I decided to write a poem about Samuel Pepys and his family Christmas. It's quite silly but I feel like the seriousness of my posts of late warrant something a bit more ridiculous.

Christmas with the Pepyses

Thence by coach to my shoemaker’s and paid all there, and gave something to the boys’ box against Christmas. (From the Diary of Samuel Pepys, 19 December 1663)

In honour of age-old traditions

Wherein, at the festive time of the the year,

Those who had much would generously share

With those in less fortunate positions,

Mr Pepys took his coach to the shop

Of his shoemakers and there paid the lot

Of his bill for the year, and before he did trot

Away in his coach, he chose then to drop

Something to the boys’ box against Christmas.

The expression is odd, though Pepys too was odd

And his diary haphazard: that year he forgot

To write about Christmas Day, which must

Have been a riotous day for the Pepyses.

In one other year, his diary declares that he passed

Christmas Day with his wife and the boy whom he asked,

Or instructed, to read from Descartes before sleepses

And play for his master upon his sweet lute.

His wife sat undressed until ten, at the task

Of fixing a petticoat. (One has to ask

Why Pepys went forth in his waistcoat

That morning while she stayed boxed up at home.

His sympathy for her is clear, however.

Poor wretch he called her, and in such cold weather

A man deserves a vest of his own.)

Pepys slept soundly that night, his mind

In mighty content, he declared.

And ask though we might, if the others all shared

His content, the answer we sadly can’t find.

Of all the crowns Jehovah bears (Christmas Day)

Having said that I would not have time to write anything on Christmas Day, I find myself in the lull period after lots of food and before we have energy enough to do anything else, and am able to post something wonderful that I read last night. It's by my favourite eighteenth-century poet and hymnist, William Cowper, a man who deep depression forced to cling more closely to the truth than more stable minds might have done. This is the last in a sequence of hymns about the names of God, and is wonderfully appropriate for Christmas Day.

Jehovah-Jesus

My song shall bless the LORD of all,
My praise shall climb to his abode;
Thee, Saviour, by that name I call,
The great Supreme, the mighty GOD.

Without beginning, or decline,
Object of faith, and not of sense;
Eternal ages saw him shine,
He shines eternal ages hence.

As much, when in the manger laid,
Almighty ruler of the sky;
As when the six days' works he made
Fill'd all the morning-stars with joy.

Of all the crowns JEHOVAH bears,
Salvation is his dearest claim;
That gracious sound well-pleas'd he hears,
And owns EMMANUEL for his name.

A cheerful confidence I feel,
My well-plac'd hopes with joy I see;
My bosom glows with heav'nly zeal,
To worship him who died for me.

As man, he pities my complaint,
His pow'r and truth are all divine;
He will not fail, he cannot faint,
Salvation's sure. and must be mine.

Pax and Shalom (Advent #16)

And so this is Christmas.

Actually, it isn't. It's Christmas Eve in Australia, but I suspect that, with the busyness of a typical Christmas day, there won't be much time for blogging. So I have decided to end my Advent series here, on Christmas Eve, with this, my sixteenth post.

And Christmas Eve, I think, should be a time to reflect. That's the value, if there is any, in John and Yoko's Christmas classic, the horridly named "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". It causes us to ask the question: are things any different this Christmas than they were the last? John and Yoko certainly don't bring Jesus into it, but He's everywhere in the assumptions of the song. If war should be over and peace flourishing, then why is Christmas any more of a time to wonder, and to mourn, at the lack of peace in our world? Surely only because Jesus came to institute a world of peace, and we have not yet found the reality of that.

Unfortunately, I think we've missed the point of peace.

Many great Bible teachers today, Tim Keller being perhaps the most obvious one, will tell you that God's people were supposed to be a people of peace, shalom peace, deep, abiding peace - most importantly, peace with God. The trouble was, humans couldn't easily live in peace with God, because He is utterly righteous, and they were, and still are, utterly not. So for Israel to be a people of shalom, God had to declare peace with them. Then they could live in peace with Him.

And sometimes that succeeded, and mostly it didn't. Not because God's peace failed in any way, but because Israel failed to live in the terms of that peace. They continually took it for granted, and continually taunted a righteous God with their sins.

The real shame of Christmas 2011 should not be that we have not yet come to live in a world where humans live in peace with each other, but that we still do not know our creator and therefore do not know His Shalom.

You see, when the angels appeared to the shepherds and made that glorious declaration that we love to put on our Christmas cards, they meant far more than we might think:

“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” (Luke 2:14)

Firstly, it isn't quite the same as mere goodwill to all men - generally respecting and liking each other. Far from it. Those words were spoken to a people who were crushed under the yoke of Roman oppression. Did the angel want the shepherds simply to give Christmas cards to the Roman centurions or offer them a cup of tea or a swig of brandy? Was this little more than a cosmic declaration of the kind of good-old-chap chummery that we hear about in stories of enemy armies having a cease fire over Christmas, and the like?

No, it was peace bought with man and God: peace bought by God coming into the battleground to negotiate the terms of peace. And the terms of peace? Here we have to look ahead, to Easter. Here we have to look to the cross.

If John and Yoko and the rest of us really want peace on earth, we need to look to the glorious God in whom we will find the deepest peace. But we need first to accept that we are the problem, and then humbly accept that He is the only solution.

Many will not be willing to accept this - not this year, not the next.

But if, perhaps, you are reading this, then you possibly already know this, or are willing to think about it, or believe it with all your heart. And then, perhaps, you too can help declare the arrival of a peace that may not look like we expect and may be far more humbling for us to find, but a peace which is the deepest, most significant, most sustainable peace that we can ever find.

“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

I am a poor boy too (Advent #15)

There is no Biblical text for today's post. That's because it concerns a story that you won't find in the Bible. You may know it: a poor boy who hears of the news of his king's arrival; he has nothing to offer the king but his drum, which he plays for his king with all his heart.

I used to cringe at this song. It seemed to fit alongside "Little Donkey" and "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" as the least Biblical carols we sing. Then I heard the sublime Future of Forestry's version of it, and everything suddenly changed. The story, I realised, may appear nowhere in the Bible, but that seemed less relevant than what the song was about: a boy with nothing to offer but a drum, a humble drum presumably, to proclaim the coming of the King. He had no gold, frankincense or myrrh to offer; but then neither did the shepherds; neither did Simeon, who had only the wisdom of devout old age to offer the Messiah.

It also makes me think a little about worship: about how feeble and humble our offerings so often are, but how pleased God is with them. It makes me think of the King Himself, who, when declaring the constitution of His Kingdom, began with these words:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:3)

Your spirit may have much to offer your king this year, or it may have very little. Come to Him anyway. Sing to Him out of your riches, sing to Him out of your poverty. Offer Him your finest gold, offer Him your humblest drum. All He asks is that you come to Him, and acknowledge Him as your King.

Over the Hills and Everywhere (Advent #14)

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Matthew 24:3)

Towards the end of the school year, one of our senior teachers led a devotion in which he considered what it might have been like for Jesus to be born into our age in history. The shepherds, he suggested, would have posted pictures on Facebook of themselves with Mary and baby; they would have updated their statuses to make everyone else wish they were there and be envious because they weren't.

I wasn't entirely sure of his assessment of our generation, but it got me thinking. When Christopher Hitchens and Kim Jong Il died in the last few days, I heard as soon as the New York Times posted the newsflash: my iPad said "ding" to notify me of the update. But when Jesus was born the news was only broadcast locally. Only shepherds heard the angels singing; only the Magi paid attention to the herald in the stars. The news was there for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, but few saw it and fewer still heard it. The teachers of the law whom Herod consulted gave the doctrinally correct answer about where the Messiah would be born and showed not the remotest interest in finding out for themselves if this had indeed happened. Would it have been any different if the media were there to broadcast it? Would we be any more attentive?

