Kim’s last doodlings

by Kim Fabricius, 1948-2018

Kim’s family sent me through his final batch of doodlings, posted posthumously here. (Kim, your last doodling is incorrect. But I won’t hold it against you.)

Two keys to self-knowledge: acknowledging that you are ashamed of yourself, and being able to make fun of yourself.

The superficial explanation for why some people don’t like tragedy is that it’s depressing; the deeper reason is that in tragedy there is no one to blame.

Most people couldn’t care less about why bad things happen to good people, they are only concerned with why bad things happen to me. Like Job, they think they’re the centre of the universe: theodicy reduced to cosmic egotism.

Title for a book on the doctrine of election in Calvin and Barth: Will and Grace.

The term “speaking in tongues” always makes me smile: it’s the irrepressible suggestion of oral sex.

The root of all misogyny (Girardianly speaking) is boys showing off.

“Don’t tell lies.” But the most insidious mendacity is mute.

Bible verse on a plaque in the birthing unit of a maternity ward: “Jesus said, ‘Come to me all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you an epidural.”

In Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, the sage and shrewd Dr Oreshchenkov observes that “it’s the truest of all tests for a doctor to suffer from the disease he specializes in.” So too for the clergy. A self-righteous minister is bad, a righteous minister worse.

Evangelical Americans: so understandably concerned about whether an unborn child has feelings, so indefensibly indifferent that a grown-up child – their president – doesn’t.

Combining funny-peculiar and funny-ha-ha, the Church of England seems to think that the Divine Comedy is a Punch and Judy pantomime.

Augustine is said to have remarked, “The Church is a whore, but she’s my mother.” Well, better a whore than a harridan.

On Luke 10:25-37: In order to be a good Samaritan, one must first become a half-dead Jew: lest you succumb to pride, he is your focal identification. 

“The widow? Easy pussy – go for it. The orphan? Little shits of color – normalize motherlessness (Herod, btw, was a classy guy, smart, tough). And the stranger? Keep the vermin out; otherwise, concentration camps.” —Trump’s exegesis of  Exodus 22:22-24 and Deuteronomy 10:18.

“Make America Great Again.” Again? Better make America British again. 

Having an American accent abroad during Trump’s Reign of Terror is like having a tattoo you had done when you were young and stupid but is now impossible to remove. The best you can do is to cover it up, e.g., by insisting, “No, I’m a Canadian.”

When The Complete Tweets of Donald Trump is published, in what section of American bookstores should it squat? Juvenile Fiction? Fantasy? Women’s Studies? Performing Arts? For cultural accuracy, I’d go for “Christianity.”

Death kills, but not for the hell of it. No, for death omnicide is an anti-ontological vocation: Deleo, ergo sum.

Since Cain slew Abel, you could call every homicide a copycat crime.

Christus solus, ergo Islamophilia.

My default facial expression in coffee houses has become the Smirk. Observing the washed having a flat white as a side with their iPhones – uninvited it floods my features. It’s only a matter of time (you’ll be pleased to know) before someone punches me in the face.

One of the pathologies of senescence is verbosity. You can still take off and cruise, but you can’t land the damn plane. You even forget that you are in the air – until you run out of fuel and crash.

“What do people think of me?” The question is both begged and vain: very few people bother to think about me at all. Why would they?

Dicey doodlings

 You think you know someone, but of course you don’t know them too. What might you not know about Jesus of Nazareth?

It is not the gift- and skill-sets – the intelligence and imagination, the range of reading, the elegance and wit – that separate the great theologian from the good one. The difference lies not in the brilliance but the defects. It takes a magnificent flaw to make a great theologian.

Ask me who I am and I will tell you my story. The genre, of course, is fiction.

Am I my own best interpreter? What a dumb and diabolical notion. Only God can truly interpret me, which he will do definitively on Judgement Day – deploying, I am confident, post-kritical theory.

What was the takeaway message for the great and the good after listening to that sermon at the royal wedding? The gospel according to John and Paul: “All you need is love (all together now) / All you need is love (everybody) / All you need is love, love / Love is all you need”. An uncomfortable reminder that what a preacher says and what a congregation hears may be two very different things.

A newspaper headline I quite like: “Kim’s a Seoul Man”.

BBC Breaking News (May 22nd): “Brief [Michael Cohen?] to moon Trump on handling Kim”. Oops, sorry: that should be “Moon to Brief Trump on handling Kim”.

Trump’s annotation of Titus 3:2 in his bedside Bible: “Against everything our country stands for. Most over-rated apostle in history. A total loser. Very sad.”

Might Trump win the Nobel Peace Prize? Why not? Though ISIS will present some stiff competition. North Korea, Iran, Israel/Palestine: better the Orwell Peace Prize.

Information is power. Alas, so too is misinformation.

God and I have an admirable arrangement: I need someone to love me and God wants someone to love. We’re the perfect odd couple.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor.” “Absolutely,” agreed the first four disciples: “you cannot worship both Cod and Mammon.”

Following the trajectory, expect praise music to trend as liturgical karaoke.

Revenge is a dish best served with either apomorphine or xylazine.

What’s the difference between parental abuse and neglect? The difference, respectively, between knowing and not knowing whether your children are spending most of their free time on-line.

AI may be the future but another AI is already an everyday reality. I mean Artificial Imbecility: you see it in people whose iPhone is a prosthesis.

Everything passes; nothing lasts. But there are some moments – you know those moments, all but forgotten but suddenly adventitiously triggered – that are with you all your life. Unless you stop and take a picture of them with your goddamn iPhone.

Why do I write – doodlings, propositions, sermons, hymns, whatever? Answer: authorial itch. Of course scratching only makes the pruritus worse, and can lead to all kinds of existential and spiritual lesions.

Waiters – even if the service is terrible, always be kind to them. Not because of WWJD, but because you don’t want your entrée heavily seasoned with gob.

That life can unravel so quickly, uncontrollably, and irreparably – that is the tragic. And faith? Faith does not alleviate, on the contrary, it intensifies tragic affliction. Over the abyss, faith hangs by the thread of hope alone.

The Christian is indeed simul iustus et peccator. He is also simul laetus et miser.

I may or may not be a “real Christian”, but a Christian who tells me I’m not is definitely not.

Who, in Adam, is more likely to understand me better than anyone else? My mother or father, sister or brother, spouse, partner, friend – or perhaps my enemy? No, someone who does not know me: a great novelist.

The best that I can say about me is that I am a placeholder for what I will become.

What is the basis of both Christian ethics and vocation? “What can I do for you?” (Bob Dylan).

Delphic doodlings

Breaking News: “Hell abolishes pope” (source: John Piper).

Their Lord was a loser, his ministry a failure, his death a shambles, so just what did Christians expect when pastors became celebrities?

Peter’s advice to Christians who would boast about their faith: “Cock-a-doodle-doo!”

If it could be demonstrated that God does not exist, I would, of course, become an atheist. And if it could be demonstrated that God does exist, I would, of course, become an atheist.

“It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” But hey, why not do both?

There is nothing so uninteresting as certainty. Hence our puzzling preoccupation with the most certain thing of all, and therefore the ultimate in boring: death.

The problem with many sermons is that they continue after they conclude.

Good “spiritual directors” aren’t. They are spiritual indirectors.

(After Augustine) If you understand prayer, it’s not prayer you understand. Also: you will never pray if you try, you will only pray if you pray, but you will never know whether or not you have prayed.

So studies show that prayer is good for you. It makes you healthier, happier, more stable. Well, if it’s so beneficial, the hell with it!

Thank God for sorrow. Without sorrow, we would all be such insufferable pricks.

The NRA has more congregants than Episcopalians and not many less than Lutherans and Methodists. Well, Jesus did say, “On LaPierre I will build my church.”

According to a recent poll, the historical event of which the British are proudest is the creation of the NHS (1948), with standing alone against the Nazis (1940) coming a distant second (68%-49%). Imagine that, my fellow Americans. No, I didn’t think you could.

A good teacher is not someone who can give a good answer but someone who can detect a bad question.

Ironic at least, tragic at worst, our neighbour is more likely to be our enemy than the stranger we so fear.

It’s not rocket psychology: we are afraid of strangers because we are afraid of ourselves, my inner others who are split, repressed, denied, or, less pathologically, simply fugitive, obscure, opaque. Xenophobia is misdirected egophobia.

If you want to catch the essence of humanity, observe the faces of the sleeping. We look like imbeciles, don’t we? Or, better still, passport photos. Serial killers, right?

While physicists frantically search for a Theory of Everything, Christians blithely explore a Theory of Everyone: it’s called Christology.

Jeez, the way some Christians are responding to life in a post-Christian culture you’d think that Chicken Licken was a prophet and whinging and sulking fruits of the Spirit.

I’m thinking of taking the Benedict Option. Benedict Arnold, that is. Under the current administration treason seems a conscientious calling.

