Identity crisis

Mary and Kath

2012-02-24T00:02:00.000+10:00

Not having a TV spares me many horrors, and gives me more time to waste in other ways: and it means that occasional small gems pass by me unseen. Not too long ago, television was the most ephemeral of media, with programs broadcast once and relegated to a spool of tape in an internal archive, eventually to be erased, destroyed or discarded. The internet and massive digital storage systems have changed all that.

On Shrove Tuesday, Andrew Bolt mentioned, in amongst all of the Labor Party leadership frenzy, the Australian Story broadcast on the ABC the previous night. Called "Mary and Me," it is the story of Kath Evans, whose recovery from advanced and metastasised lung cancer was the second miracle required by the Catholic Church for the canonisation of the then Blessed Mary McKillop.

During her brief programme introduction, Emma Alberici says, "Whether you are a believer, or a non-believer - and Mrs Evans has been both - her experiences have been startling."

Brought up a Catholic, Kath has four children before she is abandoned by her husband. She meets Barry.

Kath: We ended up getting married in the Uniting Church - which was his church - and it was really taboo in our church to be remarried outside the Church. So, when I took the kids to church I couldn’t go to communion or anything. I felt very uncomfortable, and it was at that stage where I thought, "Well, God’s not thinking of me so, you know, goodbye. I’m not going to worry about You", and that’s when I turned away from the Church.

They have a son, and it is the son's interest in the Church that brings Kath back to practise as a Catholic.

Kath: The priest ...came and visited us in our home, and he put me through the third degree I can tell you, but yeah I come back to the Church - after ten years. When I come back in the Church, I came back with a different faith altogether... I found a loving God.

Perhaps there was more to the story that did not get into the programme, but if this is the basis for the claim of Kath's having been an unbeliever, then I would have to disagree. It is one thing to abandon the Catholic practice, and another entirely to abandon belief in God.

Kath prays in the backyard, with a cup of tea and a smoke.

Kath: ...this one day, we were sitting out in the yard and I actually heard a voice, and was asked to give up smoking. Sat out there, had me last smoke with Him one day and screwed the cigarettes up and the cigarette pack up, and I’ve never smoked since. The second time I heard the voice was a little bit more daunting. He asked me if I’d give my life to Him. I finally said, "Yes, my life’s yours", so it was like a calling, a calling that people have to different things.

Kath is still surprised by the unfolding of her story. I’m not a saintly person...I’m just an ordinary person. One of the things which I was surprised about is the media wanting to know about me, about my story. Because I was just an ordinary person, I found that very, very hard. I didn’t realise why why people wanted to know that story...it was one of the times that I really was thinking, you know, "Why was I chosen for this?"

I can understand Kath's bewilderment, but, on the flimsy basis of this programme, I am not surprised that she was chosen. How many of us have such a prayer life? How many of us are directly asked to give our lives to God? And of those who are, how many say "Yes," and live out their Yes? Kath has, Saint Mary McKillop did, and, primally and critically for the whole of our race, so did the Blessed Virgin Mary, Theotokos, the Mother of God.

Oh, dear, another miracle: God meddling with His creation again.

Ash Wednesday

2012-02-22T23:23:00.000+10:00

It's 10:22pm on Ash Wednesday, and Lent hasn't got off to a flying start. Shrove Tuesday was a black day indeed. Jen was very distressed—the cause is immaterial—and instead of giving the sympathy and support she might expect, I opened the cranky valve and vented, loudly and at length.

One nurses a grievance so that it can grow big and strong, and one day strike out on its own in the wide world. On that day one experiences a momentary surge of delight; the righteous release of pent-up bile in a welter of abandonment. Then the sanity comes flooding back in. Does this sound familiar?

How many of our sinful actions are like this? In how many, before the rush of blood has even subsided from the cheeks, has remorse set in? There's something about the way we are made that predisposes us to such moments; moments that reveal the cracks in the foundations of our being; moments that reveal the truth of the millennial teachings of self-discipline and self-control; of the matrix of tradition and custom that teaches us how to live in the terrible fiery flux that is our life in this world.

So I came to Ash Wednesday dispirited and un-cooperative, ready to forgo any promise of restraint and self-denial because of the the prior failure of restraint and self-denial. How curious. I continue to live by my own lights, by my own strength, my own judgements, my own convictions, my own deep wells of anger and righteousness. I will not, will not, will not, surrender control of events to God. I will not, will not, will not, put my trust in Him. And so I came sulking from the ashes of Tuesday to the Wednesday I did not want.

I have a glass of wine beside me as I write. My usual fast from alcohol will not be this year, said my inner toddler. I'm OK with that, for I have something else in mind. It is this: to post something on this blog on every day of Lent. Greg J. said to me once that writing was, for him, a crucifixion. I did not let myself savour that tidbit, thinking it did not apply to me. Sometimes, it is true, the words come easily enough; but not under the lowering cloud of expectation. Reliability, repeatability, dependability, responsibility—these are the nails from which this soul, arrested in its development, turns and twists and pleads and shouts to avoid.

So let us see. It is 11:19pm. Today will be a tick. There are forty days, excluding Sundays, which are always feasts, of Lent. Help me, my Lord.

The Gestalt of Faith

2012-02-10T13:39:00.000+10:00

I suppose there are those who come to the faith gradually; upon whom it steals up and like a rising tide claims more and more of the territory of the soul by imperceptible increments. Presumably, such people's sensibility is attuned to Christianity, but its tines have not been struck just so. It's not surprising that there would be many such. We live in the decline of Christian societies, and move among the neglected monuments of Christian culture, morality, law, philosophy, theology and the science that studied the rational and good works of God, rational and good. Theirs is not the situation I wish to discuss.

The census of souls, their habitations and dispositions, and the length of their various tenancies, is not known to us, but it seems that the homeless are many hereabouts, forever squatting in one gerry-built shack or other, until the rains come. From the censi we do have we know that the number of professing and practicing Christians, in many of the former bastions of Christianity, is in free fall. I don't need a census to tell me that my world, the world of the boomers and the children of boomers here in Australia and across the Western world, is characterised by deep, though not necessarily systematic, unbelief. It is in one sense thoroughly secularised and in another besotted with Gaia or angels or comic-book Buddhism.

The categories of unbelief are many. Many have integrity about their unbelief, with an intellectual commitment to atheism, and an emotional commitment to the life-styles that flow from the rejection of the Christian basis of our cultural institutions. It was a commitment I once shared. Probably more frequent are those who style themselves agnostic; they unable to come to any definite conclusion. Along with agnosticism there usually comes an agnostic proviso: if there is a god, it is unlikely that any one religion has a monopoly on knowledge of it. I spent a lot of time at this way-station, although with greater sympathy for Christianity than is usual.

Most curious of all are the neo-christians (no capital, in recognition of the non-divinity of Christ.) These are the inheritors of German theology from the 19th and 20th centuries. In a strange way, the last fifty or sixty years in the West resembles Alexandria and Antioch in the first centuries of Christianity; filled with a cacophony of theological voices and a multiplicity of views on the nature of Christ, the nature of God, and their relationship. Gnosticism pretty much died out in Egypt, leaving only the traces to be enthusiastically taken up again in these turbulent times. Arianism lasted longer, getting a foothold among the Goths and Vandals, and in parts of Italy, Spain and North Africa, and lingering on into the seventh century.

Some unbeliefs are common among neo-christians. The Gospels are not historically accurate, but contain mainly legendary tales about Jesus, invented some time after his death. The stories of miracles are a sure sign of this legendary character, as miracles do not actually occur. The Gospels being legendary, there is no need to take anything therein as gospel, so to speak. This includes, obviously, the Virgin Birth and the Ascension. What happened to bring about this burst of legend-making? Obviously Jesus was a pretty impressive character in life, to generate such enthusiasm afterwards. So the stories of the crowds and the preaching are probably true. The crucifixion we can probably accept as well. After all, Jesus had to die somehow, and such a death of such a charismatic figure would be grist to the legend mill. No miracles, no Virgin Birth, no Ascension. What about the Resurrection? A man rising from the dead? Not possible, as the Athenians said to St Paul. Divinity?

A simple soul might ask how a N-C can claim to be Christian, when he has thrown over every element of, for example, the Nicene Creed. What commonality remains between the N-C and the Church through the ages? Isn't it hypocrisy to remain in his Church, and indeed, to be a pillar of his institutional Church? The traditional believer looks at the teaching, the history, the structure of the Church, and sees the chalice.

On the other hand, the N-C will claim that he has merely continued the great Christian tradition of the unity of Faith and Reason; of the correspondence of the Good, the Beautiful and the True. It is reason that undermines the simple acceptance of the Gospels, and if the great tradition is to be continue, it must find its way back to a correspondence between Faith and Reason. Reason is implacable, so Faith must adapt. The N-C looks at the same vista as the traditional believer, and sees two faces in profile.

There's a switch in perception between the two. Figure and Ground alternate. For one, the ground is the reality of God and revelation and the particulars of the New Testament and the Old are figures on this ground. For the other, the ground is the critical method of the "Enlightenment," and the incidents from the Bible are particulars pinned like dead butterflies to this cork board of methodology and philosophy. For a modern unbeliever, or for a neo-christian, such a switch in perception is required to come to, or return to, a traditional faith. Unlike the switch that makes the faces disappear and brings the chalice to the fore, such a shift is not itself easy. When it comes, the change in the ground of intellectual perception is dramatic, and difficult to reverse.

At the end of the day, the difference is between the ground of faith in each perspective. If one is absolutely committed to secular materialism—if one believes in secular materialism—that is the ground against which every figure will be judged. If, on the other hand, the Gospels have taken root in one's heart, one's imagination, one's reason, one will also discover that there is no contradiction between the Faith of tradition and reason; between the Good, the Beautiful and the True. Then God in His limitless creativity and power will be present to the believer in the person of Jesus Christ: God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—will indeed be the ground of all being.

Updated 11 Feb 2012.

Bultmann: The Problem 2. Obsolete Mythology

2012-01-25T12:44:00.003+10:00

This is a follow-on from my previous post. It looks at the subsection that follows from the summary view of the NT as mythology. I urge you to read this subsection in its entirety in Kerygma and Myth. I will summarise it here, but it is such an unreasonable and unreasoning series of assertions that you may want to verify that this is, indeed, what Bultmann wrote.

2. The Mythological View of the World Obsolete

[Italics in original are marked by [Bult]. Other italics and bold emphasis mine.]

...the kerygma is incredible to modern man, for he is convinced that the mythical view of the world is obsolete.[Bult]... Can Christian preaching expect modern man to accept the mythical view of the world as true?[Bult] To do so ... would be senseless, because ... [i]t is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age. ...[I]t would be impossible, because no man can adopt a view of the world by his own volition -- it is already determined for him by his place in history. ... [H]e can [alter his world-view] only when he is faced by a new set of facts so compelling as to make his previous view of the world untenable. ... The discoveries of Copernicus and the atomic theory are instances of this, and so was romanticism ... and nationalism...

...[A]ll our thinking today is shaped irrevocably by modern science. A blind acceptance of the New Testament mythology ... as an article of faith would ... involve a sacrifice of the intellect... Modern thought as we have inherited it brings with it criticism of the New Testament view of the world. [Bult]

Man’s knowledge and mastery of the world[Bult] have advanced to such an extent through science and technology that it is no longer possible for anyone seriously to hold the New Testament view of the world-in fact, there is no one who does... The only honest way of reciting the creeds is to strip the mythological framework from the truth they enshrine-that is, assuming that they contain any truth at all, which is just the question that theology has to ask... There is no longer any heaven in the traditional sense of the word. The same applies to hell... And if this is so, the story of Christ’s descent into hell and of his Ascension into heaven is done with. We can no longer look for the return of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven or hope that the faithful will meet him in the air (I Thess. 4:15ff.).

Now that the forces and the laws of nature have been discovered, we can no longer believe in spirits, whether good or evil.[Bult] ... Sickness and the cure of disease are ... attributable to natural causation; they are not the result of demonic activity or of evil spells. ... The miracles of the New Testament have ceased to be miraculous, and to defend their historicity by recourse to nervous disorders or hypnotic effects only serves to underline the fact. And if we are still left with certain physiological and psychological phenomena which we can only assign to mysterious and enigmatic causes, we are still assigning them to causes, and thus far are trying to make them scientifically intelligible....

It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles. ... We may think we can manage it in our own lives, but to expect others to do so is to make the Christian faith unintelligible and unacceptable to the modern world.

The mythical eschatology[Bult] is untenable for the simple reason that the parousia of Christ never took place as the New Testament expected. History did not come to an end, and, as every schoolboy knows, it will continue to run its course... There is the still more serious challenge presented by modern man’s understanding of himself.[Bult]

Modern man ... may regard himself as pure nature, or as pure spirit. In the latter case he distinguishes the essential part of his being from nature. In either case, however, man is essentially a unity. He bears the sole responsibility for his own feeling, thinking, and willing. … He is not, as the New Testament regards him, the victim, of a strange dichotomy which exposes him to the interference of powers outside himself. If his exterior behavior and his interior condition are in perfect harmony, it is something he has achieved himself, and if other people think their interior unity is torn asunder by demonic or divine interference, he calls it schizophrenia.

[B]iology and psychology recognize that man is a highly dependent being... This dependence is inseparable from human nature... If he regards himself as spirit, he knows that he is permanently conditioned by the physical, bodily part of his being, but he distinguishes his true self from it, and knows that he is independent and responsible for his mastery over nature.

In either case he finds what the New Testament has to say about the "Spirit" and the sacraments utterly strange and incomprehensible.[Bult] Biological man cannot see how a supernatural entity like the spirit can ... set to work within him. Nor can the idealist understand how a spirit working like a natural power can touch and influence his mind and spirit. Conscious as he is of his own moral responsibility, he cannot conceive how baptism in water can convey a mysterious something which is henceforth the agent of all his decisions and actions. He cannot see how physical food can convey spiritual strength...

...The only relevant question for the theologian is the basic assumption on which the adoption of ... every ... Weltanschauung rests, ... the view of the world which has been molded by modern science and the modern conception of human nature as a self-subsistent unity immune from the interference of supernatural powers.

Again, the biblical doctrine that death is the punishment of sin[Bult] is equally abhorrent to naturalism and idealism, since they both regard death as a simple and necessary process of nature. To the naturalist death is no problem at all, and to the idealist... [d]eath may present him with a problem, but he cannot see how it can be a punishment for sin. Human beings are subject to death even before they have committed any sin. And to attribute human mortality to the fall of Adam is sheer nonsense, for guilt implies personal responsibility, and the idea of original sin as an inherited infection is sub-ethical, irrational, and absurd.

The same objections apply to the doctrine of the atonement.[Bult] How can the guilt of one man be expiated by the death of another who is sinless...? What primitive notions of guilt and righteousness does this imply? And what primitive idea of God? ... Moreover, if the Christ who died such a death was the preexistent Son of God, what could death mean for him? Obviously very little, if he knew that he would rise again in three days!

The resurrection of Jesus[Bult] is just as difficult for modern man, if it means an event whereby a living supernatural power is released which can henceforth be appropriated through the sacraments. To the biologist such language is meaningless, for he does not regard death as a problem at all. The idealist would not object to the idea of a life immune from death, but he could not believe that such a life is made available by the resuscitation of a dead person. If that is the way God makes life available for man, his action is inextricably involved in a nature miracle. Such a notion he finds incomprehensible, for he can see God at work only in the reality of his personal life and in his transformation. But, quite apart from the incredibility of such a miracle, he cannot see how an event like this could be the act of God, or how it could affect his own life.

Welcome to the world of Rudolph Bultmann.

What strikes me immediately about this is the tightly self-referential nature of the system that Bultmann expresses. Bultmann defines his own New Testament by throwing most of it away, and by selectively quoting and re-interpreting the bits that he finds congenial. The result is a caricature and a straw man that he can beat up as he sees fit. But the caricatures don't end there. He introduces a deliberate but useful (to him) confusion into the argument.

Bultmann equates New Testament mythology, New Testament world-view and New Testament cosmology. He does not actually spell that out, but is is an underlying assumption of his argument. Therefore the three-tier Jewish cosmology becomes reason to reject the NT holus-bolus, in Bultmann's view. This is an absurd contention. It is also no more reasonable to call the three-tiered universe of the Old Testament a mythology than it is to call the big-bang theory, or the steady-state theory of the universe that preceded it, mythological. Each is a theory, based on observation, of the nature of the universe. The steady-state theory was firmly held within astro-physics at the time Bultmann's paper was written. It was, we now believe, mistaken. Bultmann's mythological NT should be (and is being) thrown out, but not because of his mistaken theory of the universe.

"Now that the forces and the laws of nature have been discovered," e.g. the steady-state universe, "we can no longer believe in spirits, whether good or evil." Bultmann seems to assume that there was no knowledge of or recourse to medicine in first-century Judea and Samaria, and that all ailments were attributed to evil spirits. Yet there is no mention of evil spirits in the restoring of the withered hand, nor in the curing of the woman with the haemorrhage, nor the man born blind, nor the man born lame, nor in the deaths of the eighteen when the tower fell at Silo'am.

Almost immediately after this, Bultmann contradicts himself in the matter of spirits.

Modern man, he says, comes in two, and only two, versions: biological and idealistic. Biological man is what we know as modern man: a scientific materialist. That is, a man deluded into the unshakable belief that scientific methodology is compatible only with philosophical materialism—materialist man. Against biological man Bultmann puts idealist man (not idealistic), who is some peculiarly German oddity who can on the one hand consider himself "pure spirit," and on the other "permanently conditioned by the physical, bodily part of his being." How one can be both, I'm not sure. However, how a "modern man" can consider himself to be "pure spirit," whilst simultaneously he "can no longer believe in spirits, whether good or evil," is not explained. It cannot be. And, if there are no spirits, good or evil, why do we still have theologians?

Bultmann insists that "no one...does" hold seriously the NT world-view, by which he means virtually everything in the NT. That is clearly false. However, I would defend the view that no one seriously acts on the understanding that he is a biological machine, and that the mind is a delusion propagated by the brain's neurochemistry. Everyone acts on the basis of the reality of the mind, including materialists. No matter how often, and by what authoritative figures, the mind is proclaimed to be of purely material origin, such a mechanism cannot logically be demonstrated. The reason for the unreasonable insistance that the mind is a purely material phenomenon is that the alternative is that it is spiritual. That conclusion must be fought unrelentingly.

Christian anthropology recognises the spiritual reality of the mind of man. That is, man is a hybrid of the physical and the spiritual realms, uneasily straddling both; the bridge between the realm of pure spirit and the purely physical universe.

Likewise, the parousia, a future event in the NT, is mythological because of the early expectation of an early return, an expectation which was not realised. Even within the NT, however, this expectation is revised. The Second Coming is a fundamental part of Christian belief in the 21st century, as it was in the first, the second, and the third, by which time it had been noticed that Christ had not yet returned. But Bultmann puts the sometime expectation of a future event—the return of Christ—in the same category as Jewish cosmology, in order to support his hypothesis.

The Ascension, an event reported in the Synoptics, is likewise dismissed because of the cosmology. Having come this far, the Resurrection must also be disposed of. For, if there was a Resurrection, there must be a body. And if there is no Ascension and no Second Coming, there was no Resurrection. As Bultmann points out, nobody nowadays believes in a heaven above the clouds, or a hell under the earth's mantle. Yet they, we, believe in the Resurrection; and the Ascension and the Return follow logically from that belief. That we can offer no physical explanation for the mechanics of the Ascension should not be surprising. We can no more explain that than we can the sudden appearances and disappearances of the risen Christ. Add that to the almost infinite number of things that "modern man" believes withut being able to offer a physical explanation for. Mind, for example.

Christians have always understood the NT as the fulfilment of the Old. In particular, the coming of Christ, His death and Resurrection are the resolution of the Fall, even as the whole of Hebrew sacramental history is addressed to atonement. So Bultmann must throw that away as well. There is no atonement, there is no original sin, there was no Fall, there was no rift with God at the beginning of the history of mankind. What, then, to say about death and suffering?

No worries. Literally. Death is not a problem to biological man. It is of some concern to idealist man, because he frets that the control he exercises over nature by his spirit eventually succumbs to nature. Suffering, we simply won't mention. All in all, this central question of human existence sinks without a bubble to disturb the smooth surface of German theology.

The year, I remind you, is 1941.

How did he get away with it?

Within the closed universe of academic theology, Bultmann had clout, as had Harnack and, very belatedly, Strauss before him. Academic worlds are self-perpetuating. They define the standards by which academic activity will be judged and rewarded, and the awarding of approval. In the case of theology, that approval is essential for those who seek to be priests, ministers or pastors in all of the main-stream churches. These will be the shepherds of the flock, and they have a strong incentive to find approval, the stronger is their sense of vocation. Others seek a career in the academy itself. Again, approval is essential. An honest academy does not discourage dissent. However, it greatly esteems cleverness, and cleverness is most readily displayed in developing startling and difficult new interpretations.

