The Lamia / the Slippermen (More Earth than Sea)

OK. You may or may not agree with this. But I'm going with it because I believe it is true. And if we don't identify what is true, what can we betray later?

Here it is.

"The Lamia" may be the most beautiful song ever made, and certainly more beautiful than anything else Genesis ever made. The flexuousness of Peter Gabriel's incredible voice, the odd yet sexy subject material - it's a piece of absolute, exquisite, scary, beauty.

Rael stands astonished doubting his sight,
Struck by beauty, gripped in fright;
Three vermillion snakes of female face
The smallest motion, filled with grace.
Muted melodies fill the echoing hall,
But there is no sign of warning in the siren's call:
"Rael welcome, we are the Lamia of the pool.
We have been waiting for our waters to bring you cool."

I guess like Lamia herself, it's a symbol of male insecurity. The Lamia bring sexual ecstasy to the
tired, disorientated Rael. But as soon as they taste his blood - which, apparently, is what sexually-confident women do - they die. Rael steps from the room - his lovers are dead from their brief encounter. And yet. And yet.

When he gets to the Colony of the Slippermen, he discovers that it's he who has lost a lot (and has a few inches more to lose - and let's face it, insecure males worry about such things). The Lamia, he discovers, are capable of regeneration. Every one of the Slippermen has known that same short-lived ecstasy as Rael and - when he thought the Lamia were dead - has crawled off, wart-covered and loathsome. The Lamia have suffered merely a petit mort-  although it seemed much more. It is Rael, his brother John and the Slippermen who are afflicted on an ongoing basis. Rael realises he has to lose his virility to survive - the Slippermen are stuck in their self-inflicted goo.

The moral of this story appears to be that young men shouldn't mess around with snakes. I will point out that Gabriel describes the colour of the Lamia as "vermillion". Quite appropriate, as that's the colour of wyrms. Isnt't that neat?

I will also suggest that the "violining" that Hackett uses in this piece is possibly the best, most snaky, bit of violining ever achieved by any lead guitarist with an effects pedal. Ever.

The Death of the Press

A really well thought out piece on the death of the US press, much of which is relevant over here.

More so over here, perhaps as we have Auntie Beeb. The BBC through its licence fee - where it is allowed to charge us for the right to watch other channels - is able to provide vast amounts of online material - competing directly with the newspapers - for free.

The other papers, as sales of dead trees dry up, retreat to online. They pay less money to more junior reporters to write clickbait commentary, or crowd source news from people actually at news events via Twitter. By the time some articles are merely curated Twitter timelines, you know real journalism went away a long time ago. You can see the falling-away in quality most especially, I believe, in the science and religion journalism in allegedly quality press and the BBC - as pointed out by this site repeatedly.

Even this model is failing. To raise the cash they're losing offline, the papers turn to more intrusive advertising. So the readers turn to adblockers. An arms race that will send the press the same way as coopers, pit pony handlers and Spinning Jenny operatives.

It strikes me there's two lessons I want to take out of this today. The first is that we should avoid ad blockers if we want to keep the remnants of a free press. And the second - that I am part, in  my own small way, of the problem. The time you have spent reading my blog post, you could have spent reading an article on a newspaper site, with ads.  You now have time to read one fewer article.

I'd skip the one by Polly Toynbee, if I were you.

Contacting Your Church Minister

It's always a tricky one - how do you get hold of a minister? What time, place or communication method is best? Well, in fact the method varies with the minister's week.

Minister's Working Day

The trouble is, they're really tricky to get hold of on a working day. They keep on the move. Sometimes they'll be at committee meetings: and ministers get to be on lots of committees, not church ones. And you're talking about people whose definition of "work" includes leading retreats to Walsingham or the Holy Land, or going off to other ministers' services. Sure you can leave a message on the phone. If it's the manse phone you might have a chance. But if you have a church office - well, church administrators are terribly protective of the minister. You will get your message added to the giant pile of ignorage and spoon fed to the minister when the administrator thinks it's a less stressful part of the week.

Minister's Day Off

Ministers get one day off every week (apparently Sundays don't count). On this day they are in strict purdah, inaccessible and subject to radio silence. In an ideal world they would be teleported to another county on days off to be on the safe side. So how do you get hold of them?

This is possibly easier than you might imagine. Not that you be able to get hold of the minister personally in the first instance - not unless you hang around in a tree overlooking the manse garden on the off chance that the minister decides to do some gardening or sunbathing. And a sunbathing pastor isn't always in the best frame of mind when, having applied the sun lotion and poured the Pimms, they find a churchgoer shouting questions about the Book of Deuteronomy or the church drains down from a height at them.