Why can’t I get my head around Trump, why can’t I feel him? Wittgenstein is helpful. He said, “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.” Well, the same goes for a hyena. Similarly, Thomas Nagel asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” So of a different life-form we might ask, “What is it like to be The Donald?”

Trumpvangelicals – aka Christian Nihilists.

In the Age of Twitter, Warhol’s “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” has become “everyone will be fatuous in 140 characters.”

Back in the day, I moved in a circle of junkies. I still do, but the addiction du jour is now Facebook, a drug equally toxic, harder to kick, and easier to justify.

To update E. M. Forster’s sigh: “poor little key-pad tapping Christianity”.

Dinky doodlings

I’ve never had an original thought in my life – including the thought that I’ve never had an original thought in my life.

Do you ever feel that something is missing from your life? If you do, you are.

“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Well, Gramsci was half right.

“From dust you came, and to dust you shall return.” Stardust, actually.

Lent launches an assault against disordered desire through fasting and prayer: in fasting you pray with your body, in praying you fast with your mind.

Apart from the Bible, theological reflection is propaganda, and apart from theological reflection, the Bible is propaganda.

In criminal law there is GBH, the equivalent of which in theological polemics is DBH (i.e., David Bentley Hart).

What are Charlie Craig and David Mullins doing in the Masterpiece Cakeshop Case? Speaking truth to flour.

As the recent service featuring Andy Savage at Highpoint Church confirms, there is nothing like praise music du jour as an aperitif for the junk food that follows.

I hear that the Vatican is now marketing Donald Trump tee shirts for his fan base. Emblazoned on the front is a picture of the president, encircled by a Latin translation of “Make America Great Again”: Populus Americae Vult Decipi, Ergo Decipiatur.

Imagine Trump with his circle of family and friends worked into a novel by Jane Austen. It would make all his critics’ diatribes look like encomia.

American exceptionalism: some nations may be shitholes, but they are bog-standard shitholes; only the United States is (to re-coin Madeleine Albright’s famous phrase) “the indispensable shithole”.

In an interview at Religion Dispatches, Professor Russell Jeung opines that “the white evangelical church is dead.” “Dead”? Worse than dead: undead.

What has caused the demise of the white evangelical church in the US? The classic hubristic military miscalculation of opening a second front: to their perennial asinine atonement wars, they started a series of mephitic culture wars.

Prayer is not just an inherently political activity, it is an act of resistance and protest. To pray “Thy Kingdom come” on a hassock is truly to take-the-knee.

Who are America’s greatest comic writers? “Self-Reliance” alone puts Ralph Emerson right up there.

There is a word for someone who has been argued into faith: sucker. Because (a) he doubtlessly has failed to detect some rather poor apologetic reasoning, and (b) because even if he hasn’t, whatever he has been argued into, it isn’t faith.

“If we have to use a single word here, it would have to be ‘concreteness’ – their world is vivid, intense, detailed, yet simple, precisely because it is concrete: neither complicated, diluted, nor unified, by abstraction.” That’s Oliver Sacks (in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) describing the world of the “retardate”. Of clinical interest, it is also a perfect fit for Jesus the Идио́т (Idiot) (Dostoevsky).

If you read without a dictionary to hand you insult the author; if you write without a thesaurus at hand you insult yourself. Not to mention you’re a lazy bastard.

Not talking is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being silent; in addition you need the act of humility called listening.

The worst thing about retirement is not that you are no longer necessary, it is the realisation that you never were. And the best thing about retirement? The same as the worst.

I look at my grandchildren, 5 and 2, and of course I want them to be happy, but not too happy and not only happy. I pray also for a seasoning of anger and a soupçon of anguish.

Pity the devil: the loveless bastard is scared to death.

Life makes one promise, and keeps it: Death. God also makes one promise, and keeps it: Jesus.

Pitiable is the person who approaches death saying, “I have had enough”, but blessed is the person who approaches death saying, “I want nothing more.”

Dingo doodlings

“What is the chief end of man? To glorify Gold and enjoy it whatever.” (Westchester Shorter Catechism)

So the Pope nods off while praying? No, the Pope prays while nodding off.

Title for a sermon on Galatians 3:27: “The Man Who Took His Christ for a Hat”.

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” Poor Monsieur Pascal: he had a tin ear for star song and galactic symphonies.

Before I ask a minister whom I don’t know what theologians he reads, I ask him what novels he has read. If he reads novels, I go on to poetry. If he doesn’t read novels, I lose interest in the conversation. Then, for my nightly devotions, I pray for those who listen to his sermons and experience his pastoral care.

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Stevens, the English butler, speaks of “that balance between attentiveness and the illusion of absence that is the essence of good waiting.” Ergo good praying too.

A famous paradigm of the pastor is the “wounded healer”. Shouldn’t that be “healing wounder”? Only truth and love can heal, but both begin with the recoil of hurt and pain.

My dear pastor, ask not how many people you have fixed, rather pray that the number you have broken is few.

The progressive will eventually become an embarrassment, but the reactionary will always be an asshole.

Great bumper sticker: “America First? Matthew 20:16!”

“Patriotic” Americans will make any sacrifice except sacrifice itself.

I feel for those for whom “thoughts and prayers” has become either a mindless mantra or a euphemism for “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition”. But don’t despair. Turn to the Psalms. There you will find the integrity of lament, outrage, and imprecation, the perfect obsecrations for the NRA and its lackey politicians.

Good news for American misogynists: it’s now legal to carry a concealed weapon across state lines – in addition, that is, to the one they’re born with.

The problem with all moral arguments for torture is that they are utilitarian. If they were deontological I would have more respect for them. As O’Brien frankly states in 1984, “The object of torture is torture.”

Ah, if only the roads of social and cultural nostalgia led to Eden. They don’t. They converge on a new Nuremburg.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. What was cool yesterday is uncool today, and what is uncool today will be cool tomorrow. Likes, Followers, Trending – puffs of smoke! But suggest that I close my Twitter and Facebook accounts – go chase the wind!

Both the fulsome panegyrics for and fulminating diatribes against the Reformation commit the same just-so story fallacy, treating it as the inception rather than the invention of modernity.

When a snake sheds its skin it does not become a post-snake. So too modernity does not become post-modernity when it modernises, it is simply shedding its skin. Modernity is modernising. In its deep grammar, “modernity” is a gerundive.

On November 8th, 2016, they thought they were walking into a voting booth when actually they were marching to the guillotine. The election of Trump has been the decapitation of White American Evangelicalism, with all the squawking, frenzy, and gore you’d expect from a headless fowl.

With a lifetime of trying, I have never found the truth. Occasionally, however, it has bumped into me – and once He ran me over.

God bumps into us when we’re least expecting it, so why on earth should people go to church anticipating an encounter with God? I always go to church with no expectations whatsoever, and I am usually not disappointed. But then ubi et quando Deo visum est – thunder from a clear blue sky.

Psychology (it seems to me) is a sort of meteorology of the self. Epiphanies or traumas – they’re climate change.

If you think it’s hard to be yourself, try not being yourself.

The older I get, the more I am interested in antiquities. Why is that?

I can just about cope with the aches and indignities of aging. It’s the well-meaning concern of others for them that I can’t handle.

Dastardly Doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

What’s the best way to find God? Set out at night – and go in the opposite direction.

Does God speak to me? It’s a question that I myself have put to the Lord. I never get an answer. The devil, however – he won’t STFU.

A word of advice: if you believe “it’s the thought that counts”, don’t get married.

Don’t you just love the expression “good behaviour”? A euphemism, of course, for “not-getting-caught” behaviour.

We know that we will die, but we figure that in my case an exception might be made.

There is a paradox to writing good sentences, namely, that by cutting out the fat, you add to their weight.

Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father, but who sits on the left? The Holy Spirit, of course. Though he doesn’t actually sit, he perches.

Alternatively: Karl Barth is the Lord’s right-hand man (though Rudolf Bultmann tries to grab the seat when Barth goes for a pee).

J. W. Schopf, an American paleobiologist, claims that “for four-fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pond scum.” A cultural anthropologist, let alone a Calvinist, would beg to differ: make that five-fifths.

“You are who you’ve been.” This truth is universal, but Trump certainly makes a particularly alarming and chastening case study.

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma? What hurricanes? It’s fake weather fabricated by a conspiracy of meteorological elites.

Until recently, during his morning shave Trump would look in the mirror and say, “Handsome devil!” Nowadays, with Robert Mueller and “Sheriff Joe” in mind, he says, “Pardon me.”

As for Trump’s court prophets – Falwell, Graham, Carson, et. al – if Trump makes my skin crawl, they make my blood boil. Their faith is textbook ideology and their churches – well, they’re not churches, they’re movements.

How timely: in The Handmaid’s Tale, Commander Fred Waterford combines in his character the specific misogynies of both Mike Pence and Donald Trump: from the former, that women are for fertilising; from the latter, that women are for fondling.

It is not surprising that Baby Boomer white American evangelical males love war: old men sending young men to kill and die – it expresses, confirms, and globalises their Second Amendment fetishism, their militant androcentrism, and their perverse doctrine of penal substitution.