This dynamic was in play before Bultmann arrived, and the "findings" of earlier generations were taken within the academy as "gospel," so to speak. The narcissism and destructiveness of the "scholars" was context in which all "theological development" occurred. Within this circle, Bultmann became "one of the great New Testament scholars."

The academy is essentially unchanged. If you went to, say, a Catholic seminary a decade ago, the rejection of traditional Christianity was complete. A believer, entering this environment in furtherance of a vocation was bullied into intellectual submission. No quarter was given in the onslaught against simple faith. Those who could not, or would not, adopt the prevailing view were winnowed out. And the process was never even brought out into the open. The faculty operated in the manner of the Emperor's tailors. And the graduates were sent naked into the world.

The statement, It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles, is widely quoted. In A Man For All Seasons, Robert Bolt has Thomas More ask Richard Rich, newly appointed Collector of Customs for Wales, after he has perjured himself at More's trial, "What profits it a man if he should gain the whole world, but lose his soul? But for Wales, Richard?" What profits it a man if he should gain the whole world, but lose his soul? But for wireless, Rudolph?

Bultmann: The Problem 1. The Myths

2012-01-23T14:49:00.000+10:00

As mentioned in a previous post, Kerygma and Myth contains the text of Bultmann's New Testament and Myth in the first two parts authored by Bultmann. I will look at the first of those, The Mythological Element in the Message of the NewTestament and the Problem of its Re-interpretation Part I. That document is further subdivided by Bultmann into

Part I: The Task of Demythologizing the New Testament Proclamation
A. The Problem

The first subsection expresses the New Testament's mythical worldview in a nutshell.

1. The Mythical View of the World and the Mythical Event of Redemption

...The world is viewed as a three storied structure, with the earth in the centre, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings -- the angels. The underworld is hell,the place of torment. ... God and his angels...and Satan and his demons...intervene in the course of nature and in all that men think and will and do. Miracles are by no means rare. Man is not in control of his own life. Evil spirits may take possession of him. Satan may inspire him with evil thoughts. Alternatively, God may inspire his thought and guide his purposes. ... He may give him the supernatural power of his Spirit. It [the end of the aeon] will come very soon, and will take the form of a cosmic catastrophe. ... Then the Judge will come from heaven, the dead will rise, the last judgment will take place, and men will enter into eternal salvation or damnation.

This then is the mythical view of the world which the New Testament presupposes when it presents the event of redemption which is the subject of its preaching. [Italics in original] It proclaims in the language of mythology that the last time has now come. "In the fullness of time" God sent forth his Son, a pre-existent divine Being, who appears on earth as a man. ... He dies the death of a sinner ... on the cross and makes atonement for the sins of men. ... His resurrection marks the beginning of the cosmic catastrophe. Death, the consequence of Adam’s sin, is abolished ... and the demonic forces are deprived of their power. ... The risen Christ is exalted to the right hand of God in heaven ... and made "Lord" and"King". ... He will come again on the clouds of heaven to complete the work of redemption, and the resurrection and judgment of men will follow. ... Sin, suffering and death will then be finally abolished. ... All this is to happen very soon; indeed, St. Paul thinks that he himself will live to see it.(I Thess. 4:15ff.; I Cor.15:5lf.; cf. Mark 9:1.)

This, then, is the New Testament according to Rudolph Bultmann, stripped down to its essentials. Bultmann is introduced as "one of the great scholars in the field of New Testament study," so he should have known what the New Testament is all about. If he didn't, who would? And most of this summary is unexceptional, if highly selective. However, there are a couple of sticking points.

[Spiritual beings] intervene...in all that men think and will and do... Man is not in control of his own life.

That's news to me. Clearly I'm not reading the New Testament properly. There are plenty of instances of spirit possession in the NT, but that's against a context of the free will of men. The NT Jews still believed the Old Testament. The problem started, not when Eve was possessed but an evil spirit, but when an evil spirit inveigled her; likewise Adam was inveigled by his wife. Without free will, there is no sin. Without the law to break, there is no sin, so how can the first paragraph be compatible with the second? How could "one of the great scholars" make such an egregious blunder?

What the NT, and the Old, does tell us is that we are not alone. We are not the autonomous and isolated beings, standing utterly apart from such fantasies as spiritual beings, in sole and bitterly lonely control of the barque of the self on the vast sea of existence. We make our decisions, moment by moment, year by year, lifetime by lifetime, but that decision draws to our assistance those very spiritual beings whose existence Bultmann ridicules. Among the whisperings, the cajoling, the shouts, the enticements offered to us, we choose, and join, for the duration of that moment or that lifetime, the side we have chosen. And that army stands with us, while the other is arrayed against us.

Of course, to Bultmann, this is nonsense. After all, he was writing in Germany, in 1941. He was the heir to a couple of centuries of "Enlightenment." Germany was rich, powerful, and in control of Europe from the Atlantic to the Soviet border. Rommel was driving towards Egypt, the Suez and Jerusalem. When he arrived, the Mediterranean would become a Nazi lake. Germany was peopled by rational, enlightened, independent intellects under no influence from any spiritual entities. Clearly.

All this is to happen very soon; indeed, St. Paul thinks that he himself will live to see it.

Reading the NT, especially the letters written so relatively soon after the Resurrection, one is struck by the lively expectation of the parousia in a number of places, including the Gospels. However, by the time Peter wrote the letters (which of course he did not write) he clearly saw the return of the King as a more distant event. I would be surprised had Paul not himself come to the same conclusion by the time he was in Rome, at the very latest.

I would not cf Mark 9:1, either. In all of the Synoptics, this reference is immediately followed by the recounting of the Transfiguration, mentioned also in the 2nd letter not written by Peter. And John beheld His glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father. When was that? But we don't have to worry about what John might have said, because John's Gospel has no historical validity at all. Bultmann, his teachers, and the generations of theologians and NT scholars who have trained under his influence, tell us so.[1]

Of course, the Church Fathers of the first, second and third centuries were well aware of the contents of the NT. The fact that the parousia had not yet eventuated doesn't seem to have disconcerted them. There was a ferment of criticism, a multitude of theological splits, an abundance of apocryphal documents vying for canonical status, and many variant readings of the canonical works, notably in Egypt. It often seems, when reading modern attacks on the NT, and Christianity in general, that the critics don't think blokes like St Augustine, Eusebius, Origen, Tertullian and Irenaeus could either read or think: that in this current unbelieving generation has a better understanding of the NT than did they. The canonicity of the four-fold Gospel was well established in the early second century. It took until 400 for the full complement of the NT to be firmly established throughout Christendom, although this discussion assumed the four Gospels, the thirteen Pauline epistles (not including Hebrews), I Peter and I John. It was the status of the other books, and of a number of non-canonical books, that was in dispute. And an active dispute it was. How was it, then, with all of this discussion of the merits of various books, that the supposedly crippling problems of the canon were not noticed as Christianity spread to encompass the Mediterranean and beyond?

[1]There is an interesting side-trail here. It is argued that the Gospels could not have been written before the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in AD70. Why not? Because the references to the end-times in the Gospels are obviously referring to this event. When Jesus predicts the sack of Jerusalem, we know that he could not have actually predicted the future: therefore the supposed prediction was invented after the fact. So, 40, 50 or 60 years after the crucifixion of the hopes of Jesus' followers, Matthew, Mark and Luke constructed Gospels which contributed to the sense of "lively expectation." Why then, when the model of the end-times had come and gone, and Jerusalem was being re-populated in peace, would they do such a thing? If, however, the Synoptics were written before 70, Bultmann's hypothesis makes slightly more sense.

Candy Glass

2012-01-16T13:29:00.002+10:00

I watched the last twenty minutes or so of the movie Ratatouille with a four year old boy the other night, doing my shift while his parents were having dinner with us. The animation was very good, and the visual syntax was varied, dramatic and assured. They sure know how to make animated movies nowadays.

One scene that struck me was when the girl, having walked out of the restaurant with all but one of the staff, for reasons I could not fathom due to ongoing discussions with the four year old, is stopped in traffic on her motorbike, and looks to the side at something which invokes remorse at her leaving. The lanes of traffic on either side of her drive off, with her sitting on the bike, and the traffic held up behind her. (It loses in translation.) Another is the previous scene when the staff walk out of the kitchen, and we have a rat's eye view of the feet and legs in regulation black and white checks as they tramp out.

The character around whom this whole story turns is a saintly rat with a genius for cooking. Think about that. I'm sure that when this unworldly little fella arrived at the restaurant he encountered very mean rats, including the alpha rat, but by this stage of the movie he had won them all over, and a couple of the humans to boot. Boss rat marshals the others to do our hero's kitchen bidding, and takes care of threats from the rest of the humans. Two of them find themselves trussed up in a cupboard while the restaurant meals are prepared and served. One of them is a health inspector. Think about that.

A character who is not trussed up is the morbid-looking restaurant critic, whom Jonas—the four year old—pointed out to me as a "bad man." With the wisdom of my years, I had detected that the critic was not such a bad bloke, and assured Jonas so. The restaurant staff weren't much chop though, except for the two who remained. Aside from the temporary difficulties with boss rat, there are no bad rats in this movie; at least, none that I saw. And when the rats took over the kitchen, they all went through the dishwasher, demonstrating their commitment to hygiene.

Those of us who are more or less grown-up can look at this movie as a parable informed by the shlock-standard absolute social value of inclusiveness. It is an article of faith that most Western atheists and agnostics, and a goodly number of Christians, subscribe to. The rats are the despised outsiders, stuck with labels such as "filthy," "disease-carrying," "sewer-dwelling" etc. Enlightened human beings, however, are capable of seeing through this kind of discrimination to appreciate rats as they truly are. And what a gourmet feast results! So, those whose thinking is so advanced as to be pre-adolescent may argue, "This is not about rats! It's about socially-excluded group X, Y or Z." Those of us who are more or less grown-up can conclude that this story is, to use a gastronomical metaphor, a bucket of tripe. But what about Jonas?

When I was growing up, I saw a lot of mediocre Westerns at the movies and on TV. One of the staples of Westerns was the bar-room brawl. Almost inevitably, someone would be propelled through a window into the street. He would usually pick himself up, shake himself off, and charge back into the brawl. These scenes were so familiar to me that when I learned, as a teenager, that a boy had been hospitalised after riding his pushbike through a ground-level glass panel at a school, I was nonplussed. It was the first time I had ever given the matter any thought. Of course that would be the result, but the frequently-repeated scenes had bypassed reflection and made their way directly into my (mis-)understanding.

The bar-room windows were part of the elaborate charade that is the movies. The glass for those scenes has only to support it's own weight and a painted sign—usually Saloon or Bar—until the extra goes through it, when it will be replaced for the next take. It's not much more substantial than microscope cover slips, and is called, I believe, candy glass.

Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth

2012-01-13T12:16:00.000+10:00

This is a handshake introduction to an extremely influential work: Kerygma and Myth by Rudolf Bultmann and Five Critics. The work was originally published in Germany in 1948; the original English translation appeared in 1953.

The first two parts of the piece reproduce Bultmann's 1941 paper, translated as New Testament and Mythology. The paper is most easily accessible in the Kerygma and Myth collection, and it is accompanied by some useful commentary.

James F. Kay, now Princeton Theological Seminary’s Dean of Academic Affairs, wrote in 1991 in an article marking the 50th anniversary of the paper,

Bultmann spoke at nine o'clock in the morning [of 4th June, 1941], and, with the exception of prayers at noon and again at four o'clock, the whole day was devoted to discussing his lecture. Thus appeared, a half century ago, what Schubert M. Ogden later called "perhaps the single most discussed and controversial theological writing of the century."

The prayers are a nice touch. Kay offers some flavour of Bultmann's theology.

For Bultmann, myth embraces those reality claims that do not square with scientific understanding. For example, the kerygma's claim that Jesus rose from the dead cannot refer to a real fact or event about Jesus inasmuch as facts and events are held to be recovered, or reconstructed, through scientific means. [Emphasis mine.]

However, Bultmann's reputation had suffered by 1991. Myth was overtaken by narrative as the theological mode-de-jour. Should we cheer? Not yet. Kay discusses Hans W. Frei's The Identity of Jesus Christ as a seminal essay in the rise of narrative theology. He writes,

Frei, as a believing Christian, ... must show how a literary character possesses saving significance for people today. Frei ... ingeniously... infers the present factuality of the Savior on the basis of his literary identity. The fictional Gospel narrative renders an identity of Jesus that entails the claim of his factual presence today. [Emphasis and italics mine.]

Got that? You may have noticed that no-one in this discussion actually believes the Gospels, nor does anyone feel the need to explain their disbelief. The discussion is about how, given that the Gospels do not witness to actual events, to construct some elaborate rationale for calling oneself a Christian at all. Note that all of these folks are descendants of the Reformation. Whither sola scriptura?

In the linked version of Kerygma and Myth, John Reeves, in an introduction written in 2005, points out that Bultmann was defining a position that was more traditional than that of his teachers such as Harnack.

For Adolf Harnack and other German liberals, the significance of Jesus lay only in his moral teachings. Following Karl Barth, Bultmann argued that “[t]he NewTestament talks about an event through which God has brought about our salvation. It does not proclaim Jesus primarily as a teacher…”

From the perspective of 1941, the devastation that is Bultmann looked like a green shoot. German liberal theologians had laid waste the landscape in the generations before, in the manner of Strauss and Harnack. The Gospels were full of mythical tales, which no "modern" man could believe. German theology proceeded from this bedrock of understanding to construct a theological mythology—or narrative—of its own. Bultmann, also a "believing Christian," had to try to convince himself and others that salvation remained a term with any meaning.

Bultmann thought to base a new understanding on the correspondence he saw between the existentialism of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, a sometime colleague at Marburg, and the "existentialism" Bultmann detected in his particular reading of the New Testament. Reeves writes,

For Bultmann, the philosophy that best understands human existence is the existentialism of ... Heidegger. Or rather, “…Heidegger’s existentialist analysis of human existence seems to be only a profane philosophical presentation of the New Testament view of who we are…” Bultmann rejects the charge that he is translating the kerygma into an alien philosophical framework, for Heidegger’s philosophy “all by itself”has discovered the New Testament message about the human condition.

We might well ask which came first, the New Testament or the profane philosophy. As Reeves says in summarising, "While Bultmann had hoped to anchor the Christian gospel in a secure existentialist framework, in fact this framework secured its irrelevance as soon as Heidegger’s philosophy became dated." In another post I will look at some of the "mythology" that Bultmann sought to strip out of the new New Testament.

All of this was occurring in Germany between the wars, simultaneously with the rise of Hitler and the savage paganism that effectively swept Christianity aside in that country. When New Testament and Mythology was delivered, Nazism was at the apogee of its power and security. Within a few months, Operation Barbarossa would be launched against the Soviet Union, and the cataclysm would be set in motion. German theology could not possibly have any bearing on all that, though.

Memo: The Faith of Scientists

2012-01-13T02:44:00.002+10:00

I have just read this in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (towards the end of XII. The Resolution of Revolutions):

The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by problem-solving. He must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith.

More later.

God's Metaphors

2012-01-09T14:01:00.002+10:00

The Shroud of Turin is an object subject to a great deal of devotion and a great deal of controversy. Many believe it to be the shroud in which Jesus was buried. While it's provenance is not known before 1349, it is a relic that will not go away. For every study that definitively determines it is of European medieval origin, another is published to establish that it is not.

My purpose is not to discuss the likelihood that the shroud is or is not genuine. Let us assume for the moment that it is an accurate picture of the kind of crucifixion that Jesus suffered. My interest is in the position of the wounds on the back of the hands of the the figure; more precisely, in the position of the wounds on the back of the wrists of the figure.

Part of the discussion surrounding the shroud concerns the feasibility of crucifixion in which nails were driven through the palms of the hands. It has been widely noted that the tissue of the palms would not support the weight of the body in crucifixion, but would tear through between the fingers. The consensus seems to be that the bones of the wrist must be involved to provide the necessary support. This augurs well for the shroud. What, however, does it do for centuries of Christian iconography? What for the Gospel of St John? Interesting as these questions are, I want to address another, and one of particular note for Franciscans.

What are we to make of the stigmata of St Francis and of Padre Pio? The positions of their stigmata, as near as I can tell, correspond to the traditional sites of Christ's wounds, notably the palms of the hands.
What went wrong? Did Jesus not remember? Or is this an indication that the stigmata are, in spite of the plethora of evidence presented in the Cause of Pio, extremely clever fakes?

For the purposes of this discussion, let us take it as a given that Pio's stigmata are genuine. By this I mean that they cannot be attributed to any natural causes that they are what they are said to be by the Church; a supernatural intervention in the natural world. On that assumption, the investigation and validation of Pio's stigmata has the happy side-effect of validating the stigmata of the founder of Pio's order, St Francis. But why the palms, if that was not the site of the Lord's wounds?

What would be the point of God's speaking to us in ways we do not understand? If every Christian in Italy understood Christ's wounds to be in His hands, how would wounds in St Francis' wrists be regarded? God translates for us. He translates His small personal epiphanies into the language of an individual soul. So, the overwhelming apprehension of the presence of God that is a conversion or a re-affirmation, and which cannot be conveyed to another human being. Likewise He translates His public utterances into the language of their audience. So, Pio carries the wounds in his hands and elsewhere for fifty years until they begin to heal at the end of his life, eventually closing without scars.

An instance of this kind of accommodation is the Ascension. It is a perennial target of the mockers. The Creed has it that, He ascended into Heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. Let us assume, again, that this millennial belief of the Church is correct. The event of the Ascension is consonant with Jewish cosmology, and expresses the essential elements. The Jews knew that Heaven was up there; clouds were the medium of heavenly exchange, so to speak. How might it have been expressed? Perhaps a tardis in the shape of a dinghy, given Jesus' associations with the boats of Galilee. Perhaps the angels could, like Krishna with Arjuna before the battle, have set aside four days to explain and persuade: to lay out for the disciples the fundamentals of general relativity, quantum mechanics, the big bang (a familiar note, this), finally explaining that the glorified body of the Lord was about to depart through a warp in the space-time continuum to a parallel universe, viz. Heaven.

Yes, it's ridiculous, but what alternative would not be ridiculous? The whole point of ridiculing of the Gospels is to support a philosophical commitment that a priori denies their validity. The mockers assume the superiority of their philosophy over what we may still call Christianity. Their superiority, though, is that of schoolboys clustering in gangs at universities and seminaries, egging each other on to ever more daring feats of mockery in order to carry themselves, en masse, through the prolonged intellectual adolescence that is the pre- and post- of modernism.

As it happens, I do not believe that is is necessary to abandon either the Gospel of St John or the shroud. They seem to me to be quite compatibile; but for the terms of this discussion that is irrelevant. Similarly, I accept that the stigmata of Francis and Pio are God-given, and that the Ascension was an actual event, witnessed by the Apostles. Furthermore, I will insist that these beliefs of mine are more reasonable, rational and coherent than the beliefs of those who oppose them.

The Scale of God

2012-01-07T09:20:00.002+10:00

The cosmology of the ancient Hebrews has subject to a lot of snide comments by enlightened moderns, ever since those Copernicans appeared. Let's face it, it looks kind of quaint. The universe is viewed from the same platform that all but a tiny handful of us have always shared; the surface of planet Earth; but whereas we have built for ourselves models of the earth in its galactic context, no such detached and purely intellectual perspectives were available to them.

By human criteria, this home of ours is pretty substantial. It has a vastness which awed the Hebrews, and still more cast was the firmament, the waters above the firmament, and the waters below the earth. There is a mismatch, though, between Hebrew cosmology and Hebrew faith.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

It's not the only oddity of the early part of Genesis. In spite of it, though, the Jews were to believe, and to pass on to us, the assurance that God created everything, visible and invisible, out of nothing.

Again:

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Even so, Tacitus, after the Jewish War, would write of the Jews:

The Jews acknowledge one god only, of whom they have a purely spiritual conception. They think it impious to make images of gods in human shape out of perishable materials. Their god is almighty and inimitable, without beginning and without end.

These sparse clues are not unrepresentative of the ancient theology, holding fast to its essential revelation, and watching every other conception of God fall before human religious and intellectual development. God they know to be all-powerful, creating everything, and by His forbearance, maintaining all of the visible and invisible universe in existence. The psalmist wrote,

The mountains melt like wax before the Lord.

There was early Holocene, or post-glacial, volcanic activity in parts of the Middle East since the Holocene flood. It may be that some memory of flowing lava has impressed itself into this psalm. Truer, I think, to think that the reality of the mountains being formed by the upheavals of molten rock is simply a actual counterpoint to the inspiration of the psalmist. To him, the mountains were as wax in the hands of the Lord, who comes, who comes to rule the earth. Vast as the mountains were, they were the playthings of the Lord. All the stars are named and numbered by the Lord, the sun and the moon run their course at His behest, and the seasons sweep in and out as He decrees. All the creatures of the unfathomable deeps are His. No depth nor height is hidden from His gaze.

