not too much

Why North Korea will never disarm

(03 Jul 09)

It is no longer possible for anyone to go on claiming that everything Kim Jong-il does is an effort to get America's attention, or that he just wants to go into the next round of disarmament talks with a stronger hand. Nor can anyone seriously argue that all these hugely expensive exercises are aimed at securing more economic aid.

In short, it has become obvious that North Korea's nuclear and military provocations and the escalating belligerence of its rhetoric are motivated by domestic political considerations instead. This does not mean that we must now waste time speculating about which of Kim's sons will someday take over, or whether the army and the party are struggling for power. It hardly matters who succeeds Kim. All players in the elite are wedded to the same paranoid, race-based nationalism, without which the country has no reason to exist at all.

Over the past 15 years the regime in Pyongyang has painted itself into an ideological corner — or, to put it better, it has pushed itself up to the edge of an abyss. Kim Jong-il shook off responsibility for economic matters in the mid-1990s in order to avoid public blame for the famine. The propaganda machine claimed that his new "military first" regime would henceforth be too busy defending the country from the Yankees (who in fact were sending aid at that time) to bother with economic issues. This line not only maintained support for Kim, but also enabled officials at the provincial level to begin dismantling the command economy.

The West, of course, was overjoyed to note that the North Koreans no longer took all that Communist nonsense seriously. But the spread of capitalist values is what made the current string of nuclear provocations inevitable. Simply put, the more North Korea resembles a third-rate South Korea on the economic front, the more the Kim Jong-il regime must justify its existence through a combination of radical nationalist rhetoric and victories on the military and nuclear front. This is why North Korea will never disarm, for to do so would be to declare itself irrelevant.

Some in the West are now suggesting that North Korea's nuclear capability must be accepted as a fait accompli, but that is no solution either. Needing constant tension with the outside world for his own political survival, Kim Jong-il is no more interested in winning international acceptance of his nuclear ambitions than in normalizing relations with Washington. The West must assume that he will always find a way to make his nukes unacceptable, while at the same time engaging sporadically in arms talks to keep the tension from tipping into all-out war.

It is time for America to shift its focus from negotiating with North Korea to negotiating with the Chinese about North Korea. Beijing understands how vital these nuclear provocations are to Pyongyang's survival, which is why it continues to bankroll them. Washington must therefore do more to assuage Beijing's fears of a collapse of the Kim Jong-il regime. Let us remember how opposed the Soviet Union was to a unified Germany, until NATO came up with a promise not to station troops in the former East Germany. It would be a step in the right direction for the United States to assure the Chinese that they will never have to face American troops along the Yalu River.

One thing is certain: We cannot simply wait for Kim's death and hope for the best, because whoever succeeds him is going to need an especially dramatic military crisis to legitimize his rule. What we have seen in the past few weeks may well end up looking tame in comparison.

Israeli piracy

(03 Jul 09)

Lazing in the North

(29 Jun 09)

What's the worth?

(10 Jun 09)

Good Work of Praise
Strange Lord, who would rule your creation through the crucified Son of a carpenter, make us workers in your kingdom. We want to work, but so often our work turns out to be nothing but busyness. We think that if we are busy we must be doing something that you can use. At least being busy hides our boredom. Yet we know you would not have us busy, having given us the good work ofprayer. Help us, in our busyness, learn to pray"so that all our work, all that is our lives, may glorify you. In a world that for so many seems devoid of purpose, we praise you for giving us the good work of praise. Hallelujah and Amen.
— Stanley Hauerwas Prayers plainly spoken. (1999)

Soon I shall be a name on a list of vicars past. One day, all will be distant memory. New vicars will come and go . . . Has anything lasting been achieved? I built a new building. But one day that will be demolished for another. In the great scheme of things, it is as passing as a well-struck five iron.

One of my favourite verses from scripture is 1 Timothy 6.16, where we are told that God alone is immortal. It is worth spelling out. The only thing that will last for ever is God—not Giles Fraser, not Putney Church, not even the planet itself.

Folk religion commonly imagines the soul continuing after death, with scant reference to the existence of the Almighty. It is as if the immortality of the human soul is something that happens by itself, under its own steam. No: without God, we are food for daffodils and nothing else besides.

This means that the desire for some sort of solid and permanent achievement over time is utterly impossible without the author of life itself. Achievement is little more than a soon-to-be-forgotten name on a board. The only thing we have is God, and it is only by indexing our existence to that reality, only by participating in the divine life, that we find the permanence that we so often crave.