Did you hear about the evangelical youth club leader who rented a DVD of There Will Be Blood to show to a group of 17-year-olds? She thought it was an educational film about a bride’s wedding night.

Jesus said, “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the Gates of Hell will not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:26). A prophecy Bill is doing his damnedest to falsify.

“No one can become a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle.”—John Milbank. Oops, Stanley Hauerwas. Sorry, I mean Eleutherius.

What conservatives don’t get is the Bible’s unreliable narration; what liberals don’t get is the Bible’s indefectible veracity.

So “Researchers are fairly successfully uncovering an ocean of evidence to suggest that living in the ‘information ecosystem’ of smartphone, internet and social media is seriously detrimental to our mental health and cognitive capacity” (i, 6 September). What does that even mean? Researchers – the wankers are always out to get you.

BREAKING NEWS: A comprehensive examination of the ancient object recently discovered near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem demonstrates that it is not, as some archaeologists have claimed, the spear with which Jesus’ side was pierced (John 19:34): it is, rather, a first century Roman centurion’s selfie stick.

Speaking at the Labour Party Conference, Naomi Klein declaimed, “You know that horrible thing currently clogging up the London sewers. I believe they call it a fatberg [“a congealed lump of fat, sanitary napkins, wet wipes, condoms, and similar items” (Wikipedia)].  Well, Trump, he’s the political equivalent of that.” Thus another political radical goes soft in middle age.

The more I pray, the less I know what praying is – especially (cf. Augustine on time) if you ask me.

Samuel Johnson said that “people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed”, but those were the days when people didn’t suffer from the pathologies of historical amnesia and cultural presentism.

Clearly the best way to prevent mass shootings at concerts is for every concert-goer to be armed with an automatic weapon. Multiple-thousands of guns in a packed arena or stadium are bound to make it a safer place, guaranteeing music-lovers an enjoyable, fear-free evening. Indeed for complete peace of mind – because a massacre might be launched from, say, an upper floor in a hotel across the street – concert-goers should consider renting mortars or bazookas, or even portable surface-to-air missile launchers lest the killer deploy a drone – all available from on-site kiosks provided by your friendly local NRA. As President Trump comforted the families and friends of the dead and wounded in Las Vegas, “We are here for you.”

DDD (Doodlings Deficit Disorder)

Gadzooks! It’s the 4th of July,
when we boast we’re the gens Domini,
and with napalm and nukes
and a “Put up your dukes!”
we give thanks to the Lord of the Flies.

Thank God for small mercies. Large, and even medium, are out of stock.

The natural state of the human is the inhuman. Even to begin to become human takes time and practice – lots and lots of practice.

How do you begin to change the world for the better? By having no such ambition whatsoever.

Looking for a church? Narrow the field: check if it has a Mission Statement.

I’ve just read Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option. It’s not bad for a first draft.

Write, write, write! You don’t need readers to write. Readers, however, do need writers to read.

Not long ago the “church in exile” was a heuristic with potential for exploring post-Christian ecclesiology. Alas, ignoring the critical element of judgment in Israel’s self-understanding of Babylonian captivity, contemporary Christians have reacted to their loss of status and privilege with bitter resentment and whinging self-pity. [Muffled sound of Jeremiah rolling in his grave.]

Don’t worry if your prayers are interrupted by dreams. It is sufficient that your dreams are interrupted by prayers.

My dear pastor, what if your congregation agrees with everything you say? Then you’re not doing it right.

I hear that progressive Christians are having a heated conversation about whether the Creeds should contain a trigger warning for left-handed people.

“Let you word be ‘Yes, Yes’, or ‘No, No’, or ‘It all depends, It all depends’; anything more than this comes from the evil one” (Matthew 5:37: Jesus, on second thought).

“Sincerity”, “transparency”, “accountability” – bullshit! What are you hiding?

People who are anyone-phobic usually know fuck-all about the anyone.

Why do I love Wittgenstein? Because of the audacity with which he dives headlong into the chaotic depths of mind and soul, the tenacity with which he excavates nuggets of incandescent clarity, and the posture at once humble, disconsolate, and serene with which he bows to the intractably unsayable.

“Every cloud has a silver lining”, an adage that goes back to gloomy Milton’s Comus: “Was I deceiv'd, or did a sable cloud / Turn forth her silver lining on the night?” [ll. 221-222]. The short answer, Comus, is Yes: clouds are sable all the way down.

“Trump” is a good name for a dog. Wherever the President goes, he barks, licks his balls, and pees on the fire hydrants, right?

Who said, “We’re all in this together”? Was it (a) Emperor Nero (to a visiting delegation of Christians at the Colosseum in July 64); (b) the Commander of Abu Ghraib (at a summer fête for the residents in August 2004); (c) David Cameron (to the people of austerity Britain at the Tory Party Conference in October 2009)? Prize: a “May Contain Traces of Bullshit” tee shirt (compliments of Ben Myers).

You gotta hand it to austerity governments for their environmental friendliness: I mean the conscientious way they recycle the red tape they cut from business and industry by sticking it on the forms filled in by desperate benefit claimants.

It is, of course, good to have an interrogative mind. But asking questions is useless if, as often, you don’t really want to know the answers.

Life’s a kitsch. Then you buy.

The name “Starbucks” is a despicable aspersion on the virtuous first mate of the Pequod. Surely the coffee company should be called “Ahabs”: after all, like the ship’s captain, its product is evil.

How about a name for a nursing home that is neither saccharine nor non-descriptive but tells it like it is? For example: The Baby Powder and Urine, The Children’s Revenge, The Not-on-My Bucket List, or (for the more literary), The One Hundred Years of Hebetude, The Unbearable Nightness of Being, The Hamlet Shuffle.

“Any change?” the cadger asked my wife. “The Change?” she replied (her hearing isn’t so good now). “Been there years ago. Now I’ve got The Decay.”

Young, you sing and dance the songs of passion; older, you whistle the tunes and tap your feet.

Downwind Doodlings

Why is God silent? Because the tree of trust has silence for its roots.

God moves in mysterious ways, but he also moves in quite pedestrian ways.  He walks and runs, hops and skips, leaps and jumps, sashays and dances.  But God never, ever marches.

God gave himself into the hands of sinners on the cross, and God gives himself into the hands of sinners in the sacrament.

God makes sense of things. In addition, God makes nonsense of things.

Recent experiments have demonstrated that loud swearing not only boosts strength and stamina but also makes people more able to tolerate pain. Perhaps an unprintable eighth word from the cross has gone missing?

Thank God for Judas, our substitute: without betrayal, no salvation.

I have always assumed that because God forgives us, we should forgive ourselves.  But I am no longer so sure. Perhaps self-forgiveness is not-yet realised eschatology. Perhaps in a broken world, even as forgiven we must live with the affliction of self-accusation.

Christians talk a lot about God’s mercy, but not nearly enough about God’s pity.  Personally, I pray more that God will pity me than that he will have mercy on me, because having his pity, surely I will receive his mercy.

Think of something you could do that would put you beyond the saving grace and love of God.  Then think of a lifetime of futile cogitation.  But I repeat myself.

The problem is as old as Romans 14-15: traditionalists dismissing liberals with condemnation, and liberals treating traditionalists with contempt.  The solution is also the same: Romans 15:7.  Alas, even Paul didn’t practice what he preached.  And the contemporary conservative captivity to nativist populism has hardened the sneer of progressives into a rictus.  My own penitential practice now includes jaw-massage.

What do I think of Christians whose faith is mortally threatened by some terrible personal tragedy? The brutal truth? That they are egocentric and purblind. The pastoral reality? That pivoting off your own faith, you must love them back to hope.

Ministerial education or ministerial training?  Well, you educate people and you train domestic animals and business managers, so in many a modern seminary I guess it’s ministerial training.

Show me a church with a vision statement and I’ll show you a church suffering from cranial decay, linguistic corruption, and ocular degeneration.

The ice water is great, but why do waiters in America always swoop down on your table like hawks on a sparrow to refill your glass sip by sip?  I want to cry, “For Chrissake, just put me on a drip!”

Back in the day there was a rumour that “Kim Fabricius” was but a nom de plume of Ben Myers. Ben and I the same person?  Well, a plausible suggestion only as Jekyll and Hyde. To wit, on identifying with a fictional character, Ben has tweeted that he’d like to be Jayber Crow. Me – I’d settle for Olive Kitteridge.

I hear that a decomposing bat was found in a packet of Walmart’s Organic Marketside Spring Mix Salad.  This is a gargantuan Food Fail.  From Walmart I would expect better: namely, a fresh bat shot dead with one of its own AR-15s, marinated in an orange garlic cockroach dressing.

The wildebeests of Botswana are really pissed off at the editor-in-chief of National Geographic for including a photograph of ungulates of different species in a recent article on one of their herds.  A spokesbeest for their community has said that they will be suing the prestigious magazine for publishing fake gnus.