So we Christians have been brought up to consider God, ordering all things to the good of His people who love and worship Him; a Presence infusing and innervating the earth, the heavens and the seas to the farthest reach of the understanding that centres on the Temple and the chosen people. The Scriptures provide us with the measure of our measureless God, in terms of the world he has created for us to inhabit, and, in doing so, have provided us with an implicit sense of scale through the anchor point of God's concern for us, the pinnacle of His visible creation.

The scale that emphasises the grandeur of God expresses to us also, paradoxically, the intimacy of His care for His creation. It balances for the worshippers the power and might with the tender personal concern in a lesson that is developed throughout both the Old and New Testaments. As such, it has been the culture in which the searching soul can be cultivated in growing devotion to the Lord. And so it should be.

What of our own time, and our own view of the universe, visible and invisible? What cosmology is offered to our understanding? A universe that gives every appearance of having been created out of nothing comes into being, time and space, and into that space and across those eons it expands to inconceivable dimensions, forming a 100 billion galaxies of a 100 billion stars, give or take a few orders of magnitude. Each of these stars dwarfs the earth; each is a vast burning or burnt-out clump of the primitive fuel of the universe. Such is the story we tell ourselves, and what message does it convey? This: our home is unspeakably and incalculably insignificant, less than a fly-speck on the surface of planet Earth: accept your meaninglessness, o Man, embrace your nothingness, for you, and everything you hold precious, is as less than nothing.

As our world and our night sky have shrunk, so, strangely, has the scale against which we measure the grandeur of God. We cannot help our anthropomorphising of God, hovering over the heavens, encompassing the sun, the moon, and the same set of uncountable stars that Abraham was challenged to number. As the scope of our perspective has been intimidated by these incomprehensible numbers, so has our anthropomorphic Deity. We are bereft of the psychological tools to conceive of the blessing and honour, and glory and power of the God who made us.

Yet, nothing has changed. We still dwell here, we still love this beautiful place, the stage on which each individual cosmic drama of a life is still lived out. We still know truth, beauty, goodness, love, justice, honour, humour, tragedy, betrayal, pain, loss and evil. We still know with absolute assurance, that we are not alone in the communion of our fellow human beings. We still grope towards the ultimately meaningful.

More importantly, God is still the Creator, still the sustainer of every particle of the universe. In the words of Moses, the Psalms and the wisdom books we find the tools that we need to remake our attitude to Him. Grant that we must retreat almost infinitely farther than the prophets before the wonder and glory of the Lord, because we understand more the scale of His power. Grant Them His due. I will lift up mine eyes unto the stars

from whence cometh my help.

My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.

Pio's daemon, Pio's angel

2012-01-04T19:19:00.002+10:00

Thanks to Daniel, I have been reading Patricia Treece's Meet Padre Pio. It is a compact summary of Pio's life and vocation, drawn in large part from the documentation that supported the cause of his canonisation. Pio was always a challenge to Catholic Church authority, simply by virtue of the vortex of inexplicable events and experiences that drew others to him. But Pio had trouble with daemons. Treece quotes from the diary of one of Pio's spiritual directors, Padre Agostino, at a time when Pio was very ill.

I went to his room where there were some other friars also, and I saw Padre Pio lying on the bed with an agitated expression on his face and he said: "Send away that cat which wants to fling itself on me."

...I went to the choir to pray for Padre Pio, fearing that he would die...I returned to the room, and found a serene and cheerful Padre Pio, alone. As soon as he saw me, he said: "You did the right thing going to the choir to pray...You even thought about my funeral eulogy." [p 38]

Treece continues:

Only then did [he] realise that Pio had been having a diabolical vision. The devil, in those years, appeared to Pio in various forms: as his guardian angel, St. Francis, Our Lady, even Padre Agostino. Other times the devil appeared in the form of a crucifix, nude young women, torturers who whipped Pio and, finally, as Satan himself surrounded by dark spirits.

Gradually his directors uncovered that Pio also had ecstatic visions of Jesus, of Mary, and other mystical phenomena. Visions of Jesus were proved genuine, his directors believed, by the great benefits they left in in Pio's soul. [p 39]

Pio's relations with his guardian angel weren't all fraught. Fr Alessio Parente wrote a book, Send me Your Guardian Angel, about Pio's interactions with his guardian angel, "the playmate of my childhood," and the angels of others.

In an earlier post, I talked about Jeremiah's "condition," as viewed from within a modern psychiatric and irreligious frame of reference. We might be able to get away with that when the subject is so remote in time, and when the sources are so few. The embarrassment of Pio is that he was a contemporary of most of the people still alive in the Western world; that his life has been subjected to the same critical scrutiny that has undermined belief in the facticity of Jeremiah, of the prophets before and since, and of the Gospels. During his lifetime, he was alternately embraced and persecuted by the Church, inspiring near-fanatical contempt and devotion, sometimes from the same person.

Pio died in 1968. The preliminary process for the Cause of his canonisation was commenced shortly after his death. In 1973 the results of this process were presented. It was not until 1983 that the Cause was allowed to proceed. The informative process continued until 1990. In 1997 John Paul II announced his beatification, and in 2002, his canonisation. Ten volumes of documents had been compiled by the investigation, which goes some way to explain the twenty-nine years that passed between the beginning of the process and his beatification.

It is this documentation, this evidence, on which the case for his canonisation was decided. Once upon a time, sainthood was conferred, not by rigorously defined processes of the Church hierarchy, but by popular acclaim; on the voices, so to speak. In the case of Pio, his sainthood was declared by the people among whom he lived and worked for many years before his death. The strength of that acclaim was no doubt an important factor in delaying the recognition.

It is said that, for those who believe, no proof is necessary, and for those who don't believe, no proof is sufficient. No doubt, so to speak. As to sceptics, there is a difference between those who will dismiss any evidence without examining it, on the basis that, the proposition being impossible, the evidence must be concocted or otherwise unreliable, and those who will turn the evidence every which way in order to assure themselves of the rightness of their disbelief. The latter is a more honourable course, but—and this is critical—enormously more time-consuming; which is why so few pursue it, in any field of enquiry.

Nonetheless, the evidence in regard to Pio remains an eloquent testimony to a reality which confounds materialists. It is a reality as primitive as the Old Testament; yet a reality that continues to intrude into the sanitised worldview of a faithless and perverse generation. It is a reality of daemons and angels, of Satan and Christ, of Mary and St. Francis. It is a world which generations faithless and perverse, arrogant and hubristic, knowing and superior, can only explain by recourse to the brittle mythology of psychiatric disorder. And, bending with the remover to remove, the worldly-wise can gesture in the direction of the now-dead schizophrenic and accommodate him neatly within the claustrophobic confines of their own faith.

Pio, though, is other-wise, and is not to be denied. Those ten volumes, and all of the witnesses still alive, testify to him. His holiness, the repentance he inspired in others, the converts he won, his inexplicable knowledge of the inner lives of strangers, the healings attributed to his intercession, his bi-locations, his stigmata, will not be contained in those cardboard categories. When a sceptic points out to Pio that he is suffering from a delusional mental condition, Pio responds, "Even though you do not believe me, believe the works."

Belief, Knowledge, Faith

2011-12-14T12:02:00.000+10:00

Not long after 9/11, I was talking to an elderly Dominican priest. I was startled to discover that he thought the felling of the towers was an inside job by the CIA, of some such US authority. The evidence for this was all over the web. Adherents to this particular theory are known as truthers, as in "the truth about 9/11," much as believers in the theory that Barak Obama was not born in Hawaii, but in Kenya, are called birthers. Each of these theories is supported by a slew of websites and internet forums constantly presenting and re-presenting the evidence for their contention, although truthers have the more vigorous and voluminous support. In fact, 9/11 conspiracies have the largest following since the various theories about the assassination of JFK seized the public imagination, and the term "grassy knoll" came to have a specific meaning in the vernacular of the US. There's never been any shortage of theories on a bewildering range of topics, from the trivial to the socially disruptive. With minimal effort, I can find a mass of evidence that Neil Armstrong did not land on the moon, but was in a TV studio in Houston, or that the Shoah was invented after the war.

Sensible people like us know the truth about these things: teams of Al-Qaeda killers hijacked four airliners and flew them, with their passengers, into the twin towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania; Barak Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii, a US citizen; JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald; Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon and returned safely to earth; and the Holocaust took the lives of over six million of Europe's Jews, and about 5.5 million others.

How do we know these things? Or, to put it another way, in respect of such things, what do we mean by knowing? Is it perhaps more comfortable, and more accurate, to say that we believe these things?

In Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi uses the following illustration in discussing the use of statistical confidence intervals in judging experimental results, to 95% confidence interval. Whilst its purpose is to illuminate one of the statistical components of experimental design, it offers a nice contrast between things known to be true and things reasonably concluded to be true. Suppose you are handed an opaque bag containing 100 marbles, which may be either black or white. You are asked to draw a single marble from the bag, and then to make a judgement about the statement, "The bag contains ninety-five or more white marbles." You draw a black marble. What conclusion do you draw with respect to the statement? It is measurably reasonable to say that the statement is very probably false; alternatively, that you believe the statement to be false. Now suppose that you are the one who counted ninety-five white and five black marbles into the bag. What conclusion do you draw? Does the improbable drawing of a black marble alter the fact that you know the statement to be true?

Almost every conclusion of science relies on statistical inference in support of its truth claims, and the place of probability has become more and more prominent in science in the last century or so. At least with the claims of science, we should be able to trace the strands of inheritance by which the conclusions have come to us, even if, in practical terms, we are in no position to verify the evidence for ourselves. However, scientific conclusions and models of reality are only a tiny part of what we believe we know, and the personal verification of the greater part is even more unlikely than the lesser.

How many of the things that we casually claim to know, do we know in the sense of the marbles we put in the bag, and how many in the sense of an article we have read in a scientific journal, and how many in the sense of the factuality of the Shoah? The reality is that most of what we take to be our "knowledge" is the testimony of trusted witnesses.

The contrast between the situation in which the contents of the bag of marbles are known, and that in which they are unknown, but postulated, illustrates one clear distinction between knowledge and belief. The conclusion drawn from statistical inferences is always less certain than the knowledge gained from a complete personal enumeration. But there are many others. The earth, as everyone knows, goes around the sun, does it not? How did we come to this "common knowledge"? Here's Polanyi.

Why did Copernicus exchange his actual terrestrial station for an imaginary solar standpoint? The only justification for this lay in the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the sun instead of the earth. Copernicus gave preference to man's delight in abstract theory, at the price of rejecting the evidence of our senses, which present us with the irresistible fact of the sun, the moon, and the stars rising daily in the east to travel across the sky towards their setting in the west.

It's so ingrained now that we do not even notice that rejection of the evidence of our senses. Les Murray still pays attention to this evidence, and provoked mild ridicule for observing, correctly, that the sun travels in a different direction in the northern hemisphere.

Edward Oakes S.J. wrote, passim, about the sociology of knowledge in Peter Berger's A Rumor of Angels,

The real problem is that almost all of what people claim they know—and not just the esoterica of science—must be taken on faith, from the number of planets in the solar system…to the age of the earth and the chemical composition of water.

He then quoted Berger.

One of the fundamental propositions of the sociology of knowledge is that the plausibility, in the sense of what people actually find credible, of views of reality depends upon the social support these receive. Put more simply, we obtain our notions about the world originally from other human beings, and these notions continue to be plausible to us in a very large measure because others continue to affirm them. . . . Most of what we "know" we have taken on the authority of others, and it is only as others continue to confirm this "knowledge" that it continues to be plausible to us.

Let us say, for the purposes of discussion, that knowledge derives from personally accredited direct experience, and that belief is a conviction based upon the testimony of witnesses considered reliable. If we then classify the example statements made above, we will find that all of the common-sense things we know about events in the larger world are beliefs, rather than knowledge. This bears out Oakes analysis. On the other hand, I know, when I have put the marbles into the bag, what the distribution of white and black marbles is.

Where does faith fit into this picture? It seems to fall somewhere between knowing and believing. To return to the example of the marbles which I have placed in the bag. Do I have faith that there are only five black marbles in the bag. It's not faith, but certainty. What happens, though, if I draw a black marble on three successive attempts? If I am in company, I begin to suspect that all is not as it seems. A comparison would be with a "magician," who seems to defy reason in his performance. But we "know" that legerdemain is involved. So even my certitudes are susceptible to doubt if the evidence contradicts them, and continues to do so.

Do I have faith that the earth orbits the sun? Not exactly. I have faith in the processes that lead to the conclusion, but I believe in the conclusion. Can my confidence in the processes be shaken. Of course. The processes of scientific consensus are of critical importance to modern Western culture, and have cultivated magnificent intellectual developments. The validity of these developments seems to be borne out by the success of the technology that has been built on those intellectual foundations. These processes are identified in large measure with the critical mindset of the Enlightenment. That framework, however, as Polanyi and T.S. Kuhn (in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), have pointed out, is showing cracks.

On the Enlightenment view of faith and knowledge, Polanyi quotes Locke, from A Third Letter on Toleration.

How well-grounded and great soever the assurance of faith may be wherewith it is received; but faith it is still and not knowledge; persuasion and not certainty. This is the highest the nature of things will permit us to go in matters of revealed religion, which are therefore called matters of faith; a persuasion of our own minds, short of knowledge, is the result that determines us in such truths.

There is an assumption of transparent mapping from the forms of critical enquiry advocated by Locke to each person's corpus of knowledge. Polanyi's book directly challenges such assumptions. He responds to Locke on the basis of the analysis he has conducted to that point on the limitations of objectivism, and the inescapable element of unspecifiable personal philosophical and axiomatic commitments.

We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.

It seems to me that the "faith" we have in scientific processes, or in the academic structures that underpin research into history or philosophy is similar to the religious faith experienced by most believers, and both are subject to similar assaults on their stability. This is clearly true for those schools of Christianity that stress the unity of faith and reason. While such a faith will have a more forthright struggle with the assault of modern scientific materialism, more dogmatic religious groups, for example fideist Christians or traditional Muslims, are, in the medium and long term, even more vulnerable. While the former are constantly engaged with the science of the day, the latter can only assert that every apparently true conclusion that is inimical to a fideist position is actually false, and that the dogmatic position is always and everywhere true. This creates tensions within those ordinary believers who are aware of the intellectual developments "outside", and those tensions contribute to undermining religious confidence. Such undermining by the gradual receding of Berger's "social support" is not easily distinguishable from the undermining of confidence in particular scientific theories as discussed by both Kuhn and Polanyi.

If this view is acceptable, then the triptych of knowledge, belief and faith will tend to reduce to a diptych of knowledge and faith, where "faith" encompasses those processes and structures whereby we come to believe in things outside the range of our resources to verify.

There is another dimension of knowing, which is by far the most important. It belongs to our direct experience, it is the ground of all our other knowing and believing, yet its elements cannot be proved, although they are only very rarely called into question, and then only in very abstruse and specialised milieux. This dimension encompasses such things as the reality of the external physical universe, the actuality of the past, the independent existence of other minds and the meaningfulness of language. Such fundamental understandings may also be classified in the realm of faith; a faith so subtle and all-encompassing that it is disconcerting to regard is as such: elemental, unquestioned, and the ground on which all of our understanding is constructed.

With this realisation, we can better appreciate St Augustine's maxim nisi credideritis nisi intelliigitis; if you will not have believed, you will not understand. All of our understanding is constructed in a dialectical play between the panoply of our beliefs, many too deeply embedded to be acknowledged, let alone questioned, and the enquiries we constantly conduct into the nature and behaviour of the world around us.

Socrates' Daemon

2011-11-13T23:51:00.001+10:00

If you start to read Xenephon's The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates on your Kindle, or Kindle reader on PC or Mac, you will encounter in Book 1, Chapter 1, the following passage:

What, in my opinion, gave his accusers a specious pretext for alleging against him that he introduced new deities was this–that he had frequently declared in public he had received counsel from a divine voice, which he called his Daemon. But this was no proof at all in the matter. All that Socrates advanced about his daemon was no more than what is daily advanced by those who believe in and practice divination; and if Socrates, because he said he received intelligence from his genius, must be accused of introducing new divinities, so also must they; for is it not certain that those who believe in divination, and practice that belief, do observe the flight of birds, consult the entrails of victims, and remark even unexpected words and accidental occurrences? But they do not, therefore, believe that either the birds whose flight they observe or the persons they meet accidentally know either their good or ill fortune–neither did Socrates–they only believe that the gods make use of these things to presage the future; and such, too, was the belief of Socrates. The vulgar, indeed, imagine it to be the very birds and things which present themselves to them that excite them to what is good for them, or make them avoid what may hurt them; but, as for Socrates, he freely owned that a daemon was his monitor; and he frequently told his friends beforehand what they should do, or not do, according to the instructions he had received from his daemon; and they who believed him, and followed his advice, always found advantage by it; as, on the contrary, they who neglected his admonitions, never failed to repent their incredulity. Now, it cannot be denied but that he ought to have taken care not to pass with his friends either for a liar or a visionary; and yet how could he avoid incurring that censure if the events had not justified the truth of the things he pretended were revealed to him? It is, therefore, manifest that he would not have spoken of things to come if he had not believed he said true; but how could he believe he said true, unless he believed that the gods, who alone ought to be trusted for the knowledge of things to come, gave him notice of them? And, if he believed they did so, how can it be said that he acknowledged no gods?

This passage jolted me. Here, suddenly, at the fountainhead of Western sceptical rationalism, was an utterly unexpected entity. To Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, we must add a spiritual adviser, on the evidence of Socrates himself. In Plato's account, the daemon acts only to inhibit Socrates. For example, when Socrates attempts to prepare for his trail, he finds that he is prevented by his daemon. In Xenephon's account, as we see above, the daemon is not so restricted.

It brought to mind a passage from Acts that I quoted in my previous post.

As we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by soothsaying. She followed Paul and us, crying, "These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation." And this she did for many days. But Paul was annoyed, and turned and said to the spirit, "I charge you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." And it came out that very hour. But when her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the market place before the rulers... [Acts 16; 16-19]

Divination, except for the gift of prophecy, is forbidden in Judaism and by extension, in Christianity. It is the forbidden fruit of commerce with an invisible world of spirits; a world populated by some very unsavoury characters indeed. A world with which human beings have always had commerce; a world well known to the Greeks, as to the Romans, as to Islam. A world which has seemingly been lost to the West.

Socrates' daemon creates an obvious problem for Christian (and Jewish) admirers of Socrates. In 1872 the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Henry Edward Manning, presented a paper to The Royal Institution. It's title was The Daemon of Socrates. Manning surveys the references to the daemon in Plato and Xenephon, and a number of attempts by Christian authors to rehabilitate the daemon, before concluding that the "daemon" was nothing more than the universal voice of conscience. I'm not convinced. At any rate, the daemon has quietly disappeared from discussions of Socrates.

I think that the main reason for that is not that the near-universal admiration for Socrates remains problematical for Christians and Jews, but that the very notion of a spirit world has become problematical for generations of academic theologians and the priests and ministers they have trained. In essence, the academy has succumbed to an intellectual mono-culture of materialism. For those who inhabit this milieu, intellectual respectability trumps religious orthodoxy. The inherent incompatibility of such a position for Christians and Jews is a small price to pay for acceptance at the Staff Club and a career-enhancing flow of publications in various journals of "religion." This contradiction should surprise no-one: a huge percentage of Humanities-educated Westerners are wedded to the completely unsupportable belief that human beings are solely material entities; and this belief has the unassailable character of fervent religious conviction.

When you deny the spiritual reality most immediately present to your understanding–yourself–is it any wonder that the Second Person of the Trinity soon disappears in a puff of rationalisation, and we are left with a purely material Jesus of Nazareth; a purely material, non-resurrected, completely dead, Jesus of Nazareth. But he was a very great teacher, and his "spirit," if I may use an outdated metaphor, lives on. Now about that Trinity. It's like a three-legged table without the second leg, isn't it? It doesn't stand up. But we do have a universe; self-creating, self-elaborating, self-sustaining. Quite awe-inspiring, really. So many Christians become, by various paths, some open, some carefully obfuscated, pantheists.

Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward... All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

'Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. 'Are you afraid?'
'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet— and yet— O, Mole, I am afraid!'

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.
The Wind in the Willows, Chapter 7, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

No, not like that. Pantheists without Pan. But it's a short enough path to Rat and Mole's backwater. The desire to worship will find expression somehow, somewhere.