Then last night I watched Lars von Trier's latest offering, the visceral masterpiece, Melancholia. Though beginning with a detailed and rich depiction of a wedding going slowly, subtly wrong, von Trier gradually introduces the pivotal plot device of the mysterious planet Melancholia which, some say, is hurtling towards the earth. Kiefer Sutherland's John insists that no, it isn't, that the real scientists know what the alarmists deny: that the planet will only pass us by, not hit us. But Charlotte Gainsbourg's Claire does not believe him and regularly goes online to see what the "alarmists" are saying. Which of them is right is adjudicated by the film's devastating denouement, already foreshadowed in the spectacularly understated prologue - a series of extended single shots set to Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" showing the varied forms of emotional and physical desolation the characters encounter.

The film, in the end, offers decisively little hope, seemingly presenting annihilation as the only answer; and perhaps von Trier is right, though not quite in the form that he has shown. One of the more interesting elements of the film, however, is the way in which characters wrestle with crisis. Kirsten Dunst portrays Justine, the deeply depressed heroine whose "melancholy" paradoxically dissipates as the crisis approaches. Only she seems equipped to deal with what comes. John, on the other hand, represents the laissez-faire attitude so many of us have towards the idea of an apocalypse. A Christianity Today review of the film cites media analyst Neil Postman as noting "that it is impossible to look at the world as a serious place when a newscaster can solemnly inform viewers about a military study touting the inevitability of nuclear war and be followed by a commercial for Burger King". Or, in simpler terms, Susan Sontag once noted that a typical scenario for the past century is that an apocalypse is predicted and then nothing happens.

But the world is a much more alarming place than we can quite grasp. The creator of the universe was born into a manger and only a few people noticed. When the end comes, will we be as indifferent, as able to ignore it? Jesus, who would know, suggested it would be otherwise:

“So if anyone tells you, ‘There he is, out in the wilderness,’ do not go out; or, ‘Here he is, in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it. For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather." (Matthew 24:26-28)

Perhaps this Advent we would do well to pray that our eyes might be open and our ears attentive. When the newsflash arrives, we won't be able to ignore it, but we also may not have time to respond.

The despised things that are not (Advent #13)

Here are Jesus' credentials:

- Born to a pregnant teenager, in a tiny, insignificant village.

- Descended from failed and disgraced kings, at least one prostitute, one girl who coerced her father into sleeping with her, a woman from Moab (descended from one of Lot's daughters who coerced him into sleeping with her) and the unnamed "wife of Uriah" - Bathsheba, whom David saw bathing on the roof.

Here are Jesus' heralds:

- Shepherds: dissolute, untrustworthy.

- Magi: pagan, and above all foreign; astrologers, whom the Jewish law condemned.

Here is Jesus' geographical pedigree:

“Are you from Galilee, too? Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.” (John 7:52)

“Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Nathanael asked. (John 1:46)

---

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways,”

declares the LORD. (Isaiah 55:8)

---

This is the God of whom Christmas reminds us: He who "chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are" (1 Corinthians 1:28). And, if you're anything like me, and your credentials, your pedigree or your innate qualities are nothing to recommend you to an almighty and righteous God - then this is a very good thing indeed.

The light shone bright - A Poem (Advent #12)

The light shone bright, Bethlehem-ward, but

There was little else to guide them: no signs on the door,

No royal procession, no red carpet.

Watch out, the guides might have said, for the smell of cow dung:

Not a fragrance, perhaps, befitting a king,

But such was – and is – our King.

A newborn, no doubt he slept when they came to the door.

What did they say, I wonder? Is there a king in the house?

The teenage, virgin bride flushed, post-labour, almost certainly tired.

The mother will not yet be ready to receive visitors, our modern-day

Matrons would no doubt pronounce.

Yet, strangers – aliens – that they were, they

Found their way into the stable, and gave the humble

Child-king the reception he deserved.

Not that this would set the tone for the rest of his life.

Yet in this moment he was – almost – acknowledged in a manner

Befitting his natural state. But was that really the point?

Surely he could have commanded a royal party every night, if he chose.

Instead, his final night he spent in a garden, just

A few close friends (they fell asleep later on that night),

A kiss in the moonlight, a shaky prayer; Father, take this cup…

Does the story end there? We wait, on the edge of our seats.

Yet we’d prefer it, I suspect, if that was the end.

He’s easier to take, as a baby, or – dare we admit it – when dead.

Alive, a broken king, his life defies all onto which we cling;

And rightly so, yet awkward for sure. There’s no option,

Before such a king, but to bow: all else is treason.

He knows, of course, that most of us won’t.

His brow was crushed by ones like us – the ones, I suppose,

Who would not find their way to the stable no matter

How many stars there were to guide the way.

Joy, joy (Advent #11)

There is much talk about joy at Christmas. One of the most famous carols that we sing at this time of year is, of course, "Joy to the World", and for many, I suppose, Christmas is a joyful time.

But it's widely accepted that, for many, it also isn't joyful. Families come together to share food, but they do not always come together in spirit. Christmas can be more a time of squabbling than reconciliation. And for some Christmas does not bring them closer to their families because, for whatever reason, they no longer have a family. When a tragedy occurs this time of year the newsreaders bemoan its happening "this close to Christmas", a statement that is, on one hand, meaningless (a tragedy is terrible at any time of year) but also reveals the fact that the Universe does not instantly conspire to bring about happiness simply because it is Christmas.

To an atheist, this is further evidence that there is no God ordering things. To an agnostic, it might be further reason to withhold judgement. But to a believer, it need not be troubling, though for many it will be. We think that "joy to the world" means that we should somehow all be happy, all the time. I remember the first time I was unhappy on Christmas day, and I didn't know what to do with the feeling; it did not fit what we consider to be the purpose of the season. But the joy that the Gospel proclaims is a deep joy: one that transcends circumstances, one even that transcends emotions. I am naturally a fairly melancholy person. Over the past year I have been more melancholy than usual. But the Gospel has not failed. The joy the Gospel brings is not one that gives quick fixes or boosts in mood. It is a Gospel that gives a joy that nothing in this world - not family squabbling, not death, not depression - can squash.

In one of Jesus' first public statements, he read a passage from Isaiah which declared what he was here to do. The passage, in its original context, is rich with this deeper, abiding joy:

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim freedom for the captives

and release from darkness for the prisoners,[a]

to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor

and the day of vengeance of our God,

to comfort all who mourn,

and provide for those who grieve in Zion—

to bestow on them a crown of beauty

instead of ashes,

the oil of joy

instead of mourning,

and a garment of praise

instead of a spirit of despair. (Isaiah 61:1b-3a)

I would not say that I fully understand this. I would not say that at every moment I can physically feel the joy that Jesus' coming brings. I would not even say that I feel it terribly often at the moment. But that's okay. The joy that Jesus holds out is untouched. And one day, or night - we do not know - He will step down from the clouds, and sweep me up into His joy that He has been keeping waiting for me.

You who are too little (Advent #10)

Micah 5:1-6

A week or so ago, during staff morning devotions at school, one of the teachers shared some video footage of short interviews he had done with students in our primary school, asking them questions about God. One of the questions was what they were thankful to God for. Many knew the right answer to give at this point, and only a few perhaps spoke from their hearts. One young student amusingly said he was thankful to God "for dying for our sins and giving us baby Jesus". This answer, I must admit, intrigued me; what was the distinctiveness of the gift of baby Jesus, apart from the fact that He would grow up to die for our sins? The two gifts did not seem connected in this student's mind?

Of course, the incarnation is not only significant for Jesus' death, though that is the ultimate point of it all. And, while prayers to or about Baby Jesus unavoidably make many think of racing car driver Ricky Bobby and his painfully ludicrous dinner-table grace, there is surely significance in the fact that, while "Jesus did grow up", He also came to this earth as a baby.

One of the Old Testament prophecies which often comes out at Christmas is found in Micah 5, in which the prophet assures Israel that they will be saved from their enemies, through the Messiah being born into a highly unlikely place - Bethlehem, a small and insignificant village, famous only for being also the birthplace of King David. That king, though the greatest king of Israel, was also notable for being, at first glance, not the sort you would choose as king: he was short and a bit weedy, compared to his tall, strapping brothers. But God chose him, and chose Bethlehem, and chose to be born as a baby in Bethlehem.

