The rumour of other possibilities

• 2010-12-21

  Cantique de Noel

  

  Cynicism is the religion of our day. It provides a worldview, it has priests who propagate it and adherents that wield the message with voracity. Brian Stimpson, John Cleese’s character in the film Clockwise, is a prophet of this religion: he says

  I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.

  Despair is easy. It takes nothing and it costs nothing. It needs no courage and will never let you down. Hope, on the other hand, can take you places, lead you to believe and leave you stranded. It opens you up to the possibility of failure. 

  President Obama, who campaigned on the premise of bringing hope, has not been able to deliver the wholesale change he promised. Those who feel most let down were his most fervent disciples who realise he hasn’t bought the change they ached and longed for.  

  Any follower of the England football team could adhere to Stimpson’s maxim: the despair of second round or quarter finals exits are easier than the hope that the team could actaully do something. You know where you are with despair. Hope can mess with you.

  A friend of mine’s Dad just died. Cancer spread from his colon to his liver and he died peacefully in his bed two nights ago. Everyone has stories about how things are not as they should be: we yearn for things to change whether it is cholera in Haiti, the billion people who will go to sleep tonight hungry or the habit/thing in our life that controls us and we cannot shed.

  Which raises fundamental questions about how we view the world. Is it wise to continue to believe? Is it better to cut ourselves off and save ourselves from the pain of defeat, of loss, of hopes dashed? Is there any cause to believe or will we always be let down?

  Which brings us to the Christmas story. There is a gap, a radio silence of 400 years between the last book of the Hebrew Scriptures and the birth of Jesus. It would have been easy to give up hope. To be cynical. To cease to believe that things would change, that Roman oppression would end. The Jews were waiting for deliverance from the Empire: to be delivered, rescued and to rule themselves.

  Zechariah, dad of John the Baptist, says this:

  And you, my child, (talking about JtB) will be called a prophet of the Most High; 
  for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him,
  to give his people the knowledge of salvation 
  through the forgiveness of their sins,
  because of the tender mercy of our God, 
  by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven
  to shine on those living in darkness 
  and in the shadow of death,
  to guide our feet into the path of peace.

  What’s going to happen? What reason is there to believe? The God child will be born and bring light into darkness, he will shine a light into the shadows of death and lead people into the paths of peace.

  The Christmas story shows that God has not given up on the world and that he is active within it, to bring healing, peace and shalom. To reconcile and restore all things back to himself. Elsewhere, St Paul writes to people in Ephesus saying that for some, they are without God and without hope in the world.

  Hope is real because God is active and working in the world. The carol O Holy Night puts it like this:

  O holy night! The stars are brightly shining,

  It is the night of our dear Saviour’s birth.

  Long lay the world in sin and error pining,

  ‘Til He appear’d and the soul felt its worth.

  A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,

  For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

  We face a choice: do we embrace cynicism or hope? Do we continue believing or do we give up? Jon Foreman says that cynicism acts as a temporary insulation against the pain of being alive. Do we choose to reside there or do we open ourselves up to hope, to love but also to their counterweights.

  In the Four Loves, C.S Lewis says:

  To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

  The birth of Jesus, the presence of God in our time/space existence, demonstrates that God has not abandoned the world, that hope is real and that situations can change. Hope is more real than cynicism and despair. And maybe, just maybe, one day, the England football team will rise above abject failure to at least fail heroically.

• 2010-08-05

  Le metier

  

  Michael Barry is a professional cyclist (he rides for Team Sky, the same team as Bradley Wiggins) and writer. He has just written a new book where he describes some of his experiences.

  Over the hundreds of thousands of kilometers I’ve ridden, I’ve come to realise why my desire became an obsession. Without it, I struggle - I am anxious, unfocused and tense. Cycling has become spiritual…I can pedal away angst, find calm and clarity with the rhythmic motion and freedom. The commitment gives me a focus; the love gives me panache. Whether it is pedalling to a victory or training in the mountains, I find peace.

  Plato’s view of humanity was that there was a distinction between the soul and the body; the soul is good or capable of good while the body is corrupt. This body/soul dualism (which says that the two are separate) persists today, so that often those who would recognise humans as having souls would see them as distinct and ‘other’ to the body.

