Saved in Translation

Yesterday's merry japes in the Spanish tongue have brought me back to Doug Chaplin's comments regarding the translation of the words of and stories about Jesus into Greek - or, to put it another way, the writing of the Gospels.

The scriptural basis of the Christian faith lives primarily in translation. We don't have Our Lord's words as he originally spoke them because the Gospels are not in his native tongue of Aramaic. Which makes any claim to be using the "originals" very nuanced when we go to our Greek New Testaments and try to drag the beauty of John's Gospel out of them.

But it's not even that simple. Because if we are reading Jesus quoting Old Testament scripture, we have to bear in mind that the Old Testament that the early Church tended to use was the Septuagint - a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Common Greek.

And so we have passages where Jesus - an Aramaic-speaking Jew, presumably - is quoted (in Greek) referring to passages in the Hebrew Bible, but the Bible he is quoted using is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible - presumably (and this is presumably, I realise - I have no way of proving this) a version he didn't use. It's as if I wrote a life of Spurgeon, and wherever he quoted Scripture I subbed in the words from the Douai-Rheims Bible.

I'm assuming here that this is what happened -  and that this page is wrong when it argues, from Jesus' quoted words in the Bible, that he used the Septuagint.

If I were Drayton, and set store by Biblical inerrancy, I could despair at this point.

But the evidence, thankfully, is that I'm not Drayton. And I will rejoice that the Spirit takes all that linguistic mess and confusion and, through yet another translation, adds another layer of nuance. Or two, if you read the NIV where the Bible has been translated into Evangelical, or the Revised English, where passages appear to have been translated into Liberal. And I could go on.

And I will rejoice that God can get in on the act to the degree that he can take the Hebrew of Isa 7:14-16 and actually translate that into a genuine miracle.

A glory of our faith, it seems to me, is that through the competing narratives of the Bible stories and the scope for flexibility and imprecision that the story of the words entails, the work of Spirit and man or woman in interpretation goes on. We share a belief that can morph into a thousand expressions of life. And rather than regret that, I'm going to celebrate it.

Now I'm off to pour out some beakers. We're reckoning the wind's dropped off enough we can hold the ceremony outside again today - which is a great relief. Young Keith is busy installing the stations for the Spirituality of Robotics in the Moot House and I'm not convinced that one of those robots isn't a People-mincing machine. One of the Sirius Cybernetics Corps' less successful GPPs.

Todo se ha ido tranquilo por allá

Phil comments on the problem that Fernando Torres has had with translation - ie that when he was trying to say "given a bit of patience I'm sure my run of poor form will come to an end - after all look at the quality of the people behind me", it came out as "If you put a white beard on Frank Lampard he'd be a dead ringer for Father Christmas, Terry's always too tired from extra-curricular activities to limp any faster than an asthmatic snail and the rest of them, frankly, are well past it".

But had El Niño really said what he has been reported as saying, he would only be proving what we all knew - that there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who blame others when they are at fault themselves, and those who blame themselves no matter who's at fault. It's a simple psychological fact that, by blaming his team mates, Nando would be preserving his self-belief until he started scoring goals again. It may not be a spiritually good idea, but it does wonders for your self-respect. Although it may mitigate against ever getting better.

Still, good luck, Fernando, I'm sure things will get better,  Or, as they say in Spain, "Él no podía golpear las nalgas de una vaca con un banjo".

Tweeting during Sermons

Maybe a bit late to the party, but I've been reading the blog by Vicky Beeching regarding the use of social media in Church/Moot House/Religious Conference with a Groovy Hashtag (#RCGH11).

Now I'm as hip as the next person when it comes to technology. Especially if I'm sitting next to Marston Moretaine, who thinks that he hears "voices" when it's just the Archers on the radio. Whereas my family were among the first to get into 8-track cassettes, Betamax videos, Segways and Sinclair C5s. And I'm really looking forward to this Google+ thing taking off.

And of course Hnaef is even more technically minded than I am, with his Android tablet (although I really can't see how he's going to get that down, no matter how much water he takes it with). But I still thought overdid it during last night's sermon. He must have sent out thirty tweets musing on whether the Nativity of Richard Gatling was a suitable celebration for a peacable kingdom like ours, updated Facebook with exciting statuses like "is in the Moot House", "likes Messiaen" and "wishes Cafe Church had decent coffee". Uploaded some rather tasteful images of the tea lights and pebbles onto yfrog.  And wondered whether anyone would ever accept his invitations to join him on LinkedIn.

Which would, I suggest, have collectively been a little obsessive at the best of times - and very distracting for him. But we were all waiting for him to finish preaching. Three hours that sermon took. We didn't "like" him after that.

