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.

The Book list

Below is the list of books that was my attempt at a complilation from my world. It's a funny mix of genres across quite a wide spectrum of people. Enjoy :)

"The French Lieutenant's Woman" by John Fowles
"Life of Pi" by Yann Martel
"To kill a Mocking bird" by Harper Lee
"Whats so amazing about Grace" by Philip Yancy
"I, Claudius" by Robert Graves
"The kite runner" by Khalid Hosseini
"Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller
"Captain Corelli's mandolin" by Louis De Bernieres
"Like Water for Chocolate" by Laura Esquival
"Tuesdays with Morrie" by Mitch Albom
"The Gathering" by Anne Enright
"City Girl" by Patricia Scanlan
"Madame Bovaire" by Flaubert
"Freakonomics" by Theodore Levitt
"The first circle" by Solzenitzen
"The Book Thief" by Marcus Zusak
"Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell
"1984" by George Orwell
"To The Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf
"Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie
"A Wrinkle in time" by Madeleine L'Engle
"Kamasutra" by Mallanaga Vatsyayana
"Why Men love bitches" by Sheri Argov
"Lord of the Rings" Trilogy
"Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut
"Chronicles of Narnia"
"Ma, he sold me for a few cigarettes" by Martha Long
"White Oleander" by Janet Fitch
"Atonement" by Ian McEwan
"Fight Club" by Chuck Palahniuk
"Beloved" by Toni Morrison
"Mercy" by Jodi Picoult
"Light in August" by William Faulkner
"A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khalid Hosseini
"Mrs Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf
"Half a Yellow sun" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"One flew over the cookoo's nest" by Ken Kesey
"A Suitable boy" by Vikram Seth
"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac
"The God of small things" by Arundhati Roy
"Brideshead Revisited" by Evelyn Waugh
"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austin
"The Blind Assasin" by Margaret Atwood
"Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo
"Possession" by A.S. Byatt
"Snow crash" by Neal Stephenson
"A Dance to the music of Time" by Anthony Powell
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S Thompson
"The Catcher in the Rye" by JD Salinger
"The heart of Yoga" by TKV Desikachar
"The Secrets of Jin Shei" by Alma Alexander
"The Jitterbug perfume" by Tom Robbins
"The Time Travellers Wife" by Audrey Heffeneger
"Fathers and sons" by Ivan Turgenev
"Catch 22" by Joseph Heller
"Women in Love" by DH Lawrence
"The Sun also Rises" by Ernest Hemmingway
"Z for Zachariah" by Robert C O'Brien
"Go tell it on the Mountain" by James Baldwin
"The silver sword" by Ian Serelliar
"Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver
"Old Possums book of practical cats" by TS Eliot
"The war of Don Emmanuel's nether parts" by Louis de Bernieres
"Fasting Feasting" by Anita Desai
"Ragtime" by E.L. Doctorow
"The Divine Comedy" by Dante
"Remembrance of things past" by Marcel Proust
"The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexander Dumas
"Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan
"One Hundred years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"Gone with the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell
"The Anatomy of Melancholy" by Robert Burton
"Surprised by Joy" by CS Lewis
"The Tao of Pooh" by Benjamin Hoff
"Dubliners" by James Joyce
"Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier
"Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes
"The Scarlet Pimpernel" by Baroness Orczy
"I know why the caged bird sings" by Maya Angelou
"Peer Gynt" by Ibsen
"Measuring the world" by Daniel Kehlman
"The tell tale heart" by Edgar Allen Poe
"Roll of Thunder hear my cry" by Mildred D Taylor
"The Crucible" by Arthur Miller
"The Prince and the Pauper" by Mark Twain
"Blue like Jazz" by Donald Miller
"The Road less travelled" by M Scott Peck
"Cats cradle" by Karl Vonnegut
"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte
"Under the Duvet" by Marion Keyes
"Confessions of a shopaholic" by Sophie Kinsella
"Chocolat" by Joanne Harris
"These Old Shades" by Georgette Heyer
"Life after God" by Douglas Copeland
"Dirt Music" by Tim Winton
"Love of a Good Woman" by Alice Munro
"Notes from a small island" by Bill Bryson
"The great Railway bazaar" by Paul Theroux
"Hitchikers guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams

Authors Recommended
Tolkien
CS Lewis
Oscar Wilde
James Patterson (crime Fiction)
Michael Connelly (crime fiction)
Jeffrey Deever (crime fiction)
Khalil Gibran
Rabindragth Tagore
David Harvey
F Scott Fitzgerald
Paul Collins
Sarah Vowell
Italo Calvino
Chaim Potek
Herman Wouk
Tolstoy
Dostoevsky
Charles Dickens
Shakespeare

Book lists

Recently, during an unexpected break in work, I browsed Time’s ‘’all time 100,,,,’’ lists for both books and film. Now normally you can find a list to suit your personality, top *insert relevant genre here*, and feel justified but I wanted to pit what I considered to be a fairly weighty cinematic and literary history against what the top dogs thought. Now I was well aware of the gaping holes in my pop cultural CV but honestly, the crushing realisation that I had seen a mere 12 of the 100 films on their list came as a shock. My novel experience was marginally better, 14 out of 100, although I was tempted to not be quite so honest, I mean if its been sitting on my bookshelf in my room for 2 years plus, I must have assimilated it by osmosis by now right??? The film debacle I could salvage by taking a moral high ground but that moral high ground would only be applicable if my novel score had been higher. So, in the manner of all good English grads that have been shown up as not quite the scholars they would have the world believe, I began to justify my shortcomings. First step in this defence is to attack the compilers. In this case they are American; of course they had no Oscar Wilde, no Shakespeare but included a couple of Graham Greene’s. Nothing against Graham Greene, he is a great writer but in a world of such vast choice to put two of his books on there was indulgent. Second step in this defence is to rubbish at least a few of the books on there and wax lyrical on what I, in my o so humble opinion, believe should have been included. I ran into a bit of a sticky problem here, having read so few of the books I could not logically argue against them and if I read them to then dismiss them, my average would improve, negating the need to rubbish them in the first place. Hmmmm, conundrum. Having frustrated myself at both my shortfalls and my time wasting in this whole exercise, I decided to stick to the list of books I compiled earlier this year from friends, colleagues and family which led to a more realistic and slightly less high brow and biased collection. I’ll post it in next post.I may at some stage in the future do a film version as well just for the heck of it. Lists are fun to look at and aim towards.

Fun memories

This makes me laugh so much



John Cleese and the muppets,,does it get better!!

US politics

Barack Obama, what can be said that hasn’t already been analysed to death by minds with far more information and political savvy than mine. I had an interesting conversation last week with a friend who said if he was American he would probably abstain from voting as he disliked McCain’s stance on guns and Obama’s stance on gay marriage and abortion. The professed faith of both men was also called into question which I considered to be a valid concern. In America it is political suicide to be anything other than a Bible believing church attending Christian, or should I say its political suicide to be perceived any other way. I thought about what I would do for most of the drive home. If the good is the enemy of the best should we not take the good or should we simply stand back and then feel justified in saying ‘well I didn’t vote for them’ and knocking the government we had.

To my shame I have to admit I don’t vote. I researched the various parties at the last election and the one I found to have the best social policies is a party I would have grave reservations about contemplating voting for, Sinn Fein. While I in theory agree with their political views, and yes part of me wishes we had a united Ireland, I can’t overcome the fact that their militant wing was/is the IRA. But that is a whole different hot potato that I’m not going to unpack now. So I hid behind the excuse that I was registered in Kilkenny and couldn’t get home but in all honestly if I cared I would have voted. Irish politics are ludicrous. Are we the only in the Western world to have no valid left wing? The labour party, the socialist party and the greens hold no influence and when they do they are absorbed into a larger right wing party that they form a coalition with. But I digress.