  C.S Lewis said that a person does not have a soul, rather a person is a soul. With a body. The philosopher Dallas Willard argues that the soul is what drives a person, it is what defines who they are at their very essence, at their very core. The soul is directed by the will/heart/spirit and it is this will that determines the kind of person that we are.

  Willard argues that people are inherently wired up wrongly, that things are not as they should be. He describes the spiritual disciplines as transforming the will to be more and more like Jesus, or that through deliberate practices, disciplines and an intentional way of life, that we can be transformed inwardly.

  To put it crudely (and metaphorically) the will is inside the soul, and the soul is inside the body, so there is a link between what I do with my body and the state of my spirit and therefore my soul.

  Maybe this is why the spiritual practices seen in the bible are very physical acts. Fasting is about the absence of food; it is not so easy to tell a sated person that they rely on God for all things. Taking a sabbath rests the body and allows someone to enter all of life and the other disciplines (study, prayer, worship, confession) with a fresh mind and body. Dallas Willard asks if we’re rarely changed by going to church because we are too tired from our daily living.

  Resting and not eating are very physical activities, that can effect and transform the inner life. They engage with our physicality and through that process help to transform the soul. So maybe a professional cyclist helps to show the connectedness between what we do with our bodies and the state of our souls…

  I just wonder if Plato would have had that same insight if he had ridden the Tour de France…

• 2010-06-13

  Coupe du Monde

  The ‘special’ relationship and photoshop…

  

  …and American optimism coupled with geographic vaguery.

  

• →

  (More) cynicism

  

  What’s below is written by a guy called Donald Miller.

  If I’ve a primal sin, it’s cynicism. I don’t normally make fun of people (I got too much of that in elementary school and am sensitive to it) but man do I roll my eyes a lot. I roll my eyes when things get mushy. Every girlfriend I’ve ever had has, at one time or another, become frustrated when I started making jokes as the conversation became too intimate. I’m only thankful the jokes were actually funny (if you laugh, you can’t also be angry, right?) Ultimately, this sort of thing is childish (which is sometimes fun, though) and I have to learn when certain moments require me to grow up.

  And lately I’ve realized cynicism stunts your growth. There aren’t many great leaders who are cynics, at least not publicly. Leaders have to believe in something, and cynics are too cool to believe. Leaders have to create community, they have to work with their enemies, they have to love and be committed to people, they have to convince people of their ideas, and cynicism doesn’t contribute well to any of this.

  I’ve started a little list of the true reasons I am cynical, but I could use some help. What are some reasons you find yourself giving to cynicism?

  1. Its my way of setting low expectations, protecting myself from being let down.

  2. I’m jealous of somebody, so I’m cynical about their success.

  3. I’m distrustful of somebody’s motives.

  4. I’m not wanting to follow through on the responsibility that sincerity creates.

  5. I don’t believe somebody could really like or love me, so I let them know in advance I don’t care. (I do this because I actually care.)

  Sometimes, changing behavior simply involves understanding why we do what we do. What this means is that, when I’m cynical, I just need to understand why, then move on, not really trying to change, but allowing the seeds of understanding to grow.

• →

  Dogs

  

  Jon Foreman writes about his struggle with cynicism.

  Who is the enemy of our joy, peace and freedom? Most days, my adversary is the feeling that nothing will change. That helpless feeling that humanity is spinning out of control. I fight the notion that nothing I do will ever make any difference, that love will never be able to make a dent against the horrors of hate, that my life is insignificant, that faith, peace and love have no chance against the forces of violence, hatred and brutality among us.

  Cynicism can be prevalent in people who want to look for the good in life, but everywhere they turn hate seems to win out over love; darkness over light and bitterness over good.

  If one looks for good in life but so often finds it eclipsed, cynicism is an easy and comforting place to reside. It requires nothing, it expects nothing and is incredibly easy. But

  cynicism cannot save us. I know this first hand. Yes, it might offer us a temporary insulation from the pain of being alive. But the world that disenchantment offers us is closer to the grave than we might have thought. Dull and gray and tasteless — the tomb of the cynic is built while he is still alive.

  There are so many reasons to be cynical but equally there are so many not to. I wonder if the reason we love watching hero films is because they help us to believe that goodness can triumph over darkness and bland mediocrity.