It is counter-intuitive, but the firmest foundations for life are to be discovered in activities that do not have a look of concrete-and-steel solidity: acts of loving kindness and the life of prayer. "Solid joys and lasting treasure None but Sion's children know."

Un-Christian Christianity

(04 Jun 09)

It is clear the problem was not just "a few bad apples" or even a whole barrel of them, but the arrogance of an almighty Church too powerful for its own good. It is useless to blame the state or society for allowing it to happen. The blame lies within the Church itself. The power and the glory that were so badly misused had a theological, even ideological, basis. This told the Church that it was "a true and perfect society" (in the words of Pius IX): whatever it did was right, and whatever might contradict that impression had to be suppressed. Only "bad Catholics" would dare whisper it. If the Church has a future in Ireland it will be because it now has the courage to say such things to itself out loud, and repudiate the habitual abuse of power that lay behind all the other horrors. . . .

One priest's reaction sums up Ireland's increasing fury over the sexual and physical abuse suffered by so many of its children, and the cover-ups and paltry compensation offered by the religious orders guilty of such appalling crimes against those in their care.

"They raped me on a Saturday, gave me an unmerciful beating afterwards, and then gave me Communion on Sunday. My God."

... To try to calm public outrage, the Minister for Justice said he would ask the police to study Ryan's revelations in the light of possible criminal proceedings. Undaunted, the head of the Conference of Religious of Ireland still insisted that "the deal is done", which left one archbishop, Dr Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, to reiterate the question asked of the orders by the Ryan team: "What happened that you drifted so far away from your own charism?"

It is said that the Ireland of these horrors was a theocracy. In as far as the word has any meaning, this is probably correct. It is difficult to outline now the fabric of a culture in which the Catholic Church was the effective moral government of Irish society, deferred to by state institutions and personnel. Violence was taken for granted in a way that is certainly no longer the case. Although I was never in one of the institutions implicated in this week's report, I grew up in a culture wherein men and women in the uniform of the Catholic Church would make daily attempts to inflict on me serious physical pain. They did not do this because they were stupid, or because they had not watched enough current affairs programmes on television. Curiously enough, they did it because they were trying to "civilise" me. The irony at the heart of this story is that the brutality now adumbrated arose not from any condition of backwardness, but from a desire to drive a society towards what was understood as civilisation.

... The dominant ideological proposition was that troublesome children were a threat to public order, rendering justifiable almost any means deemed necessary for their subjugation. A child sucked into this system was made beyond the embrace of public compassion.

There has been a lot of talk about "the culture of the time", as though there must in the recent past have existed some less civilised understanding than is available now. What this analysis proposes is that, 50 or so years into the past, the underdeveloped nature of the human mind, as it existed in Ireland, was such that it was believed appropriate to beat and torture little children, and only the enlightenment of the present moment enables us to see that this was not a good thing. This is dangerous nonsense because it enables us to perpetrate in the present precisely the same culture of denial in respect of horrors happening today. It is, in particular, a strange defence for a follower of Jesus Christ to proffer in defence of their institution. For if the thinking of the 1950s has become so exposed in the glare of modern enlightenment, what might happen next? What view will the future Church take of today's Church? And where does this leave the eternal word of Christ?

There was nothing intrinsically "backward" about the barbarism of the 1950s, any more than there is anything intrinsically backward about the barbarism of 2009. Barbarism is barbarism, past or present.

First, there is a denial of the proper goodness of creation, of human createdness, of all that is good about natural human living as made by God. This has been justified by an interrelated understanding of sin and of perfection. So when the Church has taught about sin, it has done so in such a way that much of human life, and especially human desire, has been understood as essentially concupiscence, or sinfully driven desire, and often located in the 'flesh' and even more specifically in sexuality. ...

This is linked intimately to the second element: the belief that the essential flaw in humanity is pride and that therefore the key spiritual work is to break the human will. Thus both human desire and human will are portrayed in a largely negative light.

The third element is the Church's frequent inability to live in a counter-cultural way, in particular when related to the social, economic and political hierarchies of human societies. …

The fourth element enters the picture when the Church — the visible institutional Church — takes to itself inappropriate and unwarranted authority and becomes a master rather than a servant, pretending to be infallible rather than honestly fallible and structurally designed to manage the consequences of fallibility. For someone nurtured in the Evangelical tradition, I have to note that this also applies just as much to our handling of the Bible.

The fifth element is an inappropriate, unrealistic and even illusory supernaturalism that fosters belief in systematic miraculous interventions at the cost not only of truthfulness but also of a commitment to enabling people to develop towards mature human responsibility.