I have to admit my knowledge of the broad, complicated labyrinthine aggregation that is American politics is limited at best. I wish I knew, and yes I’m aware it is within my power to change this, all the intricacies of both Republican and Democratic policy other than the sweeping right wing/left wing generalisation. I keep meaning to watch an interview that Rick Warren did with both McCain andObama and once I do i'll comment on it but for now I'll stick to what I told my friend last week. I would vote for someone who wants to improve someone's standard of living above someone who wants to change their sexuality. If it comes down to a social issue of either someone living or dying or gay marriage I say let life be the aim, Jesus came to bring life to the full, would He have shunned what we consider 'sinners'' or would he eat with them, love them and ultimately draw them to himself with love and compassion rather than the rules the religious leaders imposed. Maybe i can be so blatant because its a moot point, I won't be voting for either in the election, obviously, but it makes me wonder what issues were close to Jesus's heart and why do I not focus on them.

Greenbelt

Greenbelt,,,how does one go about trying to describe it,,to say it’s a music festival just isn’t adequate. It’s a conglomerate of people, music, beliefs, attitude, all connected, albeit loosely in some cases, to Christianity. The sheer volume of variety stirred my heart and excited me. I actually bounced and skipped a couple of the nights and tried to persuade people to dance with me (unsuccessfully I might add,,grr) I’m well aware that I have a rebellious streak that I usually manage to contain but which came alive somewhat at GB. Be prepared to have a lot of topics touched on over the next while. Even already I’m diving into research and books but getting distracted, in a childlike way, by a new concept, thought, idea, bright shiny and appealing. I’ve had a break from study for the last few months and I’m itching to get back into some in depth reading.

I realised this weekend that it had been just over 3 years since I last went camping, in New Zealand in fact, and even then it was only for 2 nights. I think prolonged camping should be a mandatory experience due to its ability to make me appreciate the small things and not so small things of daily life. Funny thing is, this isn’t a new lesson, it’s one I learn repeatedly over and over and forget with a rapidity that astounds me. So after 4 nights in a tent, with the nearest toilet a 5 min walk away and shower non existent apart from a tap what did I learn to love again;

My bed, which is possibly the same size as the inside of the tent I slept in!!! Soft and welcoming and it won’t leave me with bruises on my hips if I sleep on my side!

Clean sheets-not wondering how many ants/spiders/variety of bug like creatures I sleep with!

Being able to walk across the hall to the bathroom in the morning without having to get dressed first

A hot shower,,,good Lord words fail me,,,

The smell of washing powder from clean clothes

The feel of crisp clean clothes

A cursory glance at the above fills me with a mixture of gratitude and shame. How used to comfort am I!! none of the above has the remotest bearing on my health or welfare, I had access to food and water and everything I needed but its these superfluous to existence things which I appreciated most. It creates a guilt inside of me that I am not guilty enough or grateful enough for all I have. I guess my catholic upbringing was successfully countered by my Mother and the catholic guilt assuaged somewhat. But the flip side is, what good would guilt do? Would it help others if I forfeited my comforts? For here and now I am at a place in life where these things are a given in a culture and society I live in so I will focus on gratitude for what I have and helping others less fortunate where I can and leave the guilt thing to those who secretly enjoy it.

