Radical discipleship and humility

I recognise this temptation and the tension Jim Wallis writes of here.

there is a real and very deep tension between humility and the prophetic vocation. And most prophetic Christians I have known - present company and preacher included - are really not very good at humility. You see we are always making judgments of others - church leaders, political leaders, majority cultures - but are not often good at applying the judgment to ourselves. Even when the prophetic judgments we are making are necessary, they seldom lead us to humility. After all, we are the ones who know how other people are supposed to change. We are the ones with the answers. We are the ones who are doing it right.

One of the questions that should be a regular part of my an others' examen is when we have judged others and whether we could stand up to scrutiny ourselves under the same standards, or whether we could be misunderstood in similar terms.

It does seem to be the temptation that goes with the territory of 'prophetic' stances and shows well why nurturing an interior and reflective life is important for activists. Particularly as the symptoms of burnout or that lead towards burnout tend to militate against sober self-appraisal. And externalising discontent is a follow on strategy for handling tensions in many people. Of course, there are those who internalise it viciously and become paralysed because of the horror of hypocrisy. The humility of recognising common human frailties and complexities and of recognising other areas of life where we ourselves are struggling with such things makes us more, not less, helpful to others. Learning to get more right the balance between compassion and challenge can only be a good thing.
SojoMail:
Filed in: Christian spirituality humility activist radical

Bereaved vicar struggles with forgiveness

I saw Mrs Nicholson on Breakfast news this morning. She is the clergyperson whose daughter was killed in the London bombings. In her interview she said something like:

I can't forgive the killers for my daughter's death. I can forgive for my own pain and loss...

I may not have a very word-accurate recollection but the impression I came away with was that she seemed to be hesitating to forgive the actual death of her daughter. The damage to herself seemed to be forgiven or on the way but it seemed like she was saying that she did not have the right to forgive on behalf of her daughter. And in a sense, I think she's right. The sins against others, those others have to forgive for themselves. However, I also wondered whether she was getting at the issue of what such a forgiveness might seem to say. That is, she could not forgive the actual death of Jennifer because if she did so it might seem to condone or too lightly accept the wrongness of that death. She needs to have the perpetrators acknowledge that what happened was a wrong, an evil. Without that acknowledgement, to simply 'give up' her daughthers death would violate a sense of right and wrong; it would feel tantamount to saying that it was alright for Jennifer to die.

I don't believe that it is wrong to insist the death was wrong and that those who engineered that death were evildoers. Forgiveness here must not condone the wrong. It must, however, enable those left behind who are mourning the death to move on without bitterness polluting their lives and to build the possibility of understanding any mitigations and were it possible in this life, to hear and to begin accept the sincere repentance of the wrongdoers. She may not be there yet, but I do hope and pray that she is making progress towards the latter things.

And I wonder; does this give us an insight into the meaning of forgiveness for God? That God cannot forgive unless it's personal. That's the point about incarnation and cross. If God just 'forgave', without having God's own hurt, grief and pain to forgive, it would just be without any real meaning. We can 'forgive' all manner of things if they do not touch us personally. But for it to be real forgiveness, we must be personally involved; we must have a hurt to put to one side, a pain to refuse to impose back onto the perpetrator, the possibility of forgoing revenge, the acceptance and determination that for us love, grace and mercy trump strict justice.

So as we view Christ accepting to be harmed, vilified, mistried, misunderstood, betrayed and killed, we are seeing God personally imaging the cost of forgiveness; playing out in spacetime the personal price of forgiveness. This is not so much the price of our sins, first and foremost, but bearing the pain of forgiving of not passing on the hurt or passing back the wrong to the perpetrators. It is living out the prayer to 'forgive them for they do not know what they are doing'.

And more than living out. It is the event where it actually happens. It is not illustrative but performative. God accepts to be harmed by humanity so that forgiveness is actually personal. God is not condoning wrong but putting God's own being in the way of harm so that God may work through the hard task of forgiving in God's own person not as some kind of blithe and untouched benevolence making easy pronouncements of forgiveness because the hurt is not personal.

Without the cross we only have karma: an impersonal principle of Justice. The cross tells us that there is something about ultimate reality that is personal, that personal love [and therefore apathy and malevolence] do matter in the grand scheme of things; that forgiveness is the way to life where strict justice will lead to death.

BBC NEWS | England | Bristol | Bereaved vicar in 7/7 documentary
Filed in: forgiveness, Christian, spirituality, bombing
Via Crucis Grid Blog

Pagans and Christians; mutual learning?