So we create a Church that is hostile to human desires and careless about human dignity, indifferent to a full life in this world but also too closely allied to existing unequal human power structures and authoritarian in its attitudes and practices. We see churches that in theory teach Christian poverty and obedience but in practice enforce submission to unjust structures and promise relief only in the next life or perhaps through a miracle in this life, thereby playing on people's deepest desires and longings but without enabling them to strive positively for change.

This means "a way of being Christian that is marked by a fundamental shift from a primarily negative to a primarily positive conception of life in this world and from a primarily negative to a primarily positive motivation for the Christian life. It is celebrating the best of what it is to be human at the heart of our faith and life — not because we are subverting the place of God but because he has placed such value on human life, in creation and redemption. God is always the life-bringer. Therefore the heart of the Christian faith is not threat but invitation. Not, 'you are bad and I will punish you, unless ...' but, 'I am offering you goodness, beauty and life: respond to me.'

Those who have ears to hear . . .

(31 May 09)

Truth through voting?

(26 May 09)

After more than three hours of debate, the Church of Scotland's General Assembly, meeting in Edinburgh, has this evening avoided a confrontation on sexuality and ministry, after a motion from anti-gay hardliners was withdrawn before it could be voted on. The development is being seen as a significant achievement by those who want reason and conciliation rather than anger and confrontation in the argument over homosexuality. Some church members claim this is incompatible with tradition and scripture but others see it as part of the variety which God blesses and uses for good in the face of fear and prejudice.

The 'overture' (the Lochcarron and Skye motion), if passed, would have had the effect of barring those whose sexual relationships fall outside heterosexual marriage from ministry and the life of the Kirk - an approach deliberately targeted against gay people. Ekklesia has been told that part of the motivation in withdrawing the resolution was for the anti-gay lobby to avoid another damaging defeat. This follows their attempts to rescind the decision by a parish and presbytery in Aberdeen to recognise the call of the Rev Scott Rennie, an openly gay minster who lives with his partner David, which were decisively rejected on Saturday night (23 May 2009).

. . .Leaders of the Church of Scotland are pleased with the outcome. They will respond to those who accuse them of a fudge or of delaying tactics by pointing out that the great majority of those involved with the Church - other than some who actively seek confrontation - want a reasoned process and discussion.

Abuse in a theological vacuum

(24 May 09)

Optimistically starwards

(15 May 09)

It takes a certain mix of optimism and frustration to contemplate the possibility of space travel. To dream of navigating the cosmos is to assume that man has the resources and the know-how to propel himself into the heavens, but also some compelling reasons to exchange his home planet for the cold vast unknown.
[. . . ]
Forty years later, as Star Trek is returning to its past so is America: the country is again gripped by anxieties about entanglements abroad, compounded by the fear that the economy could collapse at warp speed. A cautious optimism has emerged in the afterglow of the election of President Obama (whose Vulcan-like composure has invited frequent comparisons to Mr. Spock), but a surge of foreign violence, a swine flu outbreak or any number of other events could easily dampen that mood.
[. . . ]
But at least one person closely identified with Star Trek argues that for all the ways in which the franchise has been affected by current events, its optimistic vision has persisted. "A lot of science-fiction is nihilistic and dark and dreadful about the future, and Star Trek is the opposite," Mr. Nimoy said. "We need that kind of hope, we need that kind of confidence in the future. I think that's what Star Trek offers. I have to believe that — I'm the glass-half-full kind of guy."

Despite all the high-tech wizz-bangery, the story is "fundamentally about two men engaged in a continuing conversation about civilizations and their discontents. Hot and cold, impulsive and tightly controlled, Kirk and Spock need each other to work, a dynamic Mr. Abrams captures with his two well-balanced leads. Mr. [Zachary] Quinto lets you see and hear the struggle between the human and the Vulcan in Spock through the emotions that ripple across his face and periodically throw off his unmodulated phrasing. Mr. [Chris] Pine [Pictured] has the harder job — he has to invoke Mr. Shatner's sui generis performance while transcending its excesses — which makes his nuanced interpretation all the more potent. Steering clear of outright imitation, the two instead distill the characters to capture their essence, their Kirk-ness and Spock-ness.

Written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the story has plenty of chatter, but Mr. Abrams keeps the talk moving, slowing down only intermittently, as when Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) or the wryly smiling Leonard Nimoy (!) unload some paternalistic advice on Kirk. . . . By far his finest moments take place on the brightly lighted deck of the Enterprise, where against the backdrop of limitless space, Kirk, Spock and the rest of the young crew fumble with roles that — much like the young actors playing them, including Anton Yelchin as Chekov and John Cho as Sulu — they ultimately and rather wonderfully make their own.

