Barack Obama on The Today Show

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/29/obamas-daily-show-intervi_n_139123.html

Continuations on a morality theme,,,

I'm still investigating the shadowy concepts of ethics, morality,tradition and perception of all these combined and as yet am just absorbing and pondering. So as a cop out I'm attaching a link to a website which expounds Deitrich Bonhoeffer's 'Ethics'. Maybe one day I'll feel I have enough of a grasp of the topic to issue my own opinion.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/b/bonhoeff.htm

Advent

For some reason this poem has been in my head for the last week. It's been a favourite of mine since I was a teenager and has so many lines and thoughts that strike a chord in me. As I get older I appreciate the sense of loss, loss of innocence, loss of wonder, loss of newness, the world becomes predictable, people are creatures of habit; with our ability to see everything on TV, travel anywhere in the world, taste every experience we could imagine, we grow more jaded. We seek more and more to fill a space that just seems to grow increasingly empty. I spent a quiet weekend in the Beautiful kingdom of Fife, just outside Edinburgh and it was glorious in its quietness. Walking through woods in Dollar Glen, walking by the sea in Dalgety Bay, it was the perfect antidote to a horrific preceding week. I think one of my aims over the next while will be to forget being cynical and knowledgeable in as much as I can. To focus my mind on the small things and shun the dramas that people revel in. I may come back to this poem sometime, expect me to quote it!

Advent

We have tested and tasted too much, lover-
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.

And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking
Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill
Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking
Of an old fool will awake for us and bring
You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins
And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.

O after Christmas we'll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning-
We'll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we'll hear it among decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won't we be rich, my love and I, and
God we shall not ask for reason's payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God's breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-
And Christ comes with a January flower.

What a difference a year makes

My Dad reminded me today that it was just over a year ago that I crashed my car and I was quite shocked, it really seemed longer ago than 12 months. So much has happened in the last year, my vehicular misadventures aside.

On an academic side I went back to college and got a post grad qualification, on work side my job has grown and expanded in ways I never really imagined when I took it. I moved house yet again, this is becoming an annual tradition!! I have people I consider close friends whom I didn't even know existed a year ago and I have no contact with some people who I thought would always be a constant part of my life.

On a spiritual side I went through a dark patch where I was rebellious and angry at God and didn't want anything much to do with him or His church and tonight I chatted with someone about how even though its always a journey back when you've walked away, I'm at least heading in the right direction.

As i get older time goes by more quickly and I'm becoming conscious of two things simultaneously; my need to fill that time with doing things and the need to prioritise what I do. I'm also learning to marry this instinct to 'live extravagantly' with the necessity to live simply, to 'ruthlessly eliminate hurry' and live in the present. Life, situations, dramas, and all that human interaction entails will happen whether I strive to make it happen or not.

Moral musings and the like

This is a thorny issue that an come across as being judgemental or apathetic or just plain sitting on the fence and I’m afraid I have a feeling I’m going to fall into the latter camp. Most of my blogs are reflections on conversations with my extremely blunt and forthright friends. One of these conversations yesterday concluded with me being informed that I had flexible morals, a comment I instinctively reacted against but which made me think, is there a time and place where morals, separate from ethics, need to be flexible or is that simply me trying to justify inconsistencies?

The conversation was with one of my oldest friends who has recently graduated as a midwife. Some people close to me are currently undergoing tests in order to begin fertility treatment. Honestly I’d never really given IVF much thought and hadn’t been fully conscious of the moral issues surrounding it. In my mind I was delighted at the thought of these people I love and adore being able to have a child. In the course of the conversation she expressed surprise at my support for IVF as I had once told her I was uncomfortable with the thought of the morning after pill and she saw them as being on a par. The definition of morals on dictionary.com is ‘motivation based on ideas of right and wrong’. That definition would seem to imply that there are black and white absolutes but no shades of grey and to some extent rightly so. Are morals like a sweet shop where we can choose a pick and mix of beliefs depending on our mood, what we feel like that day and who we’re with? Or should they be a code by which we live our lives indiscriminately holding fast to a moral foundation.

I’m conscious that as a child and teenager I was brought up with a strict sense of duty and how one should behave. There were behaviours ingrained into me that I never questioned as they were the very fabric my life was composed of. The church I grew up in and the people I learned from provided me with moral guidelines that I took very seriously. To some extent, looking back, I would have been quite harsh and judgmental, both on myself and others (not that I ever did anything wrong, perfection incarnate I was!!). In recent years this has softened a lot. I realised two vital points. One, holding people up to a high standard, often a standard that is impossible to maintain, creates in them a fear of being rejected and so leads to hypocrisy and the life sucking task of keeping up appearances, never truly understanding and loving the complexity of human nature which wars and flexes internally on a constant continual basis. There is more to be said for a struggle that is ultimately triumphal than to have never struggled at all. Secondly I think there are shades of grey. Maybe this is because people I love, people close to me, have made decisions which grieved me but have forced me to look at how and why I react the way I do. There are things which will continue to grieve me but it’s my reaction to them that concerns me. Jesus condemned the sin but loved the sinner; the ones he caustically slated were the religious moralists of the day, the guardians of the rulebook. Maybe it’s more of a reflection of my walk with God but in the last year I have experienced and understood finally the temptations some people struggle with; realising my own inability to consistently rise to the standard I unconsciously set. That being said I won’t be throwing all morals away and subscribing to a permissive society which seems prevalent in the world around us.

