We're only human

Try to identify the difference between Lent and Advent.
Try and put your finger on it.
After all, there are things in common:

• Lilac / Purple colours in Anglican churches (we prefer red hi-viz until the Spring Equinox in Husborne Crawley, for historical reasons).
• A general soberness in the mood (except at the interminable Christmas dinners and parties in Advent, when the fast is suspended - sometimes for days at an end)
• A shortage of flowers around the place - although the deadly Flower Arranging Mafia may be inclined towards cacti and succulents during Lent, in the same way as they go for dried Nigella and bits of stick and rose hips in Advent).

Maybe it's that Advent is about expectation (on the cheerful side) and about judgement and death (on the ominous side).  And Lent is about what it means to be human - about temptation, and getting things wrong, and failing, and wondering what to do about it.

Frequently when I ask Beaker People why, or how, or for what purpose they have fouled up I get the response "I did my best".  To which the correct response is "Yes, I was afraid of that".  Or they may say "We're only human", to which the answer is "Keep trying, you may make it..."
Sarcastic I know.  But it's best that we are fully aware of the situation we're in.  We get it wrong.  We muck it up.  If we see a hat on the pavement, we'll kick it - even if we know there's a brick underneath it.  Shown an apple and told not to eat it, we eat it.  Give us a button marked "do not press this button..." - yes, well you all know how that ends.  Give us a talking snake and we'll listen to it.

We're only human.  That's what it comes down to.  We're only human.  And as long as we can remember that's what we are - we do fine.  If we think we're a little lower than the angels - well maybe we are.

But when we decide we're gods - that's when the trouble starts.  Because we're only human.

Fasting Friday

Good  ideas for Lent

• Giving up red meat and things from the chocolate machine (Eileen)
• Giving up red meat and port (Hnaef)
• Giving up men (Stacey Bushes - personally I'd given up on men years ago)
• Giving up dancing naked on Aspley Heath (the Beaker Fertility Folk - although I think they're just glad of the excuse not to in this weather)
• Giving up standing on Ridgmont Station taking the same train's number over and over again all day (Burton Dasset)
• Refraining from persuading people that the Great House is Woburn Abbey and selling them tickets (Young Keith)
• Giving up Death Metal (Drayton Parslow)
• Giving 10% more of your income to Community Funds - nobody's offered, but if they would like to I'll give them an extra tea light.

 

Bad ideas for Lent

• Giving up breathing (Marston Mortaine.  The good news is that every time he passes out he breaks his fast.  Still, respect for the self-control when he's conscious)
• Giving up going to work (Elbert.  That's 10% of an IT help desk operator's salary that won't be coming our way for the foreseeable future).
• Standing in the pond up to your waist while holding a bird in a nest in your hand (Oicumenika - in the first place, she's combined two different saints.  In the second place, they were both Celtic and therefore not recognised in the Beaker pantheon.  And in the third place, we had to pull her out when she went blue and her legs stopped working.
• Saving money by making tea lights out of melted-down dead badgers (Burghley).
• Eating only seal meat (Rordricka.  Again, we suspect she's done this in an attempt to be vaguely Celtic.  But it's a nightmare in the kitchen.  And the smell of roast seal just hangs over the place.

A proper fast

If Lent is a time of fasting, and Friday is a day of fasting - then how much fasting must one do on a Friday in Lent?  Is it a double fast, or a fast squared?

Humans love a set of rules.  Keeps us safe.  We know where we are.  The Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, decreed that anyone eating meat in Lent was to be put to death.  He also decreed that Saxons who would not convert to Christianity were to be put to death.  You didn't mess with Charlemagne.

But relief was at hand for Saxons - in Lent, at least.  The Church came up with all sorts of exceptions over the years to the meat-eating rule.  Some said you could eat Beaver Tail, as an honorary fish.  Or maybe duck on the same basis?  And on St Patrick's Day, the Irish could eat corned beef.  Then you could have Mothering Sunday off - and any other Sunday according to some - or you only had to fast on Fridays.  Or only until 3pm.  For every rule its exception.

How often do we do that?  Hold fiercely to principles that have the most convenient exceptions?

And yet.  And yet.

"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?" 

Have a good fast.

Not one stone on another

Just go and have a look - at your house.  Your church (building).  Your office.  The town where you live.  Your football team's stadium.  The Houses of Parliament.

One day - not one stone will be left on another.

What does that make you feel?