Oz and the ACC

(14 May 09)

(c) affirms the request of the Windsor Report (2004), adopted at the Primates' Meetings (2005, 2007 and 2009), and supported at the Lambeth Conference (2008) for the implementation of the agreed moratoria on the Consecration of Bishops living in a same gender union, authorisation of public Rites of Blessing for Same Sex unions and continued interventions in other Provinces.

2009 National Photographic Portrait Prize

(14 May 09)

For the first time, James and I visited the National Portrait Gallery in its new building, including for a look at the 2009 National Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition of 56 portrait photographs that had been short-listed from over 1,000 entries. I would have given the prize to the picture singled out by the judges to be highly commended—Gary Grealy's photographic portrait of Sydney art gallery directors Frank Watters and Geoffrey Legge—which the judges thought to a close runner-up to the winner. I agree with the judges that "the portrait invites the viewer to enter into the empathy between the two portrait subjects—the two faces are similar yet subtly different. The photograph's strong classical composition and technical distinction are highly impressive." Indeed so.

Sadly, I do not like the judges' choice of Ingvar Kenne's picture of his sons Cormac and Callum as the prize-winning work for 2009. The judges were impressed by the "potent connection that is evoked between the subjects in the photograph and the viewer", but it doesn't do much for me, I'm afraid.

Curator Christopher Chapman notes that this year's exhibition "vividly portrays the intensities of youth." I found Petrina Hicks's portrait, simply titled 'The Boy', to be quite arrestingly beautiful. But is it the picture that is beautiful, or the boy? When looking an interest in portrait, I never quite know whether it is the artist's work or the subject of the portrait that is arousing my interest. I don't enjoy portraits in which the artist's style indulgently takes attention away from the subject. Yet, a good portraitist draws upon and interprets the subject, of course. So too with the new Gallery building. It's not large, but very fine, offering a pleasing setting for the display of the pictures while not posing as a grandiloquent work of art itself

2009 International AIDS Candlelight Memorial

(12 May 09)

Obama's crackers

(11 May 09)

Anglicans support peace through a two-state solution

(11 May 09)

Middle East (from APJN)
Resolved: 09.05.09
The Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Kingston, Jamaica between May 2-12, 2009, in response to the challenge in a sermon on May 3, 2009, of the Archbishop of Canterbury to be a people of hope to those in need of justice, forgiveness and reconciliation,

1. deplores violence wherever it is used in conflict in the land of Israel/Palestine and affirms its desire that a robust peace process in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict leading to a two state solution should be pursued by all parties without delay;
2. expresses its deep concern about recent and continuing events in Gaza, and supports and draws attention to the Statement on the situation in Gaza issued by the February 2009 Primates meeting;
3. laments the fact that current Israeli policies in relation to the West Bank, in contravention of UN Security Council resolutions, have created severe hardship for many Palestinians and have been experienced as a physical form of apartheid;
4. noting that a just peace must guarantee the security and territorial integrity of both Israel and the future state of Palestine so that all the people of the area can live in peace and prosperity, applauds President Barack Obama for his commitment to work for a just peace for both Palestinians and Israelis, and calls on him and all governments of the Middle East to work in co-operation with the United Nations for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel as defined by UN Security Council Resolutions;
5. welcomes the Arab League statements which indicate a readiness to make peace with the state of Israel, the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the normalization of relations, and calls on the Israeli government to respond favourably to the Arab proposal in an effort to end all forms of belligerence on the basis of international law;
6. calls on Israel to:
   1. end its occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,
   2. freeze immediately all settlement building with the intention to abandon its settlement policy in preparation for a Palestinian state,
   3. remove the separation barrier (wall) where it violates Palestinian land beyond the Green Line,
   4. end home demolitions, and
   5. close checkpoints in the Palestinian territories;
7. recognising that the city of Jerusalem is holy to Christianity, Islam and Judaism and is not therefore the monopoly of any one religion, upholds the view that members of all three faith groups should have free access to their holy sites; and
8. calls on all people of faith and good will to pray and work for peace so that justice and reconciliation may be achieved for all the people of Palestine and Israel.

Reconciliation takes as long as long as it takes

(09 May 09)

How to save $100bn and be happier

(08 May 09)

• a increase in the size of the Army, of about 3,000 to 57,000,
• a completely new submarine fleet doubled in size to 12,
• a new fleet of 11 frigates and air-warfare destroyers, equipped, like the submarines, with cruise missiles, and
• about 100 new air force fighter-bombers.