And don't waste your time trying to phone them. Again - if you go via the church office you'll get onto the "pending" pile. And if you phone the manse you'll get the answer phone. And if your minister is of a certain age, or a man, it's more likely the message will be accidentally deleted.

Dave Walker has a wonderful cartoon that shows the bunker deep underground where the "vicar goes on his day off". So if they are there you'll struggle to find the the minister if there's a day off bunker.

But no, it's much easier. If you want to get your message across on a Minister's Day Off, send them an email. 

That's what the minister does on a day off. Sorts out the emails.

Sunday

Sunday during the service is a very bad time to get hold of the minister. If you start asking whether you can have a word about how the yews are shading your garden, or whether marrying your next-door neighbour falls under the degrees of affinity, or if you can put a 20 foot poster up on the church wall, or organise a "guerilla fete" in the manse garden - assuming the minister's not sunbathing at the time - don't do it during the service. They tend to be busy. And after the service is bad time - normally they've got another service to go to, or lunch with the Area Superintendent, or a deep desire to be in Weatherspoon's. 

But before the service - that's a really convenient time. You can easily get them because you know where they are, they're not going to run away. And they are often conveniently confined to the vestry - so you are able to block the exit until they deal with your problem. And if they're Anglicans they may be struggling to get themselves into a particularly tricky piece of liturgical outerwear, leaving them at your mercy. The ideal time is about 7 minutes before the service starts - if you catch them off-guard they will sign any form, agree to any changes, or promise to visit your sick pigeon. They will be pathetically happy to help you as quickly as possible.

Sometimes you will come into the vestry just before the service, to find that the minister is kneeling. This is so you find it even easier to tap them on the shoulder.

Hiding Places

Some ministers, despite your kindness in catching them in their spare time before services, will take extreme measures to be unobtainable. Ministers are very cunning, and spend a full semester on their training in learning how to use any scrap of cover to their advantage. If your minister is like this, the best thing to do is not to start setting fire to the undergrowth or cutting down trees. Simply send them an email. Ideally on their day off - that's when they tend to deal with them.

Can you spot the seven vicars hidden in this picture?

Seven Stones - Stuff Happens (all the time)

Tinker, alone within a storm,
And losing hope he clears the leaves beneath a tree,
Seven stones
Lay on the ground.
Within the seventh house a friend was found.
And the changes of no consequence will pick up the reins from nowhere.

Here's a thing. Lots of stuff happens all the time. A tinker gets a coincidence between the stones on the ground and the householder who gives a space in the house/garage/shed. A sign from above? Or just one of the things that happen all the time?

Well a traditional analysis would conclude: one or the other. Either God is sending a message or we live in a complex world - one where so many things happen all the time that coincidences are nearly inevitable.

The important thing about the tinker is not the number 7 - it's than he kept banging on doors. The captain turns the boat in peril to follow a gull which appears to be a supernatural sign. But will the gull lead him into peaceful weather? Or onto the rocks?

But if you drive the theology to its end, in a weird way they're both true. Yes, the logic of this world means that coincidences happen all the time - for every tinker who gets their sign that they will get shelter, there's a farmer who sows at the wrong time.

But underneath the coincidences, "God"-incidences and downright chance of this world, there's a deeper logic - derived from the Logos - where nothing is meaningless; nothing is an accident; no sparrow drops to the street unseen.

Enjoy your days in this meaningless life where yet everything is held in the hands of the Ancient of Days.

And feel free to ascribe meaning to the unexpected significance of some of the things you see and experience. Some of them will be statistically more likely than you might think. But all of them will have happened according to the Logos that first designed the world. So tread lightly on your coincidences. They may happen all the time. But they are all worth something.

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

You don't need me to do the poetry. Peter Gabriel has drawn the scene - the hustlers, homeless and - emerging sheepishly from a subway - our hero, Rael. 

There is no way I can imagine that, when they wrote the track, the boys from Genesis did not think of the first Lamb I think of in these circumstances. The Lamb of the title is quite out of place amongst the city landscape. It doesn't do much - it's forgotten after its conjuring up of a wall-of-death in Times Square. 

But there amid the city dwellers - folk who never went to an English public school, or even an Ivy League college - the Lamb takes its place. Out of place, out of time, out of all logic, it lies down on Broadway.

It's a different, crowded city. And the prostitutes - more careful than the women on the New York scene - have stopped plying their trade. As the city bustle kicks off in the morning, a man is pushed and shoved through the crowds, carrying a plank of wood. The procession - for he is being led - goes past men who gaze with joy, or who care not. Women who weep. And those who are just getting on with their lives. And they wind through that busy city to a quiet hill, where the plank is raised on a standing post and the man is raised up.