Miracle or Magic? A homework exercise

2011-11-12T17:03:00.001+10:00

What's the difference between miracle and magic? Let's first define them. The Macquarie Dictionary defines miracle as an effect in the physical world which surpasses all known human or natural powers and is therefore ascribed to supernatural agency. Magic is defined as the art of producing effects claimed to be beyond the natural human power and arrived at by means of supernatural agencies or through command of occult forces in nature. Occult is variously defined as 1. beyond the bounds of ordinary knowledge; mysterious. 2. not disclosed; secret; communicated only to the initiated. 3. (in early science) a. not apparent on mere inspection but discoverable by experimentation. b. of a nature not understood, as physical qualities. c. dealing with such qualities; experimental: occult science. 4. of the nature of, or relating to, certain reputed sciences, as magic, astrology, etc., involving the alleged knowledge or employment of secret or mysterious agencies.

Common usage for "magic" refers to conjuring or legerdemain; illusions which are known to be such by all but the youngest observers. The means may baffle us entirely, but we will never admit that we are witnessing magic in the earlier, and I would say true, sense. This is to be expected when belief in the supernatural is at a such a low ebb. Wiccans would be an exception to this rule. Even very orthodox Christians and Jews, on the other hand, would balk at hurdle of magic. The supernatural is all very fine, as long as it is not unpredictable or hostile. While "the supernatural" finds its way into the definition of magic, it is in the guise of the occult that it is most commonly understood.

Originally, "occult" practices were what we would call "science." Occult meant that some of nature's characteristics were hidden, but susceptible to discovery. These attempts at discovery were the beginnings of experimental science, even as alchemy was the beginning of modern chemistry. At a time when the hidden forces of nature were considered to reflect the action of intelligent agents, occultists sought means of controlling these agents. We still expect this

of our scientists; only the philosophical assumptions have changed. Intelligent agents could well respond, as better known intelligent agents do, to language. Find the right language, and communication with the hidden forces would be yours. Find the right incantations, and you would control them. And you thought research into infectious diseases was dangerous. Elements of this approach remain in Christian liturgy, modulo the blasphemous notion of control. The incantations are still essential, but as evidence of obedience to the commands of God, and as invocations of the covenant freely entered into by a God who is ever faithful to His promises.

The notion that nature of itself will respond to the appropriate commands was subsumed in the progress of modern Western scientific enquiry. For Western science, nature was commanded by the characteristics of its own deep structure. Command still followed knowledge — the de-occultation of this structure — but command must accord with the discovered reality. Nature was assumed to be rational to its deepest level, and in this to accord with the nature of the Judeo-Christian God. Nature is not capricious, because God is not capricious, pace Muslim belief.

If the occult is no longer seen as a "natural" phenomenon, there remains its supernatural aspect. Occult instances can be interpreted in terms of spiritual agents acting parallel to nature. In this case, the incantations are directed to the spiritual agent. An obvious example is a black mass. Why not use the Mass itself as an example? With this question we come to the fulcrum on which magic and miracle are balanced. The dividing line is not entirely clear-cut, but we would be safe in assuming that an incident such as that portrayed in Rosemary's Baby, where a rival is blinded by black magic, would not be classified as a miracle. On the other hand, Jesus' "works,"as He referred to them, have always been classified as miracles. In these cases, it is the nature of the agency that determines the classification. Nonetheless, assuming that an event such as the black magic of the film could actually occur, the circumstances are similar in representing the intervention of an intelligent being who exists — in the case of Jesus' divine nature — as a spirit independent of the natural universe.

To complicate the issue, there is an example to which C. S. Lewis refers in Miracles, A Preliminary Study. Here is the text of Tacitus' report of the matter, from The Histories, Book IV, Events in Rome and the East.

During the months which Vespasian spent at Alexandria waiting for the regular season of the summer winds to ensure a safe voyage, there occurred many miraculous events manifesting the goodwill of Heaven and the special favour of Providence towards him. At Alexandria a poor workman who was well known to have a disease of the eye, acting on the advice of Serapis,whom this superstitious people worship as their chief god, fell at Vespasian's feet demanding with sobs a cure for his blindness, and imploring that the emperor would deign to moisten his eyes and eyeballs with the spittle from his mouth. Another man with a maimed hand, also inspired by Serapis, besought Vespasian to imprint his footmark on it. At first Vespasian laughed at them and refused. But they insisted. Half fearing to be thought a fool, half stirred to hopes by their petition and by the flattery of his courtiers, he eventually told the doctors to form an opinion whether such cases of blindness and deformity could be remedied by human aid.
The doctors talked round the question, saying that in the one case the power of sight was not extinct and would return, if certain impediments were removed; in the other case the limbs were distorted and could be set right again by the application of an effective remedy: this might be the will of Heaven and the emperor had perhaps been chosen as the divine instrument. They added that he would gain all the credit, if the cure were successful, while, if it failed, the ridicule would fall on the unfortunate patients. This convinced Vespasian that there were no limits to his destiny: nothing now seemed incredible. To the great excitement of the bystanders, he stepped forward with a smile on his face and did as the men desired him.
Immediately the hand recovered its functions and daylight shone once more in the blind man's eyes. Those who were present still attest both miracles to-day, when there is nothing to gain by lying.

The report was written in about AD 108, long after the Flavian dynasty of Vespasian and his sons Titus and Domitian had passed into history. According to C. S. Lewis, the same incident is also reported by Suetonius and Dion Cassius. It is worth noting that, despite the status of Roman Emperors as gods, no other such reports are discussed in Lewis' book. Tacitus' discussion continues as follows.

This occurrence deepened Vespasian's desire to visit the holy-place and consult Serapis about the fortunes of the empire. He gave orders that no one else was to be allowed in the temple, and then went in. While absorbed in his devotions, he suddenly saw behind him an Egyptian noble, named Basilides, whom he knew to be lying ill several days' journey from Alexandria. He inquired of the priests whether Basilides had entered the temple that day. He inquired of every one he met whether he had been seen in the city. Eventually he sent some horsemen, who discovered that at the time Basilides was eighty miles away. Vespasian therefore took what he had seen for a divine apparition, and guessed the meaning of the oracle from the name 'Basilides'. [I.e. king's son.]

Reading Tacitus, one glimpses the Weltanschauung of a bygone era. The structure of beliefs is held and expressed with the same superior confidence in which we today indulge when discussing Tacitus. Was this crowd of spiritual beings impinging on human affairs the busy invention of overactive imaginations? The modern view is an immediate and emphatic "yes". Perhaps, though, some other forces were at work.

As we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by soothsaying. She followed Paul and us, crying, "These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation." And this she did for many days. But Paul was annoyed, and turned and said to the spirit, "I charge you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." And it came out that very hour. But when her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the market place before the rulers... [Acts 16; 16-19]

Liberation from spiritual bondage is a theme that runs through the Gospels, and this story from Acts illustrates a process of what might be called spiritual displacement. There are however, other ways to displace magic from human affairs. One may simply abolish it by a change in the perspectives by which one accredits knowledge. Michael Polanyi, a passionate advocate of scientific epistemology, illustrates this.

Astrology has been sustained for 3000 years by empirical evidence confirming the predictions of horoscopes. This represents the longest chain of historically known empirical generalisations. For many prehistoric centuries the theories embodied in magic and witchcraft appeared to be strikingly confirmed by events in the eyes of those who believed in magic and witchcraft. Lecky rightly points out that the destruction of belief in witchcraft during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was achieved in the face of an overwhelming, and still rapidly growing, body of evidence for its reality. Those who denied that witches existed did not attempt to explain this evidence at all, but successfully urged that it be disregarded. Glanvill, who was one of the founders of the Royal Society, not unreasonably denounced this method as unscientific, on the ground of the professed empiricism of contemporary science.
[M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, University of Chicago Press, 1958, 1962, p 168]

Where has this ramble led me? To this: magic and miracle are the darkness and the light of the spiritual influences in the physical world. There are those who believe that the philosophy of scientific materialism is the new Philosopher's Stone, which has turned the gold of supernatural Christian reality into the dross of a spiritually barren, utterly material reality. The good news — a tiny fragment of the Good News — is that this view is false, and has been collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions for most of the last century. It, like the mental universe of Tacitus, will pass away. Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis the materialist, "...but my words will not pass away."

I will finish with something from a woman, who, in spite of her Medusa-headed political correctness; in spite of her fashionable furies; in spite of her elaborate exhibitionism, knows more about the Christian reality than many in the Church today.

I became a Catholic priest in 1999, largely, I think, because I'm the type of woman that doesn't like to get told what to do by men, and I wanted to demonstrate that we don't have to take no for an answer. There are an awful lot of women out there would like to be priests, and the Pope says they can't be, but there are a number of bishops who will ordain women regardless. And, given that it's a magic ritual, once a bishop ordains you, you are a priest, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. (And I do believe in magic, obviously.)

[Sinead O'Connor http://www.sinead-oconnor.com/home/index.php/articles/178-lions-daughter]

Close Encounters

2011-11-12T16:58:00.001+10:00

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released in 1977, and was a blockbuster success for Steven Spielberg. Here's a thumbnail sketch of the plot.

A team of investigators find, intact in the Gobi Desert, a flight of Navy planes which disappeared in the 1940's, and interview a witness to the re-appearance of the planes. This team will re-surface throughout the film, making similar startling discoveries, and conducting similar interviews. They provide an underpinning of respectable reality for the events we are about to witness.

Three year old Barry Guiler is woken when his electrical and electronic toys turn themselves on in the middle of the night. He wanders outside, and his mother Jillian has to go out to find him. Not far away, Roy Neary, a linesman investigating power outages, has a similarly electrical close encounter when his car stalls at a railway crossing.

The effect on Roy Neary's life of his first encounter is profound. He becomes obsessed with the image of a mountain, and this obsession intrudes into his everyday life in ways he cannot control. While eating dinner with his family, he begins to play with his mashed potato; at first in the desultory way of children with no interest in their food, then with a growing fascination, as he begins to shape the mash into the form of the image that haunts him. As his attention disappears into the task of re-creating this shape, his family exchange anxious glances around the table. His wife packs up the kids and leaves, but Roy hardly notices. He is soon in the yard of his suburban home—with a hose, a shovel, chicken wire and piles of dirt—creating a larger model of his mountain. It is, of course, the mountain where the space-ship will land, but Roy does not even know that such a mountain exists, until he sees a news item about a chemical spill. There on the TV screen is his mountain. He sets out on his pilgrimage.

In his semi-rural home, young Barry, who seems also to have been deeply affected by his earlier encounter, is drawn out of his home by another appearance of strange lights in the night. This time he disappears. Gillian begins a pilgrimage of her own. The dramatic climax of the movie unites Roy, Gillian, Barry, the investigators, the missing pilots and the musical aliens, before Roy goes off with the space-ship.

This movie was a dramaturgical tour-de-force, carrying audiences into the little world it created over a couple of hours. Disbelief was enthusiastically suspended. Spielberg was able to build on the widespread interest in conspiracy theories about space visitors. He was able to employ the full force of the developing industrial light and magic that has become more and more central to movie-making ever since. Those are not enough, on their own, to grip an audience. The story must create and maintain plausibility. You may question whether any story about an alien space-ship making contact with earthlings can be called plausible. Nonetheless, without plausibility, any drama will collapse. Exactly how any fictional work creates this environment has been a discussed for millennia, but a critical common component for narrative works is that they ring true motivationally and psychologically. It is in this domain that Close Encounters retains its appeal.

The release of an extended version of the movie with extra scenes within the alien ship indicated where the appeal lay for many viewers. However, the virtue and value of the film lies not in the special effects but in the study of Roy's obsession. We see this obsession from the inside. We are with Roy when he has his first encounter; we understand the power of the experience. As his behaviour becomes more erratic, its necessity carries us along with it. There is no choice, we understand, and while we also understand the uncomprehending response of those who have not seen, we know that they are wrong, for we also are initiates, having shared the moment with Roy.

This is a complete inversion of our normal understanding of behaviour. Consider the question from the point of view of Roy's family and friends. Roy comes home claiming to have seen, not some strange light in the sky, but a whole procession of UFOs running along at road level, pursued by police cars; and that just for starters. That at least is a concrete incident. But as well as these strange (and unsubstantiated) tales, Roy has started to behave in a manner that is, frankly, schizoid. What would you think?

In the long run, whether Roy is vindicated or convicted depends upon the underlying reality. If the events Roy relates did actually happen, then he has encountered the Other, limitlessly powerful, glorious and awe-inspiring, and such an encounter will, of course, alter forever the human lives it touches. If these events did not actually occur, then Roy has gone insane, for reasons which may never be understood, and he must be treated as a person of whom rational behaviour can no longer be expected. The question is moot in this case: we know this story is made up, and we do not have to closely examine our responses while we slip into the world of the movie. There are cases where these comfortable conditions do not apply.

O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived; thou art stronger than I, and thou hast prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all the day; every one mocks me. For whenever I speak, I cry out, I shout, "Violence and destruction!" For the word of the LORD has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, "I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name," there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.

It's Jeremiah, Chapter 20, 7-9, and it's one of a number of similar passages recorded for the prophet by his scribe, Baruch. What are we to make of Jeremiah? He, too, has had an encounter with the Other, limitlessly powerful, glorious and awe-inspiring. No flying hardware, no flashing lights, as far as we know. Instead, just the word of the LORD. Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah...to whom the word of the LORD came in the days of Josiah...in the thirteenth year of his reign. It came also in the days of Jehoiakim...until the eleventh year of Zedekiah... (2-3). Is this a fictional story; or is Jeremiah suffering from schizophrenia; or is this a account of events that actually occurred?

If the story is a fiction, it was constructed after the fact, and the "prophecies" of Jeremiah are, not to put too fine a point on it, lies. That doesn't reflect well on the writer; but it does avoid the problem of the fulfilment of Jeremiah's prophecies. The "problem" is this: for anyone who adopts an a priori position that all miracle stories are legendary—and intimations of future events surely qualify as miraculous—another explanation must be found.

There is another way around this difficulty that does not require such a blanket rejection of the validity of the book. Enlightened moderns can develop a more medically sound analysis that allows honesty and integrity to the prophet, while still denying any supernatural content. The "prophet" is in the grip of a psychosis, and goes around Jerusalem articulating his delusions. In the course of this, he stumbles upon insight into the fate of Judah and Israel, much as some of the many pundits who make a career of predicting political and economic futures might, with a little insight and a lot of luck, stumble on accurate forecasts of events over the course of the next year or two. Think of the row of "prophets" peddling their various visions along the street in "Life of Brian," and you will get my drift. From the vantage point of 21st century psychology and psychiatry, our contemporaries can diagnose Jeremiah's condition at a remove of twenty-seven centuries on the basis of two books that have come down to us. While such a diagnosis is of no relevance to Jeremiah, it is a spiritual anaesthetic for those who offer it.

Alternatively, one can continue to read Jeremiah as he has been read for the past twenty-seven centuries: as a true account of the life and times of one of the prophets, telling a vital part of the story of God's self-revelation to fallen humanity through his chosen people.

Whichever reading you choose will colour, and be coloured by, your understanding of God, of Christ, and of the Church through the millennia.

Blame Hume: About a Sermon

2011-11-12T16:53:00.001+10:00

"As Charles Sanders Peirce notes (Peirce 1958: 293), the Humean in-principle argument has left an indelible impression on modern biblical scholarship. Humean considerations are expressly invoked in the work of the great German critic David Friedrich Strauss (1879: 199–200), transformed into one of the “presuppositions of critical history” in the work of the philosopher F. H. Bradley (1874/1935), rechristened as the “principle of analogy” in the writings of the theologian Ernst Troeltsch (1913), and endorsed, explicitly or implicitly, in many contemporary studies of the historical Jesus (Dawes 2001: 97–106) and the New Testament (Ehrman 2003: 228–30). Commitment to something like Hume's position lies on one side of a deep conceptual fault line that runs through the discipline of biblical studies."

The passage above comes from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy article on Miracles, in the section 'The impact of Hume's “Of Miracles”.' It sums up nicely the currently dominant dogma of biblical studies.

As the above passage points out, biblical criticism over the past 150 or more years has been predicated on a particular philosophical viewpoint. That viewpoint is very closely allied to what has come to be known as scientific materialism. In this view, all of nature, and all of existence, is a law unto itself. Everything in the universe behaves in a consistent way, such that its regularities can be abstracted as general laws which it is impossible, by definition, to violate. This philosophy has developed its own creation story: for living things, evolution from a single ancestor; for the universe itself, self-creation according to the (apparently pre-existing) laws of quantum physics.

No notion of "spirit" is required in this scenario. God, therefore, is either non-existent or completely detached and irrelevant, like Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. For atheists, this is a congenial view, despite its plethora of intractable problems, not least the "problem" of conscious self-awareness. But, as Newman said, a thousand difficulties do not make a doubt.

However, for a believer in that Trinity of creative spiritual intelligences Christians call God, this position is untenable. It will not do to adopt an Aristotelian model, because there is no interaction between God and His creation, and certainly no interaction with us. Any interaction with human beings by God the Father, God the Son, or God the Holy Spirit is, by the skeptical definition, a miracle. It occurs outside the closed circle of nature and natural law. And that is not to mention the divine human being, Jesus of Nazareth. Any communication between God and us breaches this quarantine, as does any influence of God upon us. Prayer is reduced to one-way mediation, and any change we notice within ourselves is entirely our own doing.

Hume's view can be applied directly to both Testaments, but is often applied in a way which disguises its flagrancy. Take the first miracle of the loaves & fishes. Like all of the miracles, this event is a vital part of the gradual revealing of Jesus' identity. It establishes Him as a greater prophet than Elisha, and thus its meaning depends on the knowledge that Elisha fed the hundred men with twenty barley loaves, "and had some left over."

The first step is to de-legitimise the books of Kings. Unlike the Gospels and other works of the New Testament, the books of Samuel and Kings, although based on earlier documents mentioned in Chronicles, are histories written many generations after the events depicted; possibly by Ezra himself. Now, although the underlying rationale is that of Hume, the stories of Elijah and Elisha can be treated as "legendary"; as stories invented about revered prophets, long after their deaths.

Something glossed over here is that, because these books purport to be a true history of Judah and Israel, the deliberate inclusion of material known to be, or even suspected of being, legendary, is not a mere example of poetic licence, but a lie. Because of his remoteness from the events, the writer of Kings can be excused on the grounds that, steeped in ancient ignorance, he knew no better. The modern Christian or Jew, however, can use no such excuse.

With this understanding established, we proceed to the Gospels. If Elisha did not perform his miracle, what is the point of Jesus' reproducing it, raised by orders of magnitude? The only point is that Jesus' contemporaries believed that the miracle had occurred. So, did Jesus perform this miracle for the benefit of these deluded contemporaries? A more Humean approach is to say that Jesus is innocent of such claims. After His death, the nascent Church, anxious to demonstrate that Jesus was greater than all of the prophets, created this legend. Legend begets legend.

But where does that leave the Gospel authors? The New Testament was written by contemporaries of Jesus. They cannot claim to have pored over records already centuries old as they compiled their documents. They would have been able to confirm the truth or otherwise of this story with the purported witnesses. If it is not true, the Gospels are written by liars, and are full of lies. Everything we think we know about Jesus is either utterly unreliable or a downright lie.

Another "critical" approach I have heard to this story goes as follows. There was no miraculous multiplying of the loaves and fishes. The miracle was that by His open-heartedness in offering the little that He and the disciples had for the benefit of everyone, the multitude within the multitude who had brought more than enough food for themselves were shamed into sharing it. The earnest silliness of this interpretation shows the extent to which one's critical reason can be suppressed in order to protect one's faith in the completeness and independence of the physical creation.

Thinking with a lisp

2008-09-30T20:13:00.002+10:00

I talk to myself. Or, I talk to others when alone. At times, the dialogue, or at least my part in it, is audible, and at others quite an interior event. The embarrassment of being caught in this most inappropriate behaviour will generally suppress it, but a period of isolation can bring it to the surface again.

If I was staying to look after him, I could hear my father, as he lay awake in the morning or after a nap, angrily engaging with the demons irrupting to consciousness from long halls of painful memories. He was old, he was deaf, and was no doubt unaware of just how his interior struggles infiltrated the quiet house. In any case, he would probably not have been concerned.

I'm not so old as to be unconcerned. Except in extremis, I generally remember to keep the volume down, but the monologues go on. There may be a vast assembly of dramatis personae, but none of them get to say much. Others with a finely tuned awareness of the motors of human behaviour may well be able to design and rehearse very practical conversations in the same arena; not me, for worse or better.

Many of these are almost entirely silent. I say almost. Sometimes I realise that the interior voice is lisping. I notice because of the fullness and tension I feel in the top of the throat and up under the jaw to the tongue. I cannot get my tongue, in silence, around the words properly: I am thinking with a lisp.

Not simply thinking, of course. Along with the imagined words must be the slightest of muscular rehearsals; far too small to be audible, but enough to suffer from some temporary dislocation which feeds back to my inner ear as a lisp. So idea, and the inchoate will to express, precedes language, which serves it, better or worse.