Sometimes it is really helpful to see things, even if only in a small way and momentarily, through the eyes of those who often oppose us. So this is really interesting:

My experience as a Pagan clergyman, however, has made me aware of a difference between the cultures of Christians and Pagans, and it is one that I feel is something they (for the most part) have, that we (for the most part) lack, to our collective detriment. The key to the difference can be seen in the basic fact that most Christians have a more institutional approach to their faith than most Pagans do to ours:

He goes on then to outline the practical ways he is aware of that having an institutional and corporate dimension to faith practice can be helpful. It comes down to helpful default positions and a kind of resource sharing that goes beyond individuals and small groups which enables more exceptional things to be taken care of without making a bigger than necessary drama out of a crisis.

However, as I was reading, I was thinking ironically that the reversion to small groups was precisely something that is happening in a lot of northern/western Christianity, sometimes deliberately, often by accident. So I valued this reminder from a small group situation of the value of wider connections and networks of resource sharing. I may not be a big fan of big institutional relgion [well, I'm not], but I tend to take the view that we cannot escape institutional life; it is a natural outgrowth of corporate and networked life. The issue is how to make sure that it remains at the service of God and people, and how we build in and maintain accountability and yet also make sure that things don't become bland and stifle good and creative initiative.
Witchvox Article:
Filed in: Christian, Pagan, institution

London bombings: no to ID cards

So, it turns out that the London bombings were a DIY affair...

Far from being the work of an international terror network, as originally suspected, the attack was carried out by four men who had scoured terror sites on the internet. Their knapsack bombs cost only a few hundred pounds, according to the first completed draft of the government's definitive report into the blasts.

And my question to MP's who have committed us to the white elephant/blow to civil rights represeted by the National Identity Register and ID cards is: how would they protect us from this? Any ways that they could conceivably do so would be easy to circumvent ...
The Observer | UK News | Leak reveals official story of London bombings:
Filed in: ID_cards, UK, terrorism

Da VInci Code -fiction writers breathe again.

At last the trial is concluded. Unsuprisingly for me. I couldn't see how using the results of alleged historical research could be copyright unless the authers of HBHG were willing to claim their book was also fiction [and even then it would be touch and go].

"It is unfortunate that the claimants were not willing to bask in the glow of recognition that the book gave them when it was published in 1982 and the subsequent revival of interest ... entirely as a result of DVC. The latter is of course a work of fiction and its special attractiveness is the way in which Mr Brown has put together these generalised facts and ideas into a well received thriller. By writing in such a genre he hugely increases the available audience. That is something in my view that the claimants cannot complain about. ... Mr Brown is a fiction writer. As a device to writing fiction he is perfectly entitled to dress up factual scenarios to give an illusion that supports his fiction ... He simply needs a mystery and a series of unanswered questions. He can do that without deep research and that he has done.

Guardian Unlimited Books | Special Reports | A smile played around the author's lips. In London's Court 61, victory was his: See also.
Filed in: DaVinciCode, copyright

Judas: the gospel

Well, I guess it's only a matter of time before we having to field comments and accusations based on this Gospel of Judas. So it may be worth bookmarking this article which does at least give some helpful context, some of which is the comment from a [note this] Jewish scholar:

leading biblical scholar and translator of the dead sea scrolls, Professor Geza Vermes of Oxford University, said: "The document is of interest for the ideas of the gnostics but it almost certainly adds nothing to our understanding of what happened 150 years before it was written."

The earlier paragraph points out that the gnostics "had different beliefs from the mainstream church".
Later on we are told:

Scholars in Britain pointed out that the document appeared to have been written several decades after the last of the gospels in the New Testament - that of John - and at least a century after the death of Judas Iscariot.

In other words they should be regarded more as a romance using the characters of the canonical gospels in the service of an ideology somewhat alien to the gospels. A bit like the 'Braveheart' is to the actual events it purports to portray: modern notions of freedom being imported into an ideological context that barely recognises the kind of 'freedom' Braveheart promotes. The real issues were other: Braveheart rewrites the story and the aims of the characters in terms of modern political notions that we can get excited about. In reality, battles over which relatively-absolute monarch/dynasty should rule [that is exploit] whom would scarcely get us excited.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Judas: this is what really happened:
Filed in: apologetics, gospel, Judas, gnostic

Pedal Powered Generator

I wrote about this ages ago, and it's good to see someone hase been doing it (since 1976!). It'd be great if something like this could be commercially available with the relevant accessories to be able to integrate it into domestic usage...

The article is useful too for showing how to make one, dealing with issues such as how to use it in practice, and giving some idea of how much power is generated and what appliances that could power. Apparently a vaccuum cleaner would take two people but a washing machine one ...

Thanks to World changing for this which I picked up here.
David Butcher: Pedal Powered Generator
Filed in: generation, human_power, energy, electricity, exercise