  Maybe inspiring stories help us to believe that despite the pain and suffering that life inevitably brings, that situations and people can change.

  The London marathon goes past the end of my road so I went out with some friends to cheer people on. Seeing people running for a cause that has affected them (usually the death of someone they loved) makes me (nearly) cry every time. There is something noble, heroic and fully human about it, but it also shows that goodness can come out of terrible situations and that hope seems to endure despite people going through gehenna. Jon Foreman concludes by saying

  Yes, this planet is wrought with horrors and pain and heartache, but there is beauty still.

  And whilst there is beauty there is hope. Hope that we can change and hope that the world can change.

• 2010-06-02

  Turner

  

  For a long time, I’ve loved Turner’s painting The Fighting Temeraire, but could never quite figure out why. Turner’s paintings are, as the philosopher Edmund Burke put, supposed to ‘stun the soul’. One critic wrote of one of his paintings 

  the moral and physical elements are…blended by a most masterly hand, awakening emotions of awe and grandeur.

  Turner’s paintings explore the vastness of nature and the awe that comes when you are surrounded by mountains, the ocean or the sun setting. The well known source of art criticism, Wikipedia says:

  Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability amid the ‘sublime’ nature of the world on the other hand. ‘Sublime’ here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God….Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena.

  Turner’s paintings are a striving to depict something more than the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment would permit. It’s debated whether Turner had a religious view of the world, but he attempetd to demonstrate that there was more to the human experience than that permitted by a purely empirical view of the world. His chosen vehicle for that and way of expressing that there must be something ‘more’ was the bigness, beauty and savagery of nature.

  There is a poem in the Hebrew scriptures which says

  The heavens declare the glory of God;
         the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

  Day after day they pour forth speech;
         night after night they display knowledge.

  Which seems to be saying that nature is oriented towards God. That there is something untainted and unspoiled about the natural world. That it points in its vastness and in the awe that it inspires to something beyond itself. That it has a power to bequeath beyond its physicality. That nature itself can stun the soul.

  Maybe this is why I like The Fighting Temeraire. Because it has the ability to move the soul, to say that reality is made up of more than mere physicality. The sun setting over water is always medicinal and it is incredibly beautifully depicted in the painting. Turner was obsessed with light and saw it as the expression of spiritual things in an otherwise drab universe. So maybe sunlight depicts goodness breaking into our world and that true spirituality is close by…

  Or maybe because it depicts a ship used in the Battle of Trafalgar when we well and truly kicked some French arse and the World Cup is nearly upon us and the French cheated to get there…

• 2010-05-28

  The forms and Michael Vaughan

  

  Plato’s theory of forms asserts that the most fundamental kind of reality is not found in the material, sensory world, but in the abstract, non material but very real world of the forms. To Plato, there is a perfect form for every object or quality in reality; there is a perfect form of an apple, a square, a badger, a pass in football, a spoon, mountains, beauty, love and madness.

  The world that we inhabit is a corruption of the ideal forms of things; we see the shadow and reflection rather than the true form. The issue for humans is to understand the forms and try and mimic them in the temporal, spatial world they inhabit.

  Plato surmises his argument in the cave allegory in The Republic, of which a good summary, involving plasticine men, can be seen here.

  If there is an ideal form of everything that we know (mountains, love, bears, trees) then some things will be closer to the ideal form than others. Watching any football team coached by Sam Allardyce is far, far away from the ideal form of movement, rhythm, timing and good football. Ed Balls would not even be approaching the foothills of the ideal form of the mountain of basic civility. Basildon would be the dreggs at the bottom of the ideal form pint glass.

  Anyway, this is a long winded way of me being able to show the following two clips. These are the very essence of the temporal world mimicing the atemporal ideal form. This is as close as humanity will ever get to the ideals of timing, movement and rhythm. A signpost in the direction that there may be something more.

  Or just the best pass you will ever see and the pinnacle of timing on a cricket pitch.

• 2010-05-27

  Plato and Jose Mourinho

  

  In The Republic, Plato articulates his vision of a right, just and ordered society. Every person plays a defined role, which they are not expected to deviate from; through this the politeia (the city state) would flourish and so, as a consequence, would each individual person.

  Watching the Champions League final on Saturday night, it is possible to see the influence of Plato on the teams that Jose Mourinho coaches.

