On seeing a Yellow Venus

“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
"Yes."
"All like ours?"
"I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted."
"Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?"
"A blighted one.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

An odd experience walking across the Great Meadow tonight. The crescent moon was beautiful, of course. Jupiter set beneath the horizon. But hovering above the western horizon, a yellow Venus.

Venus is meant to be white, of course. I don't know what made the third-brightest object in the sky turn yellow - could have been the haze of sodium lighting from Milton Keynes, could have been atmospheric - but it transformed that pristine superlunary embodiment of the Goddess of Love into a different entity entirely.

And I fell to contemplating the State of Things. The usual question of course. There's no doubt that if I were not the good, traditional, Trinitarian Christian that I am, I'd be a particularly scary form of neo-pagan. The universe we inhabit is just so terrifying - the sizes so great, the gaps so large, the habit of random particles popping up from the random wave-form of the quantum void just so - well, so random, to be honest. The "God's in his heaven and all's right with the world" theory of life has never done for me. But then neither has the idea that Mother Gaia loves the bunnies. The evidence, such as it is, is that if God's in his heaven., the world's bloody terrifying. And as far as Mother Gaia is concerned, the bunnies can fry if that's what it takes to burn off the fever called Humanity. If I were a pagan, I'd be raising giant stone blocks to keep the One I feared off my back.

I stereotype, of course.  But it does strike me that any cuddly-bunny theory, either Christian or not, fails to stand up to a reasoned investigation. Darwin had his Ichneumon moth; Hardy had Tess as the plaything of the gods. We have the fate of the innocent Cornish pasty. They all add up to meaningless misery on the face of this apparently wonderful earth.

But go outside, under a yellow Venus, and the world changes somewhat.

CS Lewis asked himself why sheer, boring, brute, physical matter was required for God to create other beings. And, as one who is tempted to poke among mysteries, he merely confined himself to the comment that maybe it was necessary to create a physical, dimensional universe in which to house other beings than God himself. I'm sure someone (maybe Holger or Archimandrite Simon) will be able to reference this book, but it's late and the CS Lewis wing of the library is a scary thing late at night - inhabited as it is by centaurs and not-quite-tame lions.

But if the physical world was necessary to house sentient beings, then maybe there's something existential about a physical world that it should go bloody wrong the whole time? Give a human being free will and sure - before you know it there's going to be a war, or oppression, or racism or One Direction. We can't help ourselves. And maybe if God's going to create a world, then the world has that same problem - the world has a kind of free will (which you can express in the equations of the Quantum Theory, if you wish) - and if you give something free will then it's going to go wrong. It can't help it - it just does. Earthquakes will happen, stars will emit meaningless but deadly pulses of radiation. The truth of the Garden of Eden story is that anything created - given a free choice - will at some point make something pointless and stupid happen. And create something as big as the Universe, and something pointless and stupid will happen everywhere, all the time. It's not a problem, as such. It's not a design flaw. It's not even unexpected. It's just that, if God creates something that's not God, the option's there. And if the option is there, you can be fairly sure it will be taken.

In which case the Crucifixion is not a cruel God, punishing an innocent man because all the other humans couldn't keep the rules. The Crucifixion is God saying - "I took a chance. I made a universe so I could have living beings. I made it able to be what it wants - and I made you able to be, within the parameters of your environment, the things that you can be. I made it that way because that's the only way I could. If I made people that couldn't go wrong, they wouldn't be people. If I made a world that couldn't go wrong, it wouldn't be a proper world. You had to be free. I made that decision. And I did it because I wanted to love you.
And because the world is so fierce, and your decisions are so wrong so often - because only by leaving you alone could I let you be you - I knew that if I was going to make you, then pain was inevitably going to happen. And if that was the case, then I was going to have to take it with you.

"So I know it's foolishness. And I know you won't understand it. And I know you are going to make up all sorts of theology to rationalise it - because how can a human being deal with anything without a model - but I'm going to have to do it.

"If I'm going to make a world in which you have to suffer - because if you don't, then you and the universe won't be free - then I'm going to be in it with you.

"So give thanks to the human Jesus - because he's shared all the sufferings you and the world ever will. But the human Jesus is also Me. I am He. It may make me seem small, it may make no sense. It may be open to ridicule, and all sorts of misinterpretation. But I am going to be He - sharing the sufferings you must suffer, because if you don't there will be no world. And if there is no world then I will have nothing outside myself to love.

"And bear with it. Because - when we've broken down the need for a physical world together, and crawled through the pain it brings, there's an eternity of joy you can never imagine. You'll have to bear with me - but then I've shared with you."

This world may be blighted, but then they all are. Venus is this evening, in all her unlikely yellowness. But they shine with the light of eternity.

Sweden - an Apology

Digs on Ridgeway Hill, Weymouth have revealed that the mass burial of beheaded young men recently uncovered during eathworks for a new relief road was of Vikings.

It would appear that the men were captured in battle, stripped, then beheaded in a mass execution.  Given that the site is of important Hardyan relevance*, and on a Ridgeway with known Beaker associations - there's a possibility that the people who carried out this act of vengeance may have been, not Anglo-Saxon, but a hillside enclave of the Beaker People.

Obviously, we can't be sure.  But to be on the safe side, and to get in before Gordon Brown, I would like to apologise to any living descendants of these no-doubt innocent Scandinavian tourists, and also to the whole Swedish people.  I will happily sign any on-line petition that the Vikings' remains be repatriated to Uppsala or Malmo, although I hasten to add we won't be offering any reparations.

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* Being not far from where Dick Dewey became engaged to Fancy Day in Upwey, and indeed not far from the settings of The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion, and with relevance to The Trumpet Major as well.  This is deep Hardy country.  If only he'd known about this.

** Image © Copyright Nigel Mykura and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence at http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1085853