For most of its life, Australia has relied for its security on the naval presence in the Pacific region of first Britain then, since the second world war, America. The paper predicts that China' s rise as an economic and military giant could well end all that. It sees China as possibly becoming the world's biggest economy by 2020. That, plus its military modernisation and the testing of America's primacy, could give China's regional neighbours "cause for concern".

This implies China has now replaced Indonesia as the main strategic threat to Australia. But the paper talks only of a remote but plausible confrontation with "a major-power adversary". The new hardware's priority will be defending Australia's northern approaches from the Indian Ocean via the Timor Sea to Polynesia. The American alliance will remain pivotal. But Australia will no longer put troops at risk "in distant theatres of war where we have no direct interests" (read Iraq, but perhaps not Afghanistan).

Self-reliance is one thing. How Australia's region will respond to its apparent preoccupation with China as a possible future adversary is another. Mr Rudd seems keen not to let China's status as Australia’s biggest trading partner override its security concerns. But Hugh White, a defence analyst, and an author of the last white paper in 2000, worries that this one lacks answers on how this can be achieved. "It's reluctant to tell Australians that we have to think seriously about living in an Asia that will be very different from anything we have known," he says.

Labor's budget is anti-intellectual

(06 May 09)

An overworked official's prayer

(05 May 09)

My dear Lord and Saviour, I come to you burdened and oppressed by many worries and slavish work, by an unbearable yoke, which I have imposed on myself because of my lack of humility. It is a burden which I have deserved, but it is also the heavy yoke of a sinful world, of collective pride and arrogance. We are tied together in this lamentable condition. I groan and sigh, realising my plight in this double slavery of mine and of the world. What a relief if I listen to your invitation, "Come to me all whose load is heavy"! Yes, now I dare to come. [. . . ]

I entrust myself to your school. I want to learn from you, day by day, the royal way of humility. It is our own love that teaches us.

Lord, transform our hearts, make them mirror images of your own heart. Make them fountains of healing for many. Lord make us humble.

Spiritual health and the dogs of Internet war

(02 May 09)

blogs where authors and commenters sip vim-and-vitriol under the cover of Christian sanctimony and care not about crucifying friends because, let's face it, in our world crucifixion doesn't mean real death so why should it matter. It’s 'blog eat blog' out here. Everyone has their 'Brutus', a 'friend' stabbing them in the back, whether on Holy Smoke, Articles of Faith, Twitter, even Facebook. And some of us have people doing it to our face.

Blogging is a compulsive medium that appeals to the addict in me. I wonder how long it will be before there is a wing of The Priory in Roehampton set aside for recovering bloggers? Or a Bloggers Anonymous meeting in London: ‘My name's Ruth, and I’m a blogger.’ We'd all be sitting there, posting on Twitter: 'Guess who's just walked through the door . . .'

I’m not sure The Tablet's suggestion of stripping the anonymity from blogs can ever be workable. Anonymity is an essential protection in the name of freedom of speech. But perhaps the blogosphere needs a set of 12 guidelines rather like those used by AA: 'Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.'

Of course, there are some fantastic blogs and threads, and there are many places where decent argument is respected and encouraged. Yet some sites are moral pigsties, where the most disgraceful comments are justified, and even encouraged, as a show of democracy and internet freedom. It is easy to imagine that all this unpleasantness originates with a small number of obsessive blog "commenters", operating from sweaty bedrooms that have never seen the light of day, living off pizza and pornography, and getting their kicks out of being unpleasant as compensation for their own social inadequacy.

Oh, that it were so simple! The people who are being so cruel to each other are just as likely to be wearing pinstripes or flowery dresses — or even clerical collars. Part of the problem is that too many contributors do not recognise that they are being unpleasant because they believe themselves to be justified by some higher cause. [. . . ] The other problem is that, on the internet, the other does not come with a face. The French philosopher and Talmudic scholar Emmanuel Levinas has based his ethical philosophy on the sense of responsibility for others that originates in the face-to-face encounter. Only by looking at someone's face does one properly appreciate his or her vulnerability — a vulnerability that cries out not to be harmed.

The quick-fire argument on the internet has cut itself adrift from this sensitivity, and has become cruel. This is why too much time going through blogs and comments can be bad for your spiritual health.

Being there at Communion

(01 May 09)

Prayer before receiving the Body and Blood of Christ

Lord Jesus Christ by the Father's plan and by the working of the Holy Ghost of your own free will you died and mercifully redeemed the world from sin and everlasting death. I adore and venerate you as much as ever I can, though my love is so cold, my devotion so poor. Thank you for the good gift of this your holy Body and Blood, which I desire to receive, as cleansing from sin, and for a defence against it.