  Mourinho’s teams have a rigid and set structure. The whole is more important than the individual; Wesley Sneijder is their only instinctively creative player. Even Milito who scored both goals in the final fits well into Inter’s style of cold, calculated, ruthless attack; unlike many strikers who think the team (and possibly the world) revolves around them, he is merely part of an (incredibly effective) organism.

  In the semi final second leg against Barcelona, Inter played the entire second half with ten men and only conceded a goal with fewer than ten minutes to go. They played with a band of four in defence, a band of four in midfield and one striker, with rarely more than 20 metres between centre back and centre forward. It was a victory for Platonic order; of everyone playing a defined role, subjugating their own individual freedom and desire to the greater good of the polis team. Maybe it isn’t a surprise that this style of football flourishes in a country from where the term fascista originated, and Mussolini once ruled.

  Next stop for Mourinho is Madrid, another historic centre of European fascism. It is more difficult to see Ronaldo viewing himself as a simple part in a bigger organism. One Real Madrid match report from this season started

  Cristiano was not just Cristiano but the whole of Christianity

  and another Madrid supporting newspaper proclaiming

  God came disguised as CR9.

  Sid Lowe put it well in the Guardian, saying that it was a bloody good disguise. Perhaps to best understand Jose Mourinho’s view of himself it is worth returning to classical Greek philosophy and Plato’s teacher and mentor, Socrates. He said of himself:

  Apollo did not compare me to a god, he did, however, judge that I far excelled the rest of mankind.

  How much Mourinho may be judged to exceed the rest of (managerial) mankind will be down to how he can make Madrid’s merry band of galacticos view the big picture; if he can do that he can reasonably lay claim to being a philosopher king.

• 2010-05-21

  Mozart

  

  There is a scene in the Shawshank Redemption where Andy Dufresne, an inmate at Shawshank Prison, broadcasts a song from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro to the entire prison. His friend ‘Red’ (played by Morgan Freeman) describes what happened:

  I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are better left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was as if some beautiful bird had flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

  To Red, the words being sung are almost inconsequential; it is the music in its totality that makes it beautiful and somehow manages to surpass the rational faculties to effect the soul directly. The music points beyond itself to a beauty that ‘cannot be expressed in words’ that makes the heart ache. Which does somewhat lead to the questions - what is that beauty, where does it come from and why do we experience it?

  Music here, brings hope and a sense of freedom and liberation. The beauty of the music is partly judged in its effect; it made people feel free, that the prison was an inconvenient truth rather than an ultimate reality. The music brings hope that extends beyond their present situation…

  Music can be a ‘signal of transcendence’, something with the potential to point beyond ‘the grey places’ to allow people to dream and hope of something better. Maybe it is the hoping that produces the aching in the heart…

  You can listen to the song itself here. The seemingly insightful ajitk28 comments on Youtube that it is ‘the antidote to everything that is wrong in the world’.

• 2010-05-14

  Olives

  

  Last year, I was on holiday with friends in the Lake District, eating some green olives. I’m a big fan of green olives and was so enjoying the experience that I said that I thought they were evidence of the Divine. I was met with a stony silence and a slight incredulity, which was to be honest, probably fair enough.

  C.S Lewis was fascinated by the beauty of nature and the beauty of poetry, and being a rarefied sort, I’m sure was fond of the odd olive. He questioned where beauty came from, what it was and why seeing a beautiful sunset, listening to a piece of music, or reading a poem could lead one to feel such longing, verging on the edge of melancholy and even sadness.

  In The Weight of Glory he describes the experience in this way.

  “We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty… The books or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”

  In his novel Till we have faces he puts it more succinctly

  The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

  I wonder if this is why being confronted with beauty or goodness can evoke such strange feelings within. Seeing the sunset over water, or staring at mountains or seeing a mother make costly sacrifices for her children often make me verge on sadness. We sense intuitively that they are scenes or acts of aching rightness, yet is their power in that they point beyond themselves? Are they scents, echoes and news that are not the true reality, but point beyond themselves to the flower, the tune, or the country not visited?

  Is this why green olives affirm that life is good? Do green olives (pitted) point, in all of their goodness, to a deeper, greater reality than our empirical senses sense, but that we intuitively know?