Anxiety burnout

2008-09-24T20:29:00.004+10:00

Looking at the posting dates, I see that it has been nearly 6 months since the last. I descended into a pit of work-related anxiety, and now — well, it's not that I have overcome the anxiety; more that I am getting sick of it, and need to do something else.

I've been out of my depth at work since I started, but in volunteering to write a particular document, I bit the bullet of learning enough about the things we do to be able to explain it to other who were starting from the same position as me. And a serious case of lead poisoning I developed.

At about the time of my last post — the last post before this resurrection, that is — my workplace shifted from the city to West End. The move itself should not have been a problem. I love West End, and I enjoy being able to walk through it at lunch time, heading for a cheap feed: a couple of tandoori chicken wings and a vege samosa at the Indian Kitchen; a piece of grilled mullet with salt and pepper from George's; a potato and chicken filo triangle with a couple of felafel from KingAhiram's; a small selection of sushi; a quarter of roasted chicken and a banana from Coles. And on the way the characters of West End, doomed like the End itself, to gradual extinction by the encroaching Off-Central Business District.

I work above the "new" Melbourne Hotel (The Best End of West End). It's another depressing clone of an up-market pub/club/eatery, but, being on the site of the "old" Melbourne, at risk of attracting some of the "old" clientele. So for months I have run the gauntlet the black-clad goons on the footpath outside the pub. Not that the old clientele would have stayed. The price of a drink of the house goon was prohibitive; so prohibitive that it was a threat to the new clientele, so the management lowered the price after a week or two, explaining that they were obliged to offer a lower quality tipple, because of complaints about the price. Sniff.

The security has thinned out somewhat. On the way home tonight, as I passed the entrance to The Oasis (home of the pokies) a bloke in a yellow work jacket was coming out, and the usual guard was absent. Can pretensions be so fragile?

Albert Speer seems to be the fashionista of choice for the eatery clone studios — black-shirts are everywhere. I suppose it lends something of the distinction of the SS to these modest establishments. A touch of silver wouldn't go astray, but most seem to make do with basic black, or, as for the Melbourne serving staff, a flash of white.

For now, Browning Street is the boundary of the intrusion, with Boundary still the centre of the End. Über tried to drive up-market, holding out for a long time with a strict dress code and the muscle to back it up, but eventually eased off and let the people back in. Over the road the Pavilion, operating under the Boundary Hotel's licence, had already tried for glitz, but is now looking a bit tatty. They have some good music though, but better is generally playing, early on Friday night, in the public bar of the Boundary itself. There's more music up the road, but Satchmo's has been taken over, and the open and inviting front, through which the players tucked in the back left corner could be seen and heard from the footpath, is now a "music cafe", and all closed in.

There's much to be said about West End, but not now. In honour of Murri Corner and the West End goanna, here's a little story to end. A colleague of Jen's lived near the PA, and would walk past the Buranda shopping centre on the way home. He would regularly be accosted by one or other of the local urban blackfellas on the cadge. They always copped an abrupt refusal on the way past. One evening, one says, "Gotadollar. Go to Melbourne." He paused. "You can't get to Melbourne for a dollar!" "Melbourne Hotel." I don't know whether he got his dollar.

Cathedral, after midnight

2008-04-07T17:01:00.023+10:00

Let's go back a decade, more or less. Find, in memory, some Friday night. After midnight, the Victory gradually quietens down. The groups of drunken kids wandering from pub to club along Charlotte Street, begin thin out. Wander up the ramp from the footpath into the grounds of St Stephen's, past the lovely old two-storey house, past Bishop Quinn's statue, to stand at the curved glass wall of the sacrament chapel. The water flowing along the inside of the wall from the baptismal fount might be matched by a semi-circle of water outside. Or, depending on how late in these years you choose to visit, there might be a dry bed of pebbles, as there is today.

You might see me approach along the same path, then sit cross-legged in front of the glass. Join me, and you will see, reflecting the light from the street and the city beyond, the stainless steel box of the tabernacle, gaunt and pigeon-toed, inside the chapel. A good place to pray. To the right, in the corner of the grounds, is the grotto, where today there is a stairway down to the street. In the grotto, a statue of the Virgin Mary stands before a kneeling Bernadette Soubirous. When your prayers at the tabernacle are finished, you might go with me to the grotto to pray.

Other worshippers have preceded you. The flamboyantly devout may have stretched a condom over the head of one or the other, and set it alight. Others more reserved in their devotion, have simply left some mark or other of their attendance. If you were to return in the early light, you might see the morning patrol of the grounds, gathering up the discarded needles and syringes. The ministrations that left them must have been conducted in careful seclusion; you are unlikely to have seen any of them.

What you will see, between the tabernacle and the grotto, is the blossoming of love, teased out by a night of relentless music and alcohol. Ah, to be young. Against the stone wall of the cathedral, a young man, the waistband of his jeans loose across his buttocks, might be pressing his suit between the legs of a young woman leaning against the stones. Or perhaps a beau, tired at the end of the night, lies naked on the grass in front of the grotto, while the object of his affection, also naked, sits astride him, twisting around to face him, her hand reaching back to his. In the freedom of the children of God, they cast aside all inhibition.

Or again, on a winter night, you might observe me in the dim light walk over to face the tabernacle, to have my attention drawn down and to the left by a slight movement. There is the face of a young woman. She lies on the now dry bed of pebbles, and on her face, upside down to me, plays a smile, hesitant yet friendly, apologetic yet hopeful of understanding and friendship. She is naked from hip to thigh, but her mons is obscured by the head of a man, busy at cunnilingus. In your shock, you might, with me, turn away, and move to the grotto. Soon you look back to find the coast is clear; as I do, and return to the tabernacle. But from there you see her again, kneeling, attending her lover as he leans against the stone wall. She notices you, places her hand on his shirt, and looks up at him. They move around the corner and out of sight.

Then I pray, but what you will not detect is that her face, that halting smile, remains with me, as I pray, as I drive home, and at intervals thereafter. In my imagination, I forget my intention, my situation, and I kneel beside her. I take her hand, lean forward and kiss her, and the three of us work together to a divided goal, and when she comes, she bestows, in the clasp of her hand and the closing of her eyes, the blessing and curse of that momentary grace upon me. And from the dogged pursuit of this distorting grace in the private yet transparent world of fantasy, I seek again, of my observers, deliverance.

Winter...

2008-04-01T22:12:00.005+10:00

Winter is coming. The sky this morning is a perfectly clear blue. A light breeze carries the chill, and a high pressure system sits over most of the continent. Across from the station where I wait, fuming slowly at the mess that's been made of the timetables, one of the yellow-orange crane booms over the tennis centre building site is swinging around against the blue. Soon I'll have to start wearing a jumper.

A Beenleigh train has just pulled up behind me, cutting off the sunlight except for the back of my head. It's gone now, but the breeze has gusted, so I momentarily feel colder in the sunlight. The secret of Brisbane winters, when the drying westerlies blow cold, sweeping all cloud from the sky, is to stand in the morning sun in the lee of the wind, and bask in the warmth. But not today. This day is warming as the sun rises.

A speaker announces that the 7:12 service to the city is running approximately ten minutes late. Previous train 6:50. Next train 7:25. Not bad. I see a flash of red underwing and look for lorrikeets, but in a moment I realise that these are galahs. The birds are on the move. An unusual drone has me looking up from under my hat. Three Cessnas are flying in formation, quite high, towards Archerfield. I'll wait for the 7:25. Winter's coming.

Sunday School

2008-03-21T13:03:00.005+10:00

It was, mostly, in the hall of the Presbyterian church at the end of our block, diagonally across from the headmaster's house on the corner of the primary school. There, while the parents, notably excepting ours, or, I should say, excepting our mother, worshipped, the children were instructed in the basic tenets of the faith and in the virtues, until the day they could join the adult congregation, to be exposed to the more risqué passages of the Bible and dark talk of temptations and sin which would run off the steep flanks of their incomprehension, along the erratic, parabolic gradient from innocence to experience that ran through the listeners, to collect on the eroded terrain of others' experience in pools of remorse and baptismal grace. I say our mother, because it was as though our father spoke a foreign language with no correlates to "church" or "religion" and could not comprehend this Sunday morning activity, and so ignored it. At our mother's insistence we went, and grumbled at going. There was, despite this, much that I enjoyed about it. There was much that, to my later surprise, I remembered.

Here, at the hands of a small group of volunteers such as maintain so much of the social life of communities, we learned the Creed, worked our way through the graded teaching materials provided by some sedulous teaching apostolate, learned and sang our hymns. The Apostles' Creed was problematical. We were enjoined to recite, I believe in the Holy Ghost, but my conception of ghosts was formed by the comic strip Casper, and not, to my great good fortune, Industrial Light and Magic; the holy Catholic Church, but I knew from my mother what an unspeakably awful thing the Catholic Church was, and my distress and suspicion were only slightly mollified by being assured that catholic here referred to universal, whatever that meant.

The hymns we learned to sing included standards like Onward Christian Soldiers, which I thought I comprehended, and Rock of Ages, which I did not. Much metaphor escaped me at that age —and subsequently— and the image of crouching in a crevice in a rock left me nonplussed. Why would you want to do such a thing? I cannot remember learning Amazing Grace there, although it beggars belief that we would not have sung it.

Then there were the hymns for children. Jesus wants me for a sunbeam I remember, and remember finding it childish, even then, though somehow that did not inhibit my singing. Jesus loves me, though, was always a pleasure without let or snag; a smooth, simple, direct, tuneful elevator of the spirit. I sang it with a delight very like to joy.

Jesus loves me,
This I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to Him belong,
They are weak,
But He is strong.

Yes, Jesus loves me;
Yes, Jesus loves me;
Yes, Jesus loves me,
The Bible tells me so.

There is a story widely told with slight variations that I wish to believe is true. Karl Barth visited the US in 1962, towards the end of his life. Asked to summarise his most important theological insight, Barth replied, Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. All unbeknownst to me, the logic of the Faith, parcelled into these hymns, and wrapped in the hooks of their melody and rhyme like so many velcro burrs, was being scattered in my memory.

In a time soon enough, and in another place, a school-friend and I took to visiting churches in my small orbit in order to argue the toss with bemused suburban pastors. It was a very daring and almost adult thing to do. During Mum's long illness, I experienced a revival of, if not faith, at least a belief in God, before her death threw me into confusion. In all the emotional turmoil that followed, it never occurred to me to seek solace in church. The closest church was a Salvation Army meeting hall, and I had never settled in there.

Three decades later, through agnosticism, atheism, and agnosticism again, I came back to belief. On a suggestion of Dad's, I went to find out about Catholicism. It should have been a long way from the Sunday School, but I found that the things I had learned there had embedded a surprisingly complete theological perspective in me; one which informed all of my study of Catholicism—to my detriment, some would say. I haven't found it so, then or now. I'm grateful to all of those, now anonymous, labourers in the vineyard.

The Kiwi's pilgrimage

2008-03-15T03:07:00.005+10:00

I've been thinking about the Kiwi I met on the way to Medjugorje, and mentioned in a previous posting. He's had three incarnations in that post. In the first version, I mentioned meeting him on the ferry, and he did not appear again. I thought I was finished with the item, but I had an uneasy notion that it needed tidying up. The Kiwi was a loose end that I had to tuck away. So I went back, and took up the story of my unhappy co-tenancy with him at the boarding-house.

He wasn't finished with me yet. The whole piece had an unfinished feel to it (and, in a compositional sense, it still does.) I made some small changes to the ending, and thought, "That will do." This morning, on the train, he started to nag me again. Since the trip, my opinion of him had been dismissively low. But this morning, as I took out my notebook to write something completely unrelated, I noticed for the first time the places in which I had encountered him, and it dawned on me that he, too, had been on a pilgrimage.

To hold this faith, which after all was the point of my visits to Medjugorje and Jerusalem in the first place, is to acknowledge the active presence of God in the world. It is, among other things, to refute coincidence; to realise that one's life is a narrative, as, consequently, are all of the lives with which one's own story intersects, in whose narratives one writes some lines, while each, in turn, scribbles in your scrapbook.

I paid him little heed but that of embarrassment and avoidance, and even a few weeks ago, wrote dismissively of him. Yet he has returned to deliver his lesson. A touch more humility, a touch more charity, if you please. More wonder at the glories of your companions on the way. Here endeth, for the time being, the lesson. Deo gratias.

The voice of the spider

2008-03-11T21:30:00.003+10:00

Abeba rented a room in a weatherboard house in St. Lucia (the suburb of Brisbane, not the Caribbean nation). The aging owner had set up a caravan and a shed for himself in the backyard, and rented the rooms to students. Of the tenants there, I remember only a Chinese girl with excellent English, and Abeba, who was from Eritrea. Bereket lived nearby, and Saba was also in St. Lucia.

One day I was over at Abeba's place, when she suddenly rushed out into the hallway. She had been in the bathroom on the toilet, when she saw a spider. We both made our way gingerly back in to consider the arachnid. It was still on the wall, and a very handsome specimen it was. Nearly a hand-spread of mine, and certainly more than a hand-spread of Abeba's, it sat on the wall and considered us. It was of the type generally described as Huntsmen, although there seems to be some variation across the description, and this was one of those with a more solid abdomen than most.

I'm not good with spiders, as you may have grasped. Jen can round them up, and balance them on the end of a broom while escorting them outside. I recently saw Peter expertly employ a broom to guide one into a plastic bucket he was holding. It took him about three seconds. I prefer my spiders dead. My weapon of choice on this occasion was a can of insect spray.

I'm aware that this is not the best option. Spiders become irrational under the influence of poison, and are likely to behave very erratically. But the tide of my courage was out that day, so the aerosol it was. We applied a generous amount of spray, and, as it took effect, our fierce creature tried to run away from it. It ended up on the inside of the shower curtain, back legs dragging. From the other side of the curtain, I saw its fangs repeatedly punching through the plastic. I took a thong (flip-flop for Poms), and whacked it from my side of the curtain. That, and the force of hitting the wall, killed it. Not a glorious victory.

Abeba told me that she had been sitting on the loo, when she heard a noise. Looking around, she saw the spider. She had heard that sound once before. "The voice of the spider," she said.

A visit to Medjugorje

2008-01-30T18:14:00.003+10:00

In the autumn of 1996 I took a ferry from Ancona across the Adriatic to Split. There was a reasonable swell, into which we heaved through the night. I slept little in the "aircraft style" seats, keeping an eye on my knapsack, in which all of my travelling possessions, and a significant portion of my worldly possessions were packed. I was travelling with cabin luggage only, which kept the volume down, and made the airports mercifully easy to leave. By dawn we were sailing down the Dalmatian coast. We moved in behind the shelter of the string of elongated islands that parallel the coast, and came into Split. I'd met a Kiwi on the boat who suggested we get accommodation together in Medjugorje. I agreed, having become all to aware of the cost of single rooms. It was a bad mistake.

From Split we took a bus down the spectacular coast road, and eventually turned inland. The Dayton Agreement had come into effect, and had formalised the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Medjugorje was well inside the the country. The border was marked by a collection of armoured cars, some IFOR and others from one of the armed forces of the area. A soldier looked at passports on the bus, and we went on. As we moved further into the country, we passed through ruined villages, the houses pock-marked with bullets, some burned out shells showing the holes from the tank fire that had destroyed them.

We rolled into Medjugorje past an IFOR post, and found ourselves in back in Croatia. There were Croatian flags strung across the street, a Croatian police station, and a Croatian post office. So much for the Dayton Agreement.

There has been a lot of building over the past decade, to judge from recent photos. Even then it was a thriving pilgrimage centre, with plenty of accommodation and plenty of souvenir shops of a Catholic character. I immersed myself in the pilgrim's round; my Kiwi companion looked for girls and drank a lot.

Pilgrimages in Medjugorje focus on the local church (St. James), Cross Mountain, and the Hill of Apparition (Podbrdo). Some kilometers away is the Franciscan monastery; the order is responsible for the parish. Father Jozo Zovko, OFM, who was the parish priest at the time of the first apparitions,played a prominent supportive role in the early years, and was still at the monastery in 1996.

The hills in the area are relatively new, geologically speaking. Layers of sediment had been slowly laid down and packed solid into laminates of rock. Then the whole structure had been broken up, and chunks of it thrown up at crazy angles to form those hills. Their slopes were faced with dragon's teeth; the edges of the laminates exposed at sixty or seventy degrees, harrying travellers' footfalls. Up these slopes the armies of pilgrims clambered.

Podbrdo was the lesser trial, because it is close to town, and the site of the apparitions is not far up the hill-side. The mysteries of the rosary were presented in bas-relief on large copper plates positioned along the circuit up to and back from the focal point. Cross Mountain was more arduous. It is further from the town, the mountain is higher, the way steeper, and the cross is right at the top. The path, as well-worn as the Podbrdo path, was marked with similar plates portraying the Stations of the Cross.

The church maintained a packed schedule of of morning and evening Masses in various languages. No sooner had one Mass finished than the next group would be pressing at the entrances. In between, the confessionals were busy, and often some visiting priest could be seen sitting outside in close conversation with a penitent.

After a day or two, I met a couple of backpackers from Oz. I'll call them Grant and Adrian, because I have forgotten their names. They were from Adelaide. They had come in the hard way; from Macedonia, presumably through Serbia, into the shattered Sarajevo, where they had spent a night in their sleeping bags, and on through Mostar.

Adrian was a robust young Australian atheist, and Grant was an easy-going young Australian Catholic. He had an auntie who had been to Medjugorje, and who had told him about seeing the miracles of the sun. What's more, she had the video to prove it. The combination proved irresistible to to Grant, so he had made a point of visiting on his backpacking travels. Adrian was just along for the ride.

I had heard many stories about the place, but the aunt's video intrigued me. I was sceptical about it. It it existed, then the perceived behaviour of the sun was not some psychological effect—an explanation I rejected in any case— nor even a direct miraculous and simultaneous intervention in the perceptions of a large group of witnesses, but something far more puzzling. The easiest course was to discount the story.

Grant's attitude was interesting. He arrived with an expectation of seeing miraculous events. That expectation virtually amounted to a demand, and when they did not immediately occur he began to express his disappointment. I was more circumspect, having no preconceptions.

I went up Podbrdo one afternoon, praying the Rosary in the desultory company of many other pilgrims, and I encountered a group who were excitedly examining the sun. "Oh yes, look at the colours." So, with many others, I squinted into the brightness, hoping for some revelation, but being forced soon enough to look away. When I did, all I could see was the after-image. Then my prayers began in earnest. "Please don't let me have damaged my eyes." I walked past a little, old nun who had been engaged in the same squinting, to the same effect. Seated on a rock in front of her was a woman wearing a white T-shirt. "Oh, look," said the nun, "her shirt has turned to gold!" A couple were walking past me at that moment. One whispered to the other, "Of course. You've been staring at the sun," voicing my unspoken opinion.

I was by nature cautious of the power of desire over perception, and had long been a devotee of my unscientific notion of scientific method. At the time I began to open myself to spiritual experiences, I let the guard of my scepticism lower. As a result, I learned many things, most of them false.

I became involved with charismatic Christians, and relished the release in the mild ecstasies of speaking in tongues, and the mutual prayers for healing and the laying on of hands. One of the conventions of such prayer was "resting in the Spirit". Under the influence of the Spirit, the prayee would, for what of a better word, faint. Such an outcome was known in the trade as being "slain in the Spirit", with its overtones of baptism and resurrection. The slain one would then "rest" before arising refreshed.

Accordingly, the ritual of such prayer involved a "catcher"; it was a role I had often assumed. At the time I became involved, much of this procedure had become ritualised, and the slain ones would collapse just so, to be caught under the arms and lowered gently to the ground. After a seemly interval, they would stir again and, if necessary, be helped to their feet. The interval tended to vary directly with the abandonment of the collapse. I was frequently slain, my falling making no concessions to safety, and my resting being correspondingly longer. I became increasingly suspicious of myself, but, suspicious as I was, I could never resolve for myself the engine of this behaviour.

A few days into my visit, I joined one of many parties travelling to the monastery. We toured the monastery, visiting the outside cellar where a group of priests had been killed by occupying German troops during WWII. Afterwards we made our way into the church of the monastery, where we were treated to a long address by Fr Jozo. He and a few fellow priests than began the rounds of the pilgrims, praying a blessing for each. A young priest prayed over me, and was clearly startled when I keeled over. In doing so, I made the effort to twist a little, as I was aware there was no catcher. I was one of the very few that day who reacted so, and it was probably this priest's first such experience.