Waxing sexual attraction may lead to a wedding, but it’s waning sexual attraction that tests whether it will remain a marriage.

Jeez, is prayer boring.  Boring, boring, boring.  Until, just maybe, it isn’t.  Until, again, it is.  And so it goes.

The problem with most memoirs is that they’re about the memoirist.

What is preaching like?  Before I preach, I am scared.  After I preach, I am scared.  And while I preach – I’m preaching.

Pray that you never get used to getting used to stuff that sucks.

I feel sorry for people who approach the end of their lives with no regrets, for without regrets there can be no gratitude either.

Memorial Day is the American way of turning everything Homeric about military service into an ignoble cliché.

At a press conference on his return from the Middle East, asked about Sunni and Shia, President Trump replied, “I loved them.  One of the great pop duos of the sixties.  Sonny was also a great Republican congressman.  Too bad about Cher, a  Hillary supporter – evil, very evil.   But I thought you guys were going to ask me about my incredible trip to the Middle East…”

Duodenal doodling

Nietzsche’s excellent question as to why, if Christians are redeemed, they don’t look redeemed, is more excellently answered by Evelyn Waugh: “Think what I would look like if I were not a Christian.”

Donald Trump has finally revealed his favourite Bible passage. “It’s from the Book of Job,” he told Fox & Friends (pronouncing the “o” as in “Hobbes”): “chapter 41: I see it as a kind of self-portrait.”

What’s the difference between a Wagner concert and a Trump rally? The music is better at a Trump rally.

Being born is overrated. It’s a start, that’s all.

The way of Jesus is the way of detours and digressions, following him in whatever direction he happens to stray.

What’s the difference between Jesus and a Zen master? The guy who asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” – a Zen master would have whacked him with his keisaku. Come to think of it, that’s what Jesus did too. The parables of Jesus – consider them short narrative keisakus.

I just saw an episode of the cheerlessly hilarious British comedy Fleabag in which Fleabag’s boyfriend Harry says to her, “Don’t make me hate you. Love is painful enough already.” And I thought: that’ll pray.

Does any preacher – or any writer – ever really know whether they are giving their audience pearls or poop? If they do, it’s undoubtedly the latter.  

You can choose your friends but not your family – with the notable exception of your library.

Premodernity: Paranoia
Modernity: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Postmodernity: Narcissism and sociopathy
(From A Dummy’s Guide to Epochal Personality Disorders in Western Civilisation)

“My reaction to the instruction that all the dioceses in the C of E coin 3-word vision statements is identical to a modest proposal: ‘For Christ's Sake!’.” (Letter to the Church Times – needless to say, unpublished)

I have always thought that the fourth little piggy gets a raw deal, and more recently that perhaps s/he is a victim of domestic abuse, or a tragic example of free market scarcity economics. I mean, the third little piggy has roast beef while the fourth little piggy has none? Not on my watch as a grandpa! So as I wiggle her fourth digit and say “… and this little piggy had …”, my munchkin Delilah gleefully exclaims: “a pizza!”  (Obviously not pepperoni.)

The only way to write good non-fiction, particularly academic stuff, is to reads lots of good fiction.

Dogs or cats? Fool! You espouse a zoological version of double predestination. In the new creation, dogs and cats will lie down together. The cat on top of the dog.

I am a universalist-minus-one. That is to say, if hell exists, it has a population of me.

On second thought, I’m inclined to think that everlasting torment also awaits all who edit, publish, or read abridgements of Moby-Dick. (Mercifully, I will be in solitary confinement.)

My big problem with the divine omniscience is that people who think they know everything are such dicks.

Marriage is the great cure of loneliness. And the great cause.

Don’t shoot the messenger – unless, of course, it’s a cold call. Then make sure it’s a head shot.

The best way to make good use of one’s time is to waste it.

On a good day I remind me of myself. At least I think I will.

Old age is like a motorway on which you’re driving along in the slow lane while time flashes by in the fast lane.

When will I stop writing? Possibly when I am dead.

The Big Joke is that when you finally figure out that there’s nothing to figure out, it’s always too late.

The Communion of Saints – aka the Grateful Dead.

Do-lang, do-lang, do-lang Doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

Another terrorist attack and mass murder, the brutal ending of lives and worlds, the implacably occluded futures of the wounded and grief-stricken – and the inevitable confected aftermath of political fustian, media puffery, and vox-pop cliché.

God is love. Monotonously. Or rather Trinotonously.

God is like an excellent malt whisky. Alas, liberals add ginger ale and ice to it, while evangelicals just read the label.

The church is like a cappuccino: 1/3 creedal espresso, 1/3 milk of human kindness, and 1/3 ceremonial froth.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Because if bad things happened only to bad people, we’d be in hell.

One of the best arguments for torture is belief in hell, and one of the best arguments against belief in hell is torture.

“There’s nothing worse than loving someone who’s never going to stop disappointing you,” said Hosea. (Actually, it was a character in a series 7 episode of House I watched last night.)

What was Descartes doing when he wasn’t hunched over that blazing stove cogitating? Probably checking and rechecking and checking again that he had turned it off.

Selfie, ergo sum. Indeed, Selfie, ergo mundus est.

Wow! A new iPhone that can take 3-dimensional selfies – of 1-dimensional selves.

At a recent funeral, a mourner [sic] took a selfie at the graveside as the coffin was lowered. Now if only Joseph of Arimathea had had an iPhone …

Greatest selfie of all time: Velasquez’s Las Meninas.
Runner-up: El Greco, Pentecost.

The binary social media world of Thumbs-up/Thumbs-down – it’s missing a third icon: Turd = Who Gives a Shit?

Did you see the pilot for the brilliant new sitcom set in the Brady Briefing Room?  It’s called That Was the Week That Wasn’t (subtitle: Fake You!), starring Donald Trump and co-starring a cast of discombobulated journalists.

Let’s be clear: Trump does not drive me to despair.  The reality of his presidency suddenly flashing like lightening across a clear blue sky – my reaction is always “WTF!”, not despair.  In fact, I have moments of lucid hopefulness. Trump is a compulsive fantasist, and our fantasies always fuck us in the end.

Stanley Hauerwas has recently written: “I want to suggest that one of the essential tasks of those called to the ministry in our day is to be a teacher. In particular, ministers are called to be a teacher of language.” God’s bollocks! From the fact that Hauerwas feels it is necessary to make such a “suggestion”, one can only conclude that our seminaries have become cemeteries.

To re-endorse Hauerwas: the ministerial vocation is ecclesial speech therapy.

People often say to me after worship, about the sermon, “Thanks. You really gave us something to think about.”  And I think: another Sermon Fail. Imagine someone coming up to Jesus after preaching and saying, “Thanks, Rabbi. You really gave us something to think about” (cf. Luke 4:28-29).

Every year the Times runs a “Preacher of the Year” event. Seriously. Commensurate with the theological vacuity of such a contest, I propose that the winner should be awarded their own celebrity brand of cologne, perfume, or (if High Church) incense.

So The Rt. Rev. Christopher Cocksworth [sic] has apologised after accidentally voting against the Bishops' report on marriage and same-sex relationships, confessing that the mistake had been a “moment of distraction and some confusion” (BBC, 16 February). Rather like the report itself.

Breaking News: The District Attorney of Denver has announced that the three fundamentalist Christians who were arrested for the abduction of the Lutheran minister and human fresco Nadia Bolz-Weber have pleaded guilty to the charge of artnapping.

As a Protestant I don’t have a problem with Mariology, only with mariologiae gloriae. So I guess I’ve got a problem after all.

Why biblical criticism and hermeneutics? To unsettle the text. It is to the bewildered that the Spirit speaks.

Who am I when I do not know who I am? That may seem to be the predicament of the person with Alzheimer’s. It is, in fact, the human condition. Advantage, however, to the person with Alzheimer’s: he does not lie to himself or deceive others about it.

Early Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Late Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the rain gets in.”

Do Dum Dum Dum, De Do Dum Dum Doodlings

What an immaculately conceived picture of Queen B as Madonna del Parto in the Instagram icon. I hear that Gabriel has told Beyoncé to name the twin boy after his father: Jay-Zeus.

The Trinity is like pornography: you can’t put it into words but, as Justice Potter Stewart famously declared, “I know it when I see it.”

Praying the other day, I was suddenly interrupted. “Why do you keep calling me ‘Jesus’?” he asked. “Because that’s your name,” I replied. “In Latin,” he said. “For God’s sake, speak English: call me ‘Jack’.”

God gives us the bread of life on the table lest we starve on the scraps from the pulpit.

What is “closure” but the therapeutic ploy of putting putty in the cracks so the light can’t get in?

The profundity of Leonard Cohen’s poetry is that it doesn’t dispel the darkness but illuminates its different shades.

To riff on Hopkins: stars star and planets planet, continents continent and oceans ocean, trees tree and tigers tiger. And humans? Alas, humans inhuman.

Power disempowers; absolute power disempowers absolutely.