Lord, I acknowledge that I am far from worthy to approach and touch this sacrament; but I trust in that mercy which caused you to lay down your life for sinners that they might be justified, and because you gave yourself willingly as a holy sacrifice to the Father. A sinner, I presume to receive these gifts so that I may be justified by them. I beg and pray you, therefore, merciful lover of men, let not that which you have given for the cleansing of sins be unto me the increase of sin, but rather for forgiveness and protection.

Make me, O Lord, so to perceive with lips and heart and know by faith and by love, that by virtue of this sacrament I may deserve to be planted in the likeness of your death and resurrection, by mortifying the old man, and by renewal of the life of righteousness. May I be worthy to be incorporated into your body ‘which is the church', so that I may be your member and you may be my head, and that I may remain in you and you in me. Then at the Resurrection you will refashion the body of my humiliation according to the body of your glory, as you promised by your apostle, and I shall rejoice in you for ever to your glory, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns for ever. Amen.

—The prayers and meditations of Saint Anselm, translated by Benedicta Ward (Penguin Classics, 1973, pp. 100-101).

Come on now little man

(29 Apr 09)

Encouraging the Mind to Contemplate God

Come on now little man,
get away from your worldly occupations for a while,
escape from your tumultuous thoughts.
Lay aside your burdensome cares and put off your laborious exertions.
Give yourself over to God for a little while,
and rest for a while in God.
Enter into the cell of your mind,
shut out everything except God and whatever helps you to seek God once the door is shut.

Speak now, my heart, and say to God,
"I seek your face; your face, Lord, I seek.
"Come on then, my Lord God,
teach my heart where and how to seek you,
where and how to find you. . . .
You have made me and nurtured me, given me every good thing I have ever received, and I still do not know you.
I was created for the purpose of seeing you, and I still have not done the thing I was made to do."

A distance beyond imagining.

(28 Apr 09)

How many know that this is the International Year of Astronomy? To me, it's among the most fascinating of the sciences. NASA reports that on 23 April 09 NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old—less than five percent of its present age. The event, named GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen. The satellite information allowed telescopes on Earth to target the burst before its afterglow faded. Astronomers in Chile and the Canary Islands independently measured the explosion's redshift of 8.2, corresponding to a distance of 13.035 billion light years. That's roughly 123,320,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1.2332*10^23) km, a distance beyond imagining.

Prayers for a long weekend?

(24 Apr 09)

Prayer flags

I left the store with a Kleenex and Snickers bar.
The girl behind the counter said,
"Enjoy your afternoon"; I said, "you too"
and walking home I asked myself
what I could do, if anything,
too reel that pleasure in.
Perhaps in stores across the city
people were telling one another
as we had done just now
to fill the afternoons with happiness
and as those wishes caught the wind
like prayer-flags in the Himalayas
were there enough of them
to change the days for some of us? Who knows?

Maurice Jarre

(24 Apr 09)

The cinema, as he remembered it, was off Trafalgar Square. It was small, stuffy and dark. And there, over 40 hours in early 1962, Maurice Jarre watched the first rough cut of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. The showings started at 9am on a Monday and did not finish till the Friday. And he was mesmerised. Peter O'Toole, the blue-eyed, white-robed Lawrence, rode his camel along a beach at dawn. He crested the dunes and gazed out over a landscape of shimmering oranges and greys. Cavalcades of Arabs, keffiyehs flying, raced across the sand. It was astoundingly beautiful. And it was completely silent.

Mr Jarre's commission was to write the music for it. It was extraordinary that he had been asked. Sam Spiegel, the producer, had heard only his ten-minute score for a French film called Sundays and Cybele, written for bass, counter-bass, flute and table-harp. Now he was supposed to produce, in six weeks, two hours of music for a 100-piece orchestra. Back in his room in Half Moon Street he tried to read all he could about T.E. Lawrence, including the huge Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as well as searching for that little swatch of notes that might turn into a theme. Search, search, search, search, as Stravinsky said. "Sam Spiegel told me, you have the job of Superman!" Mr Jarre joyously recalled.

Donna Leon's Inspector Brunetti

(24 Apr 09)

Paola had been as good as her word, for the aromas that met him as he entered the apartment were a rich blend of seafood, garlic, and something he wasn't sure about, perhaps spinach. . . She was already seated at the table, a glass of white wine in front of her, reading.

'All right,' he said, 'I'll ask you what you're reading.'

She glanced at him over her reading glasses and said, 'A book that should be of great interest to us both, Guido: Chiara's [their daughter's] textbook on religious doctrine.' Little good could come of this, Brunetti realized instantly, but still he asked, 'Why to us?'