And the meaning of this is? Certainly not that God is insignificant or small. The absurdity of Ricky Bobby's grace is not that he acknowledges the truth that God came as a baby, but that he thinks he can view God however he likes. It isn't only his view of God as a baby that is questionable but that he uses his prayer for product placement and as a means of impressing God so that he can win the race the next day. This kind of view of God misses the point altogether; He is not to be remade in our image.

No, but it is an amazing, wonderful mystery: that God, though all-powerful, chose to be humble, to honour the small and insignificant, what Paul later calls "the despised things that are not", honoured in order to "nullify the things that are".

Is it simplistic to say that this shows us how much value God places on the things we neglect? It is certainly not the full theological significance of the incarnation. But it is true, and it is something that, today at least, it is worth pausing on, thinking about, and thanking God - all-powerful, truly omnipotent God - for.

Why no-one buys gold, frankincense and myrrh anymore (Advent #9)

Well, it was probably too much to expect that I could make it through an entire series of posts on Advent without once railing against the consumerism that is rife at this time of year. And certainly a trip into the city today, past the Myer Christmas Window and through a Melbourne Central absolutely packed with Christmas shoppers, I have come home with much fuel for such a vitriolic anti-consumerist post.

But I'm not going to write it. And here are my reasons.

#1: Our culture is consumerist at all times of year. Christmas might see more spending, but we spend too much all year round and replace God with more material things than we could ever need. Some might suggest that consumerism is particularly abhorrent at Christmas because it means that we are using God as an excuse to spend money. That is certainly my gut response to what I saw today, but on further reflection I'm not so convinced. God is hardly forefront in most people's minds at this time of year; there is no conscious justification of consumerism with God in mind. Rather, family and generosity and love are the excuses we use. So if anything is being blasphemed, it is these secular values, not God. The fact is, He deserves to be honoured every day of the year, in every way. Our failure to do this is the great sin we are all guilty of. Christmas consumerism only magnifies the sin; it is not the heart of the sin.

#2: In some small way, the giving of gifts can point us to God. The rest of the year, we spend obsessively on ourselves. At Christmas time, that spending is directed towards others. It may be misguided and misplaced, but surely it represents something that can be channelled carefully into some sort of openness to the Gospel, more than our blind, self-focused consumerism of the rest of the year can.

#3: The problem is not that we are spending extravagantly at Christmas. The problem is that we are spending the wrong way: spending the wrong currency and spending it on the wrong goods. The magi knew what to spend their wealth on when they came to Jesus, and they knew what to buy: gifts to honour Him, yes, but gifts also to anoint Him for His burial. You see, the gifts they gave pointed to the gift He gave: the gift of Himself.

Though a king worthy to be honoured with gold, He was found by them in a completely humbled state. Though worthy of anointing as king, He was anointed for burial, the act in which, bizarrely, paradoxically, His true glory as king was seen - and so the gift of myrrh. And, though He came to a place where the "presence of God", the Temple, was soon to be destroyed, His very presence on earth and His sacrifice brought that presence to us - and so the gift of frankincense, the incense of the Temple he came to replace. His life was a costly gift; and so we too should give of ourselves at great price, for we too were bought for a price (1 Corinthians 6:20). We should give to Him, and give that others might know Him.

Perhaps, then, the right response to consumerism at Christmas is not to see it as a distinctive evil but as something that represents the bigger problem: that we live in a culture, in a society, which, 2000 years later, still fails to honour God as it should. Perhaps we, on walking through our city streets this Christmas, should feel something a little like Eliot's Magi on returning to their homes:

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

Speak Tenderly to Jerusalem (Advent #8)

Comfort, comfort my people

says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

and proclaim to her

that her hard service has been completed,

that her sin has been paid for... (Isaiah 40:1-2a)

When John the Baptist was asked by the Pharisees to give his job description and show his credentials, he responded first by denying the positions of honour that they suggested to him and secondly by quoting the prophet Isaiah, describing himself as:

A voice of one calling:

"In the desert prepare

the way of the Lord..." (Isaiah 40:3a)

And what was that desert in which he called, or the desert in which the way was to be prepared? For Israel there was one desert which resonated in their minds: the wilderness in which they wandered for 40 years after escaping Egypt but before entering the Promised Land. And when Isaiah wrote these words, he was speaking to an Israel that was facing another desert - the desert of exile in Babylon. When John the Baptist came preparing the way of the Lord, Israel was in another desert - the desert of Roman occupation. The comfort of God felt far, far away.

When Jews quoted Old Testament scripture, they were not only talking about the exact words quoted but the whole context that the scripture came from. It was expected that their audiences would know the background and fill in around the quote. So John the Baptist was not only identifying himself; he was identifying the age that had come. And that was a time of comfort for God's people.

The church in the West is sufficiently comfortable and complacent that we seem therefore to miss a huge amount of what Jesus came to do. We don't understand what it meant to set captives free, because we don't understand what it is to be captives. We sing about Immanuel "ransoming captive Israel" but the words are potentially no more than figures of speech.

Perhaps the persecuted church could teach us something about longing for Jesus' second coming as first century Jews longed for the first. Perhaps they could help us understand Simeon's joy on meeting "the consolation of Israel". Perhaps then it might mean something to read Isaiah 40 and to know that, when Jesus came, He fulfilled all of that, and that we who believe are just on the cusp of knowing and experiencing precisely what that means.

So for our music today we have something a bit different. I have found myself unexpectedly discovering some music of late that draws heavily on Jewish and Middle Eastern roots in capturing the emotions of some of the Psalms and prayers of the Old and New Testaments. For this, I can strongly recommend Aaron Strumpel's two animal-themed albums, but today I would like to share a version of the Lord's Prayer sung by highly eccentric and experimental outfit Psalters. You can, I think, imagine that you are seated with the early church, waiting, hoping, begging to God for the consolation of His people. It's quite long, and it isn't an easy listen. But sit back, take it in, and perhaps then read Isaiah 40 and pray that these words will truly resonate with you this Advent.

"The beginning shall remind us of the end..." (Advent #7)

Last night, while preparing a class on T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi", I found another one of his wonderful "Ariel" poems which so perfectly suited the Advent season that I decided to share it with you all today.

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish - which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,
So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or int he piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):
So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By "eightieth" meaning whichever is the last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy,
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.

He did what the angel commanded (Advent #6)

This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly...

Of all the ways that God could have chosen to come to earth - this. An unplanned teen pregnancy; a scandal falling over a young couple's engagement. If your head doesn't swim a little at all of this, you probably aren't thinking about it terribly much. Is this the triumphant way that a king comes to be among His people? Is this the way we would expect the Infinite to make His presence felt in His creation?

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 'The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel' - which means, 'God with us'...

And somehow it all seems part of the plan, first signalled by the prophet Isaiah talking to Ahaz, a fairly reprobate King of Judah. That king thought that he could use God for his own purposes, and feigned piety when Isaiah caught him out. That time, the prophecy of Immanuel - God being with Israel - was not necessarily a word of encouragement. God could not be put in a box; He was not Israel's great nationalistic Secret Weapon. Who could predict what God can do? Who could know His mind? Who could ever hope to contain Him?

When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus...

And so we have a great mystery. No-one can contain God, yet a fourteen-year-old girl gave birth to Him. No-one can predict Him or box Him, yet He has made His plans known to us. And He is with us. He came to be with us in Jesus, and He remains with us in the very same way at the end of Matthew's Gospel as He is at the beginning (Matt 28:20).

Joseph and Ahaz both heard the news that God would be with them. But for each one, the news had vastly different implications. How, I wonder, does it strike our hearts today to think of, to prepare for, God being with us?

The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel...

(All Bible passages quoted come from Chapter 1 of Matthew's Gospel)

Is anything too wonderful for God? (Advent #5)

Luke 1:26-38

In my last post a few days ago I commented on the strange paradox that we see often in our society today: that we are surrounded by wonders yet so often fail to believe in the wondrous aspects of the Bible. There is, perhaps, an explanation for this: though we do not understand much of what surrounds us - the physics required, say, to allow a plane to fly off into the clouds, seemingly defying all laws of gravity; or the software programming used to make iBooks with translucent pages that we can turn with our fingers - we trust that somehow "science" has made each of these wonders possible. We couldn't do them ourselves, we reason, but we just don't have the know-how. Someone else does. But parting the Red Sea? That's impossible. A virgin giving birth to a baby? No-one can do that.

