As I have blogged here and elsewhere over many moons, I say again that Easter Sunday morning is one of the most beautiful of the entire year. That first appearance to Mary in the garden...the even earlier appearance of Jesus to the Blessed Mother, according to a tradition St Ignatius and others believed... the peace of a grove that briefly rang with the screams of frightened pagan soldiers who could not believe their eyes and scuttled away to report the return of the Crucified One... If we had no eye for comedy in the Gospel, could we even be true spiritual Semites?
Peace be to you...There seems no fuller, richer greeting on such a morning. No matter if you feel unworthy of the peace He offers. There are many mansions in His Father's house, even for workers of the 11th hour. This is our hope, those of us clinging on for dear life in this rollercoaster known as the Ark of the Covenant.
It is unfitting, unworthy even, to dwell solely on the turbulence of the last few days, so we will not do so. I cannot be the only blogger who wrote a post and then deleted it following the latest Scalfari debacle. All we can do is to pray. The greater the evil - and if denial of hell were not bad enough, what is more contrary to the goodness of God than the literal annihilation of souls? - the more we can be sure it is the devil's work. Whether or not the Pope said those words to Scalfari, it has served the devil's agenda to have them spread abroad. Contrariwise, perhaps the fact that some Catholic leaders were dragged in front of the media to explain that there is a hell is a good thing. Fine. But not for me the fatuous excuses of the John Allens, claiming that the pope might prefer dialogue over clarity of doctrine. Because frankly, if you are going to be so utterly misrepresented, what is the point of dialogue? What was reported did not lack clarity; it lacked truthfulness. Who reads beyond the headlines most days? "Pope says no hell?" many will say. "Well about time too." Goodnight, Vienna!
So this Easter morn, we have to take Peter in our arms more firmly and hold him in prayer. Thursday was not his finest hour. Maybe he did not say what was reported. Maybe he did. I would not be surprised either way. What we cannot doubt is Christ's resolve to drag Peter into the light. Peace be to him and to us all this Easter.
Saturday 31 March 2018
Friday 30 March 2018
Saturday 10 March 2018
More coping strategies
It's all about survival! This is what I used to say to my wife when our twins were babies. Just get through! It's important but sometimes treacherous terrain to occupy. You can justify a silly wine bill and more biscuits than are strictly good for you with reasoning like that.
Yet if the survival mandate is important, it's not the be-all-and-end-all. Charles Péguy once wondered how many betrayals had arisen from the fear of not looking progressive enough; we might equally wonder how many compromises have arisen from making survival an absolute. Survival as an absolute sometimes involves us in uncompromising flight, and sometimes flight is a lesser expression of fear than having to stay and withstand the spectacle of whatever threatens us. For example, I've no doubt the rate of converts from Catholicism to Orthodoxy is on the rise currently. At a distance, it seems like a sanctuary of mystery in the context of moral therapeutic deism that afflicts so many of our co-religionists. It is a flight, however, and the sanctuary is not as safe as we might suppose.
In this context I came across a passage of Georges Bernanos's novel La Joie. It needs little commentary and the characters' names hardly matter. I'll just leave it here (as they say these days)...
I have mocked fear too much, he admitted one day. I was young and way too hot blooded.
What? she replied, I cannot believe you are saying that to me. Are you now going to give fear entry into Paradise?
He raised his red, swollen hand as if to calm her down, laughing silently as he did.
Not so fast, not so fast! In a way, even fear is a daughter of God, redeemed on the night of Good Friday. She is not beautiful to look at - no! - sometimes ridiculed, sometimes cursed, abandoned by everyone...however, make no mistake about it: she is at the bedside of every dying person where she intercedes for man.