Does it change your viewpoint?

What do you invest in that one day won't matter?

Where do you get your security from?

And is it secure?

What are you building with?  Gold and stone and silver?  Or pallets and cardboard and paper?

---

"Do you see all these things?" he asked. "I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down." (Matt 24:2, NIV)

From dust you came

There's always such an argument over the Book of Genesis, especially chapters 1-3.  Which is odd because it is such a modern view that there must be literal truth there.  Fundamentalism, when all's said and done, is a child of the 20th century - a fact that militant atheists (with their blinkered, stunted view of history) overlook.  As do those on the fundamentalist side of the argument, for whom nothing happened of any consequence between 100AD and last week.
"From dust you came".  True of course.  Utterly true.  From dust we all came.  We come from the animals (or, if applicable, plants) - and the animals came from the plants they ate.  And the plants come from the dust of the earth - and the dust goes back to the dust of more and more animals, dead animals, and more plants, dead plants, and the waste of living plants and animals.  And they all came from the dust.  From dust we come.
But what dust.  The dust of stars.  The elements of which we are formed - the carbon, oxygen, calcium, phosphorous - were forged in the atomic furnaces in the depths of stars, more than 5 billion years ago.  We are made of dead plants - of dead animals - of dead stars.  From dust we came.
And to dust we return.  No doubt about it.  When they opened up the barrows around Stonehenge that's all they found of the people themselves - scraps of bones and piles of ash and bits of dust.  Every human dream, every first love, every new child, every journey ever commenced in hope - they all end up in the dust. Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships - dust.  Alexander the Great, who conquered a world - dust.  Stalin - dust.  Queen Elizabeth I, who preserved a country and destroyed Philip's army and inspired a thousand lovers - dust.  The Egyptian Pharaohs, who tried to cheat death through Chemistry - even they crumble into dust.

A precious world, a world of greens and blues - where life is quick and love is short and hopes all crumble into the dust.  Make the most of it.  And give what you can.  For from dust you came, and to dust you shall return.  And the treasure that doesn't crumble to dust?  Stash it away.  You'll need it later.

Ashes to Ashes - Ash Wednesday

Ash.

Organic Compounds + Oxygen.

Sign of mourning.
Sign of judgement.
Covering of destruction.
End of all things.
"Dies Irae" as the Requiems have it - the "Day of Wrath when the world dissolves in ashes".

The poet said, "This is how the world ends - not with a bang, but with a whimper."
He lied.
Or at least was uninformed.
The Sun is warming.  In a billion years the seas will boil.  All life will cease.  And as the sun expands, the Earth will turn to an ash in its turn.
This is how the world ends - not with a bang, but with a fry-up.

As the prophet said, "Anyone here from Hastromil?"  It's going to be too late to worry about whether you left the gas on then.

Ash - the end of every civilisation.  Whether the burning of a city, or the covering from a volcano - what's left is ash.

Ash - the recognition.  If this is all there is, then fine.  But it's all ashes.  But if there's more than this, then what we have and what we are must change.  The impurities must be purged.  The phoenix must rise from the ashes - because where else do you get a phoenix from?

Ash - what's left from a fire, that we scatter on the ground so new life can spring up.

Have a thoughtful, and repentant, Lent.

Image "Garden of the fugitives", Pompeii - from wikipedia

Lenten Activity

I've not yet decided whether this community should give up any of the following for Lent:

• Being stupid
• Having alt.worship go tragically and/or embarrassingly wrong
• Being arrested by the local Police (Young Keith's Uncle) for dancing naked on Aspley Heath
• Filling choir robes with helium and floating them over Woburn Sands
• Lighting tea lights
• Meditating on pebbles
• Singing crass and embarrassing feminized worship songs.

Whichever I do decide they should give up, life round here will almost certainly be immeasurably improved.

However, in a spirit of doing something different, I hope I can promise you a short meditation each day in Lent.  I may be another of my sermons, it may be a stray thought, it may be something uplifting or challenging.
You have all been warned.

Well that just about wraps it up for Science

Disturbing news from Young Keith, who's been applying the theory that either Genesis 1-3 is literally true or else God doesn't exist, to other fields of endeavour.