Books to be read list;

This is my current list of books to be read, in no particular order but as soon as I can get my hands on them,

Surprised by Hope-Tom Wright currently reading

A New kind of Christian-Brian McLaren

A Generous Orthodoxy-Brian Mclaren

More ready than you realise-Brian McLaren

How not to speak of Jesus-Pete Rollins

God’s Politics-Jim Wallis

Pagan Christianity-Frank Viola

The new Christians-Tony Jones

John-Niall Williams

The Barbarian way,unleash the untamed faith within-Erwin Mcmanus

The supremacy of Christ and Joy in a postmodern world-John Piper

Interesting and hopefully thought provoking

Came across this link while doing some browsing. Its already hit me a few times.

http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/

Pins and Needles frame of mind

What, you might ask, is the concept of the above title? well while watching the All ireland semi final today (yay go Kilkenny!!!!)I sat on my foot and without realising it completely numbed it (I can see comprehension dawning in the heads of a couple of bright sparks already :) ) and had to resort to hopping about the kitchen in an effort to get rid of the pins and needles which heralded the kick start of blood flow to my foot when I moved.

So,,,here comes the not so science bit,,my present state of emotion/thought is uncomfortable. For the last while I have enjoyed a certain state of numbness,,,still looking the same,,reacting the same to a greater or lesser degree, and now that state has shifted. In the last month a lot has happened to stir me up in a way I haven't felt in along while. The uncomfortable thing is,,,it feels weird. The re awakening/kick start of blood is slightly painful,,leaves me open to more pain (to continue the analagy the foot hurts more if you step on it while suffering pins and needles) but I know its ultimately a positive sign.

As with most of my musings and ramblings lately I have no definitive compass points, No idea what this will mean,,or whats happening in the world outside my comprehension but its fun to try and articulate current realities.

Why do I fear what my heart longs to embrace?

Why do I fear what my heart longs to embrace? I’ve been reading some articles and doing some study in the last few weeks on the concept of hospitality, which my small group studied this year (I missed most of the studies so was determined to catch up). As I’ve mentioned before there’s a dream/vision/vague notion inside of me that refuses to go away which longs to reach out to people and have a home where people feel at home, welcomed and loved. In his song ‘’ Indiscriminate act of Kindness’’ Foy Vance sings that

‘’ I was always told, when you see someone defiled,

To look them in the eyes and smile,

Take their hand or better still take them home’’

Frankly that concept scares the life out of me. I would love to be that Christ like and be able to love without fear but society has created a fear culture which is so deeply ingrained that it takes monumental effort on my part to overcome it. I fear for my physical safety, letting a stranger in, material safety, although in fairness apart from sentimental value there’s nothing I would be devastated to lose. There’s an element of emotional safety, would one bad experience cloud my ability to love indiscriminately in the future?

The comment that was levelled at me recently about being on a middle class throne has rankled under my skin for a disturbing amount of time. I’m not sure when I lost my ability to shake comments like this off but I seem to be stuck in limbo land between the impetus to do something and the lethargic selective blindness of apathy. I’m affected but not affective; I haven’t managed to channel my feelings into a practical outworking and I’m wondering how I can do that anyhow.

Those dots symbolise 5 days since I began to write this, its been sitting on my mind and I’ve been brooding over it for want of a better term. Last night in small group we discussed Ecclesiastics 4, the ‘’A Time to,,,’’ passage. Two things stuck out for me, which were probably not as important to others. One was the phase ‘’he makes all things beautiful in its time’’. I’m trying to think how to best word this so as not to sound pretentious or just plain idiotic!! There’s a concept of beauty in the broken that I find so hard to grasp and yet it gives me great comfort. When life is just downright crap its comforting to know that there is beauty within that. In the ‘’a time to,,,’’passage it takes contrasting emotions like laughter and weeping, mourning and cheering. I can’t remember any of the films offhand but there are scenes in my memory of tears pouring down cheeks and the poignancy and depth of emotion portrayed cut straight to my heart. There are certain films I can’t watch too often because they cause me to cry and yet when I do watch them the flood of emotion is cathartic and a release. What is beauty at its deepest meaning and why do we seem to think that beauty should only be something aesthetically pleasing. That will be something I continue to ruminate on.