Which means, essentially, that we have elevated science to the true, marvellous miracle-worker of our age, but demoted God to the role of a fairly subservient heavenly janitor; all He can do is move around and tidy up what is already there, as if the laws of physics, which He created, are somehow too powerful for Him to overrule. Many have already commented wisely on the way in which the "miracles" of technology that happen daily have numbed us to the wonder of it all, one article from Christianity Today and the YouTube clip it references both expressing this phenomenon particularly well. The attendant effect that I often barely notice in my own life is that, though we expect great and marvellous deeds daily from our iPads, we expect nothing of an almighty God.

In a time well before iPads were even conceivable (even books with words printed on them and bound together were still a good millennium and a half away), a young girl was faced with something that still defies modern science and is therefore dismissed as nonsense: she was told that, despite being a virgin, she would have a child. On asking how this was possible, she was given a response that, to modern scientific readers, might sound like nonsense:

The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.

Not really a scientific explanation, but what could possibly be lacking from it? I do not ever feel the need to understand the mechanics of how exactly it is that I can tap away at a few black keys and hit a few buttons and suddenly become a globally published author. I just know I can, because I trust that my computer and those who have programmed it and the thing we call the Internet knew what they were doing when they set up the whole system in which I now can simply luxuriate. Likewise for Mary. How can a virgin give birth? To a human constrained by the law that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, it seems more or less impossible. To a God who made everything out of nothing - creation ex nihilo, the theologians call it - it is surely no harder than what He has already done, no harder for Him to manage than any of what we take utterly for granted in our everyday lives.

I don't question the reality of what my computer can do, simply because it is beyond my understanding. I see the proof of it daily. So too, Mary, whose virgin body would soon begin to show all the signs of being with child, would surely have known before too long that the impossible had happened. For nothing is impossible with God.

With Clouds Descending (Advent #4)

This afternoon, as part of a unit on "Future Worlds", I set my Year 11 English class the task of writing a short piece about the future, using the opening phrase, "In twenty years from now..." While they wrote their pieces, I wrote my own. By the time I had finished it, it felt remarkably Advent-related, so now I am sharing it with you.

In twenty years from now, we will not know how much our world has changed. The rapid growth of our planet and the ever-increasing, ever-changing world of technology will conspire to make us blind to change.

We will wonder: was there ever a world in which we had to leave our houses to go shopping? Did we ever not drive in cars that talk to us, remember the route to work for us, avoid oncoming traffic for us? And yet we will still say, “It is not enough.” We will still say, “It is not enough.” We will still complain when our train is late by a nanosecond, when information on any topic in the world cannot be instantly accessed from wherever we stand at any point in time. We will still say, “Miracles do not happen”, even though all around us will be phenomena that in any previous age would be declared great signs and wonders.

And when we find we still cannot make grey skies turn blue, still cannot reach heaven with our iPhones, or whatever we will call them then; when we find that God is no further from us nor closer to us regardless of the speed of our internet connection, we will still shake our fists at the sky in rebellious fury, still retreat into our labs to turn gold into eternal life, still worship the things our hands have made.

And if, in twenty years from now, we see on the clouds a sign that makes our hearts rise or weep, we will look at what we have made, the miracles we poured our hearts into and ignored, and know that now all our hopes are either met or destroyed. If that happens in twenty years from now, the greatest scientist, the greatest software developer, the greatest engineer, the greatest politician, will all be on their humbled knees.

The World, the Flesh and the God Made Flesh (Advent #3)

John 1:1-18

I have spent a lot of time with the famous prologue to John's Gospel over the past few weeks. Somehow, I don't seem able to get past it. Each morning, when I have my morning devotional time over breakfast, I come back to what is perhaps the strangest opening to any of the four gospels, yet also perhaps the most rich of them all.

Yes, it is certainly rich, but it is also extraordinarily difficult to get your head around. Much easier to think about God as distant, or simply as human; much easier to settle for either extreme, rather than the strange, arresting, confusing fusion of the two that John so unequivocally presents.

A Unitarian friend of mine, whose beliefs exclude the possibility of Jesus being God, once said that he interprets the "Word" of John's prologue as being the plan of God, rather than Jesus. I had never come across this interpretation, and for a time it challenged me. But close inspection of the passage makes such a reading impossible. The Word is a person, the same as God yet somehow distinct. The Word does contain in it the wisdom, the clear, logical communication at the heart of God, but is also much, more more. The Word - lofty, sublime, beyond us, the creator of all things, yet...

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

How do you ever get your head around that? The Creator of the world, dwelling among us...An N.T. Wright sermon that I read this morning commented wisely on how much this truth challenges our very worldview, one which, for instance, likes to keep the secular and sacred apart, one which often would happily prefer to declare that there isn't a sacred at all. Quite apart from being the first sermon I have come across to truly fit the term "antidisestablishmentarian", it raised for me an important question: how much am I willing to let God infiltrate not only the public sphere of society but in fact every sphere? Because that is what He has done. Him coming to earth doesn't just mean comfort for the poor or divine understanding in our suffering, though it does certainly mean those things too. And it was not just a means of attaining salvation; if Jesus only came to earth to die, His thirty years on earth would seem a little redundant. No, though all of these things are crucial to our faith, there is something else that the incarnation shows, which I will certainly be trying to think about this Advent.

The incarnation shows us that God is utterly, intimately, uncomfortably, involved in our lives on earth. He has come to be here; He dwells among us. Are we prepared for that?

Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming...(Advent #2)

Isaiah 11:1-10

If you fix your eyes on the deadness of winter, if you dull and numb your brain to all other possibilities, then there is a reasonable chance that you will not be able to conceive of a rose.

If you spend your time among wild animals bent on survival, you may then not be able to conceive of peace.

If you spend your nights awake and staring deeply into the darkness, you may struggle to understand the hope of the light.

If you close your eyes to the hope that Jesus brought into the world 2015 years ago, then you will probably not be able to conceive of His return.

If you look at the history of the world that God has made, if you let yourself see how frequently He has turned hopelessness into hope, impossibility into possibility, tender stems into full and beautiful roses, then it just may be that Advent this year can give you hope beyond reason.

Lo, how a rose e'er blooming

From tender stem hath sprung...

Prepare Ye the Way (Advent #1)

Several years ago I found a magnificently tattered edition of a Christina Rossetti devotional journal in the now-no-longer-existent Keswick books (it got bought out by Word Bookstore). The book cost me all of about 90 cents, but would have been a steal at any price, both for its antique appeal and the wonderful quality of the contents. Rossetti was quite "high" on the Anglican spectrum and so not all of her theology resonates with me. But it did introduce me to something that I, a thoroughly low Anglican, have appreciated in the years since. It showed me the value of letting the liturgical calendar prompt reflection and focus, directing me, for instance, to let Lent be a time of particular reflection on Jesus' sacrifice. I have always liked to do something similar with Advent - to prepare my heart for what is to come, rather than just prepare my wallet for presents or my bedroom for the storage of new presents.

And so this year I have decided to expand on my Advent preparations - to use a series of Advent-related readings to help guide my thinking in this time. I make no guarantees about how regularly I will do this, but you should expect at least a few Advent-related posts per week.

Today's comes from the passage that was preached on in the church in Hobart that I visited yesterday - 2 Peter 3:3-14. Here is a verse from the passage that particularly stands out to me:

First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, "Where is this 'coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation." (2 Peter 3:3-4)

Last night, as I was waiting to fly back from my weekend in Hobart (my flight was delayed by an hour), I saw a small, devoted gathering of TV cameramen and photographers on standby - they had been there all day - waiting for the arrival of Princess Mary who was, they had heard, potentially going to be possibly arriving in Hobart sometime that day. Their hopes had clearly shrunk down to a soodling thread by the time I got there (my flight was the last one leaving the airport that night) and by the time that the only flight left to arrive was a Jetstar plane (hardly fit for a princess) the soodling thread was down to a single follicle. They went home before my flight left.

