Art

Creative expression is very often subtle and nuanced. It speaks to our emotions, subconscience and aesthetic sensibility. Its meaning may be deliberately or unavoidably ambiguous or hidden. Because it comes to us in this complex form, we can each respond to different elements. So, for example, I listen to music for melody and emotion. I like music with passion and music that makes me want to dance. Even though I love words, when I listen to music I don't care too much what they say. I don't even really mind if they're offensive. But other people listen to music differently and, for them, the lyrics will be the number one thing. In all things, Christians have to be careful not to judge one another, but, because it is so easy to make false assumptions about each others' experience of art, I think that this is even more important here.

Sober excitement

My dear friend Mikey has an awesome blog. Phewph, been meaning to plug it for a long time.

There's an embarrassment of great material I could link to, but I thought a couple of recent-ish posts were particularly timely. I see a lot of interest these days in creation and wisdom and God-as-Creator, in addition to what is regarded as a previously narrow emphasis on justification and salvation and God-as-Savior. I'm very much a part of this, but I worry that no-one is keeping an eye on the pendulum's swing. Until these posts.

Cultural assumptions

Some missos from Malawi discussed subtle cultural bloopers at college the other day. They observed that:

• Westerners need to think afresh about servant leadership in cultures where respect for leaders is shown precisely by them not doing mundane tasks.
• Western teachers and leaders see their number one task as getting the message across, but other cultures value relationships more highly. This disconnect may mean that it can actually be a blessing to speak the language badly, as it forces you to focus on relationships.
• When you try to communicate something cross-culturally almost every word you use can conjure up different things.

The world is mad

* a rant *

Does anyone else get really irritated when the speed camera people tell the public where the speed cameras are!?!!!!! Isn't the whole point for people to not know where a camera might be, and so to keep to the speed limit wherever they are!!

Book club

I've started attending a book club with my friend Emma. It's made up of her workmates and their friends - fiesty, intelligent, well-read women. Last month we read The Catcher in the Rye. We talked about things we would never otherwise mention - moral codes, hypocrisy, failure, cynicism, hidden motivations, disability and its treatment, the impact of grief and molestation. The experience was something like Hamlet's play within a play - it was safe to present our personal opinions and beliefs because we did so under the guise of talking about the book. I don't mean that what we said was ingenuine - just that there was more going on than discussion of the book alone.

Everyone should join a book club!

Unless you don't like books. That would be silly.

Up close and personal

I'm not sure how sustainable this line of arguing is, but it occured to me that if you worship a god who isn't real, then that god will necessarily be understood as distant from you. Perhaps one of the marks of the reality of the God that Christians worship is that we attest to a personal and intimate relationship with him.

Work

And here's some random insights from our man Alain:

I felt the awkwardness of having to look up to rocket engineers and technicians
as our ancestors might once have venerated their gods. These specialists were
unlikely and troubling objects of admiration compared with the night sky and the
mountains. The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least
offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made
achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more
blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left to
wrestle with feelings of envy, anxiety and arrogance that follow from having no
more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered
and morally troubling fellow human beings.

. . .

I was stuck by how impoverished ordinary language can be by contrast [with
equations employed to determine the force of gravity at work on a telegraph
cable], requiring its user to arrange inordinate numbers of words in tottering
and unstable piles in order to communicate meanings infinitely more basic than
anything related to an electrical network. I found myself wisheding that the
rest of mankind would follow the engineers' example and agree on a series of
symbols which could point incontrovertibly to certain elusive, vaporous and
often painful psychological states - a code which might help us to feel less
tongue-tied and less lonely, and enable us to resolve arguments with swift and
silent exchanges of equation.

. . .

Death is hard to keep in mind when there is work to be done: it seems not so
much taboo as unlikely. Work does not by its nature permit us to do anything
other than take it too seriously. It must destroy our sense of perspective, and
we should be grateful to it for precisely that reason, for allowing us to mingle
ourselves promiscuously with events, for letting us wear thoughts of
our own death and the destruction of our enterprises with beautiful
lightness, as mere intellectual propositions, while we travel to Paris to sell
engine oil.

De Botton concludes:

Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect
bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our
immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it
will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired,
it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble.

I admire his courageous honesty. But I am sad for him - for, by God's grace, I know that there is more to life and to death.


Quotes from de Botton, The Pleasures, 168, 206, 324, 326.