'Because of what it tells us about the world we live in,' she said, setting the book down and taking a sip of wine.

'For example? 'he asked, going to the refrigerator and taking out the open bottle. It was the good Ribolla Gialla they'd bought from a friend in Corno di Rosazzo.

'There's a chapter here,' she said, pointing at the page she had been reading, 'on the Seven Deadly Sins.'

Brunetti had often thought that it was convenient that there should be one for each day of the week, but he kept this thought to himself for the moment. 'And?' he asked.

'And I started thinking about the way our society has ceased to think of them as sins or, if not all of them, has managed at least to remove most of the scent of sin that was once attached to them.'

He pulled out a chair and sat opposite her, not really interested in this latest observation but willing to listen. He raised his glass in her direction and took a sip. It was as good as he remembered its being. Thank God, then, for good wine and good friends, and thank God even for a wife who could find reason for polemic in a middle school textbook of religious doctrine.

'Think of lust,' she continued.

'I often do,' he said and leered.

Ignoring him, she went on. 'When we grew up, it was, if not a sin, at least a semi-sin, or at least something that one did not discuss or present in public. Now you can't look at a film or television or a magazine without seeing it.'

'Do you think that's bad?' he asked.

'Not necessarily. Just different. Maybe a better case is gluttony.'

Ah, that was to strike a blow close to home, Brunetti thought, and pulled in his stomach a little.

'We're encouraged to it all the time. Every time we open a magazine or a newspaper.'

'Gluttony?' he asked, puzzled.

'Not gluttony for food, necessarily,' she said, 'but the taking in or consumption of more than we need. After all, what is owning more than one television or one car or one house but a form of gluttony?'

'I'd never thought of it that way,' he temporized and went back to the refrigerator for more wine.

'No, neither did I, not until I started to read this book. They define gluttony as eating too much and leave it at that, but I started thinking about what it would or could mean in larger terms.'

That, it seemed to Brunetti, was the essence of Paola, this woman he still loved to the point of distraction, that she was always thinking about things--everything, it sometimes seemed to him--in larger terms.

'Do you think you could start thinking about dinner in larger terms?' he asked.

[later]

. . . 'I'd probably starve to death without you to protect me.' Brunetti said.

[still later]

He thought of the kids, how tired they had been at dinner, while his eyes travelled down her body. He set his glass down on the table and leaned towards her. 'Could we return to our examination of the seven deadly sins?' he asked.

A namesake

(24 Apr 09)

Burke and Wills, with King and Gray, were the first whites to cross the Australian continent from the southern coast to the northern coast. They didn't make it back. Who was second? Most people will say John McDougall Stuart, on the third of his epic journeys in 1862. They are wrong. A 6ft 4in Scot named John McKinlay beat him by two months. McKinlay led the South Australian Burke Relief Expedition, one of four sent out from the south, east and north to look for the missing explorers. In doing so he crossed the continent, got back safely, did not lose a man, was reduced to camel's feet soup to stay alive, and had a row with his second-in-command, who resigned in disgust, but was forced to stay with the 10-man party to the end. McKinlay also managed the first—possibly the last—transcontinental droving feat, taking with him 100 sheep as 'stores on the hoof'. Four years later he had a much closer escape. Sent to the Northern Territory to seek a better site for settlement than the existing Escape Cliffs, he set out into Arnhem Land at a disastrous time of year--the middle of the wet season. With 14 others he was marooned on a hillock for six weeks by impenetrable sheets of water, finally made it to the East Alligator River and, under attack from Aborigines built a remarkable punt from saplings and horsehide. With only a small amount of dried meat and with their fresh water turning putrid from its rubber containers, they rowed downriver to the sea. Tides and currents took them as far as eight miles out from the coast, but by non-stop rowing they made it back. After six days and nights of this hell they landed, starved and exhausted, on the beach at Escape Cliffs--six months after they had left. Big John tells McKinlay's story. It is told without frills, but with plenty of action. Apart from being a ripping yarn, it is a genuine and important contribution to the body of Australian historical literature.

Thinking, thinking ...

(24 Apr 09)

Who's not racist?

(23 Apr 09)

What do the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy and Israel have in common? They are all either European or European-settler states. And they all decided to boycott this week's UN conference against racism in Geneva — even before Monday's incendiary speech by the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which triggered a further [temporary] white-flight walkout by representatives of another 23 European states.

. . . Didn't Canada or Australia have anything to say about the grim condition of their indigenous people, you might wonder, or Italy and the Czech Republic about violent attacks on Roma people? Didn't any of the boycotters have a contribution to make about the rampant Islamophobia, resurgence of anti-semitism and scapegoating of migrants in their countries over the last decade?