It isn't hard to see the connection to the passage from 2 Peter. There had been no guarantee that Princess Mary would arrive, but the devoted few (devoted more because of employment than any particular love of the Danish Tasmanian Princess) had stuck it out - in vain. Is this what believers in Jesus are - naive? petulant? stubborn in the teeth of reason?

Peter would say otherwise. He would say that God has already shown Himself to be a God who intervenes in human history, almost always when we least expect it; he would say that what seems to take a long time for us is a matter of seconds for God (a statement that is strangely in line with what Einstein took millennia to tell the science world about the relativity of time); he would also say that, rather than a source of frustration and impatience, the time it takes for Jesus to return should be seen as a blessing - time to repent; time to be watchful and share the good news with others.

So: this Advent, be hopeful, be steadfast, be thankful and be watchful. We are not naive; we are not clinging to misinformation and dodgy tip-offs. He who promises is faithful.

The Promised Land?

Now, although my blogging may not yet have fully demonstrated this fact, I love my new home. Kensington would certainly have to be the most beautiful place I have ever lived. The natural beauty is clear, the houses are charming, the laneways are suitably and rustically cobbled, the shops are convenient, the bookshop is nearby and everything a book-lover could hope for. There is excellent coffee. It is quiet, scenic, and twenty minutes closer to work.

But I regret to inform you all that it isn't perfect. No. In fact, last night there was a terrible traffic jam that made all access points to my home street rather difficult to...access. The major roads were terrible. The backstreets were no better. There was no option but to wait half an hour until I finally managed the extremely short distance from the racecourse to my house. I personally think it was some crime committed in Flemington, because those sorts of things happen over there, but all the same, there it is: traffic, in my beautiful suburb.

I'm speaking, of course, with a goodly portion of my tongue placed in my cheek, but in amongst all of this I am aware acutely of my own desire to find the promised land, the perfect home, on earth. And, of course, it isn't going to happen - nor should it. The consequences are not so good when you seek to find a fully realised heaven on earth. You may find yourself driven further and further away from social problems, seeking an ideal society, avoiding all that does not conform to your concept of perfection. History tells us clearly what happens when we think or act that way.

In the suburb next door, there are rows and rows of housing commission flats. There the social issues loom large. But in the quiet streets of Kensington they are no less present, just less visible. I could hide my eyes from them, focus on all that is perfect about it, or move further away from any hint of such problems. But where would that lead me?

The prerogative God gives us is clear: not to seek heaven on earth, but to fix our eyes on heaven and live out its values and glory now. Which means bringing heaven into the pain and heartache, not avoiding it as a means of making heaven.

So here it goes on record: I will try my best to do the former, and pray that I can avoid the former, and praise God for His grace when I fail persistently at both.

All the secrets of fitness

There's something that happens to a man when he has spent around 20 years, give or take a few, thinking of himself as inherently bad at physical activity, only to find that he can run quite well, quite fast and over quite a long distance. I believe the common expression is that it "goes to his head". Suddenly, he wants everyone to see him running, especially those who ridiculed him at school for his not-very-athletic physique. "Take that," he wants to declare. "Just look at my correct running form. Note my endurance." That sort of thing.

Then he starts working on his speed, partly with a healthy desire to keep improving, partly because, well, he can. So he does so, knowing, somewhere in his head (someone told him) that working on speed increases the possibilities of injuries. "Yes yes," he says to that part of his head. "Yes yes, I know that. But it isn't going to happen."

Perhaps you can guess the rest.

It isn't a bad injury; just a strained muscle or tendon somewhere between my calves and my Achilles Heel. But it stops me from running, and slows me down a little in my everyday life - in subtle ways, in a way that says, continually, "Remember, Matt, that you aren't actually invincible."

It's a good thing to be reminded of, I suppose. I should be thankful for it. But I'm not. I'm grumpy that I can't run.

Then I remember this song that comes onto my regular running playlist somewhere around one of the footbridges that cross over the Maribyrnong River. It's called "Don't Kid Yourself, You Need a Physician", by Anathallo, a band I love very much. I'm particularly chastened when I hear it, running or otherwise, by these slap-in-the-face words that form the chorus:

"All the secrets of fitness

All the fitness He requires

Is to feel your need for Him."

Ouch. Yes, that is true fitness. I had better remember that before I set out to run again.

Reason #75 Why I Love My Job

Where else but in teaching can you experience conversations like this?

Year 7 girl #1 (to me, while she is dancing with friends): What's up? We're gangsterising.

Me (quizzically): Gangsterising?

Year 7 girl #1: Yes, gangsterising.

Year 7 girl #2 (as if by way of explanation): We're singing a song from "Mulan".

Ah yes, that would be THE definition of "gangsterising". I can't think why it wasn't clear in the first place.

The Golden Age

I went through a stage while at Uni when I loved most things that Woody Allen made. I loved the unabashed neurosis of it all, and found myself quoting suitably intellectual or angst-ridden lines well after each viewing. Then I guess it all started to go downhill. I realised that Woody himself was a bit of a pervert, and got sick of films that suggested that no relationship can last and that "the heart has its own reasons" for abandoning one woman for another at regular intervals. Woody and I parted ways a few years ago, and absolutely nothing about "Vicky Christina Barcelona" made me remotely interested in rekindling the relationship.

Then came "Midnight In Paris", a film with so many things independently of Woody to recommend itself that I found it, in the end, irresistible: Owen Wilson; Adrien Brody (playing Salvador Dali); Rachel McAdams; Marion Cotillard; Michael Sheen; Paris; Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dali, Buñuel, Man Ray, T.S. Eliot and Gaughin all featuring as characters; did I mention Marion Cotillard?...I wouldn't be strong enough to pass all this up. And I'm glad I didn't. It was almost certainly enhanced by watching it at the Sun Theatre in Yarraville, one of Melbourne's most iconic theatres in one of its most iconic suburbs. Somehow, walking out of the film into Ballarat St, Yarraville, felt rather like remaining in Paris. It wouldn't have surprised me at all to see Hemingway inviting me into a cab with him.

But what I think I liked most about it was that, while it contained many of the moral issues of a typical Woody Allen film - including a new application of his own reason for leaving Mia Farrow for their adopted daughter - it did not quite linger in the same neurotic space as his films used to. The resolution is still a little idealistic, as if the universe does still somehow conspire to make romantic love always come true, but it was, if possible, a wise, more knowing kind of romanticism that the film's protagonist, Gil, achieves by the film's closing credits.

If there is a message to this film, it is perhaps that there is no such thing as a golden age - that we have always been discontent with our own present, however glorious it might seem to others. I don't know exactly what Woody wants me to make of that message, but I know what I left the cinema wanting to do - to praise God for what I have now, and, just as the apostle Paul taught the church in Philippi to do, to replace anxiety with thankfulness.

To top it all off, it really was just a great film.

Ideas From the Slightly North-West

So a lack of internet access over the past few weeks has conspired to keep me from blogging since I last declared that Wendell Berry was awesome and I was about to move. Now I have moved, and the move, though short in distance (move a little south of Brunswick then go west of Royal Park and you've got me), has been big in impact: a shorter distance to work, a more peaceful state of mind, beautiful surrounds, a new and improved river to run alongside. I can't speak highly enough of Kensington, my new home.

A change like this can draw attention, though, to other changes: to the expectations that I now have of a dwelling place. Some of these are positive, I think, and some neutral. I have matured, in a way. Share house living has served its time in my life, and living in a smaller place with only one other person suits me better, I suspect. But in other ways I am concerned about the changes I perceive: am I starting to crave comfort more than I should? Am I reacting, still, to the burn-out I experienced in Malaysia, and wanting to retreat into a safer space? This may be reasonable while I heal, but it may not be the best option for the future - not if I intend to continue pursuing the path that Jesus sets out for all who follow Him.

The moral of the story? We never stop growing, and we never outgrow grace. We will see what new perspectives, new challenges, new visions this new window of mine shall bring.