A friend of mine had been in this same monastery some years before, when the fever was running higher. She was a long-time devout Catholic, and had been resistant to the charismatic influence. She also had strong opinions about the dangers of mobs and the herd mentality. All of her opinions were firmly held and firmly expressed. She had described her encounter with Fr Jozo to me before I left Australia. He was praying over people, and they were dropping like ninepins. As he approached her, she resolved not to fall, thinking the display to be, at the least, over the top. He reached her, and lifted his hand over her forehead. Before he touched her, she felt a bolt of energy and down she went. All I can say with certainty about my experience is that it was nothing like hers.

Because I was living out of cabin luggage, I had to wash clothes frequently. I often faced the problem of getting them dry in time to pack for the next day's travels. In Medjugorje, I saw something I had never noticed at home. It was getting cooler, and during my stay I saw the first snow on the distant mountains. One morning I hung out some washing on the line on a balcony near the room. The sun was not long risen, and shone in the cool air directly on the clothes. Almost as soon as its light hit the very damp washing, water vapour began to rise like steam. For me, it was minor miracle of the sun.

I had been there for four or five days, and Grant, like me, had seen nothing. He was fuming. "If I don't see anything, I'm going to tell everyone that Medjugorje is a fraud." His attitude amazed me, and I thought, "That's exactly the wrong attitude." I saw him again that evening, and he was cock-a-hoop. "I've seen it." What happened? He had gone to the church, feeling quite angry. He saw a priest, and collared him. The priest was English, and had come on pilgrimage a number of times. "Have you seen it?" "Yes, I have. In fact, I can now see it anywhere. I see it when I am at home." "What do I have to do?" Outside the church was a crucifix. The priest suggested that Grant go there and pray, asking to be shown. He did, looked up, and saw an image in the sun. He rushed off to where he was staying with Adrian, and excitedly told him the news. Adrian looked, and he saw it too.

The next day was their last, and I met them in mid-afternoon on the way back from Cross Mountain. There was a layer of thin high cloud. I asked them if they could see anything. They both looked at the sun and described something that, as I recall, resembled a delta or triangle. They simply continued to look directly at the sun as they described it. I tried to do the same thing, but despite the haze of cloud, I could not stand to look, or squint, for more than a few seconds. For them there was no squinting, and seemingly no limit to the time they could spend looking into the sun.

This experience was invaluable for me. Walking beside these guys, I could detect nothing unusual, and, more telling for me, I simply could not look at the sun in that way. I had long thought that this one aspect of the phenomenon was a challenge to scepticism, but to see it demonstrated so immediately was startling. If this external evidence was irrefutable, why should I disbelieve their description of what they saw?

I still leaned to the view that the intervention occurred at the level of the individual. There is a variety of effects displayed by the sun; pulsing, moving erratically, displaying multiple colours, and containing images. In the latter case, there were differences in what image people saw. Many Catholics saw a host—the Blessed Sacrament—in the sun; Protestants might see some tri-partite image. In all cases, the sun and retinas don't mix, so, unless some hitherto unexplored bodily process exists by which the eye can sometimes protect itself from such intense radiation, the effect is not psychological. I was still not prepared to entertain the prospect that such phenomena were external, "objective" realities, that Grant and Adrian, as they walked beside me, were perceiving a world every bit as concrete, every bit as real, as the one I perceive; every bit as real, but different.

In the back of my mind was the aunt's video. It only came to the foreground when I went to the web to check some details for this posting. I found a YouTube link, and following it, I found a number of videos taken by Medjugorje pilgrims. Here are a some of them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlPHHl0AjZk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep_URgsX_QI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H00DESrdFCs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRb-eA4m9fc

By the same token, here is an example where the observed phenomenon did not register on the video. The comments with the video explain the observations. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMPUR5EVPg4

It is trivial to fake such videos with current technology, and I do not offer any of them as evidence of the event portrayed. I simply say that this is the kind of video that Grant's aunt took, and I now must come to terms with the fact that such events are recordable. It throws all of my previous thinking about these phenomena into disarray. It is as though a parallel world has been revealed to some, including Grant and Adrian, and kept hidden from others, including me. The fact that no explanation is likely in terms of the tools of our understanding of the physical environment underlines the limitations I had already detected in such tools and the philosophy they expressed.

My Kiwi roommate, as I said, drank a lot. He spent every evening in a bar, and would come back to the room late and drunk. We had found a double room in a house down the road a little from the Post Office and the bus station, on the road by which we entered the town. It was run by a middle-aged woman who seemed to have the care of a couple of children. She spoke very little English, and a neighbour translated for her.

On what was supposed to be our last night there, he came back very late and very drunk, waking me when he came in. Some time later, I was woken again by his jumping out of bed swearing at the unknown person who had "pissed in me bed". He flipped the mattress over, collapsed on the bed, and went out again like a light. In the morning, I decided to act as though nothing had happened. We packed and left the proprietor to find the mattress and the crumbs from meals of bread and cold meats, a mess to which I had contributed.

I can't remember why, but I decided to stay another night, so in the evening I went back to see if I could get a single room. The owner was clearly very unhappy to see me, and I felt a surge of guilt for not offering to help clean up the Kiwis' bed. She let me a room though, for which I was extremely grateful.

I left the next morning, and was treated to another view of the glorious Dalmatian coast from the bus. In Split, waiting for the ferry, I gave some money to one of the beggars, and was soon surrounded by a small group whom I had to refuse. There was a market, and I bought a pair of "genuine Levis", which was so ill-fitting that, back in Italy, I had to perform surgery with my tiny Victorinox scissors, a needle and thread in order to make them wearable. They saw me through the rest of the trip though.

I ran into the Kiwi again in Jerusalem in company with a young woman, whom he had presumably asked to share accommodation with him. Small world.

Raise high the cross-beam, carpenter

2008-01-24T17:03:00.001+10:00

It has been dressed quickly, but well. The wood is green, and has been kind to the adze. There is only a day's work for it to do, scaffolding for an afternoon's spectacle, and then sold to the wood-workers, who will let it dry. I'm to carry it to the site. One of the troops has lifted it. I wait for the weight on my shoulder. It's a long climb through the streets to the gate, and then further, but in sight of the city still. My arm around it, I put my cheek to the beam. Smell the wood! Such memories. We start now.

Prickly pear

2008-01-16T21:21:00.000+10:00

I recall seeing, on a trip to Rockhampton in about 1975, some stands of cactus that I took to be prickly pear. I was surprised to see it, as I had heard the story of the rampant infestation and the eventual control through Cactoblastis, so I thought it had been eliminated. A newsreel from the twenties gives some idea of the severity of the problem.

I had another prickly pear surprise not long ago. The train home from work goes from Southbank Station (once Vulture Street Station) under Vulture Street and into a long cutting. At the top of one of the embankments is Somerville House high school. Staring out of the window, I suddenly noticed a healthy clump of pear at the base of the embankments. I realised that there were smaller clumps of it growing all over the stone bank on that side. As suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone; even before the tunnel under Stephens Road I couldn't find any more of it among the angled planes of the wall.

So, is this a stable population, of has someone, not too long ago, tossed a fruit down the embankment? The next year should tell the tale.

Oliver's Greatcoat

2008-01-03T20:36:00.000+10:00

I was less than ten years old when I was given a copy of Oliver Twist for Christmas or birthday. It was a small-format Collins hardcover, blue-bound, with the Collins fountain logo stamped in silver on the front cover. The pages were very thin, so much so that in places the print from the other side, too heavy in places, showed through, making reading difficult.

I read avidly, and was delighted at Oliver's rescue. At that point, of course, things take a turn for the worse. When Oliver, carrying his benefactor's books, is kidnapped by Nancy, my heart sank, and I put the book away.

At the moment, I'm reading Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, edited by Robert Chandler. The first story is Pushkin's The Queen of Spades, the third is Gogol's The Greatcoat. Reading Gogol, I had that same feeling of impending doom as Akaky Akakiyevich makes his way back from the party whose pretext is his new greatcoat.

It took me some years to pick Oliver Twist up again. I think I finished it in my mid-teens. My expectation of a satisfying resolution may have sustained me. If so, Dickens did not disappoint. Gogol offers no such promise, but I am grown-up now, so I pressed on through my dread. Gogol did not disappoint.

Speaking of dreams

2008-01-03T17:21:00.000+10:00

Once, I had a dream. It was many years ago, some time after my conversion, or reversion. Many of the details of time, place and event are now hazy; even the details of the dream have blurred. I was still young enough in my newly-recovered faith to be susceptible to such a dream, and to go searching eagerly for its references.

Here's what I can reconstruct of it. The scene featured a chapel whose primary focus—whose only substance, perhaps— was a wall of intricately carved wooden panels, many in the form if the peaked arch which is so characteristic of western European church architecture. There was a doorway, which led I don't know where. There were two men in the chapel; I couldn't identify them. Also present, in some way I can't rationalise, was Albrecht Dürer.

The space enlarged and an angelic choir, out of sight, began to sing a Christmas hymn I had loved in my childhood, and had long ago forgotten: What Child Is This, to the tune of Greensleeves. The volume, depth and richness of the music became majestic, and I woke up filled with joy.

I began to look for the words next day. This was in the days before the ubiquitous web, and I had to employ slower methods. It took some time, but find them I did. I remembered from the dream the words whom shepherds praise, whom angels sing. In the published text, I read whom shepherds guard, but I now use my variation, and the song always brings me the delight I felt as a child, and more. It is part of the texture of my relationship with the Lord, renewed and now re-renewed; a small instance of the secret life that enriches so many of the faithful, sustenance for the long dogged daily reality of faith.

Emergence

2008-01-01T18:38:00.001+10:00

If I am not woken suddenly—by an alarm clock, for example—I often find myself in a state on the cusp between sleep and wakefulness; in reverie. And often in that oftenness some questions that have been in the back of my mind will find their way to the front. The other morning—the one that triggered this post—I "woke", and started thinking about the West Antarctic ice shelf, as one does.

In this state, I am aware at some level just below the surface, that I am awake. That awareness is deceptive, as becomes obvious when the phase change to wakefulness actually does occur, with its accompanying I'm awake now. When that happened, I was still thinking about ice, but the context of the activity had changed. The most obvious change was my sudden alertness to my surroundings. I had moved out of that inner world to which the world that contained me—the bedroom, the house, the noise of trees and birds and traffic—was connected by only the subconscious trip-wires that will be snagged by, say, the smell of smoke; and into the state of thinking wakefulness where, while the pattern of thought may be the same, the mental terrain has become spare and hard-edged, analogously to a transition between watching a movie and reading text, even if a movie that I am present in, a book that I am writing.

Where I had been following a seam of argument through a dream-rich montage of images from the ice down into the Southern Ocean to the ice-scarred bottom, I now found myself working it in the dimly lit bedroom, with the morning light seeping in at the edge of the vertical blinds. I'm awake now.

My waking mind would maintain that the drowsing mind would generate conclusions less reliable, more appropriate to a dream, but I have too many times woken with a new approach to a thorny technical problem, to accept that self-serving hypothesis from the well-lit side. The contrast with the spare environment of my waking thought brought home to me the paucity of visual imagination that I have taken for granted, relegating the imagery of dreams to a completely separate realm.

Yet they are not as separate as I had imagined, as the experiences just mentioned ought to have led me to suspect. Such enlightenments had, however, happened in the dark, simply presenting themselves to the waking consciousness. In this instance of the emergence of wakefulness I had the chance to see a process of thinking happening within the the context of dreams, with all of the imaginative richness that implies.

I don't conclude from this that I might be able to draw the imaginative content of dreaming into the conscious process of following the quirky trails of ideas. That gate closes with I'm awake, but it gives a tantalising glimpse of the mind's sleeping mode, complementing the now far too infrequently remembered fragments of my dreams.

Down on Fairfield Road

2007-12-22T08:23:00.000+10:00

About a month ago, Jen and I went for a bike ride on a Saturday afternoon. On the way home, we came up the back streets from Hyde Park. We got to Yeronga Street, and were about to cross into the commercial block when we saw them. A duck was crossing Yeronga, followed by seven ducklings, their legs flailing away to keep up. We rolled over into the car park, watching them progress up the other side of the street. Some bloke joined us, beaming at them. They crossed Fairfield Road at the lights. A couple of other were standing there watching them as well. The traffic was at its calmest at that time on Saturday afternoon, but the road was by no means empty. As we watched, a van came followed our route down Shottery Street and stopped to let them across the intersection, still following Yeronga. Seeing the van, Mum picked up the pace. Somehow the chicks kept up.

On the other side of Fairfield Road is a narrow strip of green, a chain wire fence, and the railway lines. Where had they come from? We decided to escort them up the street towards the Brisbane River. They had about two and a half blocks to traverse to the dead end of the street. Beyond was the river bank. A couple of other cars came down the road, and made way for them. Whenever they approached, Mum would find a gap in the parked cars and take them to the edge of the road. At one point a woman came out of her driveway, and couldn't see them. The ducks were already looking for the gutter, but we warned the driver.

At the end of the cul-de-sac, there was a steep grassy slope down to the water. She crossed the road and led them onto the grass, where they started to peck and run. We watched them over the crest of the hill. A couple walking their dog had joined us. No camera.

A Tale of Two Parties

2007-12-21T23:38:00.000+10:00

The election-night convention is that the losing leader first concedes defeat, and when these formalities are out of the way the victor claims the spoils. In each case, these speeches, replete with the necessary acknowledgments and thank-yous, are delivered to a gathering of the hard-core faithful.

I recall some vivid scenes from what my memory tells me are past examples of the genre: Malcolm Fraser in victory deflecting Tammy's adoring embrace; Fraser in defeat, at the precipice of tears, with Tammy attentive at his side; Keating alone on stage, announcing, This is one for the true believers, to a rapturous rock-concert response.

On the night of the 24th of November, it fell to John Howard to concede at the scene of so many triumphs—the Wentworth in Sydney. Such occasions are normally, naturally, sombre affairs, but there was an air of defiance and the mood was surprisingly upbeat. Howard said all the right things, dealt gently with the vocal drunk, and was cheered and applauded frequently.

A little later the scene switched to Lang Park. Kevin Rudd entered to a rapturous reception. After 11 and a half years in the wilderness, the Party was back. Then he began to speak, and we were treated to the spectacle of a victorious election-night crowd being ground down to a restless and perplexed audience by the numbing force of Kevin's rhetoric. Every now and then the audience would rouse itself to applause at the sound of some well-worn party electioneering slogan, but they couldn't generate any enthusiasm. It was a feat I had never witnessed before, in many years of avid election watching.

Kevin can tell a joke—an obscure joke, badly. My name is Kevin, I'm from Queensland and I'm here to help, to open his address to the national conference. In the victory speech, he made the gruesome "out-the-back-door" gesture with a small smile. It was a joking reference to the same terrible moment in his campaign ads (for example, at 2:09 in the YouTube video). Some smiling may have broken out in the audience, live and on TV, but a belly laugh it wasn't.

Some questions beg to be asked. If this is the best Kevin can do with such a crowd, how is he going to motivate the nation to follow his lead? When he needs to communicate and persuade, what resources will be be able to employ? You wonder whether a Graham Freudenberg would do him any good. The material certainly be better, but the delivery is always going to be a problem.

But the Liberal Party has collapsed, and has abandoned the only policy plank that will actually look appealing at the end of the next three years; rejection of the anthropogenic global warming cult. Even Howard baulked before the election, under pressure from members of Cabinet. With its enthusiastic endorsement of the global warming hysteria, and the abandonment of any policies that might distinguish it from the Labor Party, it has no plan for making its way back to government, except to hope that Rudd will be another Whitlam. That is even more improbable than the hope that Hawke was going to do a Whitlam. Rudd's total lack of charisma is not in itself a weakness. Combine it with unexpected stresses on the economy and the arrival of a Liberal leader with audience appeal, and the utter flatness of Kevin's personality will come to be seen by everyone as a liability.

Protocol

2007-12-11T21:42:00.001+10:00

Jen and I went to dinner in West End Saturday night before last. From Highgate Hill, we went down Dornoch Terrace to Hardgrave, and the first clump of the West End eateries. We went on down towards the next group, centered on what was the Rialto picture show. We have long been threatening to go to the Tongue and Groove, a name of intricate connotation, on a live music night, but there was no visible means of support for the car, so we turned back towards Dornoch, and found a park not far from the food. We hadn't thought about booking, of course, but we got a table at Lefkas. We arrived without a bottle of wine, and I set off, thinking I would have to go down to the Rialto, but there was next door a bottle shop we hadn't noticed. The Oyster Bay sav blanc is mighty popular in these parts, and they had sold out, so we ended up with another Kiwi called The Ned, which was tasty. Waiting for the food, we got to talking about Jen's leaving Intensive Care.

They're making it harder. With insulin, for instance. I used to stabilise patients quickly then level of the dosage. Now they have a protocol in place, and you can't set the pump the way you want to—they have fixed programming. So I have to do it manually. But with all the babies on the staff, they need the protocol. When I started down here, they were trialling an insulin protocol, but it was thrown out. Then a couple of mistakes were made, and it was back on the agenda.

In Britain, there's a crying need for protocols. You'd go into a unit as an agency nurse, and start doing the things you were used to. "Oh no. That's Dr So-and-so's patient. He doesn't want things done that way." "Ok, so where's his protocol?" There wasn't one—you just got to know what he wanted done.

There's the argument for protocols. But there's a difference between the protocol developed in a local environment, and the protocol imposed from a distance, and from a height. The local protocol allows of local override. Those who understand the motives also understand the limitations, and have the confidence to say, No, in this situation we will do it differently. They have a measure of autonomy in its application. The further the protocol moves from the centre of its development, the less autonomy its users retain. The black hole of externally imposed protocols is the demotivation and demoralisation of the most talented of its practitioners.

On top of all of that, the calamari was disappointing. The night was beautiful, though. The diners were mostly dressed for a night out, and were probably heading in to the clubs after the meal. It's generally a mixed crowd at West End though, and there were plenty of guys in shorts and thongs wending through the diners on the footpath. It's a measure of the charm of the place, that makes the idea of living there so appealing. We'll just have to settle for Yerongpilly.

Raindrops keep fallin'....

2007-12-06T19:59:00.000+10:00

It rained briefly but heavily in the city at lunch time yesterday. The sun came out almost immediately and the sky was predominantly blue again. I was sitting under cover of what used to be the Bank of Queensland building. As I walked out towards Elizabeth Street, a light rain was still falling. On the footpath, I looked around for the source. Only blue, and a few flimsy scraps of cloud. On the open space at the end of the Mall, as I headed down Edward, a light sparse shower was still falling. I looked up into it, and saw tiny balls of water falling towards me, drifting sideways in the breeze. Then it occurred to me that this must have been the runoff from the hi-rise. Up above, from pools on the top and from window seals and edgings, from concrete awnings and the various nooks and crannies on the face of these towers, residual rivulets were making their way to some precipice. Falling, they were being flailed by gravity and the wind into a spray of droplets, to make their their individual and scattered way to the street, like an afterthought of the shower.

Drifting off

2007-12-06T19:26:00.000+10:00

I was in the Blessed Sacrament chapel at St Stephen's a couple of days ago, listening distractedly to the sermon echoing in the body of the cathedral behind me, as I drifted off sleepily. The almost indecipherable words commanding attention from some unseen source reminded me of another sensation. I suddenly realised that one of the defining characteristics of the state of drifting into sleep is a similar loss of precision in things heard.

As you slip over the edge, some sounds retain a grip on the attention longer than the rest; familiar voices, for example. It's not that these foreground sounds echo—indeed they seem to become sharper—but that the auditory background becomes blurred, so that the voice that arrests your melting attention becomes detached, and drifts off above the blurring and echoing sounds below. It was a sensation frequently noticed and immediately forgotten, brought back by this auditory accident before the tabernacle.

Night Vision

2007-11-24T23:25:00.000+10:00

I don't enjoy aspirin the way I used to. Aspirin used to be a taste sensation for me. I would always chew the tablets, for that shrapnel burst of salicylate, almost as mouth-curdling in its own way as lemon, and it seemed to me that the analgesic effect was kick-started with the absorption of that distinctive taste. I don't think that the generic aspirin I buy tastes any different, but it has lost most of its interest; a consequence—another consequence—of the breakdown of discipline and morale in the body's engineering corps that comes with advancing years.

Another area that has been impacted is my driving. I'm not thinking, here, about the sudden desertion of the steering wheel aggression that had me pushing up over the speed limit enough to keep me totally focussed on the road, ahead and behind; such complete concentration now replaced by wandering attention and slow reactions. I'm thinking, rather, of the sheer visual pleasure of the road at its most beautiful—the freeway at night.

My special delight was the South-East Freeway, approaching the city. At night, a freeway is all about the architecture of light, from the flashing white lines and cats-eyes to the polygonal white curve of the concrete barriers, up in the great suspended sweep of the light standards wrapping the space like so many radiant moonflowers. And hanging in that tunnel of light, floating above the tarmac, are signs; guidance for strangers, reminders for the distracted, and for all an intermittent arbour of luminous green and white, shade from the dark above. Sweeping under Vulture Street, across the Captain Cook to the city, my sense of sight would be ravished by the river to the left reflecting the lights of Southbank, and Victoria white on the water, and on the right the city, thousands of glinting cubes piled up in patchwork towers of darkness and light, and on the top the luscious neon, and all the while the forward rush towards the crush of city exit signs.

