C.H. Spurgeon quote

Extract from Spurgeon's commentary on Job 36: 2: "I have yet to speak on God's behalf' (or 'there is more to be said on God's behalf'). Very good for those of us who are "of a nervous temperament and of retiring disposition" (bless!) and, for everyone, a reminder that the personal relationship we have with God through Christ in the power of the Spirit is only one facet of a Good News of the Kingdom that is also communal, universal and eternal.

"A Christian is not to be a village in a valley, but 'a city set upon a hill'; he is not to be a candle under a bushel, but a candle in a candlestick, giving light to all. Retirement may be lovely in its season, and to hide one's self is doubtless modest, but the hiding of Christ in us can never be justified, and the keeping back of truth which is precious to ourselves is a sin against others and an offence against God. If you are of a nervous temperament and of retiring disposition, take care that you do not too much endulge this trembling propensity, lest you should be useless to the church."

Slouchy Betty

When grunge and heroin chic became fashionable in the 1990s fashion ceased to be interesting. Who were these clothes meant for? What was meant to be appealing about the slouching posture with which they were advertised? Now Sweaty Betty, the sportswear company aimed exclusively at women, are at it too. They used to feature models who had some posture, on the whole, and looked like they could be sporty, or else models who were genuine ballet dancers or yoga practitioners - as it's impossible to fake those activities. Their current campaign poster features a woman who looks like she couldn't lift a plate of peas. And if, despite appearances, she is athletic, then why style her so hideously?

The all-consuming self

Leisurely browsing the magazine racks of our local Waitrose yesterday, disposable cup of free capuccino in hand, my attention was caught by a National Geographic Special Issue on "The Shifting Landscape of Gender" entitled "Gender Revolution". The cover showed a group of young people where each person was arrayed in painstakingly chosen indie chic and ink, and each labelled with their preferred gender indentity. These young people are cool, the cover implies, they are the future: get used to it. In the tier behind this Special Issue was a "Special Publication" issue, also from National Geographic, with the title: "Jesus and the Origins of Christianity". That cover was an artist's rendition of the trial of Jesus ("Ecce Homo" by Antonio Ciseri), with the Saviour mournfully looking down and away from the baying crowd below as Pilate gesticulates towards them, those pesky Jews, asking what what to do with The Man. The unambiguous answer, as we know from elsewhere, was 'Crucify Him!'. Thus, two unrelated National Geographic covers, displayed at Headington Waitrose,  encapsulate the current state of the West. Jesus, the only sure proof against the ragings of the unchecked self, is now the only 'Other' the West does not want to know. We Westerners are now those pesky Jews yelling 'get rid of Him!'. Every other 'Other' is good and welcome, so long as it (or whatever pronoun) can shore up the self in the illusion of its own goodness. The true Other, who takes you out of your self and highlights every single flaw in your self, can go back to where He came from, thank you very much: over there, in that battle-hardened parcel of land called Israel. And frankly, He can disappear from there or thereabouts too. The origins of Christianity, and Christians, are being eliminated from the lands surrounding Israel and possibly now in Israel, and the West could care less. The irony of these juxtaposed magazines in the midst of supermarket consummables - including the disposable cup and the 'free' coffee - is that it shows up the current crop of 'rights' as fundamentally consumer-driven. Once you go beyond obvious, scientifically provable characteristics such as race and sex (i.e. male or female), everything becomes 'I want' rather than 'I am'. Gay marriage wants to consume the accoutrements of traditional marriage; transgender wants to consume the stuff aimed at the opposite sex; the make-it-up-as-you-go-along 'gender revolution' wants to pick and choose from everything and anything like there's no tomorrow. This is all behaviour, not fact (unlike race and sex). Now, 'to consume' might sound like a benign thing to do, but at root it isn't. Consumption involves destruction, is by definition destruction. Trees were destroyed to print those magazines. Fuel was burned up to deliver them, for example. That's fine, the world is a big place. Resources can be managed. The problem with 'I want' behaviour rights is that they consume society itself. In order to elevate the consumer choice of the individual to such nonsensical depths of nature, science and language as choosing your own gender identity, institutions must be laid low. Law, public order, Church, marriage, a consensus of morality - including the notion that childhood innocence is worth protecting, even a consensus on reality itself: all must feed this 'revolution'. Bizarrely, many of the institutions go along with this (like National Geographic). Or, like law, Church etc, they actively seek their own immolation out of misplaced excitement at what appears new and therefore, it is assumed, better. So what we have are right-on people who would be outraged at the destruction of a far-away habitat rejoicing in the destruction of the social and cultural habitat that made their own lives possible. Here is Merriam-Webster's entry on the verb 'to consume':

Synonyms

devour, eat (up)