I would never have believed it, but it’s actually happening: Trump is uniting the American people in a common cause and achievable project – national self-hatred and suicide.

To paraphrase Erasmus, “In a nation of the blind, the one-eyed man is president.” In this case, he happens to be Cyclops, with the same temperament and appetites.

Just a few weeks into his presidency and Donald Trump is already posing the serious threat of a paradigm shift over Godwin’s Law.

I hear that henceforth all US editions of 1984 will be retitled 2017.

Sunday January 29th: in church. The Gospel is the Beatitudes. No need to preach it today. The text comes alive by simple juxtaposition with the anti-sermon, the anti-Beatitudes, of Trump’s execrable executive actions demonising Muslims.

Sunday January 29th: at home. After seeing the chilling, ugly game of xenophobia that Trump is playing, felt filthy. After watching the thrilling, beautiful tennis match between a Swiss and a Spaniard, felt cleansed.

Forget a coherent opposition, mass demonstrations, or the power of prayer, what we now need is a first-class White House asshole whisperer.

According to the British daily the i, scientists are suggesting that our earliest ancestor was a small creature with thin skin, a large mouth, and no anus, which means that “waste material would simply have been taken out back through the mouth.” Yikes, the missing link is living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!

“No matter how many body-politic-parts there are, you are still only one body-politic. If the heart-valves were to say, ‘Because we’re not the anus, this is not who we are,’ that wouldn’t keep them from being part of the body. Or if the brain-lobes were to say, ‘Because we’re not the penis, this is not who we are,’ that wouldn’t keep them from being part of the body. If one part of the body acts like an asshole or a prick, all the other parts share in the shite and the piss” (I Americans 11:14ff.)

Of course Trump doesn’t get the fundamental constitutional principle of “checks and balances”. He thinks it’s the discourse of banking, not government. You sign checks and you balance the books – or rather you bounce checks and cook the books.

I’ll tell you what makes me want to knock a thousand heads together: American evangelicals, in sackcloth and ashes, wailing that Thank-you-Jesus-for-President-Trump Christians are the last straw. Earth to American evangelicals: evangelical Americans have been building a haystack of alternative theology (as in “alternative facts”) for my entire adult life, a rick so enormous that by the Reagan presidency astronauts could have seen it from the moon. The trajectory is hardly a quelle-surprise: what began with “The Apostasy of Billy Graham” (the working title of a book on Nixon’s Hananiah that William Stringfellow had planned to write) reaches its nadir in the religious nihilism of Trump’s court toady Franklin.

Would someone please tell Christians who police the boundaries of their communities that faith is supposed to be the trigger of ecclesial fusion, not fission?

Doing theology takes time. Some of the time is for research and writing, of course. Most of the time, however, is for prayer. At least it is if you’re doing it right.

Prosperity Gospel market update on Revelation 1:8a: “‘I am the Alpha but not the Omega; rather I am the 1942 Rolex Chronograph,’ says the Lord God Almighty.”

And Pilate said, “How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?” The cuffed Christ replied, “Er, both.” “Ah,” the procurator smirked, “the old PS defence.”

“Whose side is God on?” we are tempted to ask in all kinds of conflicts, but his answer is always the same: “Not yours.”

Grief cuts us adrift. The tides of time take most people back to shore. Lifeboats may retrieve others. But some continue to drift, drift, drift out to a bleak and pitiless sea.

Doodlings at dusk

The gospel in 2 words: “Hey, Boo.”

If it’s a clear night on New Year’s Eve, I make a point of gazing at the heavens and counting the stars, to get a tally of my sins at Old Year’s End.

And New Year’s Day? The annual absolution of Sunrise – starlessness – and the single resolution to sin better.

The insidious secular-fundamentalist time-totalitarianism of wall calendar-makers, beginning the week with Monday – a New Year’s pox on you!

Time used to be a friend of mine. No more. He’s become a thief, first nicking bits and pieces of my memory, and now – the bastard – serially robbing me of friends.

My faith in God is sure because it expects nothing from him and always gets it. God is utterly reliable and blesses me with the gracious gift of inconsolability.

“Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer; until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger; more and more precise, more and more reverberating” (James Baldwin). So too for every preacher.

What do I make of the prayer Psalm 19:14 when said by many a minister before preaching? Wishful thinking.

“No arts, no letters, no society, continual fear, rich, nasty, brutish, and 6-foot-2.” – Thomas Hobbes on Donald Trump

You’ve got to hand it to The Donald: he’s a master of word-care. Sorry, that’s a typo: I left out the “s”.

The world according to Trump – is it not one vast self-projection? Trump wants only one thing: attention. I therefore propose that the way to make him go away is to live rebelliously etsi Trumpus non daretur.

But one thing in defence of The Donald: he was culpably misquoted about building a wall along the Mexican order. He said mall, not wall.

If I could ask Mr. Trump one self-revealing question, what would it be? That’s an easy one: what have you read in the last 5 years? Not counting Two Corinthians.

A friend of mine said to me, venomously, that he wouldn’t piss on Trump if he was on fire. I told him I’m not surprised: I wouldn’t piss on Trump if I was on fire either. However I would if I wasn’t.

Sign seen at a white evangelical rally: “Thank you, President Trump, for Jesus”.

What is social media, with its wilful and shameless decimation of the private, but a vast technological concentration camp, replete with its rapid descent into brutality?

In the toxic world of social media, name your poison: Facebook for kitsch, Twitter for Krieg.

In an age of multifarious distractions, liturgy teaches us the joy and excitement of monotony.

There are maximum security prisons, and there are maximum insecurity prisons. Many of the latter are churches.

What can we say about many a church-swapper? Amos 5:19a.

Listen to your conscience. It is your PMA (personal moral adviser). Just remember that sometimes it gives you bad advice. Remember too, however, that a bad conscience may be better than a deluded one (Bonhoeffer).

In The End of Protestantism Peter Leithart suggests that “doctrines have mattered and do matter; they have mattered enough for people to kill and die for them.” Hold on: doctrines have mattered little enough for people to kill for them.

Motoring around Europe during the summer of 1969, I spent a few days in Geneva. What struck me most about Calvintown was its spotlessness – the streets were as clean as plates. And that if the city were a painting, it would be a still life. Bad Presbyterianism in a nutshell: anal retentive and nothing happening.

What are we to think of the people who leave strict instructions for their funerals (from music and readings, to dress codes, to embargos on sadness)? Hell, if you’re going to micromanage, micromanage, and write your own goddamn eulogy too.

It is said that God has no grandchildren. He doesn’t know what he’s missing. Though I guess he does. Poor old God.

Cock-a-Doodle Doodlings (Mark 14:72)

“Ah, grief makes us precise!” —Leonard Cohen

I have never been theologically troubled by the so-called problem of evil that theodicists vainly address because, frankly, I have always believed that God is insane.

And that God has a Pythonesque sense of irony. To wit, on Election Day we woke (I kid you not) to a toilet with a leaking pipe. As the morning wore on and our domestic urine accumulated in the bowl, I thought, “Can this be a sign from the Lord?” Yes It Could.

Well, at least the star-splattered banner is still waving – waving goodbye “o’er the land of the Me and the home of the grave.”

Were I a political cartoonist, I would draw a picture of (the Statue of) Libertas contorting her massive body of copper, iron, and steel to bend over, place her head between her legs, and kiss her green ass au revoir.

After Trump’s victory was confirmed, feeling more depressed about the US than I have since the assassinations of Jack and Bobby, Malcolm and Martin – and so studiously avoiding the kitchen cabinet containing toxic household chemicals – I decided to cheer myself up. So I spent some time with GM’s sonnets of desolation and listened to LCs’ perfectly timed parting testament, “You Want It Darker”. (RIP, Lenny, once cracked, now broken: may light perpetual shine upon you.)

Anything 2016ish in Nostradamus about both Vlad the Impaler (1431) and Bram Stoker (1847) being born on November 8th?

Of course post-Election Day I feel humiliated and embarrassed to be an American. After the Vietnam years, the Nixon years, the Reagan years, the Dubya years – well, it’s like riding a bike. I’ve also grown adept at softening my New York accent and telling people I’m from Toronto.

By the impotence invested in me, I hereby declare Thanksgiving 2016 to be a National Day of Fasting. Or at least put bitter herbs in the Pumpkin Pie.

Andrew Sullivan has quotably asked, “How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?” More to the point for evangelical white-Americans (NB: “evangelical” is adjectival, “white-Americans” is the substantive), how can you tell when your religion has become the equivalent of a cultural/political ideology?

Ignoring or spinning Mark 8:36-38, many Christian have sold their soul to the devil. Of course. They got a good deal. Indeed Trump-like, it makes them smart: they won’t be declaring their profits on their income tax returns.

The go-to theologian for our troubled times has surely got to be Bonhoeffer. WWBD? Dietrich I mean, not the so-called “American Bonhoeffer” Eric Metaxas, whose inexcusable ignorance of modern German intellectual history and ideological distortions – nay, perversions – of DB’s life and thought should guarantee him a Trump Tower of a residence in the 8th circle of the Inferno.