And where do I stand on the thorny issues? The ones which have shades of grey and debate, the IVF treatment I’m excited about for a couple I know will make amazing parents, the morning after pill, abortion for a rape victim, euthanasia/assisted suicide, all these moral questions that swirl around us. I don’t know, how can I know when my knowledge is based on theory without reality. How would I react to a best friend/sister/daughter telling me she’s been raped and now pregnant and doesn’t want to keep the baby, how would I react to a family member in extreme pain wanting to end that pain, I don’t know, how can I know, I’ve never grappled and wrestled with the reality of these questions and these decisions. The One I follow was for life in its fullest and love unconditional. The practical working out of those concepts will take my whole life and I fully anticipate I’ll get it very wrong at times but all I can do is learn and keep learning, try and keep trying, love and keep loving.

As a postscript, in looking at some articles on morals online I came across the Jefferson Bible, a compilation by Thomas Jefferson of Jesus’ doctrinal truth made separate from his miracles and supernatural events. I read through it and was left with a deep sense of sadness. Jefferson removed the miracle of Jesus’ birth and the miracle of His resurrection, arguably the two main pillars on which Christianity is based. The Jesus he writes of is a moral man, a good man, but it seems that Jefferson’s intent was to strip Jesus of His divinity and in doing so strip away what made Jesus so radically different to mere moralists past and present. There have been many debates as to the true nature of Jefferson’s faith and I do appreciate what he’s doing in trying to condense the teachings of Jesus into an accessible collection which dispenses with the necessity to believe what seems to be unbelievable, but I am saddened by the thought that what Jesus said was more important than what He did and that the work of God in Him and through Him somehow takes second place.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Morals_of_Jesus_of_Nazareth

http://www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/jeffintr.html

Postscript 2,,, have added yet another book to my booklist, ‘Ethics’ by Dietrich Bonhoeffer,

Italia

I'm feeling a little like a child at the moment, as the day progresses I'm getting incresingly excited. I'm heading to Sorrento, Italy tomorrow morning at an unearthly hour. So despite work being busy and me running around trying to make sure all runs smoothly in my absence I have more than a faint urge to skip and sing,,, :)

Love and Timing

Over the last week I’ve had some interesting conversations about love with a variety of people, single, on the brink of a potential, in a relationship that has hit its testing time and another admitting finally that she is in love, unexpectedly and almost unaware. The sheer spectrum of emotion circling this one feeling made me think of how wide and vast love or the concept of love is. Last night I was reading E E Cummings and came across a poem of his I really liked, actually I came across a few but this stood out, its called ‘but if a living dance upon dead minds’

but if a living dance upon dead minds
why,it is love;but at the earliest spear
of sun perfectly should disappear
moon's utmost magic,or stones speak or one
name control more incredible splendor than
our merely universe, love's also there:
and being here imprisoned,tortured here
love everywhere exploding maims and blinds
(but surely does not forget,perish, sleep
cannot be photographed,measured;disdains
the trivial labelling of punctual brains...
-Who wields a poem huger than the grave?
from only Whom shall time no refuge keep
though all the weird worlds must be opened?

Two lines captured my heart and mind, ‘disdains the trivial labelling of punctual brains’ and ‘from only Whom shall time no refuge keep’

The first made me laugh, I used to moan about timing, how it was so essential and how heartbreaking it could be to know something wasn’t going to happen because of timing but I realised that Love will come despite my timing, despite my wanting it to happen now or my wanting it to wait a while.

The second line I liked because it makes me uncomfortable, like most of his poetry he ignores conventional syntax, he shuns punctuation and spelling and every fibre of my being longs to edit and rephrase and yet in my having to reread the line over and over it hit home, from only Whom (his use of capitals denotes its divinity) shall time no refuge keep. My punctual mind puts God in my time box. Why not now? Why do I have to wait? What isn’t this/doesn’t this happen? But time has no refuge from an Almighty God and time has no power or control over an Almighty God and yet again I try to learn the lesson I’m so bad at learning; that its about His timing and His purpose, its about His will and not mine. Chances are, in the seemingly cyclical nature of my mind, I will return to this again and again and eventually will slowly learn to trust the One who is eminently trustworthy and eternally true.