The second thing that got me fired up last night was the verse where it talked about ‘eat and drink and take satisfaction in your toil for this is God’s gift’. There were two reactions to this that I don’t necessarily think are mutually exclusive. One of the girls saw it as a challenge, being content among the restlessness and striving atmosphere of the world and society we live in. My initial reaction was almost polar opposite, I saw it as a cop out, a way for people to say they were enjoying God’s gift by just enjoying life and being content. Don’t get me wrong I seek contentment as much as anyone but not at the loss of my sensitivity to the world around me. I seek a contentment that knows who I am in God, that my life has a purpose entwined with His plan, that His ways are above mine so as I study and read and try to understand Him I’m aware that my finite mind will only grasp glimpses of who He is. But the flip side of that contentment is restlessness. Not the restlessness the world demonstrates with its constant demands for more, but a restlessness that longs to be used by God, that longs to see His Kingdom here on earth in even the smallest ways. I’ve no illusions about my giftings, I’m not destined to be the next great evangelist, while I admire Jackie Pullinger, Grace Alyward and others who have sacrificed so much, I, as yet, don’t feel moved or inspired to do likewise. While I applaud the massive miracles and sweeping revivals, I love seeing God’s hand in the small things, the small steps we overlook sometimes in our quest for what we perceive to be the greatness of God. But is that my mind limiting God or is it the way I’ve learned to cope in a world that is far from ideal and where do I go from this, how do I seek contentment without falling into the trap of apathy which as the first half of this post remarked upon, I have already fallen prey to? I think this is definitely partly what was meant by working out your salvation. Not the initial turn to Christ but the fallout of a decision that will change lives, both your own and those around you.

This is one of my favourite pieces of poetry,by Khalil Gibran,,I love it;

"Beauty is that which attracts your soul, and that which loves to give and not to receive. When you meet Beauty, you feel that the hands deep within your inner self are stretched forth to bring her into the domain of your heart. It is the magnificence combined of sorrow and joy; it is the Unseen which you see, and the Vague which you understand, and the Mute which you hear - it is the Holy of Holies that begins in yourself and ends vastly beyond your earthly imagination."

Misc

You’re the oxygen in my deep breath
You’re the silence in my scream
You’re the raindrop to my desert
You’re the dawn to my bad dream

You’re the good I wish I wanted
And the bad I always crave
You’re the wood that fuels my fire
And the sinner I want to save

Yet in moments of deepest clarity
you’re a shadow of my light
And making you what I want you to be
is a battle I cannot fight

Sing me a sonnet and rhyme me a song
I feel I have loved both too well and too long

********************************************************

I am your dream of love and glory
I am your vision and your story
I am the whisper of a life you glimpsed when the world lay at your feet

I am your soft and woven despair
I am the genius that you declare
I am the wonder that you feel when thoughts of destiny fill your mind

I am the quiet approach of twilight
The unobtrusive glow of starlight
I am the faintly cast shadow of the smile you used to wear

*******************************************************

And sleep my escape from the banal

From the voices that told me
That you never loved me
That all the love I’d given
Would never be given to me

From the thoughts of a long road
Stretching straight and unwinding
With nothing to break the continuous
Line of hard cold dark unyielding stone

I don’t want to be alone

I swore at the sunrise for
Bringing me back to life
And begged the dark night sky
To stay covering the bed where I lay
But night lost out to day
And I was forced to awake

Hope is a thing with feathers

I am so thankful I follow a Lord who never fails to surprise me, who has never given up on me and who in whom all things are new.

I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power,---that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity. But I find that thy will knows no end in me. And when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.

It's only words,,,,,,,

Life and death are in the power of the tongue. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my speech and my words. It’s something that’s strikes me periodically but I recently had a conversation about it that left me thinking even more in depth. I read a book a few years back by a guy called Charles Capps called ‘’The Tongue, a creative force’’. While there were some things I felt a little sceptical about the basic concept that words are creative was left hanging with me. In the very beginning it was the Word of God that created matter, life and existence. The spoken, breathed Word of God. Words have power for good or evil. ‘Life and death are in the power of the tongue’.