The courageous man is not the one who feels no fear; he's the one who holds fast, even when he is fearful. That surely is the meaning of "Do not be afraid". It is not a call for severing ourselves from the desire to flee, as if Jesus were inviting us to a condition of nursery-teatime security; it is a command not to flee when the fear comes. And it surely will.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
Monday 5 March 2018
The technology crutch
Our water pressure has gone very low. It's not hard to fathom why. Our week of Siberian temperatures has led to frozen pipes, water leaks and a wave of emergency call-outs across the county. The shortage is creeping closer and closer to us. Tonight by 6pm the other side of the street had no water at all. My young daughter thought it would be clever to flush the toilet for no reason and was surprised that the cistern then refused to fill up again (at least at anything other than a senile snail's pace). So, here we are, in one of Britain's largest cities, and across the suburbs the water pressure is going down to a trickle or stopping completely.
The shelves of the local supermarket were already cleared of the cheaper bottled water by the time I arrived after 7pm this evening. Bowed figures could be seen struggling through the doors, laden with lires and litres of water. I'd never realised how heavy the stuff is! In point of fact, without a well-oiled trolley or some other means of portage, you cannot actually carry that much without incurring injury.
Back at home I headed into the garden to find to my dismay that the children's snowmen had already melted with all of today's rain. There goes my water flush supply, I thought! Then I remembered how much was still stockpiled in the front garden and so out I headed with the wheelbarrow to collect it all for flushing purposes!
Over reaction, you say? Well, we want to be careful, especially with three small children in the house. But bobbling about tonight, making my logistical preparations for a small water shortage, made me think how brilliant our water system is and, equally, how patently vulnerable we are when it breaks down. Here we are in our gloriously complicated civilisation but how close in fact to a state of incipient chaos. Miss a beat or two and the structure begins to sag beneath the strain. We only occasionally have flashes of how close we are to social breakdown. The petrol lorry drivers strike a few years ago was one such moment.
Henri Bergson believed that every technological progress required an equally profound spiritual progress in order to counterbalance it. We might say in a different sense that every technological progress comes at the cost of some skill or practice. Most of us are rubbish at letter writing now. Mind you, conversational skills are probably on the wane also. Invent the phonograph/record player/CD player/mp3 file and while you will not kill musical skills altogether, you will encourage above all their vicarious enjoyment: let others play while we sit back and listen. And soon enough there will be hardly any parlour pianos and youths will even privatise their own vicariously performed music with earplugs.
So what did the water system destroy for us? Well, probably quite a bit of death and disease, and that is no bad thing! The problem, however, is our infrastructures are now organised on the basis of water being piped clean and fresh into our own homes. We don't have wells (and their loss was probably another killer of social cohesion). At least we know we have to boil water if it comes from a standing pipe in the street (if things get that bad), but our whole lifestyle supposes this is not the way of things. Before I had a mobile phone, I kept probably a dozen phone numbers in my head. Now, I don't even remember my wife's!
So, you say, in that case, why even learn to write? Well, quite. In Greek mythology Theuth presents Thamus with the gift of writing and the latter complains precisely that it will destroy memory. That's the cost of the technological crutch. Use a tool of some description and you risk losing something else. I make no argument in favour of grass-skirted, native-level, Luddite obscurantism, but I do argue in defence of the ethical gate to technological progress. In the war of all against all, you cannot not pursue a technology when your neighbour has it. Such a decision would leave you tactically, not to say strategically, weaker. In a world under ethical guidance, however, there are other calculations to be made beside that of how to reign supreme. How to be good, for a start.
Our water will probably come back to normal pressure by the morning (I say with trepidation). Other crises no doubt await when different technologies break down. In this context I cannot help ticking off my privileges and admitting to all the advantages that they provide me with.
Nevertheless, just a small flirtation with a breakdown of the system is enough to remind one of how thin civilisation's technological skin is. We look orderly, we might even have reasonably clean streets and normally functioning cities. But beneath it all we bleed with the vulnerability of humans. Were we not to protect ourselves so well with our tools, we might live a more human life without even trying very much.