Some Christian musings on the election of the “Remember, our God reigns” and “We always have prayer” kind – they are not false but they are not real. There is no fierce grief, no posture of resistance, no energy to join combat against the Lie, and no realisation that God is not useful, helpful, or advantageous. This is not the world of Jeremiah and Ezekiel (see Brueggemann) – or of Jesus.

What is time but a mortal wound that God heals with the astringent salve of the Spirit?

Don’t knock boredom. It is the source of all good fiction.

By all means practice introspection: it will acclimatise you to the torments of damnation.

Bad pastors command, good pastors advise – though of course they think their advice is infallible.

Advice from an old fart to newlyweds: pay close attention to the ecology of your marriage, lest, from a process of erosion, it slowly crumbles behind your very eyes.

In some contemporary liturgies there should be rubrics for snoring.

When it comes to the web, we like to think we are spiders when in fact we are flies.

What’s the difference between a care home for people with dementia and a Starbucks full of people with iPhones and laptops? You’ll find more interpersonal skills among folk in the former.

Street-wear tee shirts for the dwindling number of those whose iPhones aren’t prosthetic: the inscription reads “Watch where I’m going, apphole!”

How would I describe the social imaginary of people addicted to social media? As an anti-social imaginary, or an imaginary imaginary.

Why did I become a minister? Because I’d heard that it’s a vacation. My hearing isn’t so good.

Everybody muddles through life. Saints are simply those who muddle through it better than the rest of us.

Who do you suppose Trump sees when he looks in the mirror, assuming he sees anyone at all (see the doodling about Vlad the Impaler)? Probably himself. Like most of us. It is the saints who see someone else, “the concealed likeness, always ahead in its ambush” (R. S. Thomas), and ask, “Why do you look at me like that?”

Election day doodlings

The trick to ending a sermon is to stop without concluding. Paul Valéry observed that “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” So too a sermon.

Why did God give us clothes? Not to inhibit the sex-drive. (Fat chance!) No, but so that we should think. Or haven’t you noticed that it’s almost impossible to cogitate in the nude?

God said, “Did you eat the fruit I told you not to eat?” The man answered, “The woman you put here with me gave me the fruit. She doesn’t understand me” (Genesis 3:11b-12, Original Autograph).

I was all for “True Love Waits” until I realised – silly me – that it isn’t an album by the dude whose voice has been described as sounding like “it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car” (Daniel Durchholz).

At first, grief is like an occupying army. Then it slowly begins to withdraw its troops, but it always leaves some commandos behind. And though the numbers continue to dwindle, you’re never safe: there is always the chance of an ambush.

“If I can be saved, there is no one beyond redemption.” I have said it myself. Alas, yet another instance of egotism masquerading as humility.

We act like we are the directors of our petits récits when in fact we are just the actors – actors who have forgotten our lines and aren’t very good at improvising.

My waking nightmare: the US has turned into Jurassic Park and its people are being terrorised by a Trumpasaurus Wrecks.

The relationship between Donald Trump and women can be put in terms of General relativity: Trump tells women how to curve, women tell Trump where to go.

Asked about the fulsome endorsement of Jerry Falwell, Jr., the Donald replied, “It’s great to have the support of the distinguished president of Libertine University.”

Asked to name his favourite passages from the Bible, Trump said, “It’s a toss-up between Genesis 34 and Judges 19. Both have been an inspiration.”

Desperate for a song to spearhead his campaign and market his character during the final few weeks before the election, the Donald is going for a classic from the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature: “Lay, Lady, Lay”.

Why does Trump want to be president? I used to think it was the narcissism of power. Now add the sex: he thinks he’ll get laid more. In a Trump White House the Blue Room will be known for its films rather than its receptions, while the Green Room will be repainted and renamed the Shades of Grey Room.

A big fan of the first two amendments, Trump is not so keen on the first two commandments. Or #s 3, 4, 7, 8, or 9 for that matter. And I suspect he thinks #6 is a bloody nuisance, written for losers. I will, however, give the brat #5.

I’ve not long returned from visiting my mum in New York. What a grotesque spectacle it was observing the sulphurous figure of Trump smirking and strutting while his minders appeared on news programmes assiduously trying to polish a turd.

The most salient feature of this presidential election is anger. There is, to be sure, a godly anger, imbued with sorrow and sympathy. Like the anger of the prophets. Like the anger of Jesus. But the anger in America is proud and pitiless. It is an anger unto death.

Why have white male evangelicals been flocking to a wolf? Apart from the moral paranoia, camp revivalism, American exceptionalism, and smug misogyny, it’s because Trump incarnates a realised eschatology of wrath and damnation.

Evangelical leaders who, while conceding his egregious flaws, support Trump are fond of citing Augustine, as if the bishop of Hippo had declared (in Letter 211): “Cum delectione hominum et odio vitiorum – et suffragio assholum” (“Hate the sin, love the sinner – and vote for the asshole”).

Don’t think for a minute that Trump is stupid. He’s pig ignorant, but snake smart.

The Trump campaign and the coulrophobia epidemic – a coincidence?

Trump scares me, but it’s Trumpism, embodied in the 40%, that terrifies me: the spectre of the normalising of the campaign into a movement, a demonic parody of a martyr’s blood becoming the seed of a church.

Some Christians seem to think that Jesus said the truth will set you free to lie.

Elections are certainly revelatory of the worm at the core, as the voter asks the first question Adam put to his creator: “What’s in it for me?”

In Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, as Quoyle turns the car into a sodden road heading towards his ancestral home in East Jesus, Newfoundland, his daughter Bunny kicks the back of the seat and cries, “I’m tired of going somewhere. I want to be there.” My timeworn thoughts exactly, honey. “I want to put on my bathing suit and play on the beach,” Bunny adds. Perfect.

What’s the difference between optimism and hope? Optimism is for sissies.

Goldarn doodlings

What’s the difference between optimism and hope? Hope is for pessimists.

The Farmers Unions of California and Kansas are thinking of uniting, but they’re having a problem with the acronym.

After Thatcher, Reagan, and a generation of deregulated free market capitalism, what has become of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”? All that’s left is the middle finger.

On a bus in Montgomery, at a lunch counter in Greensboro, and on a football field in Santa Clara, a genealogy in the civil rights movement unfolds: Sit Down and Be Counted. A butt on a seat can unsettle the complacent as much as a march in the street, and a war anthem unsung by one can be as loud and liberating as a peace song sung by thousands.

Of course Donald Trump isn’t racist. Just ask all his African American buddies: he’ll tell you. As for his plans for deporting immigrants, Trump’s decided he doesn’t need any: if he just keeps talking, who would want to stay, including Canadians, Europeans, Australians …?

Some say that they will vote for Trump as the lesser of two evils. Yeah, like Hiroshima. I commend an easier moral calculus to negotiate: don’t pick the asshole. Then it becomes a no-brainer. The sociopathic self-exceptionalism, EDD (Empathy Deficit Disorder), and utter shamelessness and incorrigibility – Trump is an asshole singularity.

What’s the “alt-right”? I live in the UK, so I looked up “ALT” in Wikipedia, which says that it is an enzyme found mainly in the liver. Elevated levels of ALT suggest diseases such as hepatitis C, cirrhosis, diabetes, congestive heart failure, mononucleosis, and myopathy. Does that sound about, er, right?

Sign in a gender-neutral Bible-believing restroom in Texas: “MANAGEMENT KINDLY REQUESTS THAT YOU DO NOT PUT SANITARY NAPKINS, DISPOSABLE DIAPERS, OR THE HEADS OF TRANSGENDERS IN THE TOILET. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.”

Picture a beach party on the Sea of Galilee. Jesus is running the barbie, Peter thinks he’s the lifeguard, the rest of the lads are playing footie, Mary Magdalene is catching the rays and reading Valley of the Dolls, and the mother of Jesus, under an umbrella, is wearing a burkini, right?

What should we conclude from the fact that we see Jesus sitting in boats and walking on water? That he can’t swim.

Can the risen Christ be in two places at once? Sure. But then so can Schrödinger’s dead cat.

The good news is that if you think you’re evil, you’re not. The bad news is that the same goes if you think you’re good – you’re not.

Let’s be honest. Conservative evangelicals don’t homeschool their kids for religious reasons. It’s because it’s the only way they’ll get a valedictorian in the family.

That you can’t love God and hate your neighbour is a truism, though that’s never stopped Christians from continually attempting its falsification.

What does it mean to say that Jesus is my “personal Lord and Saviour”? It means that he owns my ass.

Truth is not the first casualty of war. That would be imagination.

Supersessionism? Of course not. To paraphrase Paul: You can take the boy out of Israel, but you can’t take Israel out of the boy.

At a wedding when we say that we will “love and cherish till death us do part” – that’s a promise, not a feeling; and “… for worse, in sickness …” – that’s a certainty, not a possibility.