The dispute was mainly about Israel and western fears that the conference would be used, like its torrid predecessor in Durban at the height of the Palestinian intifada in 2001, to denounce the Jewish state and attack the west over colonialism and the slave trade. . . . In this week's Geneva statement, Israel isn't mentioned at all. But the US bizarrely still used its reaffirmation of the anodyne [2001] Durban declaration to justify a boycott . . . In fact, like the other boycotting governments, the US administration had been intensely lobbied by rightwing pro-Israel groups, who had insisted long in advance that the conference would be a "hatefest".

Ahmadinejad's grandstanding . . . [is] damaging to the Palestinian cause by association, weakens the international support Iran needs to avert the threat of attack over its nuclear programme, and bolsters Israel's claims that it faces an existential threat.

. . . The rhetoric was certainly crude and inflammatory. . . . But the truth is that throughout the Arab, Muslim and wider developing worlds, the idea that Israel is a racist state is largely uncontroversial. The day after Ahmadinejad's appearance, the Palestinian Authority foreign minister, Riyad al-Maliki, echoed the charge in the conference hall, describing Israeli occupation as "the ugliest face of racism". It's really not good enough for Britain's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Peter Gooderham — who led the Ahmadinejad walkout — to say of the charge of Israel's racism, "we all know it when we see it and it's not that".

This is a state, after all, created by European colonists, built on the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, whose founding legal principles guarantee the right of citizenship to any Jewish migrant from anywhere in the world, while denying that same right to Palestinians born there along with their descendants. Of course, Israel is much else besides, and the Jewish cultural and historical link with Palestine is a profound one.

But even those Palestinians who are Israeli citizens face what the then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert last year called "deliberate and insufferable" discrimination by a state which defines itself by ethnicity. For Palestinians in the occupied territories, ruled by Israel for most of the state's existence, where ethnic segregation and extreme inequality is ruthlessly enforced, the situation is far worse — even without the relentless military assaults and killings. And Israel now has a far-right government whose foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has said 90% of Israel's Arab citizens have "no place" in the country, should be forcibly "transferred", and only be allowed citizenship in exchange for an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Zionist Jewish state.

. . . Of course, there's a perfectly reasonable argument to be had about the nature of Israel's racism and whether it should be compared to apartheid, for example. But for western governments to hold up their hands in horror when Israel is described as a racist state has no global credibility whatever. . . . The Geneva boycotters, fresh from standing behind Israel's carnage in Gaza, are in denial about their own racism — and their continuing role in the tragedy of the Middle East.

Risen indeed

(11 Apr 09)

A Russian lecturer, a member of the Communist party, was addressing a packed audience on the subject of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He spoke at considerable length, seeking to discredit it.

At the end, an Orthodox priest rose and asked if he might reply. He was warned that he could only have five minutes. 'Five seconds is all I shall need,' was his reply. He turned to the audience, and gave the delightful Easter greeting, characteristic of the Eastern Orthodox. 'Christos aneste,' he cried, 'Christ is risen.'

Back with a deafening roar came the traditional reply from the crowded hall, 'Alethos aneste', 'Truly he is risen.'

The radiant peace of the divine sabbath

(10 Apr 09)

The Lord is in the grave, and we stand at the grave. Once again God is resting from His works and enjoying the rest of the sabbath. Trembling, heaven and earth have bent down to the Lord's grave. In this solemn quietude, in this audible silence, in this radiant sorrow, our poor soul too contemplates, weeps, prays.

The Lord is a lover of human beings. He came to save His creation, to call to life the seed that had fallen into the earth and was dying. . . . The Father sent and the Son went—to receive death. The mind is torn apart by contradiction and grows weak before the mystery.

The Lord is a lover of human beings. . . . This grave is the revelation of God's love for man; it is the gift of the insatiable sacrificiality of this love: to give all for love, so that nothing remains ungiven. "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). And here the Creator, having assumed the human nature, lays down His life for His creature.

. . . The time for a new sabbath arrived: the Lord, who previously had rested from the works of creation, now rested also from the works of salvation. This grave, the apparent victory of death, is the victory over death. There is no darkness of death, for in the latter is concealed the light of the resurrection, the radiant peace of the divine sabbath. The gates of hell are open; the path has been followed to the end and sanctified, for He is with us in death as well, and in death as well we are not abandoned by Love.
—Serguis Bulgakov. Churchly joy: Orthodox devotions for the church year, trans Boris Jakim. (Grand Rapids :Eerdmans, 2008) pp. 105-107.