A couple of phrases/ideas often come to my mind about my speech, firstly the concept of ‘one random word’. We never know the true impact and power our words can have. When we intend to be insulting it can merely be amusing (like the time as a teenager where I told my mother to F-off and rather than getting mad she laughed and said ‘aw look who’s trying to be tough’) and when we intend to be amusing we can strike to the core of a wound that we don’t know existed. So often people have said something, a random word, which has haunted me for days. These random words drop into our lives like a pebble, causing ripples that are both far reaching and have more of an impact than might have been anticipated. They’re not always negative. Sometimes these words influence thought and potentially deed n an inspirational way but it happens too seldom. I’ve read somewhere before that the effects of an insult last considerably longer than the effects of a compliment. As insecure human beings we seem to fixate on the negative and we believe and accept an insulting lie more easily than a complimentary truth. Or maybe that’s just an Irish thing, we have a chronic inability to accept compliments and feel uncomfortable with praise. But that’s a whole other topic for another day of musing!!

Recently I had an incident where someone gave me the opportunity to tell them exactly what I thought of them following a situation that was complicated and somewhat painful. I went away and wrote what was, even for me, a scathing email, which I have to say was entirely true, based on my observations and perceptions. But I didn’t send it for a couple of reasons. Everything I wrote was true but it wasn’t the whole truth. It was the truth for this situation but there was nothing to offset my words and give them context. We are complex human beings. On any given day you will find me being a shoulder to cry on or a bitch depending on when you catch me. Our emotions are too complex and intense and our characters contain both strengths and weaknesses. Even when I’ve been told to do so if it’ll make me feel better, it’s not my place to solely highlight someone’s weaknesses as a vent for my own emotions. If it was truly in love with a view to seeing that person change for the better then it would be phrased in a way my email certainly wasn’t. In addition to this, I’m sure that what I would have said would not have been news to the recipient. I’m not sure why they wanted me to unleash my sharp tongue but I was loath to be the flagellator for the assuaging of their guilt.

One of my favourite childhood books was Emily of New Moon by L M Montgomery. There was a phrase that Emily used which I’ve taken for my own, or at least try to. She wrote a vow that her pen shall ‘’heal, not hurt’’ after her caustic vitriol and sharp observations hurt someone she cared about. The hurtful truth can be softened without its impact being lessened.

I’ve tried recently to curb my words and to resist the impulse to be cutting. Those closest to me are the ones I’m less guarded around in every way and so as well as being the ones I open up to, they still get burned by fire as I’m learning to control my tongue. I just realised how like a dragon I sound, having to control my flaming rhetoric.

I’ll leave you with some quotes I like

The tongue is, at the same time, the best part of man and his worst; with good government, none is more useful, and without it, none is more mischievous.
- Anacharsis

Open, candid, and generous, his heart was the constant companion of his hand, and his tongue the artless index of his mind.
- George Canning

Update

I had it brought to my attention recently that my blog was lacking in any recent posts and I hadn’t actually attached my ‘’assignments’’. Honestly life has been too crazy between finishing college, catching up with people, moving house and coping with madness in work. So what’s the update you ask?

Well,,got my exam results and got a 2.1 which I was over the moon about, decided against doing more study this year, I just want to relax and enjoy this year with as little stress as possible compared to the bedlam the last 9 months have been. I’ll be doing a badminton refereeing course anyhow and that will take up some time.

I moved house 2 weeks ago, am officially living in Dublin 4!! It’s a large 5 bedroom house so am sharing with 4 other girls who are fantastic! It’s a bit of a dynastic house, friends of mine/people I know, have lived there over the last 3 years so when I moved in and mentioned where it was I got the response of ‘’oh you’re moving into that house’’ as so many people have visited there over the years. I love the fact that the girls I live with continue the open house, welcoming policy. It felt like a home from even before I moved in.