The shelves of the local supermarket were already cleared of the cheaper bottled water by the time I arrived after 7pm this evening. Bowed figures could be seen struggling through the doors, laden with lires and litres of water. I'd never realised how heavy the stuff is! In point of fact, without a well-oiled trolley or some other means of portage, you cannot actually carry that much without incurring injury.
Back at home I headed into the garden to find to my dismay that the children's snowmen had already melted with all of today's rain. There goes my water flush supply, I thought! Then I remembered how much was still stockpiled in the front garden and so out I headed with the wheelbarrow to collect it all for flushing purposes!
Over reaction, you say? Well, we want to be careful, especially with three small children in the house. But bobbling about tonight, making my logistical preparations for a small water shortage, made me think how brilliant our water system is and, equally, how patently vulnerable we are when it breaks down. Here we are in our gloriously complicated civilisation but how close in fact to a state of incipient chaos. Miss a beat or two and the structure begins to sag beneath the strain. We only occasionally have flashes of how close we are to social breakdown. The petrol lorry drivers strike a few years ago was one such moment.
Henri Bergson believed that every technological progress required an equally profound spiritual progress in order to counterbalance it. We might say in a different sense that every technological progress comes at the cost of some skill or practice. Most of us are rubbish at letter writing now. Mind you, conversational skills are probably on the wane also. Invent the phonograph/record player/CD player/mp3 file and while you will not kill musical skills altogether, you will encourage above all their vicarious enjoyment: let others play while we sit back and listen. And soon enough there will be hardly any parlour pianos and youths will even privatise their own vicariously performed music with earplugs.
So what did the water system destroy for us? Well, probably quite a bit of death and disease, and that is no bad thing! The problem, however, is our infrastructures are now organised on the basis of water being piped clean and fresh into our own homes. We don't have wells (and their loss was probably another killer of social cohesion). At least we know we have to boil water if it comes from a standing pipe in the street (if things get that bad), but our whole lifestyle supposes this is not the way of things. Before I had a mobile phone, I kept probably a dozen phone numbers in my head. Now, I don't even remember my wife's!
So, you say, in that case, why even learn to write? Well, quite. In Greek mythology Theuth presents Thamus with the gift of writing and the latter complains precisely that it will destroy memory. That's the cost of the technological crutch. Use a tool of some description and you risk losing something else. I make no argument in favour of grass-skirted, native-level, Luddite obscurantism, but I do argue in defence of the ethical gate to technological progress. In the war of all against all, you cannot not pursue a technology when your neighbour has it. Such a decision would leave you tactically, not to say strategically, weaker. In a world under ethical guidance, however, there are other calculations to be made beside that of how to reign supreme. How to be good, for a start.
Our water will probably come back to normal pressure by the morning (I say with trepidation). Other crises no doubt await when different technologies break down. In this context I cannot help ticking off my privileges and admitting to all the advantages that they provide me with.
Nevertheless, just a small flirtation with a breakdown of the system is enough to remind one of how thin civilisation's technological skin is. We look orderly, we might even have reasonably clean streets and normally functioning cities. But beneath it all we bleed with the vulnerability of humans. Were we not to protect ourselves so well with our tools, we might live a more human life without even trying very much.
Saturday 3 March 2018
The joy of disconnection
Well, a near miss! Debacle postponed until further notice. I've read the letter from the CDF which was what was published on Thursday and, frankly, wondered what on earth had prompted it. Here we are in the middle of a nasty doctrinal storm and we get what looks like an interesting sideshow. Sure, pelagianism in anything but name is always relevant. There has probably been a kind of pelagianism attested in every period of the Church, even before Pelagius! Human agency is a universal phenomenon arising from our status as moral beings. It's always relevant to talk about it, except when perhaps there are more important things to talk about. Just saying.