When we no longer know

I think I'm a bit late in coming to Wendell Berry. An article about him in Christianity Today five years ago declared that he was growing in popularity amongst evangelicals of my temperament - and I only really got into him last night. But never mind. There's no such thing as "too late" for these things.

I decided to read him primarily because I knew he had written about economics, and I've decided that I care too much about things like fair trade to pretend that I don't care about economics. Separating the two hardly makes sense any more. That said, I can't read economics without a soul. So instead I go to a Southern farmer-poet economist, because that's just about as soulful as it gets.

Of course, if you approach Wendell Berry in this manner, you will almost certainly become sidetracked. You will start listening to the lilt in his voice perhaps a little more than his words, and when you discover his poetry - well, then, economics will be far from your mind.

Here's a little something from him to bring some peace and beauty into whatever kind of day you are having:

The Real Work (Wendell Berry)

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Changing Windows

The picture that you see as the header of this blog is from my window in East Brunswick. That won't be my window for much longer. As a matter of fact, I'm in Sydney now and when I return to Melbourne I will be moving on the same day, to Kensington, another one of Melbourne's beautiful inner-north(west)ern suburbs, and the view from my window there will, no doubt, be different.

Change, however, has been something of a constant in my life in the past couple of years. In fact, I've worked out that this will be my tenth house in two years. Ridiculous, I know. All this change certainly hasn't made for much stability, though there are some benefits. Moving so much has made me more adaptable, and helped me learn how to pack quicker - who knows when those skills might be useful in life. But it's time, I think, to settle down, at least more than I have of late. This is not easy to do. In going to Malaysia, I had to change altogether how I thought about much of life. I chose to be uprooted, to give up many of my expectations about living standards, comfort, relationships. When I returned, I was ready to go back whenever I needed to. Moving and moving and moving again has enabled me, I suspect, to avoid having to readjust to life in Australia. Now that I'm planning to sit still - I'm staying at the same workplace next year, and even choosing to move closer to work (hence the move) - I will need to slow down, to take more things out of boxes...It will take some effort, I suspect. It will also take some time.

So expect to see some of this adjustment documented here. The window I look out will be different, but watch this space to see the perspective - I pray - settle, and find focus. That, at the very least, is the aim.

What it is to be human...

I have three stories for you.

---

The first is about an ageing German film-maker, who is allowed entry to a cave filled with ancient paintings and bones of now extinct species. Gazing at the paintings - so vivid he is moved to comment that one looks like it could have been painted yesterday - the film-maker, Werner Herzog, ponders the nature of what he calls "modern man", a species he distinguishes from Neanderthal man primarily on his inclination to create, to draw, to represent. What yearnings in the human soul, he questions, do these paintings indicate?

Interviewing one of the many scientists involved in the project, Herzog asks the question of what makes a human. His interviewee cites the ability to adapt well to one's environment and to interact effectively with other beings (he is French, so the latter word is pronounced "be-eengs" - an awkward, double vowel sound that gives it greater emphasis than usual). Herzog does not seem satisfied with this answer. Surely humanity involves something more? A quest for meaning? A quest for beauty and truth?

Another one of his interviewees seems to agree, noting at another point in the film that the name homo sapiens - the man who knows - is grossly inadequate as a description of our species. He offers instead the name homo spiritualis. The sacred choral film score in the background resonates in agreement.

---

The second story is of an ageing French illusionist, who finds himself in Edinburgh attempting to make a living for himself plying his craft at a run-down music hall and renting a room in a hotel he shares with acrobats, a washed-up clown and an equally washed-up ventriloquist. He is accompanied by a young girl, Alice, who believes in the magic that he only fakes. Alice becomes enthralled by the world that he brings her into, but it never satisfies him. He wanders through it all with the same baffled nonchalance that his creator, Jacques Tati, epitomised. Few of the characters speak the same language. Those that speak English are rarely coherent, and there are never subtitles when French or Gaelic are spoken. Yet the characters - all animated - are magnificently real and vivid. The film so often pauses on pathos-laden images of desolation: of the drunken ventriloquist sleeping in the street, his dummy going for an ever-decreasing price at a local antique store; a clown drinking alone while vaudeville tunes play on a faltering old gramophone.

---

The third and final story is on a Lygon Street tram returning from the cinema, a local homeless man who I recognise from years spent on this street entering the tram near me. Somehow he has acquired a slab of beers, one of which he is drinking now, lying back on the plastic concertina wall that unites the two halves of the tram, glassy-eyed, not quite tranquil. I pray for him until he exits the tram. As he gets off, a man helps him zip his backpack up again to avoid losing all the beers stored in there. I'm not quite sure it is an act of kindness. When I get off the tram, the troubled and troubling lady who frequents my tram stop stands at the lights on the corner of Lygon and Stewart Streets, howling at the wind and the traffic and the rain.

---

How long, O Lord, how long?

The Apologist's Evening Prayer

About a week ago, I was defending the Trinity to my housemate, who is a kind of Unitarian. I offered the best arguments I could, and some of them seemed to at least challenge him a little. But in the silence as I went to sleep after the conversation (it finished very, very late) I found that I could not rest trusting in a God I could defend with my own words and arguments. But a God who was far beyond anything I could hope to understand, a God in no need of my defence: such a God had arms I could rest in.

While in the mountains over the past few days, I found this beautiful offering by C.S. Lewis, in a book of his poems. It struck a real chord with me, and I hope it can mean something to some of you:

From all my lame defeats and oh! much more

From all the victories that I seemed to score;

From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf

At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;

From all my proofs of Thy divinity,

Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.

Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead

Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.

From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,

O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.

Lord of the narrow gate and the needle's eye,

Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.

If we had but world enough and time

There has not been much activity at Ideas From the North for the last few weeks. There has, of course, been much activity in my life, and much activity also in my head, but not much - actually, let's be honest, not any - of it has made it onto this site. There's a whole post simply on the topic of why I haven't been blogging. The biggest reason, though, is that, while I manage to think a lot while busy, I don't manage to write very much. Writing takes time, and reflection, and space, and I haven't had any of these.

But I did go into the mountains for two days with two good friends. We listened to classical music and wrote and read poetry. We even read all of Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale", complete with accents, only to find that reading a whole Shakespeare play out loud takes quite a lot of time. But we had time, so that wasn't an issue.

There is no easy answer for being time poor. If I may brave some potentially absurd hyperbole, it is the most pervasive disease of the 21st century. But for now I can thank God for school holidays and for mountains and friends to retreat, read, write and recite with. I can also thank God that, whatever is going wrong with my time schedule, His is completely and utterly on track.

A Thorough Education

Outings to the cinema, once a common feature of living only a ten-minute walk from the Mecca of Melbourne art-house cinema (now only a ten-minute tram ride), are now rare treats. But the past twenty-four hours have seen me going to the cinema more times than I went during the whole month of July, and the two films make for an interesting comparison, primarily because, despite being from utterly different cultures, each deals in its own way with the question of education and its value.

The first, seen last night at the Indonesian Film Festival, was a film set in Kalimantan, on the border of Indonesia and Malaysia. The second, seen today in the Beanbag cinema of e Melbourne Central, was the new adaptation of "Jane Eyre". The first, appropriately entitled "Batas (Border)", dealt with a driven young woman from Jakarta who is sent by her company to a remote village near the equatorial town of Pontianak ("Vampire", in English) to find out why the local school is not being successful. The girl's experiences in the village transform her, and her presence in the village transforms the education system. She learns from them and they learn from her. An experience hunting wild boar in the jungle shows her the educational value of everyday situations, and she expands the classroom outside the "border" of a schoolhouse, taking education to where the children are, bringing it into their realm. I enjoyed the film, for its visual beauty, and the lovely soundtrack by the legendary Iwan Fals whose music I have recently discovered. Something of the sensory appeal of the film can be found in this trailer, which, regrettably, is in Bahasa with no subtitles. Still, I suppose it shows that, despite the fact that the dialogue wasn't very good (thus, you aren't missing much) the film was still a joy to watch.