Sacred Kites

I think Marston really misunderstood this one. The minute the wind got up he told us about the tradition in Pakistan of flying killer kites, and set off out with a roll of wire, 30 square feet of canvas and a load of 2x2. Said when we saw the monster kite hovering 100 feet in the air we'd marvel at the Aeolian wonder of it all, as the wind moved it where it would.

He said that as a means of inculcating primeval awe, and making us one with the elements, this was going to be a real winner.

Anyway. I'm glad to say he seems to have missed Luton and Cranfield airspace, but if anyone sees 16 stone of wally flying over the Stewartby area, can you let us know? I'd say it's cos we like him, but the truth is he's got the key to the Beaker Bar in his pocket.

Succession Planning

This morning a pericope floats round my head:

Woe is me! For I have become like one who, after the summer fruit has been gathered, after the vintage has been gleaned, finds no cluster to eat; there is no first-ripe fig for which I hunger.

I've no idea what it means, but certainly all the figs blew down in the night, and I don't fancy taking on the Killer Wasps who have put their black-and-yellow flag under the tree and claimed the land for Good Queen Wasptoria.

So instead I've been investigating the source of the rumours that I'm planning to step down next year. And when I say 'planning' the rumours seem to mean 'going to be forced into'.
I've heard that some are saying I should make way for "a taller druid", whatever that means. Apparently in these troubled times we need somebody posher, with a more liberal attitude to - well, frankly to everything. And if we are going to continue to see assemblies 'of a broadly Beaker nature' in some of of our local schools, it is suggested, we need someone who actually believes in assemblies.

I've no idea who's been putting these ideas around on Beaker Internet forums, as clevely he is using a pseudonym. Well, don't worry, 'Hafen', I will work it out.

Need I do more than point out the parallel with Mr Blair? After three centuries of ruinous wars, self aggrandisment and passing endless laws so that his lawyer wife could make more money, Tony Blair was so disliked that we encouraged Gordon Brown to plot against him. However Tony took the hint and went off to become the Supreme Leader of the World's Religions and, having the right track record, to bring peace to the Middle East. And then we found we had Gordon, micro-manager of financial insanity, distributor of cheap gold and Scourge of Bigots.

I know you're all wondering where Gordon is these days, and I can tell you that he's in a good place. Occasionally he still throws phones at us when he thinks "Ed" is out to get him. But mostly he just sits in the Peaceful Room, contemplating a tea light and moving the budgets that he still believes he controls around. It's bad news for Social Services in Gordon's world this week , I can tell you.

But you see the pattern. When Tony left we got Gordon. When Maggie was knifed we got - you know - that bloke. When Solomon went they got Rehoboam. Better the devil you know, as Gadaffi maybe should have suggested.

Anyway, enough of the rumour-mongering. Remember that the one who wields the knife never wears the mitre. I mean crown. And we religious types have better things to do than be ambitious. Like pray and do good things.

Sum enchanted evening

I've just been enjoying terrifying Hnaef. If there's a one in 60 chance of being hit each day by this satellite, I told him, then surely that's only one in 30 during the night-time? As clearly the satellite won't crash to earth in day light as it's a space object - and space things only come out at night.

In fact, as I pointed out, he's lucky we're still the sunny side of the Equinox. As there's more night than day after that, and so more chance of the satellite falling.

You see, this is why it was so important to me to get Burton in as a proper Financial Accountant. When Hnaef was Treasurer, nothing ever added up - and not in a good way. It was my own fault for misunderstanding his qualifications - when he told me he was good at Numbers I thought he meant he was qualified in Maths. Not that he was referring to his specialism in Old Testament studies.

Satellite statistics

The Archdruid mentioned last night that there's a chance of a satellite falling on our heads. In Burton's absence (he was off counting the frequency of number plates containing the characters "DU11" or something), I took it upon myself to do some research, and it turns out that there's a 1 in 3200 chance that it'll fall on someone's head between now and the end of October.

I got to thinking: what if that someone is me? 1 in 3200 sounds small, but I've only got one me, and I'm rather fond of it. And what would the impact of my loss be on the Community? Apart from a ruddy great hole in the Moot House roof, obviously.

And then I thought some more. And did more calculations. And given that there are, by my reckoning, 51 days left, including today but excluding Sundays (I don't know much about theodicy, but would God allow such an accident on His Own day? Surely not), between now and the end of October, there's a 1 in 62 chance of my getting hit on any particular day. And that's about the same as the fatality rate I found on the Interweb  bring quoted for BASE jumping. Which, I think we can agree, is pretty scary.

I mentioned this to Mrs Hnaef, and, for some reason, she's currently trying to buy me a parachute on Amazon. If only I could get her to take these issues seriously.