Antonyms

renew, replace

Related Words

gut; deplete, drain, exhaust, expend, spend, use up; annihilate, decimate, demolish, desolate, devastate, do in, pulverize, raze, ruin, shatter, smash, tear down, waste, wreck; annihilate, blot out, eradicate, exterminate, extinguish, extirpate, obliterate, remove, rub out, stamp (out), wipe out

Near Antonyms

conserve, preserve, protect, save; build, construct, erect, put up, raise

Those Synonyms and Related Words are fearsome because they testify to the harsh reality of living in the Fallen world, the world as we know it. On the other hand, the "Antonyms" and "Near Antonyms" listed here testify to all the work that needs to be done - daily, consistently, gratefully - in order to offset the one-way direction of destruction. And those are beautiful words. The aggressive colonisation of daily life by made-up 'rights' requires there to be no tomorrow. Consumer identity gone rogue prevents the possibility of sufficient renewal and replacement to hand on a sane and healthy environment to our children. My browsing episode yesterday (much briefer than this post suggests) was capped by an unassuming publication lurking at the end of the magazine rack: the Dec 2016/Jan 2017 issue of something called "BBC World Histories". Its cover story: "Has the tide of history turned against the west?" Time will tell whether it has. Meanwhile, to change metaphors, there is a terrible concerted effort in throwing the West overboard.

Favourite videos so far

On this Feast day of Epiphany, the end of the Season of Christmas, here are my favourite clips bridging 2016 and 2017:

The Queen's Christmas day message https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zscqxgDc9f8.

Jordan B. Peterson's "A New Year's letter to the world" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnEFt20qe0o.

Nabeel Qureshi's ongoing vlogs about his life, his faith, and praying to be healed of advanced cancer https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCepxnLs6GWAxAyI8m2U9s7A.

Woman of faith, secular martyr, saint: awesome, all of them. 

Doggy politics

Since acquiring a Labrador puppy two and half months ago I've had more delightful encounters with fellow dog owners than I can count. Today there were bad encounters. The setting was Shotover Country Park, which could be described without fear of cliché as an oasis of nature in Oxford. It's a frequent destination because we live close by, at the moment, and because it's a perfect dog walking place. Because the puppy (Dora) is still so young we tend to hover around the meadow at the top of Shotover, hoping to meet other other dogs for a bit of playtime before heading back home. Dora  is utterly sociable. She hasn't met any person or dog yet that she doesn't get on with. Today, as daylight was ending in a pretty sunset awash in pink, we came across a small group of three people and two dogs. They turned out to be a woman with a rescued Saluki cross (whom I'd met once before, in pre-puppy days) and a gay couple with a young Whippet. They had  just met too. The dogs got along, the owners got along. All was well until an un-neutered  male Staffie came up one of the hills to the meadow, his owner(s) still invisble. Dora and this Staffie were fine. The Saluki cross not so much: he'd been attacked by a black dog before and as the Staffie was a very dark brindle he took against him and had a go at him. Then the Staffie had a go at the Whippet - so much so that one of its owners had to scoop him up in his arms. The Staffie then started jumping to get at the Whippet, several times, while the Whippet's owners and the other lady tried to deter the Staffie. When things got progressively hairier, I also intervened and shouted down the Staffie's barking, interposing myself between him and the Whippet. It was then that the people accompanying the Staffie finally came into view. The owner appeared to be a young woman. The man holding the Whippet shouted at her - quite aggressively - to keep her dog under control. His tone was not good, needlessly confrontational, as no actual harm had been done. And really it was the Saluki cross who had misbehaved first. The Whippet owner continued making this demand, however. The young woman was coming towards us, as full of attitude as he was full of indignation. His 'de haut en bas' tone made me cringe, but I couldn't suddenly turn against him, and could only hope the young woman would not rise to the bait. At first she just repeated 'it's Shotover,' i.e. her dog had every right to be off the lead. Then, sadly, she did rise to the bait. All sorts of prejudices came pouring out of her, too many to detail here. But, in brief, not only did she dismiss the fact of her Staffie having a go at the Whippet as our 'opinion', she lumped us together - disconnected people, who had only just met  - as upper-class Staffie haters who basically thought they owned the world. True, we were mostly middle-aged, all pale skinned and probably more educated than not. But by virtue of her being young and darker skinned and less educated, she seemed to reason that she herself had every right to assume anything she liked about us, as group or as individuals, and still maintain that we were in the wrong for obviously - to her mind - having prejudices against her and her dog. Now, I like Staffies, and considered getting one. They are lovely with people but maybe not so reliable with other animals, which is why in the end I decided against the breed for the sake of our 13 year-old cat. To be labelled as prejudiced against them was bewildering. And 'upper-class'?? Nowhere near. 'You know nothing about me,' I eventually said to her, 'why are you so prejudiced?' Of course she denied being prejudiced. And still she clung to her sense that it was ok for her to denigrate all of us. And so the peacefulness of Shotover was temporarily shattered.  What I assumed was the unspoken agreement amongst dog owners that class distinctions do not come on walkies was also proved wrong, in this instance. I really wanted to reach out to this young woman. I wanted her to understand she was not under attack (except for the over-excitable holder of the Whippet). But the fierceness of her own sense of entitlement - as someone sinned against - seemed implacable. The only thing I can hope for, now it's all over, is that turning the 'prejudiced' charge against her will have been enough of a novelty to make her think about it a little. How to explain to someone of such entrenched opinion the subtleties of what was actually happening? If only it had been possible to convey to her that the next challenge on this tumultuous outing on Shotover, almost immediately afterwards, was an interesting contrast: the arrival of a pack of seven Italian Spinones, a Pointer and an Irish Setter. These dogs were all allowed to poo everywhere by their owner, a possibly 'upper class' lady walking with a stick, who was too frail, old and slow to deal with one of these big dogs, let alone with nine of them but refused to see it. According to the Saluki lady, who'd often encountered this group before, trying to tell the old lady to pick up after her dogs was a lost cause. Those were bad dog-walking manners too, in fact arguably much worse.Yet, beyond the unfortunate doggy politics,  these two incidents now linger in my mind as lost opportunities for a more meaningful contact between owners. Clearly, both the young woman and the old lady had deeply emotional reasons for having their respective dogs. What stories were there? And indeed, what about us middling-class owners? Maybe next time.