Of course, its chief problem, apart from weak dialogue, was its somewhat unrealistic optimism about the human spirit. While touching on the highly sensitive issue of human trafficking in Indonesia, it passed over the problem without looking at its heart. Humans in the film were fundamentally good, if given the right circumstances. This did not explain where the trafficking problem came from. Were the traffickers a mere aberration? Were they subhuman somehow? The film avoided these kinds of questions.

"Jane Eyre" was a film with much more subtlety. It's hard to imagine a two-hour film that could possibly do justice to Charlotte Bronte, but this, I think, came close. It was delicate, moving, passionate and tender all at once, in the way that often only Bronte can be. And, though education was by no means the focus of the film, again there was something said about it, through the comparison between the "thorough education" Jane received at Norwood - a brutal, austere education through beatings and isolation - and the kind, compassionate education Jane later gives her pupil, Adele.

Of course, in Bronte, and in all the great Victorian novels, life is the great Education. Life toughens and transforms all Victorian heroes and heroines, much as Jaleswari, the heroine of "Batas", is toughened and transformed by her time in the remote Kalimantan village.

But does education transform everyone? As a teacher, I have to say I suspect it does not. Was there a process of education thorough enough that it could stop human trafficking? Surely the perpetrators of such a crime know it is wrong; they don't need to be taught that. They need their hearts to be transformed. Could education have kept Bertha Mason from going mad? Possibly, although it would have needed to change the culture that would have confined and beaten her if she had ever been admitted to receive "professional care". Education very nearly broke Jane. Human compassion saved her.

As I sit down to mark a daunting pile of student responses to "A Midsummer Night's Dream", it is with, I hope, a healthy awareness of the limits of education. And what can overcome those limits? In our humility, we should ask the one who made us. If anyone knows the answer, I'm sure it's Him.

Hard questions and elephants in rooms

W.H. Auden once wrote a deliberately obscure little poem about asking hard questions: how easy they are to ask, how infinitely hard to answer. He never names the kinds of questions he is talking about but we can conclude that he means the questions that are asked flippantly, in passing, with little regard for the answer.

Questions, for instance, like "How are you?"

I commented on this a few years ago in a post that I'm linking here not because it was particularly good (it wasn't actually) but because I don't want to feel that I'm repeating myself needlessly. My point back then is similar to my point now: all too often, we ask questions like these with no particular intention of waiting for the answer. Or, more to the point, we find ourselves unable to handle complex answers to what is, in reality, a far more complex question than it seems. What if we aren't okay? Will we stop our questioner in their tracks and make them wait for the answer? Will we make do with an, "Okay," or "Good thanks"? Such answers may be the more socially acceptable, but they kind of expose the futility of the question. We might as well invent a strange gargling noise that can serve the same purpose - a form of acknowledgment that a human we know is present before us. The conversation need go no further than that.

Of course, I'm making it all sound a bit silly when I put it like that, but it really is a topic which I feel deeply about. Recent experiences of melancholy, of a kind that sometimes quite frightens me, has made it all the more important to know when an honest answer is welcome, and how it is appropriate to give it. Poorly timed honest answers can lead to the kind of vast, awkward silences in which one can distinctly hear an elephant walk into the room. Those times are certainly hard.

But here's a situation that's harder. Let's say that you are okay at a particular point in time: you've had a good day, you're talking to a person who makes you feel happy. When asked how you are - if indeed you are asked - you may find it hard to give an answer that will be meaningful. You feel fine then. You feel good, even. So how do you answer? Do you say, "Good thanks", because, for that moment, it's true? Do you then go away and, once alone, feel quite far from okay? Do you find yourself, at that moment, even further in the midst of a sinking, desperate kind of loneliness?

Auden poses no answer to the problem he raises. But he does give us a riddle, a hopeful kind of riddle which leaves us feeling as if therein, perhaps, lies something which is, if not an answer, at least a direction to walk in. Love, he suggests, might hold the solution: both the question that we really want to ask, and the answer we are too frightened to give.

Love and grace will, I pray, help me persevere through awkward silences and overcome elephants wandering into rooms. But I also pray that love may help those who ask these questions, thoughtlessly, in passing, at times and in places where no honest answer could ever be given - I pray that love might help transform those moments of awkwardness into times of true communication.

Inertia and friction

Some weeks, there are many wonderful ideas for blog posts circulating round my head, waiting for the opportune moment to be written. Then, when the time comes and I can sit at my computer to write one of them - blankness. I sit and fiddle with the keyboard, tapping out atonal compositions on the arrow keys, fingers up and down, up and down, nothing formulating, and there is only a numb sense that there must be something meaningful, somewhere, in all of this that deserves recording.

The trouble is that words don't do justice to feelings like this. If I were more clever with words, I might be able to convey it for you, but tonight there isn't much that I can do with words. I wish that I could take a photograph to show how it looks inside my mind tonight, because there might be some who would recognise that appearance and be encouraged by the recognition. But some people might be troubled by how it appeared, or confused, or disturbed. Some may not understand, and we are almost always afraid of what we don't understand. I'm afraid of it myself.

It isn't a night for blogging. Times like these expose the gaping hole in what a blog, or anything with words, can ever do. They are times when the human mind most cries out to be understood, and yet it is at its least coherent, its least expressive. On nights like tonight, I hold out my hand and wait for God to lift me again. On nights like tonight, my greatest comfort is a man crying alone in a garden, his friends asleep and ignorant, his heavenly father hearing every word.

Running for joy

I am considering retitling this blog "Matt's Running Adventures". This will be, I believe, the third post I have written about running in little over a week. It may seem a tad obsessive, until you consider a few things. Discovering a new hobby, at any age or stage of life, is an exciting thing. The older you get, the less common it is to discover a new love. I'm not old by any means, but I'm old enough to be fairly set in my ways, fairly fixed in what I think I like and don't like. It's a nice feeling to have those fixed ideas shaken up.

But there's more to it than that. You see, running has, unexpectedly, brought joy into a life that, for some time now, has not abounded in joy. On Wednesday night, for instance, I came home feeling truly terrible, the worst case of the winter commuter blues that I've had in a while. So what did I do when I got home? I ran. It was late, it was dark, I hadn't had any dinner, but I ran. As I set off down the inner-suburban streets near my house - it was too dark to run along Merri Creek - I wondered why I was doing this. It seemed ridiculous. Shouldn't I be resting? Shouldn't I be recovering from a challenging day? No. I ran. And when I came home, something had changed. It's hard to say what. None of my problems were solved. But the darkness of my head as I had driven home was gone. My head was clear.

So I was unsurprised to hear my sister tell me today that running can help combat mild depression. I'm weary of self-diagnosis, but the term "mild depression" seems to fit my state of the past 12 months or so - sometimes going beyond mild - and running has been one of the best things that I've done to combat it.

The idea is confirmed in this article from BBC News, and a few other places that appeared when I googled "running depression". And what is the reason for this link? Well, at a physiological level running releases endorphins - happy chemicals which our bodies and minds need for our well-being. Sitting in a car in the dark driving from Brunswick to Werribee and back each day, I suspect, releases fewer endorphins than running. I doubt, as a matter of fact, if it releases any. So, looking purely at the chemistry of it, it makes sense that running would make you feel better.

But there are other reasons. Biologist Professor Lewis Wolpert is quoted as crediting running with helping him overcome severe depression because it gives him "time to quietly think". For me, running does nothing of the sort. I hear my heart pounding in my ears; I struggle over each mound; I let the songs streaming into my ears help me up and down each crest and round each corner. The best thing, for me, about running is that I don't think. And that, for a chronic over-thinker like myself, is a very good thing.

I accidentally mistyped "good" as "god", and, while I corrected the mistake, I think it was more meaningful than your average typo. I think that running and not thinking is also a God thing. You see, with His creation on either side of me, His wind blowing into my sweaty face, His strength powering my weak feet (I pray before each run that His strength will sustain me), I feel Him in a way that I never will sitting anxiously behind a steering wheel. I also trust in Him in a way that I never otherwise do. It's a powerful experience, and one that I have trouble explaining. But I think that a quote from the classic film Chariots of Fire goes some way to expressing how it feels. Says Eric Liddell, the great sprinter and Christian missionary:

I believe God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.