Life in general is good, this year has been such a rollercoaster there’s no way to really describe it even yet. I think it’ll take a while before I’m able to articulate fully the heights and depths of what has been a breath taking, and not always in a good sense, journey.

My faith has been most affected I think. As someone who has grown up as a Christian, committed and involved throughout every aspect of my life, I never went through the rebellious phase most people hot in their college years. This year, through involvement with a couple of guys, through situations that just seemed to have no reason or purpose, I began to doubt and pull away. There was never any question of walking away from God, I toyed with the idea and all that ever came back to me was Paul’s words of ‘’where would we go Lord, you alone have the words of eternal life’’. But my faith, while never being broken or rejected, suffered. It’s been a testament to my mother’s influence that even in depths of running away from God and His will I still prayed, I still talked to God, I turned to Him in every crap circumstance and yes I blamed Him royally as well. I stopped going to church, at first it was to avoid certain people then it became a habit to not go. My Wednesday nights had other options than small group and it was just easier to go there.

Over the years as a small group leader, youth leader and general person people talk to, I had counselled others going through this same thing so I knew the answers, I’d heard the reasons and logic, I knew what I should be doing but I just didn’t want to. The worst feeling of all,,funnily enough,,was the actual not caring. I should have felt guilty but didn’t, should have felt the pricking of conscience or the Holy Spirit but if I did I ignored it and really didn’t care. In some ways I still don’t feel guilty or upset about things that happened over the year. I can see how my wavering faith affected some people negatively, interestingly anyone it affected negatively was already a long time committed Christian, a point I’ll come back to at a later date perhaps, but my doubts and uncertainties actually opened doors for me to talk to friends who were not Christians. They saw my struggles, my anger towards God, my restlessness within the boundaries I had always set about myself but most of all they saw my inability to walk away, they saw the hold that God had on me. I had always thought how difficult it would be to walk away from Christian circles, from the comfort and support I had grown up within, but this year I made a startling revelation. It really wouldn’t be that hard at all. For the guts of a year I dropped out of my usual Christian circles in Dublin and with only a couple of notable exceptions, my absence was scarcely commented on. This perturbed me, not from a feeling rejected point of view but from a sudden realisation that there is a scarcity of people in the church who watch for those falling away and come along side them. It’s always the same people who get involved in everything, similar to the old adage of ‘if you want something done ask a busy person’. I was and am blessed to have amazing friends spread throughout the country who kicked my ass where need be and didn’t suffer my foolishness gladly, who heard the words behind what I said and were there whenever I needed them but I am conscious that so many people don’t have that. People come into church broken and needing healing, needing God’s touch and that can be a long process which varies for each individual.

I recently had my social conscience questioned after a heated debate where I had to defend myself against charges of apathy and ‘sitting on a middle class throne’. I’m the first to put my hand up and say I don’t do as much for the poor and underprivileged as perhaps I should but that doesn’t cause me to stop in my tracks the way the thought of people isolated within church does. So often I think there’s an attitude of ‘well they’re in church now it’s all ok, lets look for more people to bring in’ rather than the continuance of mentoring, shepherding and supporting within a church context. It can’t be left to church leaders, it has to be the people around and that’s what breaks my heart and has done for a long time. I’m not a fan of ‘accountability’ as I think it introduces a measure of guilt and shame into a relationship that should be about encouragement.

I’ve had a dream for a long time of a place where people can come to no matter what state they are in spiritually, a place of rest and retreat, a place of learning and questioning, a safe haven which welcomes all. In recent weeks people have been talking about giftings and I’ve started to pray again about God’s plan for my life. This stirring for a place that people can come to is getting stronger but I have no idea how to go about it, I guess I’m relying on God to sort out the logistics. The one thing I’m concerned about is that this year may have delayed the realisation of God’s plan in my life but I don’t believe God woks that way, the more I look at this last year I realise what a learning curve its been. I found myself in a place I couldn’t persuade myself out of, I had doubts I came to embrace and this increased trust, reluctant, kicking and screaming trust, but trust nonetheless. I know I serve a God who works all things together for good and if this year is anything to go by, having had the experience of running away but knowing Truth, it may open doors and it may open my heart more to those who go through this.