Meanwhile, we're snowed in where we live in the UK. After days of inaccurate weather forecasts, they finally got it right, and when the Beast from the East met Storm Emma - which sounds like a mixed wrestling match - the snow came down in relentless flurries. I love this kind of moment. I'm not moving the car because the handbrake freezes in sub-zero weather. The roads are treacherous in any case because, as far as I know, they have not been gritted. At least I don't have to go to work. I've told my children that all we have to do this weekend is snuggle for warmth and make it to Mass. They have responded by going into a fit of cabin fever and are now taking it in turns to sing loudly down opposite ends of a physiotherapy roller. The joys of childhood!
There is something therapeutic when the natural elements reduce our freedom and squeeze us into some creative corner. The contemporary instinct is to reach for a device and enter it (damn it, much as I have done now). Albert Borgmann, the German-American philosopher, talks about the device paradigm: the network of options and actions that flow from and to a device, organising our activity (and, let it be said, reorganising our spiritual palettes). Normally, when people use the word 'paradigm' these days, it makes me want to reach for my copy of Thomas Kuhn and whack them with it. Borgmann isn't a pretentious theologian, however, so we'll let him off. We'll let him off also because the contrary of the device paradigm is no kind of paradigm at all but what he labels a 'focal practice': an action creative or otherwise that serves as a focus of attention individually or collectively. Watching a TV talent show locks us in a device paradigm; singing together would be a focal practice. Surfing my neighbours' Facebook page would encase us both in a device paradigm; inviting them in for a cup of tea and a chat around the fire would be a focal practice.
You see, one of the problems with seeing pelagianism everywhere - and I'm not saying there is not quite a bit of it about - is that one risks being insensitive to what technology does to human agency. What I mean is that the more we force our actions through a technological instrument, somehow the more we are exposed to a phenomenon of vicarious substitution where our agency is transferred to some artifice. Google will save our passwords for us; electronic diaries will remind us of appointments; we bank online (well, I don't but the rotten banks are making things increasingly difficult for people like me). That is all well and good but the same kind of transfer in other areas of life can only be an impoverishment. I have letters written to me twenty-five years ago that I treasure but oddly enough no texts from even twenty-five months ago. Friendships forged around a dinner table and bottles of wine somehow (mostly) go deeper than their electronic equivalents. Worse still, people you thought were electronic friends sometimes disappear like a fart in the wind when pressed into real life.
This last phenomenon could be indicative. One of the troubles with technology is that the more complicated the instrument the more we are capable of divorcing ourselves from engagement with its outcomes. Technology allows us to colonise spaces that are a thousand miles away but also to hold those that occupy them at a distance. I have no doubt this appeals perversely to certain personalities and even cultures, the British in particular. Yet I cannot help but reflect not on the gains but on the losses. If there is more rejoicing in heaven over the return of the one lost sheep than over the ninety-nine faithful ones, I wonder if there is also more rejoicing at one real human connection than over ninety-nine digital ones. Sometimes even the most digitally connected of us longs for that digital connection to elicit a truly human response.
And so we arrive at these curious paradoxes: first, that in the age of connectivity we are often less connected, and second, that humanly connecting more might mean digitally connecting less. I was reading yesterday a text written in the late 1920s that was lamenting the domination of technology. "Men are now the slaves of machines, to the point of even becoming one body with them," the writer lamented. Perhaps this is yet another paradox of the technological culture: that as we distance ourselves more from our bodies through our technologies, we become the vicarious bodies of artificial intelligences. After all, we are all unwittingly working for the big internet companies who process our data trails, repackage and sell them on for profit. Oh, glory of the age of Zuckerberg! We are the living, breathing beasts of digital burden, investing our time by chomping our way through clickbait, and leaving a surprisingly exploitable slurry behind us in our wake. Behold the digital man!
At this point, there is only one thing left for me to do, which is to disconnect and intervene in my children's game which has now reached some extraordinary flight of fancy, based somewhat disturbingly on the abduction of Persephone...I wish my reader a snow-free, and more especially a technology-free, weekend (when you're finished here of course!)!