A scarily precise satellite

We've heard the warning now. The Telegraph tells us that a satellite is falling from the sky. In a bizarre headline they tell us that it's a £468 million satellite. That's scarily precise for a falling satellite. Why would cost matter when a satellite fell on your head? You wouldn't think, "that's a £200 bike that just ran into me". To be honest, its six ton weight strikes me as far more relevant than its cost.

"Yellow" alert of weather forecasters talking tripe

It's the Weather People's  latest technique for getting in the news.

In the old days they'd issue a forecast based on their computer model of it always being hotter than yesterday, and say we'd have barbecue summers, tropical heatwaves in July, Indian summers and lager winters. But they were always wrong, and deservedly laughed to shame.

So now they have introduced the concept of a "Yellow alert". I'm guessing a yellow weather alert is two down from red, and one up from green. Perhaps with bronze alert and primrose alert available for those tricky not-quite-so-clear alerts.

Far as I can tell, "yellow alert" means that they don't think anything serious is going to happen, but they've not been in the news for a week or two. It has the great advantage that, if nothing happens, they can say "it wasn't a specific warning - just a yellow alert".

Now I reckon that we have three tends that can conveniently come together here. One is that nobody believes the Met Office any more, because they are, by and large, pants. Another is that, despite that first point, everybody has a desperate urge to hear scary weather stories. Aand the third is that the Government wants to save and/or make some money. So I suggest, bringing these three threads together, that the Government sell the Met Office to Sky Sports. The taxpayers make some money, the Met Office can talk even greater tripe - along with Geoff from the Football programmers saying "Lucky for Total Network Solutions they won 2-0 today over Cefn Druids - especially with that plague of frogs forecast" and we all feel like the world is more exciting than in fact it is. Then on the terrestrial channels, as they were once known, we can replace the pointless, fake-excitement-generating weather people with people's nans, who can just appear on the screen wearing headscarfs and pac-a-macs and say "It's September. It might rain" or - as it might be in Husborne Crawley- "Looks black over Leighton".

Just one thought though - when your local weather people issue a "Yellow alert of rain", do you think what I think? Yes, thought so. Ugh.

Ritual Food Friday

Your know, normally I prefer to work and study quietly in my own office. But Friday afternoon is different. Then, Hnaef and I like to pick up our laptops and walk - we like to quit our offices (which are, of course, hierarchical and so patriarchal and therefore bad symbols of oppression) and "hot desk" into the Open Plan.

The "Open Plan" is the area about half the size of my office, wherein work Burton, Jenni the Community secretary, Barb the COO of Mrs Whimsey's Doilies plc and of course Charlii. Ever alert to such issues, Charlii knows that  if there's anything confidential to discuss in a pastoral role, she should ensure her visitors speak quietly. Especially this week, when she's doing a cut-rate special for counselling people with unusual and embarrassing urges.

But on Fridays, the lower-ranking people of the Open Plan have a ritual almost religious in its intensity. They bring in stuff. Doughnuts, cheese straws, chocolate, tortilla chips - every low-value, high-calorie food you can imagine. All "because it's Friday". So it would be churlish not to join in. Or "eat free stuff", to put it another way. Good grief, it's barely 5 o'clock and I've eaten six custard doughnuts already.

Obviously, now we're full of cheap calories we'll be off back to our offices. Give the lower ranks too much white sugar and they become ever so noisy. And Marston's just come in to "share" his mental-image problem with Charlii. And frankly I'm prepared to wait for the book on that one.

Enya and Mary

I've received a letter from a Revd T.R.Ellis of North Wales. She writes:

Dear Ms Vorderman

I note that you spent the festival of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary celebrating instead that other famous icon of the Irish, Enya.  How do you propose to explain yourself on the last day, heretic?

Love to Hnaef. We studied together. Hope his Imitation is coming along.

Kiss, kiss

T.R. Ellis (Revd Dr Mrs)

Well, Tracey. What can I say? Not to God, but to the Great British Public - a famously less forgiving judge. I mean, just look at Red or Black.

The Nativity of the BVM is a nuanced and intriguing festival. Ann holds in her hands this child who will one day hold the Universe. This precious bundle who, in just a few short years, will receive the terrifying news that God is with her and that she is blessed among women. A choice - for I am sure it was a choice - is before her. To choose the path that leads to potential shame, to pain, possibly to divorce and estrangement and ultimately, definitely, to her own form of passion that day at Golgotha - or what? To run from the will of God, to play happy families with Joseph, to bear many children - which of these two will she choose? How can so tiny a spark already such a world of potential? And what do we bring into the world - what potential, what choices make us in our own way God-bearers: those carry God into our own places? There among the pain and the joy and the shadow of death all things are played out - albeit unknowingly except for One.

And faced with that, I thought it might be safer to light a tea light and play some nice Irish New Age music. Beaker People don't like hard theology and tough decisions. They make them fall over.