Conversation at Sunday lunch. “Grandpa, this morning you said that the church is our Mother.” “I did.” “And you also called her the bride of Christ.” “Yes.” “So then Jesus must be our Father, right?” “Um …” “Or maybe, Grandpa, if the church is the bride of Christ, and God is the Father of Jesus, then the church is the daughter-in-law of God?” “Er, could you pass the broccoli, sweetheart?”

How long do I spend with morning prayers? At least an hour. I peruse the BBC News website, then check out a few choice blogs, following links along the way, peppering my reading with such devotional responses as “Lord, have mercy!”, “Woe to us!”, Comfort them!”, and, very occasionally, “Alleluia!” or “Thank you, Lord!” Then I say “Amen!” and log off. Hey, I’m just taking Hegel – who drolly observed that newspapers had become a substitute for morning prayers – to a new level.

What is the vocation of a minister today? To teach the faith as a foreign language, to enable her congregation to become fluent in it, to ensure that they are bilingual.

A pastoral sensitivity acquired only from experience is knowing when pain can be eased and when it can only be endured, borne by the love of God.

We all put the past in the washer-dryer, but some add bleach, for others the stains never come out, while for the elderly it inevitably shrinks.

Of course I don’t want to be younger (I’m not insane), but nor do I now want to be older. To paraphrase Augustine, time’s a bitch.

Faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is gratitude.

Polly wolly doodlings

The cast of characters at the RNC was right out of Looney Tunes. I half expected Elmer Twump to delight the crowd by whispering, “Shhh. Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting Hiwwary.”

Then Jesus and his disciples went away to the villages near Caesarea Philippi. “Who do you say I am?” he asked them. Trump, called The Donald, answered, “You’re a loser!” “Exactly!” replied Jesus. “So much for your Messiah crap, Peter.” Then he ordered them, “Go, tell everyone what The Donald just said” (Mark 8:27ff., Original Autograph).

Samuel Johnson was close but wrong: patriotism is the penultimate refuge of the scoundrel; his last refuge is “authenticity” (e.g., Donald Trump) and “sincerity” (e.g., Tony Blair).

On being accused of plagiarising Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 DNC, Melania Trump declared, “I don’t imitate, I steal.”

“I know I don't have his looks. I know I don't have his money. I know I don't have his connections, his knowledge of fine wines. I know sometimes when I eat I get this clicking sound in my jaw… First he screws me, then he screws you… Excellent.” —From Wayne Grudem’s endorsement of Donald Trump (Wayne’s World)

Just out is a new, pre-election edition of Daniel Kahneman’s masterpiece Thinking, Fast and Slow. It is entitled Thinking, Fast, Slow, and Orangutan, with a foreword by Bill Maher.

What do you call someone who orders a rib eye, gets an overcooked hamburger, and is so pissed off that he stomps into the kitchen and eats the slops? A Bernie supporter who votes for Trump.

 “The business of America is business”? No, Cal, the business of America is America.

Under felt threat, toads puff, bears rear, and cats bristle and yowl. So too politicians who, alas – so much for evolution – then declare states of emergency.

Do I think it’s okay for ministers, male or female, to wear other than black clerical shirts? Sure, as long as they’re charcoal, onyx, or ebony. Rainbow-coloured shirts are just plain naff, the sartorial equivalent of saying “Hi guys” at the start of worship.

It is ridiculous to suggest that Jesus was a Christian. More ridiculous still to suggest that God is a Christian. They are, of course, both Jews.

One thing the gospels don’t tell us about Jesus (though Isaiah 53 may suggest it) is that he walked with a limp. How else could the disciples have kept up with him?

Preachers, have you ever stumbled and fallen on the way to the pulpit? If not, why not?

If you’re a minister who prefers preaching to visiting, that’s probably because you prefer listening to yourself for half an hour than to somebody else. Or perhaps because the preparation is less onerous.

The bad news about being angry with God is that you don’t trust him. The good news about being angry with God is that you don’t trust him.

Let Kent’s words to Cordelia (King Lear, IV, vii) be the epigraph of your every engagement with Facebook and Twitter: “To be acknowledg’d, madam, is o’erpaid.”

Let’s get incarnational. The colonising of the mind by conventional images of the “beautiful” face and the “perfect” body is not only a cultural pathology, it is also just plain wrongheaded. For experience teaches that when it comes to physical attraction, looks comes a poor second to scent, not least in longevity of appeal. A thousand gazes aren’t worth a single sniff.

Blessed is the person who uses the subjunctive more than the indicative, for life will be full of surprises and the kingdom will always be near.

Yes, Karl, the Bible in one hand, the newspaper in the other. But you forgot to mention that after the sermon, depending on the newspaper, the preacher might have to wash and disinfect the latter appendage.

It’s becoming more and more fashionable for people to micromanage their own funerals. I recently attended a funeral where instead of honouring God through Myvanwy we honoured Myvanwy through God. Actually, though, it’s a quite venerable practice, going back to Pharaoh.

The decline of faith has left the West without a grammar of grief. Flowers (lots and lots of flowers), rainbow raiment, pop songs, Twitter tributes, and Kahil Gibran are among our more sententious solecisms of “celebration”.

It’s a fallacy to think that just because you’ve got a good pair of garden shears you’ll be able to cut hard branches: they might be non-secateurs.

New programme on the God Channel featuring the saved giving their testimonies: it’s called Corn Again!

Ecclesiastical Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: the pathologies, respectively, of liberal and traditionalist churches. The one has no memory and the other no mobility.

I suspect that the living don’t miss the dead half as much as the dead miss the living.

Dumdum doodlings

Brexit: well, so much for plebis*ites.

“What the fuck just happened?” exclaimed one observer. “Inept, embarrassing, horrible, clueless,” said another. And a third: “It’s a sad time to be English.” But were they speaking about losing to Iceland – or to Brexit?

So The Three Stooges (Boris, Michael, and Nigel) and have gotten us into another fine mess on the model of Laurel and Hardy (Tony and Dubya): no (Br)exit strategy.

Shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are stages in the grief process. We have just learned that they are also stages in the Brexit process. Except that with Brexit, the bargaining comes last; in fact, it’s just about to begin.

Let’s ditch the highfalutin language of “pilgrimage”: we’re a mass of migrants, (in ecclesial imagery) a bunch of boat people, an ethnic salmagundi. God help us if St. Peter is a Brexite or a Trumpeteer.

You’ve got to hand it to Trump on his cunning necropolitical disguise: an angel of darkness impersonating an angel of darkness.

“Why, some people might lose their faith looking at that picture” (Prince Myshkin, in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, on seeing a photograph of The Donald). Unless, of course, you’re an American evangelical.

Why should we doubt Trump’s religious convictions? If asked for a faith-statement, I’m sure he’d say, “I like crucifixion a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough.”

There’s a lot of celebrity gossip in both the UK and Hollywood about Idris Elba being the next James Bond. And I’m thinking: if Bond, why not Superman? Why not an African American embodying the struggle for “truth, justice, and the American way”? Well, two out of three.

Why, of course racism is a pathology for whites to resolve, not blacks, just as domestic violence is an issue for men to resolve, not women. Oh yes, and an issue for the church to resolve too, for it has been – and still is – complicit in both.

Yes, Jesus spoke truth to power, but first he spoke truth to ordinary people. After all, the powerful get away with telling lies only because ordinary people like hearing them.

“Jesus said, ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock’” (Revelation 3:20a). No he didn’t. With respect, allow me to correct John’s Pelagianism: “Jesus said, ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock it down.’”

What makes God laugh? Eulogies.

As soon as Judas took the bread, Nike entered into him. Jesus said to him, “Just Do It!” (John 13:27, Original Autograph)

If you’ve ever wondered about the way Jesus called the first disciples with an imperious “Follow me!”, taking them from their families, then ran them ragged, constantly hounding, intimidating, and rebuking them, indeed risking their lives, yet still they stayed with him, defended him, identified with him – what is the explanation for the disciples’ behaviour? Stockholm syndrome.

Listening to a bad preacher is like listening to a good umpire when the pitcher can’t find the plate: what you hear is mostly balls, with perhaps the occasional strike.

As far as the 18th-century political debate between Right and Left goes, you’re either a Berk or a Pain.

Some mothers are matriarchs, others nags, others my “best friend”. The church too – for conservatives, legalists, and liberals respectively.

God is not needy. Certainly God does not need me or my love. Which is precisely why I can trust him and his.

“We are not enough. We are none of us enough! Including the man who does everything right!” Thus screams the character Jerry Levov to his brother Seymour (the Swede) in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. I would have said, “Especially the man who does everything right!”, but otherwise it’s as good a description of the person “sold into slavery under sin” (Romans 7:14) as you are likely to find. And from the pen of a ferocious atheist.

Why are young people leaving conservative evangelical churches? Here’s a theory: it’s due to the stiff competition that their virtual Jesuses now face from the multitude of virtual presences in social media.

Of course I wouldn’t say that the theology of Karl Barth has any normative authority. Nevertheless, tolle, lege.