It no longer thrills me in the same way. Maybe it's the freeway that's getting old. Maybe age has dimmed the lights and corrosion has filmed the signs. But the city itself is bigger and brighter than ever, so I fear it is aspirin syndrome.

There is another, more austere pleasure that I took in driving at night. It is the pleasure, out on the Bruce or the Warrego or the Newell or the New England, in the many miles between the towns, on the two lane asphalt, of driving a long night towards some distant city, with no other cars in sight; of gathering the narrow world into the dimmest extent of the headlights—a hint of the road, the far sparkle of a reflector, a line of white or yellow streaming in, the sudden clumps of roadside grass, the bowing trees, the tarmac suddenly filled with flashing aggregate—then discarding it to the outer darkness.

Beneath the back and forth of the road across the bright windscreen, was constantly the delicious cosy glow of the dashboard, like light rain on a tin roof. The intimacy of this cocoon, the comforting glow within the enclosing darkness, is in hypnotic contrast contrast with the reality of speed. It's an example both of classical relativity and the revolt of our kinetic perceptions against physical realities unanticipated at the birth of the species. The reality of speed is unappreciated, and unappreciable, as when, in daylight, we slow down to pass through a town, and at 60k, the road seems to be passing slowly enough for us to run beside the car.

There must always be someone in the design factories of each of the car makers who understands this; someone who can summon up the darkened world, the sleep-inducing tremors and swayings of the car and the zone of light ahead; someone who will then dream of a perfect glowing intermediary to talk to the driver of the world outside so seductively as to bring a thrill of anticipation to the prospect of a distant night on the road.

Then there is the switching off—the breaking of the spell. Out by Coonabarabran, say, on a moonless and cloudless night, find a spot on the road to pull over, turn off the engine, turn off the lights, step out into the night and experience a stab of fear. Suddenly, you are immensely alone in a vast blackness without markers except the road dimly perceived beside you, and only the night sounds of the bush and the ticking of the engine as it settles and starts to cool.

But overhead.... Lift up your face to the stars; where have they come from? How did this teeming sky become so full? How did this display, normally so pale, become so bright? Stand under it, and let the river of light, ceaselessly turbulent at the borders of perceptibility, wash into your spirit.

It's been twenty years since I have done this. I think, though, that the delight and wonder I felt dims much more slowly than my eyesight. Writing about it now I recover such shades of the sense of it, that I believe its power would be undiminished. I have re-ignited my imagination at the prospect of such everynight delights, and I want to drive the freeway again, to drive the dark cool road again, to see the stars again. How much capacity for seeing have I lost, then, doc? Chew two aspirin, and tell me in the morning.

A divorce you don't want

2007-11-20T19:07:00.000+10:00

Jen's been doing it hard. In order to let me get another 7 months' work at the Labs in Bristol, she resigned from her beloved Intensive Care Unit back in the middle of 2006. She could only take 12 months leave without pay, and time was up. By the time we came back, a little less than a year later, that rule had changed to allow 3 years leave, but it was too late for Jen.

So when we came back, she started from scratch at the hospital, and had to face the night shifts—5 per month. She couldn't do it. The ill-effects of nights had been steadily increasing over the years, and the break from the shifts had possibly made their effects worse. In any case, by the end of the third night, she was a mess, and so she resigned. Her boss was able to make temporary arrangements that involved Jen dropping to one "official" shift a week, with extra shifts offered to her to cover staffing shortages. In was known to be a temporary arrangement, and the current roster was to be her last.

She started to look for another job, and found that it was almost impossible for her to go to work in the unit. It's like a divorce you don't want, she told me one tearful night. There had been other tearful nights. Many times in the course of her years in the unit, she had dealt with tragedies that had moved her to a discreet tear behind the ventilators. This, however, was her own small tragedy: giving up the unit she loved, the team she loved, because the work she loved had exhausted her resources to cope with some inescapable aspects of it.

It wasn't just the nights. There had been a rash of kids coming into the unit, and dying there. There is always a high mortality in intensive care, but it is the parents of young families and the teenagers that are hardest to cope with. I'm tired of burying children was a sentiment common to many of the women who had their own children.

So now she has a day job, which she starts the week after next, and she must resign from the ICU again. Last time, Jen told me very much later, to leave her ID behind and walk out the door, knowing that she was no longer a part of it, had broken her heart. Bring it to me, my love, and I will care for it, intensively.

Ashes

2007-11-16T19:20:00.002+10:00

We had a day for it, all right. It was, I think, the 3rd of August, a Friday, in what we would always have considered the depths of winter. It's a Brisbane winter we're talking about, and it can be cold and windy on Moreton Bay, but that Friday was, as you can see, balmy—blue sky, green-blue water, and a light wind. The water-taxi took us from Redland Bay out between Macleay and Coochiemudlo Islands, then up to Peel Island. Once we rounded Peel, we were looking across the broad expanse of the bay, with the port just visible to the west, Moreton Island to the north-east, and northern-most part of North Stradbroke to the east.

A person's ashes are surprisingly heavy. You can see below (1) the size of the container. It was by no means full, but when the woman at the crematorium handed it to me in a shiny white paper carry bag with rope handles, of the kind that more up-market retail stores will give you, she cautioned me to support the bottom of the bag. Dad's mortal remains sat at home for a week or more before I got around to arranging the trip onto the bay. Jen and I met J, C and K at the ferry. I was pleasantly surprised to see my daughter, M, there.

The boat was noisy, so we didn't talk much. I was expected to say something before we scattered Dad's ashes, but, predictable as that expectation may have been, I was at a loss for words. I was thinking about M, I was thinking about Dad, I was thinking about Mum. When Mum had died, in keeping with the desire to "keep things from the children" which had rendered her inevitable death a massive shock to both Cherie and me, her ashes were scattered by Dad, alone, on this same bay. It was years before I was able to ask him what had become of Mum's ashes, my silence no doubt reinforcing a belief that his silence had all been to the good.

Aunt Alma tells me that she had pointed out to Dad that it was a provocation to Mum's uneasy spirit that her final resting place was in the ceaseless movement of the Bay. Mum hated the Bay. While I was a baby, and up to the time that she had Cherie, the Bay would take Dad away from her for unpredictable periods doing inherently dangerous work. Every time he went out, there was a real risk she might never see him again. If the weather blew up while he was out, her anxiety would rise with the wind. Dad saw Alma's point, but the deed was done. Dad took decisions without asking for advice, let alone consultation; like his father, and like me.

So I stumbled through some words of farewell, and took up the ashes. The crematorium had thoughtfully provided a plug in one end of the container, and I had brought a screwdriver for the purpose. The ashes averaged out to a mid grey, but as I poured the first cast into the shallow green water beneath the boat, it looked almost white in the water. No-one else wanted a part of the process, so I continued. Cast after cast sank in a spreading cloud into the water, and passed underneath the boat, carried by the tide some distance into the Bay, before settling into the sandy bottom of Moreton. Towards the bottom of the container, the material grew coarser, and I realized that these were small fragments of bone, which I assume had been ground from the larger remaining bones. I resisted the urge to rinse the container, fill it, and let it fall to the bottom. Dad's nameplate, taped on (and visible in photo 1), should have carried it down.

Me with Dad's ashes

M (off frame), me, K

Me (casting the ashes), M, J (with petals)

When the ashes were gone, everyone threw some rose petals into the water after them. J had collected a bag of them for the occasion. That done, we toasted Dad in scotch and ginger ale, thoughtfully provided by K, and we had the captain of our little ship turn and head for shore. Back on shore, M asked Jen and me for a lift, but K said immediately that she was going past M's door, and so she went with K. I was kicking myself that I hadn't pressed the point, and so missed an opportunity to talk with her on the way home. Next time. Jen and I went to the Redland Bay pub for lunch, walked a way along the foreshore, and watched the lorrikeets, before dusting the red soil from our shoes and heading home.

Joy. Division.

2007-11-14T20:58:00.000+10:00

It's a movie about the singer in a band, and it hangs on the music. The music is pretty good. The singer -songwriter is Ian Curtis, and the band is Joy Division. Joy Division, which transmuted into New Order after Curtis' death, were after my time, and I was not familiar with any of their music. Bowie tunes in on the soundtrack early on; there's a touch of Kraftwerk, Iggy Pop, The Buzzcocks and Various Artists of the period. Joy Division feature, not unexpectedly, and New Order provides a track or two, plus incidentals. Some of it illustrates the unreasonableness of showing this movie in any venue without a dance floor. The actor-musicians—or musician-actors—roll their own in all scenes of the band playing, and a fine fist they make of it. I could be persuaded that the development of New Order's music influenced the covers on-screen, especially in the drive of the drumming.

What happens? Ian Curtis is still at school when he takes up with his best mate's girl, Debbie. Some short time later, he proposes to her. Meanwhile, a local band is looking for a lead singer. So, while holding down a job at the local Labour Exchange, Ian starts performing with the band. They record an EP, and at about the same time, he suggests to Debbie that they start a new venture of their own. The band gets a new manager, a recording contract, and Debbie gets larger and more marginalised from the life of the band.

In a car on the way back from their first London gig, Ian has the first fit of his epilepsy. The drugs he requires for the epilepsy mean he can't keep his day job and perform with the band, so Debbie, with a new baby, starts working as a barmaid. While touring, he meets Annik, who becomes part of his life on the road. Ian's fits continue, in spite of his medications, and he becomes increasingly wretched at the point of the triangle. In a moment of desperation he tells Debbie that he wouldn't mind if she wanted to sleep with other men, which she immediately interprets correctly. A search of his LPs yields Annik's name and phone number; an interrogation of Ian yields not a word. He repents, but his resolution to break with Annik fails him, and the affair continues. Ian can't cope with it though, writes a note to Debbie mentioning Annik, and ODs. The strands unravel. When he recovers, Ian separates from Debbie, but can't commit to Annik. This conflict simmers on, and, on the eve of the band's first US tour, Ian has a severe fit, and, on waking, hangs himself.

The triangle gives the movie its dramatic focus, and the epilepsy is, dramatically speaking, a godsend. It provides a visual shorthand for the eventually fatal stress that is building up in Ian's life. Sam Riley is convincing as a schoolboy and gripping as a man on the rack between his wife and his lover. It helps that he has a magnetic screen presence. Samantha Morton, however, is never anything less than a woman, and is not convincing as a teenager. This underlines the dramatic flaw in the story.

As presented, Ian Curtis is a young man whose talent as a rock star expresses itself within the simpler emotional world of Macclesfield, in which the conflict between love for, and duty towards, his wife, and love for his mistress can tear a man apart. As sympathetic, or empathetic, as this conflict is, one side of the triangle has been insufficiently explicated. The development of an affair with a beautiful and attentive woman who asks offbeat questions in an interview, is something we can easily understand, especially in the context of a rock band; isn't it de rigeur? But aren't rock stars above the moral and emotional constraints of mere mortals? In the face of such expectations, the nature of Ian's relationship with Debbie deserves to be more carefully established. In the movie, it seems out of context with the development of Ian's musical self-consciousness.

This portrait of the artist as a young man shows, on the one hand, the Bowie fan with eye makeup, and on the other, the teenager proposing to his girlfriend. The contrast jars, and gives no dramatic support to the later power of his attachment to Debbie. It's not because of his daughter; the closest he gets to her is rocking the pram while Debbie gets a job, and the only comment on his feeling for her is the shot of him through the bars of the playpen, before he runs away. We need more of the teenage lovers, and more to establish the conservative and traditional side of Ian's personality. The conflict on which the movie is carried, derives from the conflict in the personality between the avant-garde artist and the traditionalist, and probably between two sets of values. But of these conflict we see only the effects.

The movie was shot in colour, and printed in black and white. That, I think, is a handicap. Go and see it for Sam Riley, for the music, and as a bonus, for Toby Kebbell as Rob Gretton, the fast-talking DJ who takes over as their manager.

Jesse and Bob

2007-11-10T12:41:00.001+10:00

Peter and I went to the movies last Tuesday to see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

We came out pretty much shell-shocked, so to speak. Neither of us had any problem with the length of the movie, although Peter started to wonder how things would develop while the first scene—in the forest on the afternoon before the train robbery— was being played out. With nightfall, the movie wrapped itself around our attention and didn't let go until the credits were rolling.

That first scene established many of the parameters of the movie. Dramatically, the ambition of Robert Ford is brought out in parallel with the growing distance between Jesse and Frank James, as is Dick Liddil's womanising. Technically, there is the setting of the palette for the cinematography. The woods are practically bleached, complementing the men dressed in dark neutral tones. And that is as colourful as it gets. In my limited experience, though, the soundscape of this film is a revelation, and it starts with this scene.

Altman had developed a technique of multiple conversations occurring simultaneously in a wide shot. It made for difficulties in following the events. In TAoJJ, one of the uses of the sound is to widen the topography of the scene. In the forest, the men are scattered about in small groups. The camera moves about in this space, focussing on one or other of the groups. As the camera moves, the soundscape traces, off camera, the distant voices of other conversations, and immerses the viewer in the three dimensional auditory scene, the focus of which is visible on-screen. It's a simple technique which works well in the relative quiet of a sparsely treed forest. There's another example when Jesse and his son walk home in St. Joseph. He exchanges some words with Ford on the way through the gate, and as he does, you can hear a girl's voice reciting some children's rhyme. A few seconds later, she appears around the corner of the house.

An immediately noticeable aspect of the soundtrack is the gunshots. They make a sharp percussive crack unlike any purported gunshots I have heard before, not only in westerns. I don't know whether this is realistic, but it sounds realistic, and the novelty of that impression of verisimilitude lends verisimilitude to the movie.

If we think the opening scenes in the lead-up to the train robbery establish relationships and introduce us to the characters of Jesse, Frank, Ford and Liddel, we have to think again about Jesse in the aftermath of the robbery. He's a vicious, arbitrarily violent thug. Upon that character trait, the film hinges.

I have to say that I'm not good with violence, or more precisely, with the suspenseful expectation of violent death. A movie like The Duellists is a case in point: full of premeditated life-threatening clashes between the two protagonists, with the final outcome uncertain (on first viewing at any rate). It had plenty of back-in-the-seat moments, but the final duel twisted my entrails like fusilli.

TAoJJ has more than its share of such moments. The key to suspense, as Hitchcock insisted, is that the audience must understand the threat, and the audience is left in no doubt as to the threat posed by Jesse James to all of his confederates, as much as to the victims of his robberies. The scenes in which we wait, often with the victim, for the shot to be fired, are chaotic to the dyspeptic constitution. Such scenes, however, are only the points at which the brooding menace of the entire film is brought intermittently into sharp focus. From the departure of Frank James, the narrative arc of the movie is the increasing terror felt towards Jesse among his former confederates, especially the Ford brothers, Robert and Charley.

The highlights of this process are the conversations that take place when Jesse unexpectedly shows up—conversations that turn into cross-examinations. In these dramatic set-pieces, Brad Pitt glows with malevolent intelligence. While, no doubt, Pitt's construction of these moments is tribute to the eloquence of his body language, the rivetting focus is his eyes, shading from bonhomie through suspicion to a steely conviction.

Casey Affleck's performance is certainly memorable, but more problematical. He presents Robert Ford as a kid with big dreams and an exaggerated idea of his own destiny. One of his techniques for conveying the immaturity of Ford is to adopt a high-pitched, breaking whine, which, for mine, is too much like caricature. In spite of this drawback, his presence is arresting, and in critical scenes shared with Pitt, such as the dinner at which the ghost of Wood Hite is an unwelcome but inescapable guest, and the climactic scenes leading up to the murder of Jesse, he maintains his balance against the sheer weight of Pitt's performance. Startlingly, his character grows in stature in the compressed history of his life and death after the killing, becoming, by the closing scene, the most sympathetic character to have passed across the screen.

Dominik employs a chorus in the form of a voice-over, the text of which seems to have been taken directly from the novel. Much of the colour, movement and lyricism that are conspicuously absent from the cinematography, the deliberate pacing of the film and the mournful music, are compressed into glorious passages of lyrical prose in the voice-over. As a chorus, it attempts to fill in the psychology and particular motivations of both Jesse and Robert Ford, and is an economical method for so doing, in contrast to the stately and sparely beautiful atmospherics of the cinematography. The film would be much the less without it, if only for the lushness of the poetry.

However, it does remind you of what Scorsese or, more especially, Kieslowski in, say, Blue, can convey with image and sound "within the frame". To do so, requires a far richer cinematic palette, and the movie would have to have been conceived in a radically different way.

Talk of motivations leads back to the central problem of the film. The assassination doesn't work. The events portrayed in Jesse's home follow faithfully the sequence as related by Robert Ford, but they carry a crushing overburden of what can only be described as mysticism. Dominik is trying to establish some connection of acquiescence from Jesse to Robert; a death wish, so that even as reading about Liddel's surrender triggers panic in Robert and Charley, it precipitates Jesse's suicide. He removes his gunbelt and stands, vulnerable, on a chair to dust a picture, exactly as reported by Robert. Them's the facts, folks, but the movie offers nothing to justify its hypothesis.

These reservations notwithstanding, the film is an order of magnitude more satisfactory than most contemporary fare.

A jarring note

2007-11-09T22:59:00.000+10:00

More accurately, a coining jar. This is our hi-tech, financially savvy way of investing for one important element of our future—the next trip.

The Turn of the Worm

2007-10-24T14:04:00.000+10:00

There's been much brouhaha about the pulling of Channel 9's coverage of the Howard-Rudd debate because 9 insisted on showing the "uncommitted voters" responses to the debate in the form of the "worm", a continuously updated graph of said responses, overlaid on the bottom of the image. This despite Howard's setting it as a condition of the debate that the "worm" not be used.

My initial attitude to the worm when it first appeared an election or two ago, was that it was a trivialising distraction, intended simply to garner a bigger audience for 9. And it is that. From that consideration, though, there arise more questionable consequences. Channel 9 is making a T.V. show, and wants to apply some showmanship. There are time-honoured ways to tweak a T.V. show. If it's a comedy, you add canned laughter. In other circumstances, you add applause. In the days of live broadcasts, the studio audience was told when to applaud, and, presumably, when to laugh. It was much harder work.

Which brings me to the worm. Devices like dubbed applause and laughter continue because they work. Their presence will predispose an audience to hearty approval or amusement to an extent that makes their continued use worthwhile. Not enough to save a flop, obviously. Will the worm, by the same token, influence the response of viewers? I don't know. If it has no such effect, there's no reason to restrict it. Let's suppose, with, I imagine, John Howard, that it does exercise such influence. One question is then, Who controls it? This device comes from the stable that brings you such examples of journalistic excellence as 60 Minutes. The networks already exercise a great deal of power during election campaigns. In that light, an extension of their influence into the debate or debates may not seem worth worrying about. Nonetheless, however small the effect, I think it one our election campaigns can do without. Which is my answer to another question: Who cares?

Tell me why

2007-10-19T13:36:00.000+10:00

I've started going to Mass again, although I am not in communion, and I don't know that I will be able to take that step. I feel the pull of it again though, and I feel a great deal calmer than I have for some time. The pressure of existence, especially the pressure of time, is not now so unrelenting. The wreckage of the past is not now so intolerably present. These benefits are, for the moment, associated with being present at Mass. They are a mild form of the consolation of prayer.

This development is, of course, causing some puzzlement and amusement around the table. It has led to the odd full-scale rant on the absurdity, or alternatively the flagrant injustice, of the spiritual economy of Christianity, generally fuelled by alcohol or resin. For instance, if the human story is drawn as a particular form of the vast interlocking graph of all human genealogy, then the shock-wave of the Christian experience travels out from Jerusalem on the first Easter and Pentecost forward in time and broadening in space like a cone through the graph. All those who lie outside its reach, including all who preceded the event, are condemned, as are those over whom the wave passed without effecting a change. Where's the justice of the condemnation of those who lived outside this cone of the Christian narrative? There are many similar complaints, but they come down to a deeply offended sense of justice. If God were as God was claimed to be, He would have done a better job. This particular polemic came from an ex-Catholic (R), and was unimpaired by the fact that the Church does not teach such a thing. (More interesting was the What about the Neanderthals? question. Do they get a Salvation guernsey?)

On earlier occasions, while I was still considering my reconstituted agnostic options, conversation had turned to the Virgin Birth. This article of faith, and consequently the Faith complete, was to be rejected on the following grounds. Leaving aside the reported conception of Jesus and modern scientific interventions, conception has only ever been observed over the millennia to occur in one way. Even our recent tinkering builds on our deeper understanding of this process. It is therefore only reasonable to reject the theory that some completely unrelated phenomenon can be responsible for the conception of a single individual. It's usually expressed more elaborately than that, but there's the nub of it; fairly, I think.