Meanwhile, we're snowed in where we live in the UK. After days of inaccurate weather forecasts, they finally got it right, and when the Beast from the East met Storm Emma - which sounds like a mixed wrestling match - the snow came down in relentless flurries. I love this kind of moment. I'm not moving the car because the handbrake freezes in sub-zero weather. The roads are treacherous in any case because, as far as I know, they have not been gritted. At least I don't have to go to work. I've told my children that all we have to do this weekend is snuggle for warmth and make it to Mass. They have responded by going into a fit of cabin fever and are now taking it in turns to sing loudly down opposite ends of a physiotherapy roller. The joys of childhood!
There is something therapeutic when the natural elements reduce our freedom and squeeze us into some creative corner. The contemporary instinct is to reach for a device and enter it (damn it, much as I have done now). Albert Borgmann, the German-American philosopher, talks about the device paradigm: the network of options and actions that flow from and to a device, organising our activity (and, let it be said, reorganising our spiritual palettes). Normally, when people use the word 'paradigm' these days, it makes me want to reach for my copy of Thomas Kuhn and whack them with it. Borgmann isn't a pretentious theologian, however, so we'll let him off. We'll let him off also because the contrary of the device paradigm is no kind of paradigm at all but what he labels a 'focal practice': an action creative or otherwise that serves as a focus of attention individually or collectively. Watching a TV talent show locks us in a device paradigm; singing together would be a focal practice. Surfing my neighbours' Facebook page would encase us both in a device paradigm; inviting them in for a cup of tea and a chat around the fire would be a focal practice.
You see, one of the problems with seeing pelagianism everywhere - and I'm not saying there is not quite a bit of it about - is that one risks being insensitive to what technology does to human agency. What I mean is that the more we force our actions through a technological instrument, somehow the more we are exposed to a phenomenon of vicarious substitution where our agency is transferred to some artifice. Google will save our passwords for us; electronic diaries will remind us of appointments; we bank online (well, I don't but the rotten banks are making things increasingly difficult for people like me). That is all well and good but the same kind of transfer in other areas of life can only be an impoverishment. I have letters written to me twenty-five years ago that I treasure but oddly enough no texts from even twenty-five months ago. Friendships forged around a dinner table and bottles of wine somehow (mostly) go deeper than their electronic equivalents. Worse still, people you thought were electronic friends sometimes disappear like a fart in the wind when pressed into real life.
This last phenomenon could be indicative. One of the troubles with technology is that the more complicated the instrument the more we are capable of divorcing ourselves from engagement with its outcomes. Technology allows us to colonise spaces that are a thousand miles away but also to hold those that occupy them at a distance. I have no doubt this appeals perversely to certain personalities and even cultures, the British in particular. Yet I cannot help but reflect not on the gains but on the losses. If there is more rejoicing in heaven over the return of the one lost sheep than over the ninety-nine faithful ones, I wonder if there is also more rejoicing at one real human connection than over ninety-nine digital ones. Sometimes even the most digitally connected of us longs for that digital connection to elicit a truly human response.
And so we arrive at these curious paradoxes: first, that in the age of connectivity we are often less connected, and second, that humanly connecting more might mean digitally connecting less. I was reading yesterday a text written in the late 1920s that was lamenting the domination of technology. "Men are now the slaves of machines, to the point of even becoming one body with them," the writer lamented. Perhaps this is yet another paradox of the technological culture: that as we distance ourselves more from our bodies through our technologies, we become the vicarious bodies of artificial intelligences. After all, we are all unwittingly working for the big internet companies who process our data trails, repackage and sell them on for profit. Oh, glory of the age of Zuckerberg! We are the living, breathing beasts of digital burden, investing our time by chomping our way through clickbait, and leaving a surprisingly exploitable slurry behind us in our wake. Behold the digital man!
At this point, there is only one thing left for me to do, which is to disconnect and intervene in my children's game which has now reached some extraordinary flight of fancy, based somewhat disturbingly on the abduction of Persephone...I wish my reader a snow-free, and more especially a technology-free, weekend (when you're finished here of course!)!
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