Mark Forsyth, "A Christmas Cornucopia"

An ideal Christmas present for anyone who likes words, humour, history, learning about Christmas traditions  and making sense of life generally. Also excellent as a gift to self, as I can attest. Mark Forsyth is at his genial best, in the same style as previous books The Etymologicon, The Horologicon and The Elements of Eloquence, but here on a specific topic as opposed to a theme. A Christmas Cornucopia is an easy-to-read and entertaining book, steeped through with erudition and wit like a good sozzled pudding, right down to the Glossary, Bibliography and Acknowledgements (if you read those, as some of us do). To be nit-picky, because I am, allow me to point out the following quirks: there is a typo on the back cover (28 March, instead of 25 March); Forsyth surprisingly uses the trendy verb 'double down', which jars a bit; and he mis-pronouns the Holy Spirit as 'it' instead of 'He'. (I'm assuming 'mis-pronouns' is already a legitimate verb, the better to criminalise us with, in secular society, though of course not on this blog.) Having got that out of my system I warmly recommend this writer, at all times, and this particular book at this particular time. It is a bulwark against the ways in which 'Santa snowballs.' (an actual sentence in the book) while its several intriguing references to 'truth', or even 'Truth', subtly point to deeper realities. Go buy!

A mercy for Hillary and for the country

When Hillary Clinton finally delivered her concession speech she was at her best. Though dressed for the circumstance in funereal black and purple, she was calm and poised, she spoke graciously and sensibly. If she'd spoken like this during the campaign, who knows how different the result could have been? But I don't think she could have spoken like this during the campaign - or at any time during her long and persistent political career. The reason she came across so well, I believe, is precisely because she was conceding defeat. Her presidential ambitions, nurtured through decades of scheming and revearsals, had at last come to nought. There was no longer an agenda; no calculation behind the eyes, no lying, no tightly reined in fury, no shouting and screeching when the fury got the bit in its teeth, no malevolent sense of entitlement. There was only her, and she seemed like a perfectly nice lady. On that showing, the death of her ambitions was the best thing that could have happened to her as a person. If she'd conducted all of her life without a consuming political ideology, who knows how much genuine good she could have accomplished? She could might even have baked the odd batch of cookies, with a love and generosity. Defeat in 2016 also spares Hillary the physical rigours of the Presidency. She has rallied commendably since her ailments culminated in a September collapse but it is difficult to see how she could have weathered four years of a job that would make the intensity of the campaign trail pale in comparison. Where the country is concerned, it is a mercy Mrs Clinton was not elected on the basis of her being woman. This was the ever more strident demand from her and from her celebrity supporters: to elect her because she's a woman. And this is where the old Hillary peeped through in the concession speech, when she addressed little girls specifically, and pushed the limitless ambition thing on them yet again. It was cringe-making partiality and a reprehensible focus on 'gender' (or sex as it used to be called more accurately). If the tenure of the First Black President has resulted in hugely increased, not decreased, racial antagonism then a First Woman President, elected simply for being a woman, could easily have led to more, not less, gender obsession. Better to elect a woman President when the right one comes along, one who is right because of every other consideration apart from her sex.