And the Lamb lies down. The perfect one, fathered by God and yet rejected by the ones he is there for. How can one so good, so chosen - so longed-for, for that matter - how can the one who chose this place as the home for his Name, be put to death by those from the Temple they built to praise him? How much out of place is this Lamb, than one that wanders through the early morning New York traffic?

And the Lamb lies down.

Harold the Barrel - Twitterstorm

Harold has decided he's had enough. We don't know why. He'd rather be on a boat - not an unachievable ambition for a bloke who lives in Bognor, even if he's got a restaurant to look after. Maybe his mum's the one who;s caused all the problems? She's not helping on the ledge.

There can be a terrible, casual hatred for those driven to this degree of desperation. A dreadful hardness - especially for those who die in front of trains. "Selfish bastard" and "Did he have to do it during the rush hour" being two things I've heard. But maybe when you're about to chuck yourself in front of the next 125, you're not really worrying about the inconvenience you might cause a few commuters. You've got the whole world pressing in - the problems you have seem more than you can imagine bearing and you think there's no other way out. So if you're stranded at St Pancras when the departure boards go into meltdown - say a "Lord have mercy", not a "selfish bastard."

Meanwhile on the street in Bognor, the rumours are piling up, piling pressure on poor Harold. Instead of a victim, someone for whom it was all too much, he's being treated as a criminal. And the allegations get ridiculous quick.

"Father of three it's disgusting"
"Such a horrible thing to do"
Harold the Barrel cut off his toes and he served them all for tea"
"Can't go far", "He can't go far".
"Hasn't got a leg to stand on"

When a Twitterstorm breaks, the person the Twitterstorm is about is normally less guilty of terrible things than Twitter has decided. Stuff gets added, taken out of context - in 1972 in Bognor, in 2016 in Cyberspace.

Give people a break. That's all.

Evangelizing Dorset

Strong stuff from natejlee on the subject of a Hillsong arrival in California. Presumably because there aren't currently enough guitars in the Bay Area. "Colonizing" San Francisco is maybe a bit strong though. I'm sure Hillsong aren't planning to get the whole population in the rhythm section.

I knew an Australian Pentecostal church in west London once. Their leadership had a vision of starting one church in a major city in Oz, one in London, one in New York etc. And though God gave them this vision, I'm not aware they were ever told what to do once they had planted. Funny that God keeps giving people these visions to go to major, affluent cities. I guess it's a burden.

However I now feel my own burden to reach the unchurched of Sandbanks in Poole. Just as soon as the dough for my Mission beach house has been raised I'll leave the Bedfordshire Beaker Folk to Charlii and head for Dorset. After all, the Redknapp family need evangelizing just as much as anyone else.

A Guide to an Anglican Interregnum

Oh, when somebody referring to a nearby parish referred to the "interregnum", did it take me back. I remembered that time, between the Extremely Primitive Methodists and the Beaker Folk, when I worshipped in a Church of England church in that mythical state.

For those who don't recognise the word, an "Interregnum" is the word the C of E uses informally for the time "between the reigns" of two ministers. It is a liminal time, like that at New Year. There's a time in between the two - the old vicar's gone, but it's not the new. Certain actions are necessary between the reigns, which I will explain for you now.

The Scouring of the Church

In a parallel to the removal of yeast at Passover before the time in the desert, all traces of the last minister must be removed from the building.

You must understand that, as long as the minister is there, anything they leave lying around is treated as sacred. If the vicar constantly leaves their printed-out sermons in the pulpit or laying around the vestry, they will have been gathered up and preserved somewhere on the assumption that, once the vicar has got them all back, they'll be bound into a kidskin book or something. The minute they're gone, this illusion is shattered. The shreds and tatters of seven years of theological reflection are taken to the north side of the churchyard and ceremonially burnt.

The Establishment of Control

At some point in the interregnum, someone is going to want to grab some power. They will decide that at this time in the desert, God is raising up a prophet like Moses to guide his people. They may well use the word "liminal".

Of course, they must be stopped. To do this two groups will be appointed: the Watchers and the Enforcers. The Watchers - a shadowy unofficial sub-committee of the PCC - will watch out for the trouble makers. Once they are identified, the Enforcers will subtly remove them from active parish involvement. This might mean organising the PCC to vote against anything they suggest; letting their tyres down to stop them making it to meetings; or hacking their computers to stop them emailing the bishop. But whatever they do, the Enforcers must not run the self-appointed prophet out of town on a rail. Not unless they really need to.

Moderating the Lay Reader

The parish Reader will normally fall into one of two categories. If they are terrified of having to preach more, they are the sort of modest example that is needed. Encourage them to preach more. If they start arguing that it might be better just to get retired priests in once a month, and start using the phrases "Service of the Word" and "Creative Liturgy", get hold of the list of retired clergy, fast.

Which brings us onto...