The unstated assumption in the argument is that we are considering events within the natural order. Therefore the tests that we have developed for such events are appropriate and applicable. The problem is that the putative virginal conception of Jesus is not such an event; it is, by definition, an event outside the natural order, that is, supernatural. The original argument reduces to: there are no supernatural events. Unfortunately, you can't say that the apparatus of reason dictates that there are no supernatural events. The commitment to a strictly material universe, or one produced by a hands-off, disinterested creator, or the one assumed by, for instance, Christianity, is philosophical, and independent of the application of scientific methodology to the physical universe. There's a nice discussion of this distinction by Phillip E. Johnson in First Things.

With that preamble, I can give a start to answering why. You can approach Christianity from many angles, but you come soon to the consideration of another supernatural event - the Resurrection. Belief in the historical reality of the death by crucifixion, and the resurrection to bodily life of Jesus is a necessary condition for becoming a Christian. St Paul puts it like this: But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain... If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied. (1 Cor 15; 13,14,19)

The Resurrection is an interesting category of event. While it is, in the nature of faith, unprovable, it is not without reasonable support. The evidence, I consider compelling. Others, with the best will in the world, will not. However, anyone who denies that there is something to be seriously considered here is either acting in bad faith, or is in the grip of a confusion between methodology and philosophy, such as described above. Or so it seems to me.

Accepting the historical reality of the Resurrection will necessarily re-order your thinking about literally everything. It may not lead you to the Church, defined in the broadest possible sense. Indeed, depending on the extent and elaboration of your existing view of the supernatural, it may lead you far away. If, though, you are trapped in a sterile materialism, accepting that this event occurred will be the first step in your liberation.

Shame

2007-10-07T23:55:00.000+10:00

T came home one day, very pleased with herself. She had attended one of those day-long seminars that sweep through organizations, both private and public, at regular intervals in order to leach some of the spare cash out of the system. She was particularly chuffed about a game they had played. In the exercise, members of a team collectively negotiated a response to a situation of some kind, and then individually passed on their response. No one in the team knew the individual decisions until they had all been made. The catch was that the points garnered to each member of the team varied with the number who chose a particular response. If all members chose response A, each received, say 40 points. If, however, one person chose response B, while everyone else chose A, that person gained 100 points, while everyone else gained only 10. If everyone chose B, however, each person got only 5 points. As T explained it, the aim of the exercise was for individual members to maximise their points. It was more elaborate than that, with points schedules for every possible result, but you get the picture, I hope.

This may sound very trite, but I had never encountered it before, and neither had T. She immediately realized that by convincing everyone else to do the right thing by the group, then betraying them, she could score heavily. This she did. That, you might think, was the end of the co-operation.

Ok, ok. It was a momentary lapse of reason. I'm sorry. But the logic of the game is still with Response A. Second round, same result. 200 points to T, everybody else, 20. So I'm ahead. But let's get serious now. There's no point everyone going for B, because the result is even worse. Only by sticking together can any of you expect to get any worthwhile points now. As I recall the story, only one of the victims broke ranks on the third round, which still left the two of them with a handsome advantage. I was, as usual, awe-struck by T's skill in this kind of manipulation. This was the least of the examples I had seen, and a click of the fingers compared to the ones of which I was then unaware.

Some while later, I found myself in a time management seminar, playing the same game with a team of people from my company, none of whom I had worked with before. Having been wised up by T, I played her game, with some success. People are very trusting, fortunately for the world we live in. It was only at the end of the game that I realized what I had done. No-one who had played that game with me would trust me in future. I had given them a disturbing glimpse of my character. Gallingly though, it wasn't my character. I wouldn't dream of behaving that way in any actual situation; had I not been presented with the successful strategy by T, it would not have occurred to me to play in such a way, irrespective of the way the aim of the game was presented. I had only myself to blame, of course, in my lack of perception and discrimination.

It was an example of the power of bad company. Like the most impressionable school-kid, I accepted uncritically the self-assessment, and self-aggrandisement, of someone who loomed large on my horizon. Mimicry, the engine of our linguistic habits, drives so much else that is occurring below the radar in the formation of our attitudes and and patterns of behaviour. Here's an example of a different order.

On the way to lunch at The Three Monkeys so time ago, I selected, more or less at random, a bottle of Mojo 2004 shiraz. It was a wonderful drop. It was the sort of wine that you take a first sip of in the middle of an animated conversation, which you are then obliged to interrupt to exclaim, What a beautiful wine; take another few mouthfuls, and have everyone around the table agree. There's no better review. The next year's, which was the only vintage we were able to get subsequently, was not a bad wine, but nowhere near as good.

Last Friday I went with Peter to 1st Choice at Oxley to get something for Friday night. Amongst the shiraz I found the 2005 Mojo, alongside the 2005 Rockbare and a third from the same winery. It featured a pink foil, and the Rockbare label background motif of thin vertical bars, but in pale pink on white, and it rejoiced in the name Barossa Babe. It even featured a Barossa babe in pink. It's an unusual way to present a wine, but it was a 2003, and the same price as the Mojo, $16.99. When we got the the checkout with our assorted glassware, the price was $37.99. Oh no, it's not that much. How much? $16 something. So we went to the rack, she popped out the ticket, took it back to the register and called the manager.

I've worked in a bottle shop, and have sold booze to customers at the (incorrect) marked price, so I knew the routine. Peter didn't. In those circumstances, he said, he would be inclined to refuse the bottle at the incorrect price, and get something else. That opinion troubled me a bit, then, but I overcame those qualms. Later that night, I was talking about visiting other 1st Choice bottle shops, looking for Barossa Babe with the wrong price tag. Just to get one, mind you, not a half a dozen. Then they'd pull the price tag. Oh, so you'd be doing them a favour? Precisely. He can be so unbearably superior.

At any rate, sometime the next day I rang Owen and asked him to nip up to his local and buy a couple if they were there at the lower price. They were not in stock. By this time, I have to say, I felt relieved that they weren't. Next time I saw Peter, he told me BB was correctly priced at Toowong. I was so glad he had checked. Nonetheless, I was feeling a sting of shame.

Funny stuff, shame. Funny as in strange, elusive, allusive, mysterious. It is potent state of mind. It is an emotion in that it has immediate and ongoing physical manifestation, but it is more importantly the interaction between an idea and a perception; the idea of the way the self should be, and the perception of the way the self is; the ideal and the actual.

We can argue for a long time about the source of this idea or set of ideas - this model of how we should be. What's most interesting, though, is the power of an idea, and the fact that the idea can lie dormant, to be aroused to its full power by a word heard or behaviour observed, either by its contrast or its felicity to that idea. When it does arise, the self-perceptions by which it has been lulled to sleep have as much chance of maintaining their coherence as a newspaper in a gale.

In case you think I know something about wine, I'll tell you the rest of the Barossa Babe story. We bought another couple of bottles of wine that night, and Peter wanted to try something a little more spiritual as well. We settled on a bottle of Pernod, after skirting around a Czech absinthe, made according to the original wormwood recipe. Neither of us had ever tasted Pernod, so when we got home a round was poured. Jen couldn't stand it, and didn't finish her glass. I wasn't any more impressed, but persevered, and found that fresh orange juice disguised the taste enough for me to drink it. Peter quite liked it., and finished Jen's glass.

With dinner we opened the Babe. Funny if it's corked, Peter said after sniffing the cork. I thought he was joking. When we started to drink it, Jen loved it, but I was a bit put off. After a while, I complained. Peter had the same problem, which was what motivated the comment about the cork. So after I finished the glass, we opened another wine we had bought. Same problem! The penny should have dropped, but didn't. Jen quietly continued to drink the Babe, thinking What's wrong with me. I like it.

It wasn't until I poured myself some coke and got a sniff of that that I realised. The coke smelled off in the same way. It was all down to the Pernod, which had colonised my palate, and Peter's. So much for our bargain bottle. At least Jen enjoyed it, but I have still to taste it.

Heart failure

2007-10-06T18:59:00.000+10:00

I got a call from the counselling service of the John Tonge Centre yesterday. The autopsy report had finally been delivered. Congestive heart failure due to cardiac amyloidosis. There was no trauma to the brain. Jen's hunch had been correct. Dad's death was coincidental to the fall. In fact, the fall may have been caused by problems with his heart.

The report mentioned some secondary findings. The coronary atherosclerosis we knew about, and the incipient Alzheimer's. As mentioned earlier, Dad's short-term memory was very short indeed. That led to his restriction to a locked unit. I now regret greatly not having been able - or perhaps that should be, not having striven - to talk to him about the experience of this isolation in the fast-fading present. Of course, only someone close enough to him to be very familiar and trustworthy could have expected to elicit such a confession or elucidation. There was a time when I could have asked him about such matters, but it had passed with my absence and his forgetfulness of me. The exploration of his mental states was never high on Dad's agenda in any case. That, and the shortness of his horizon would have precluded such conversations with anyone since his move to the hostel. Some inferences can however be drawn from his behaviour.

Confinement is rightly regarded, by the freedom-loving peoples of Australia, as a punishment, and Dad was nothing if not one of those. He temporarily escaped on one occasion. At the age of 90, he climbed the wall, but was soon recaptured. I heard this news in Bristol, and was, but of course, guilt-stricken. He was disciplined for aggression. There was among the papers I received as executor a sensitively-worded letter about his behavioural problems, the upshot of which I don't know. It probably, though, involved drugs. I was granted some insight into Dad's state of mind as I discussed this with Jen. Dad had stayed with us for a week about three years or so ago. We printed up signs for all the doors in large letters, and a brief note for his room about the reason for his stay here. I remembered Jen's attitude to him as distant. In talking about this again, she told me that, when I was at home, Dad was relatively calm. When Jen was at home alone with him, he was agitated and aggressive. He didn't know why he was in such unfamiliar surroundings, or who this woman was. He wanted to go walking, but refused to let Jen walk with him. If she tagged along behind, he would be rude to her, or shake his fist at her. She would let him get to the end of the street, and watch his confusion as he looked for some landmark. Once I went looking for him, to find him sitting at a bus stop, with no idea of the way back. The familiar street, the familiar house, the familiar face, is a beacon in the bewildering world of dementia.

In the last four or five years, he had forgotten much about Mum. They were less than twenty years together. From the perspective of twenty, that is a vast stretch of time. From fifty-six, the perspective is broader, and the shrivelling of the years is more understandable. He told me that he could not remember Iris' face. I did not try to get some photos from Cherie for him. He did remember his mother, and much about his childhood. By the time of his death, he was the last of the siblings, and when the talk turned to reunions, it was of with his mother, his only and beloved sister, Pat, and his brothers. His father might sometimes rate a mention, but never Iris.

My sister is a Mormon. The Mormons put vast sums and great effort into preserving, and making available, genealogical records all over the world. Their purpose is religious. Mormons may undergo what I dimly understand to be proxy baptism for ancestors who did not have the opportunity. Similarly, the marriages of ancestors may be "sealed" by proxy. If one of the spouses is alive he or she must be consulted about this process. Dad refused to be so sealed with Mum. The marriage, he said, had been a mistake. He may have meant that it was a mistake on Mum's part, but it is far too late to determine the shades of his meaning.

At the funeral, I was standing near the entrance to the church when a young woman with short, pink-streaked blond hair, and wearing a faux-fur top, came up to sign the book. I thought, "I know that woman. Who is it?" for a few moments before realising with a shock that it was my daughter. I hadn't seen her for eight or nine years. I had last spoken to her perhaps seven years before, and our last face-to-face conversation would date back to about 1995. I received some three or four years ago a letter formalising the reality of our break.

I was unsure how to proceed. I knew that she had re-established contact with her mother and uncle, after studying drama in Mackay. I had called Noel to pass on the information that Dad had died, and discovered that she was living with her mother and step-father. Jen had found a reference to her in a play in Brisbane last year. Was her "Goodbye, Dad" still in effect? After the funeral we spoke, and exchanged a tearful hug. I gave her my phone numbers, but did not receive hers in return, so, at the end of the day, I have no idea where I stand. She came out with us on Moreton Bay when we disposed of Dad's ashes. I asked her to get in touch and arrange to have dinner, but have heard nothing since.

The truth is that I am afraid. The load of guilt that I carry over my rejection of her is normally locked safely away. Seeing her again, with the hope of a return to some affectionate regard, brought it all out, full of fight. It's a process I can't face very often. Sorry about that.

Births, Marriages and Deaths

2007-10-06T12:21:00.000+10:00

I was the executor of Dad's will, a circumstance both appropriate and unfortunate. Unfortunate because administration is not my milieu even in the mill-pond days of the psyche, and they are few. The storms that churn my teacup depths are many and varied. My cup spilleth over at the slightest disturbance. Taken together, the employment doldrums I drifted into after the Labs, the edginess they engendered about staying in the U.K. and the consequent move home were enough to fill the saucer. All of this prior to Dad's death.

For me, at least, procrastination - the procrastination that makes me a friable administrator - is driven by some anxiety or other. There are many to choose from, and particular circumstances throw up novelties for the menu. So it was when we came home to the funeral. Nature was aided and abetted by the coroner. In order to finalise Dad's affairs, his death certificate, or a certified copy of same, was required by most interested parties. On top of the delay introduced to the funeral by the coroner, was the more or less constant call to calm reflection by the Department of Justice and Attorney-General, represented by the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths. This meditative pause ranges from five to six weeks.

To everything there is a season, especially, I should think, to marriages. But births and deaths? I don't know. In any case, the delay seems to be predictable, which leads to the conclusion that the staffing levels are sufficient to maintain the balance between work flowing in and work completed, except perhaps in peak season for one or another of life's milestones; which leads, in turn, to the speculation that, were sufficient resources made available to clear the backlog, such that the delay were reduced to, say, one to two weeks, then the original staff would be able to maintain that position.

There must, of course, be something wrong with this argument. I can't see that it is to do with increased demand as a result of the quicker turnaround. The Registry has a monopoly, and every birth, marriage and death must be documented. There's no getting fed up and opting out. "That's it. I've had it. Dad, as far as the State of Queensland is concerned, you are going to live forever."

So maybe this formal, structural procrastination is also driven by the sum of individual anxieties. Perhaps, at every level in the system, a head of backed-up demand is required to open the valves. Perhaps there must be a threshold of pressure, a degree of difficulty sufficient to engage the attention and commitment of those involved. If so, I will have to go to the end of the queue of critical commentators, because I understand this dynamic all too well. There will probably be a fight for the position.

Dad died.

2007-10-06T09:58:00.000+10:00

Dad died on Tuesday the 22^nd of May. He had a fall in the nursing home, where he was under house arrest due to his dementia, or, to be more precise, his inability to remember short to medium term events. He would wander, and lose track of the time and place. It wasn't so bad when he was still in familiar surroundings, but when he moved to the home, he was completely disorientated.

This has no bearing on his fall; it was just a fall such as the elderly suffer. He hit his head, and his skin being paper-like, his blood, inclined always to flow from incidental cuts and now full of warfarin, made a messy spectacle. As usual in such circumstances, he was taken from Tarry Brae to emergency at the Wesley. From there, Judith was rung, but there seemed to be no urgency, so she walked over from Toowong. A scan had revealed no cause for alarm. I don't know whether Judith talked to him, or whether he was sedated. While she was with him, be began to fit. Judith called attention to this, and left while he was attended to. One of the doctors came to speak to her. He didn't have long to live. Weeks, days? Hours. Judith went outside to call the kids on her mobile. While she was contacting them, he passed away.

Kyla called in the small hours of the Bristol morning, to tell me. I called Cherie in Utah. Cherie and Rob were preparing for a road trip to the east, to see Rob's relatives. Cherie decided, after talking to Judith, not to come for the funeral.

Jen and I had been due to arrive on Saturday evening. We were booked on a flight leaving Heathrow at midday on the 25th, Friday. The plan was that we would pack up on Tuesday and Wednesday, hiring a car to take us and our worldly possessions to a B&B in Iver, nearby to Fogchicken. We would spend a couple of evenings with her, and leave in her care various odds and ends she might find useful, going on Friday morning to Heathrow. We brought the flight forward by two days, packed in a frenzy, hired a van in which we drive our luggage to Heathrow, and Fogchicken's paraphenalia to Langley. We had dinner with her in a pub, and said goodbye in the evening. Jen was quite distraught as we drove back to Bristol. I dropped the van at Bristol airport, while Jen started the final cleanup.

We has already given things away on Freecycle, and we were now dumping the remainder. As well as the clothes and shoes that went into the clothing bins, some bagsful were secreted amongst the many plastic bags of detritus around the Asda charity bins, with messages left for Freecycle subscribers on how to find them. There were a dozen planters with mature fuchsias, geraniums and ivy, which went down beside the entrance, with another Freecycle plea that they be given a good home. A few other larger items went in beside the building's bins, in the hope they would also be put to good use. We had a bus to catch at 5:30 in the morning, so after about two hours sleep, we were up again. By 8:30 we were having breakfast at Heathrow. Sometime after 7:00 pm on Thursday we landed in Brisbane.

On the Wednesday night, at Lang Park (formally Suncorp Stadium; a.k.a. The Cauldron) Queensland met and defeated New South Wales in the first State of Origin match of 2007. I wouldn't be able to watch that with Dad, but I expected to see the remaining two matches with him. Before we left for the U.K., a small private ritual for us to watch the matches on TV together, fielding complaints about the noise (when Qld were on the attack). It wasn't just the Origin games we liked to watch. Before my evenings had been re-focussed on Jen's shifts, I would often go over to watch the Friday night game with him. I sometimes did still; before we left for the U.K.

I'm sure you will allow me a confession. In the two years we were away, I never once spoke to my father. It was too easy to rationalize that he would probably not remember me anyway, and that, in any case, his memory of a conversation would not survive its end by more than a few minutes. So it was too easy for me to justify my innate aversion to social contact without a “purpose”, even if that purpose is to watch a game of football. That, however, seems to be one of the components of a definition of “bloke”.

Such, at any rate, were my plans to re-establish my connection with Dad. Ah, happenstance.

There was a twist in the story that threatened to let me recover from the jet-lag before the funeral. Because the initial scan had revealed no life-threatening injury from the fall, no one knew what had killed him. His body went, then, not to the funeral director, but the coroner for an autopsy. The brain is a mushy thing, so the pathologists wanted to let it sit in something to let it firm up for about a fortnight, so that it would slice with greater consistency. In the end, they were persuaded to give it until the Monday following his death. I can't remember now whether the funeral went ahead on the Wednesday or the Thursday. In any case, I was able to remain awake, and more or less alert, for the proceedings.

Dad left the church without us, borne off to the crematorium on the other side of Brisbane in an unaccompanied white hearse. I decided to stay with the relatives whom I only saw, nowadays, at funerals. Not that I saw them any more often in less morbid times; probably less so. Dad was the last of the siblings, and only three of the spouses remain, so the gatherings will likely dwindle back to their usual frequency soon enough, to pick up again as the boomers generation runs out of time.

It doesn't sound like a very traumatic event, does it? Appearances can be deceptive.

About The Muddle-headed Wombat ...

2007-03-03T03:23:00.000+10:00

... of fond memory. Memory of the Argonauts' Club, primarily.

The Children's Session, with its Argonauts Club, ran briefly in Melbourne in 1933-34, and was revived as a national program in 1941. By 1950 there were over 50 000 Club members. The Club encouraged children's contributions of writing, music, poetry or art and was one of the ABC's most popular children's programs, running six days a week for 28 years, until it was broadcast only on Sundays and was finally discontinued in 1972.
(From History of ABC Radio)

Sadly, I can't find much more information on the wondrous Argonauts' Club. The crew of the Argo were named in Greek mythology; membership of the Argonauts' Club meant being assigned the name of one of the Argo's crew and a number. When crew-members' contributions were lauded, it would be Asterion 37, or Iphiclus 142, who received the accolade. I was a member, name, rank and serial number long forgotten, with ambitions of receiving the 10 shilling (or whatever) postal note for the story I had written. That ambition languished with the others.

One of the segments of The Children's Session was The Muddle-Headed Wombat. Ruth Park subsequently published a number of books about the Wombat and his friends, but I never saw them. What I remembered, from the program as a whole, and more particularly from the Wombat, was a voice. Years later, I heard it again in a T.V. program. Wikipedia tells me that the voice I was able to put a name to was that of Jimmie. For some reason, I always associated it more with the Wombat than any other character in the series.

Vale John Ewart. And here's to the lost idea that exposure to the Classics was an essential part of the enterprise of raising men and women; lost as the idea that the raising of children is itself a glorious enterprise.

The muddle-headed wombat

2006-01-03T04:07:00.000+10:00

... can't remember where he left his last identity, or what the password was, or where that was, or when...