He started by looking at Schrödinger's Cat.  Judging by the legal records of early-mid 20th Century Austria, it is evident that at no time did Schrödinger ever actually put a cat in the situation recorded.  There are no historical mentions of half-dead cats wandering the streets of Vienna.  Therefore no cat actually existed.  And if Schrödinger never actually had a cat, then Quantum Physics is clearly false.
He went on to Organic Chemistry.  We will remember that in explaining the structure of Benzene, Kekulé described how he had a dream of seeing a snake catching its own tail.  By Kekulé's own admission a dream, so the snake never existed - and in any case the idea of a snake catching its tale comes from the Worm Ouroboros - which is a myth.  So clearly Organic, or at the very least, Aromatic Chemistry is false.  Kevin's theory is that Kekulé's dreamt up the theory because he had been sniffing too much benzene - a chemical that Kevin has now proven doesn't exist.  Kevin realises his argument is circular - but then so are (or aren't) the Aromatic Ring and the Worm Ouroboros.


Finally for Science, Keith went on to look at gravity.  By considering the account of Stukeley, who apart from being the revered re-founder of our order of Christian Druids was also the man who wrote the account of Newton's Apple, we can see that Newton's Apple was only a theoretical apple -  mythical apple, if you will.  Not an empirical apple.
From this, with a stunning leap of counter-intuitive logic, Keith has concluded that Gravity doesn't work, and it's mere inertia that stops us falling off the earth.  We've tried arguing with him, but he's using the Fourteenth Tenet of Post-Modern Belief - "that which is counter-intuitive is always true".  So he's spent all night nailing everything to the ground.  There's a number of Beaker People who got six-inch nails driven through their flares and into the floor of the Moot House during Pouring Out of Beakers this morning, and they're not happy.


Finally, Keith points out that Ron, Hermione and ideed Harry Potter himself are imaginary.  So he has concluded that the virtues extolled by the Harry Potter series - such as bravery, goodness and friendship - aren't true either.  So now he's nailed the Beaker People to the floor,bhe's going round kicking them up the backside.  I think we're going to need to get  his Uncle, the Police Constable, to bang him up for a little while until he's calmed down and achieved some kind of sense of proportion.  And I need to check whether this is all down to Keith discovering where I stashed the rest of the Valentine's chocolate...

The Archdruid is Resting

I'm pleased to say we can all venture back out now.

Surely there's a D.Phil thesis somewhere in the effect of heroic quantities of milk chocolate on Archdruids. She's organised 15 services since midnight last night, painted the Beaker Bazaar (bright purple - who knows why) then Artexed the Dining Hall (and ignored the Working at Heights Directive, I'll have you know). She then spent a while screaming that the woodlice were coming to get her.

She's gone off for a rest now. Judging by the theme music, she's playing through her back catalogue of "Friends", so we can probably assume she'll be asleep until some time tomorrow.

Hnaef and Drayton are currently busy boarding up the door to the Archdruid's suite to make sure she's not out till she's definitely settled down. But they have asked me to let you know that Filling up of Beakers is cancelled, due to it's being dark already. The New Moon Moonstomp is at 10 o'clock, followed by Howling at the Moon. In the meantime, I suggest we all nip down the White Horse. I think we all need a swift one after the day we've had.

Thank goodness Valentine's Day only gets cancelled once a year.

Sugar Rush

I need to offer some apologies - I've been accused of being a little "excitable" in leading Pouring Out of Beakers this morning.  I can only attribute it to the vast amount of chocolate I've consumed since yesterday.
It would clearly be unethical to throw away all the chocolate Hnaef confiscated on Valentine's Day.  Therefore I felt it was my moral duty, and environmentally imperative, to eat my own weight in chocolate.  But it's left me rather hyper.  I may calm down in a day or two.

In the meantime can we get back to having services every thirty minutes, as I hastily re-arranged last night.

Valentine's Day is Cancelled

Once again I have found it necessary to cancel Valentine's Day.  The issue is that, falling on a Sunday, we need to transfer it.  And since there are no free days to transfer it to, we will simply have to forget it till next year.

So I'm afraid that any chocolates or flowers about the place will be confiscated as we enter the period of Lent early.  This evening's Festival of Flowers and Sherbert will instead be replaced with an hour of Standing in Icy Silence, which will be followed by the Act of Recrimination.

These directives are in no way because I only received one card this morning, and that from Burton Dasset.  If anyone wants to know how I knew an unsigned card was from a train-spotting accountant, I'll let you know what the verse was inside it:

"Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
I love being in a train over the Harringworth Viaduct
Only 32% as much as I love you".

I rest my case.