The Retired Clergy

Increasingly, and thankfully, the people who keep vast chunks of the C of E functioning, particularly in the parts of urban England which are nice to retire to.

But retired clergy have a kind of spidey-sense which enables them to smell a vacancy at 20 miles. Indeed, even as the first thought that it's time for pastures new crosses the incumbent's mind, a retired clergy will be on the phone to the local undertaker offering any help they can give.

The Undoing of Things That Have been Done

The Big Book of Rules says you can't make any changes to the forms of service or church ordering during an interregnum. But the Traditions of the Elders say that if you are just putting things back as they were before, that's OK. So altars that were pushed against walls will be pulled away again. Tables that were pulled away from walls will be pushed back, and attacked with heavy-duty bolts. Common Worship pamphlets will join the vicar's old sermons on the fire, to be replaced by the old BCPs. It will be agreed that not using full robes was only ever an experiment.

The Ageing of the Board of Past Vicars

The outgoing vicar's name will have been added to the board on the south wall at a point about halfway through their reign. The last four years it will have shone like new gold alongside the faded names above. Now, the Diocesan Tarnisher will be called in to make the recently departed minister as one with the priests of the past.

The Parish Profile

The PCC will get together to decide that what they really need is a minister who combines the caring of Florence Nightingale, the inspirational preaching of John the Baptist, the skills in children's work of Mary Poppins and the evangelistic powers of St Paul.

Canonization

The interregnum ends when after a suitable period the new minister - long awaited and prayed for - arrives. At their first few PCCs, it will be discovered that the previous incumbent had the caring of Florence Nightingale, the inspirational preaching of John the Baptist, the skills in children's work of Mary Poppins and the evangelistic powers of St Paul. And would never have countenanced any of the things the new vicar is suggesting. The Churchwardens will remember all the things they have returned to the former places over the last eighteen months. And keep their counsel.

Watcher of the Skies - What Remains?

Inspired by Keats's lines on Chapman's Homer, and a deserted airfield...

How would an alien look at a dead earth, its people either long-dead or long departed for other climes after messing this place up?

Judge not this race by empty remains
Do you judge God by his creatures when they are dead?
For now, the lizard's shed it's tail
This is the end of man's long union with Earth.

When we are gone, what do we leave behind? A wrecked and empty earth, too dead for life to survive? Wreathed in beauty like the photo that's not from the Hubble photo at all, and yet too hot, too wrecked to support the life that God breathed into it?

I'm not a big believer in a Return to this planet as it now is. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is too beautiful, too terrible for that. I believe in a judgement, a change of state, a Resurrection. But I'm happy to be hazy on the where and when. Maybe at the true end, when all has petered out into the void whence it came - because God's not in a hurry - maybe that's when the End comes. Though I know that if God is a God of Resurrection, then what we do with this earth matters - wrecking it is not the plan. Stuff is good. God loves it. That's why he made so much of it.

Talk Round Corners - Always Something Taller

I don't talk round corners, right between the eyes.
If you're slow they'll run past you.
Stand tall, see them falling over.
I walk a straight line, right between the eyes.
But just show me the door, show me someone who'll do it better.

The Wikipedia History of the Tallest Buildings in the World page gives us an insight into shifting power and priorities. For thousands of years the Great Pyramid was the tallest structure - a . From medieval times, the tallest buildings were churches and cathedrals. At the turn of the 19th-20th Century this all changed. The tallest buildings became commercial skyscrapers in the States and then - as the world changed again - in Asia.

There's never been a time when the greatest yet will be the greatest forever. The human desire to beat the biggest so far. The need to cry out your own greatness. The urge to go one better.

Buildings don't live forever. Even the Great Pyramid will fall one day. Humans don't even have that lifespan. 80 years or so - sometimes far less, cut off sometimes when we're far, far too young. The guy in "Down and Out" struts out of the hotel after sacking the sap. He climbs into his flash car. He sets off back to the office. But he always looks in the mirror. He always keeps an eye on the mirror.

There's only one that never gets replaced by one better. But then he didn't make himself great, did he?

He made himself less.

The Scottish Power Station That Breaks the Laws of Physics

You would think that, if anyone knows ye cannae break the laws o' Physics, it would be the Scots.

It cannae be done, Capn

And yet that is what the BBC claims in an article on a Scottish power station which it says "creates and stores energy."

As we all know you cannot destroy or create energy. First Law of Thermodynamics. Or, as that ground-breaking physicist Ecclesiastes put it, "There is nothing new under the sun."

The only way a Scottish mountain could fairly be said to "create" energy would be if it were a nuclear mountain. And even then, in accordance with Einstein's equation, only by the conversion of an equivalent mass to the energy.

Nae, capn. The Scottish mountain is merely converting energy - between potential and electric. Not the same thing as creating it at all.