I'm not sure He made me quite so fast, but He has shown me a joy when I run that I don't feel at other times. When I run, I too feel His pleasure.

Restitution and Offsetting

How do we assuage our guilt? It's an important question. The Catholic church told us to wallow in our guilt. Self-condemnation, it seemed, was the way to atone for sins we could never undo. The Freudians told us guilt was an immature response to our lives and something we needed to overcome for the sake of psychological health.

These days, we don't seem to know at all. We go for runs to deal with our guilt over eating that extra piece of cake. We offset our carbon emissions to atone for an overseas flight. And then we tell ourselves to not feel bad. It isn't our fault. We're only human. We've all got to live a little.

*

8 But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

9 Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:8-10)

Zaccheus could never have done anything to make up for his guilt. He could never have been accepted by a society that resented the crimes he had committed. He could never have broken out of the cycle of guilt and indulgence that trapped him. But Jesus called out to him and said, "Zaccheus, come down from that tree." And thus began a transformed life. The first thing he did was pay back those he had cheated.

*

3 When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. 4 “I have sinned,” he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.”

“What is that to us?” they replied. “That’s your responsibility.”

5 So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself. (Matthew 27:3-5)

Judas saw the best of all men hanging on a tree and knew he had put Him there. He looked at the silver in his hands. He looked at the perfect blood smeared all across it. There was nothing he could do. Giving the money back would never bring back the life he had betrayed. Hanging himself on a tree could never take away his guilt either. But he could see no choice.

*

A man sits at the entrance to Lygon Street. A scrawled note on a piece of cardboard sits in front of an icecream container with a few odd coins sitting in it, the sort of coins I consider a nuisance. The sort I would throw away if I could.

I have no money in my hands, only the books I just bought from Readings. The man blocks my path, and his needs cloud my happy Saturday mood. I glance at his face. I do not know what to do. Maybe I'll beat myself up over it, tell myself I suck, that I'm another Western hypocrite, that I need to be more compassionate, more giving, less selfish. Maybe I'll go home and donate to a charity to offset my guilt. Better than that, maybe I'll fall on my knees before the perfect one who already bled for my every moment of hypocrisy. And what will He say to me, when I kneel there? "I forgive you. Now go and do what you know is right."

He has shown you what is good, O man. And He knows that you will forever fail to do it. Rise every day. Pray that this time you will do what you are called to. Cling to the grace that forgives you every time you fail.

An open letter to Rebecca Black

(Inspired by reading this related post on a friend's blog...)

Dear Rebecca,

You don't know me, and I certainly don't know you. Having watched your first music video and made fun of it does not count as knowing you. But that's the thing about celebrity - it creates a false sense of familiarity. We all know your face and your voice, and we know what time you wake up in the morning. Many people even feel they know you well enough to make comments on your video that discount you as a human being, not just as a singer or songwriter. And that's certainly something they had no right to say, and no basis for saying it.

We could say that you asked for it, by choosing to put your music out there for the world to see. We could say that aiming at celebrity brings with it the chance that as many people will hate you as love you. And yet that seems to be a little like saying that those who visit war-zones deserve to be killed. The truth is that the comments people have written on your video have been truly ugly, so ugly that the video keeps being removed and then re-uploaded as a semi-effective means of controlling the hatred. At least the record of hate gets occasionally deleted, only to be replaced by more, and the occasional plea for goodwill, and sometimes, just sometimes, a comment that says, "I actually like this song..."

But it isn't just those who have hated it - and you - openly that have shown an ugliness in humanity. It's also those of us who have delighted in mocking it. The number of parodies now far outweighs the original versions available on YouTube - it now takes a concerted effort to find the real thing amidst all the mocking imitations and ironic cover versions. I watched a few and laughed. I participated in the mockery as much as most respectable Gen-Yers did. I can't apologise on their behalf, but I can say that I am sorry. You don't deserve this. If your courting of fame has left much to be desired, that doesn't excuse us for our ridicule. We were always taught in school that bullies make fun of others to feel better about themselves. We were always taught this was low. It isn't any lower when you bully someone you can't see. It isn't lower when the person you bully is also an overnight celebrity.

The truth is, I don't know if you are old enough to reflect on this whole situation in a way that will edify and not destroy you. Your latest video seems to suggest that you are fighting those who hate you by trying to prove them wrong. Perhaps you shouldn't fight them; perhaps you should just take away their fuel, by ignoring them and getting on with being a teenage girl. But then almost no girl your age is content to just be herself, and we have not helped, by telling you how worthless that self is. We have never been in any position to judge.

What is saddest, perhaps, is that a song with so much youthful innocence about it - a song where the hardest choice of the week is whether to sit in the front seat or the back - should have inspired death threats and online vendettas. I guess you can't go back to that world now, can you? But hopefully, with time, you can be wiser, and hopefully humanity, by the grace of the God I believe in, will see for itself the evil that it does, again and again, every time it picks on the weakest to make itself feel stronger.

Yours sincerely,

Ideas From the North.

What I write about when I write about running

I've never been one for athletic metaphors for life or the Christian experience. They've always left me cold, to be honest, partly because they're cliched, but mostly because I'm no athlete. I can relate to them about as much as someone born in the Ghobi Desert can relate to "The Little Mermaid". Maybe a little bit more since I have actually seen an athlete before, but now we're just splitting hairs.

The point is that typically, when I hear people talking about how something or other is like a marathon, my eyes tend to glaze over almost as quickly as they do when people try to explain economics or sub-prime thingummies. But, being Australian, I'm in the minority, I realise. Besides, people who use athletics as a metaphor for Christian life are in good company. After all, Paul did just that, drawing on the strong Greek athletic tradition (the very word "athlete" is Greek in origin) when he wrote to the church in Philippi:

Forgetting what is behind me and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:13-14)

He also wrote to his protege Timothy:

If anyone competes as an athlete, he does not receive the victor's crown unless he competes according to the rules. (2 Timothy 2:5)

And, in a famous closing remark on his ministry drawing to an end he wrote:

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. (2 Timothy 4:7)

So I suppose I should feel rebuked for my dislike of these kinds of metaphors. The fact is, Paul may not have been much of an athlete himself, but he saw in the kind of strength and perseverance that an athlete must show a helpful metaphor for what it is like to persevere in the faith.

Today, going on my second longish-distance run in three days, I feel qualified to make all kinds of comments on running as a metaphor for "going the distance" as a Christian. The fact is, I am neither qualified to speak about running nor about going the distance. My running career leaves much to be desired, and I am too young to say that I have gone the distance. Still, running in cold weather, rain and over a muddy, hilly track, with my muscles still sore from two days ago, I made a few observations that I will finish with here:

1) If I have any intention of making a fist of this running habit, I will need to do it even on days like today, when I had much rather not.

2) Being gung-ho is not the same as persevering. Persevering requires sustainability. So I need to be willing to spend some time doing the same thing - running the same distance, the same place - to build up my strength and stamina, before I rush into something else. Looking after my body is an important part of training it to be stronger.

3) The extreme muddiness of the track today made it necessary for me to slow down, even walk, to avoid slipping. We need to be willing to slow down when the track is unsafe or unstable.

4) We then also need to be willing to run whenever the track allows us to. You might think that slowing down at the muddy points would have helped me get up my energy to run the rest of the time, but it wasn't so easy. Slowing down made me more inclined to stop; I had to push myself to run the rest of the time.

5) Persevering through a difficult run like today will not be enough to make me magically able to persevere for the rest of my life. There are no magical bullets or defining experiences that make perseverance easy. Perseverance can only happen over time, and with great persistence.

It isn't very profound, I'm afraid, and I may well find that, in a few weeks or months, I'm no longer running. But I hope that I can continue, not only for the sake of the running itself but for what it will teach me about discipline and perseverance.

I must remember that perseverance is not easy in any area, whether in running or in faith, and we will rarely make it to the finish-line looking calm and dignified. But Jesus does not require that, when I get to the end, I look anything other than faithful and persistent. He only requires that I make it to the end. And that certainly is my aim.