I recommend reading great theology aloud. Just make sure you stutter.

Everything important you try to say is like the first two bowls of porridge that Goldilocks tastes: it’s either too hot (you say more than you intended to say) or too cold (you say less than you intended to say). Alas, there is no third bowl.

The last words of the Wicked Duck of the West: “I’m molting! molting!”

Doodlings Dolce far Niente

A Sketch of Origen’s Theology: Principle #21: To sum up: live and learn, learn and live. See, for example, Origen’s lost text Cut and Chaste: The Pedagogy of Orchidectomical Procedures.

The church is a school of character. Among totally depraved Calvinists, make that a Reform school.

The unexamined life is not worth living. Mind, the alternative also sucks.

Then Jesus and his disciples went away to the villages near Caesarea Philippi. “Who do you say I am?” he asked them. Thomas answered, “Hang on, lads: it’s another one of his trick questions. Better keep shtum and look stupid than open our mouths and remove all doubt” (Mark 8:27ff., Original Autograph, later plagiarised by another Mark – the Twain, not the Twin).

Then Jesus and his disciples went away to the villages near Caesarea Philippi. “Who do you say I am?” he asked them. Peter answered, “You are my personal Lord and Saviour.” Jesus wept (Mark 8:27ff. and the misplaced logion John 11:35, Another Original Autograph).

How can you tell if you lack imagination? Take Genesis 2:18ff., the scene where Adam names the animals: if you think “tiger, moose, cat, dog”, rather than “Hobbes, Bullwinkle, Sylvester, Snoopy”, you’ve definitely got an imagination deficit.

“The parents ate sour grapes, the children got the shits real bad” (proverb cited in Ezekiel 18:1, rephrased to cover Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr.).

Malcolm Turnbull has condemned Australian Opposition leader Bill Shorten for saying that Trump is “barking mad”. A barksperson for the National Federation of Dingoes has condemned Shorten’s language as “an insult to our members”.

The most chilling thing that his supporters say is “Trump has a point.”

According to Ted Cruz, Donald Trump is utterly amoral, a narcissist, a pathological liar, and a serial philanderer. Perfect presidential material then.

Now that Trump will be Republican candidate for president, no doubt his PR people will give him a makeover for the campaign. So a pig with lipstick. Or rather a boar with bouffant, bronzer, and balm.

Electing Donald Trump President of the United States would be like appointing Thomas Sweatt Chief of the Washington, D.C. Fire Department.

New book on hold until November: First as Farce, Then as Tragedy: The Presidential Campaign of Donald Trump.

Who will Trump select as his running mate? Pick a Kardashian – any Kardashian – and victory is his.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to think that they know all that is necessary for the triumph of evil.

Question: Who said, “I had no sense of peace, no joy, no conviction that what I was doing was right. It was just something that I had to do, a task to be gotten through”?
(a) Dorothy Day, on being baptised and received into the Catholic Church.
(b) John Tavener, on attending a Hillsong Easter service.
(c) Stanley Hauerwas, on singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on Opening Day.
(d) Ben Myers, on reading Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology.
Answer: Probably “Yes”, but definitely (a).

Blessed are those who never pray but simply find themselves praying.

It’s been said that women think with their whole bodies. That sounds right to me. I think there is something inherently gnostic in male cogitation. (And male copulation, for that matter.) I can just see Descartes boasting of the cogito to his mistress Helena – and hear her reply: “Ne fais pas l’idiot, René!”

Asked when he was 76 whether he had any regrets, John Betjeman replied, “Yes, I haven’t had enough sex.” So that’s 9 years and counting …

I recently took a Dodd-Schweitzer Personality Type Test. After analysing the results, my minister told me that I suffer from eschatological schizophrenia: apparently I’m both an “already” (A) and a “not-yet” (NY). “But what if I’m a ‘never-will-be’ (NWB)?” I asked anxiously. “Less Calvin, more Barth,” she comforted and counselled me: “There are no NWBs. But be careful about becoming a ‘can’t-wait’ (CW).”

Beware the moral high ground: it’s the perfect place for launching your opponent onto the rocks below (cf. Luke 4:28ff.).

“On Self-preening and Self-pruning”: a sermon on the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9-14).

The martyrs are like stones thrown into a pond: as they sink, the waters ripple.

The Sermon on the Mount – it ain’t for extra credit.

My wife often tells me that my study looks like a building site. “What else should it look like?” I tell her back. “It is here that I construct sentences.”

Duck soup doodlings

Dark matter makes up 80% of the universe, but where is it? American scientists now think they’ve found the answer: 11250 Waples Mill Road, Fairfax, Virginia.

“Hope is the thing with feathers” (Emily Dickinson). Despair is the asshole behind the duck blind with a 20-gauge double barrel shotgun.

There is nothing like a presidential election – this one in particular – to rescue from desuetude the imprecations of the Psalms.

So Neil Young, Elton John, and Adele are pissed off that their music has been hijacked by the Trump campaign. Imagine, then, the velocity of the spinning corpses of Charles Albert Tindley, Louise Shropshire, and Pete Seeger when the GOP starts singing “We Shall Overcome” at the Republican National Convention in July.

General Relativity for Reformed theologians: Calvin tells Barth how to move, Barth tells Calvin how to curve.

Einstein, of course, was right: God doesn’t play dice. He plays cards: Solitaire with Unitarians, Go Fish with Evangelicals, I Doubt It with Liberals, Old Maid with Roman Catholics, Spite and Malice with Hyper-Calvinists, Follow the Queen with Anglicans, Hearts with Universalists, Bridge with Ecumenists, Gin with lapsed Methodists, and Stud Poker with Promise Keepers.

The doctrine of predestination is no more a doctrine than the ontological argument is an argument. They are brilliant theological gags. If you get them, you smile, blissfully; if you don’t, you turn to tortured – or torturing – explanations.

Marilynne Robinson is such a thoroughgoing Barthian humanist – her childlike delight in creation, her suspicion of a logos asarkos, and her affirmation of a costly universalism – that one might call her writings a poetics of Bruce McCormack.

Time moves slowly in Hell, but the 14th-century sign at the entrance – “Abandon All Hope, You Who Enter Here” – has finally been replaced. The new sign, above an arrow composed of flashing coloured lights, reads “Follow the Money”.

Many evangelicals who declare that “America is a Christian nation” remind me of George Lindbeck’s crusader who cries “Christus est Dominus!” The only difference is their weapon of choice.

Where there’s a will, there’s a prey.

Writing for the Church Times (15 April), Andrew Brown observes that xenophobia and nationalism in Sweden have “taken a religious expression in paganism, not Christianity.” So just like the US and the UK then.

I hear that Liberty University is offering a new module in Russian literature. It features Chekov’s Uncle Samuíl, Tolstoy’s War and Piece, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Kalashnikov, and Turgenev’s Fathers, Sons, and Womenfolk.

It’s déjà vu all over again. Ever since 9/11, the US and the UK have repeatedly backed tinpot allies in the Middle East who they claim can form a government yet who are hated by the local population, while the Saudis, “our friends” (i.e., our business partners in arms and oil), remain the (wild) elephant in the region. Sisters and brothers, can I get a Yemen?

I think of the pulpit as home plate and therefore suggest that preachers should dress like umpires. If they preach the gospel, eventually they’ll need protection.

Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, one or two will piss off and start their own church” (Matthew 18:20, Original Autograph).

Jesus said, “Where two or three thousand gather together in my name, please accept my apologies for absence” (Matthew 18:20, Another Original Autograph).

I walk into a coffee shop. At the counter is a kid wearing a name badge. Zack asks, “Can I help you?” “A cappuccino, please.” “Awesome,” Zack replies. “With an extra shot.” “Awesome,” Zack adds. “And a chocolate top.” “Awesome,” Zack repeats. A hat trick of semantic vacuity. You know the worship ditty, “Our God is an awesome God”? Take it from the top, all you Zacks out there.

“No problem” is another word-wreck of a reply you often get from a waiter/ waitress/ waitperson/ waitbeing. As if in taking an order of burgers and fries he/she might suddenly find him/herself addressing an incident on Apollo 13.

The good news is that the truth will set you free. The bad news is that the truth will set you free.

What is salvation? The past catching up with you – and the Future snatching you from its grasp.

Jesus went to the territory near the town of Caesarea Philippi, where he asked his disciples, “Who so people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “David Berkowitz, of course.” “‘Man’!” Jesus shouted. “‘Son of Man’, you idiots!” (Matthew 16:13-14, Original Autograph).

“Just be yourself” goes the psychomantra. Really? And which “self” would that be? And even assuming you manage to locate and isolate one, why would you want to be him/her/whomever? Are you work-shy or just unimaginative? Have you never prayed?

The bewitchment of language begins with the hocus of “I” and the pocus of “me”.

I’m 67. Do I miss the old days? Not really. I’ve taken the good stuff with me. (And contrary to boomers who were no less senescent then than they are now, there was a heap of good stuff.) What I miss is the young days.