I’m not by any means out of the woods yet. I’ve begun a journey back to a place where I feel surrounded by God again, but I’m not going to pretend I’m in a perfect place. There will be repercussions of choices made this year and I still recoil from any attempts at cliché or placating words. But I know my God is bigger than all of my concerns and I know He won’t let me go and for now that’s all I need.

Challenge

So, as part of her efforts to get me writing in a disciplined fashion again, my friend Niamh has set me a challenge. She will give me a theme, send me an article or lyrics or quote etc and I have to write a response to it or along the theme. As most of my ramblings are the result of conversations or something I've read it makes sense and it will help me focus on writing at least one entry a week (or more if I feel like inflicting facetiousness on those of you kind enough to read this). The first challenge is a lyric but she sent it to my work email so inspiration and genius will have to wait!!

Quotes

Learn silence. With the quiet serenity of a meditative mind, listen, absorb, transcribe, and transform.
Pythagoras

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature-trees, flowers, grass-grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence.
Mother Teresa

Beggarly Heart

When the heart is hard and parched up,

come upon me with a shower of mercy.

When grace is lost from life,

come with a burst of song.

When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from

beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.

When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner,

break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king.

When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one,

thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.

Rabindranat Tagore

Musings

I've been thinking a lot lately about the cyclical nature of life. It seems, like the year, we go through seasons that recur and nothing ever really seems to truly end. Friendships, relationships, issues, concerns, wants, needs, they all seem to fade and then reappear when we least expect them.

the last two weeks have been interesting from a personal and observational point of view. Take three different situations. For me, 2 friendships I'd let go and walked away from re emerged. Two of my friends had a similar situation. One had an ex boyfriend get in contact after 6 months which led to what will hopefully be closure on a difficult relationship and another had an old flame re kindled which led to a painful experience of getting fingers burnt. All three of these situations were people we had let go to some extent or other and each time it was the other person getting back in contact. With uncanny timing I read a friends blog and he had published an article on how we are reluctant to let things go,,we dislike the uncertainty of burning bridges and always want to keep our options open. The article also spoke about how difficult we find it to make important decisions and how essential it is to close some doors even though it feels like a loss. I agree with the vast majority of the article, i don't think its a wise thing to shut doors completely and become hardened to the idea of reconciliation. From so many points of view, I agree we sometimes just need to streamline our lives and to run from the 'normality' of life which is ridiculous busyness. There is a wisdom in being realistic but I think we could run the risk of shutting ourselves off from something that is valuable.

In saying that, both my friends they need to remove these damaging relationships from their lives in order to move on and they both know that will be difficult. There are times when we just need to make the break,not contact that person that you feel you're working too hard to keep contact with, ask yourself why these friendships matter so much and why we cling to them. Is it just the sense of loss? is it that we think we have failed in some way if we don't hold hands with everyone around us? is it that we are scared to be alone and so we make our lives so busy and fill it with people all the time so we don''t have to sit in silence and listen to what our God, our depths and our heart are telling us. As a youngest child growing up in the country I spent a lot of time alone and I loved it. I read, wrote, played with our conveyor belt of dogs that came and went, and i rarely felt really lonely. It was when i moved to a city and became surrounded by people that i felt the need to validate my existance, to somehow be a significant factor. I jokingly told a friend last night that his arrogance caused people to hate him, his response was 'well at least i'm not nothinged' (bad grammer is his not mine). its so true,,we want people to love us or hate us but never ignore us.

I guess it comes down to the question of where we get our identity from. Is it from within us, a knowledge of who we really are or is it the reflection we see in other people's eyes when they look at us and what they tell us we are.