The year in review: 2013 word cloud

Doodlings towards dotage

by Kim Fabricius

Richard Dawkins has said, “I never quite understood why you would read fiction to understand the human condition.” Imagine Nietzsche, Freud, Camus saying such a dumb thing! No wonder Dawkins is such a second-rate atheist: he has no imagination. As C. S. Lewis observed, a person “who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”

Speaking of Lewis: he describes his conversion to Christ as coming via theism. My own experience was quite different: for me, Christ did not fulfil theism, he shattered it. If God were not Trinity, to hell with it: I’d be an atheist.

Staying with Lewis: theodicy – surely CS’ theological nadir. In The Problem of Pain, suffering as “God’s megaphone” – what is this but the instrumentalism of the “the outward bound school of theology” (D. Z. Phillips), cringingly inadequate in the face of horrendous evil. It might sell on The Oprah Show, but me (cf. Ivan K.), I want my studio ticket back. As for A Grief Observed, it’s a poignant reflection, but surely more “Well, er, yes” than “Ah-hah!” So POP has appeal for a can-do culture, and AGO has appeal for a death-denying culture – which, I think, adds to the explanation of why Lewis is so popular among Christians in the US.

… Finally, the devil took Jesus to Lisbon and Auschwitz, to Haiti and the World Trade Center, to Tōhoku and Sandy Hook, and said, “See all this devastation and death, bodies crushed and bloated, burned and blown away, thousands, millions, children. Why? You are the Son of God. Go on, give us a theodicy.” Jesus said to him – nothing whatsoever. He remained silent. Then the devil left him, and became a frequent visitor to philosophy and theology departments.

Almost everything that is wrong with American Christianity can be traced, metaphorically, to disobedience to the primal command of Genesis 12:1: “Leave your country.”

That purge in North Korea – some evangelical Christians struggling to remain in the Party will know that hunted feeling, that fear of inquisition from the panjandrums, and thus the need for constant self-surveillance, attention to the script, and carefulness in public speech.

Mark Twain famously quipped that he could remember anything – whether it happened or not. Rather like the authors of the biblical narrative – as pudd’nhead biblical literalists would do well to recognise.

So God gave Moses two tablets (Exodus 31:18). Kindle Fire, no doubt (Exodus 3:1ff.). Which the technologically challenged Moses proceeded to break. For his second set (Exodus 34:1), he went for Nook (Exodus 33:22). And Paul? He used an iPad (Romans 2:15a) – by Apple, of course (Romans 5:12ff.).

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry”? No, love means never having to hear you’re sorry.

The New Monasticism shares three main marks with the traditional variety: (1) mutual accountability and the sharing of resources; (2) hospitality to the stranger; and (3) beer.

“Is the pope Catholic?” In some traditionalist Roman circles, and among ignorant right-wing pundits, this archetypal “yah-think?” is no longer a comical question. What next for this most personable, unconventional, and perhaps quite radical (i.e., faithful) pontiff? “Call me Frank”?

There are few moral absolutes, but torture is one of them. Hence my antipathy to “worship music”: liturgically, it’s abysmal; ethically, it’s excruciating. That’s why Sunday November 17th 2013 is a date that (for me) will live in infamy: led by a screeeeching soloist, we “exalted” the Lord eighteen times in one chorus. 18 times! In 1 chorus! Before we were in double figures I was thinking FFS! This wasn’t praise, it was hazing, and the worship leader should be prosecuted for a crime against humanity.

How would I describe George Herbert’s relationship with God? Complex, to be sure, but fundamentally (I think), the Lord was George’s best, sweet friend, one with whom he could play.

Jesus was sinless, okay, but that means he was perfectly obedient, not that he made no mistakes, let alone that he was successful. After all, he ended with a microchurch of two (and only one convert). And you and me – if there is any good in us, any growth in us, we owe it all to our failures.

Again: Did Jesus know about the boson before Higgs? Could he have run a marathon in under two hours, leaving Phidippides in the dust? Or delivered the Sermon on the Mount in German or Swahili? More somatically still, after a hard day’s healing, did our Lord stink? If your answers to the first three questions are Yes, and to the last question No, you get a Christology Fail (for Docetism).

I reckon that if Jesus had lived to be an uncle, he would have said that God is Saba, and that we must become like grandchildren to enter the kingdom of God.

People who say they wish they were young again were probably never young at all.

“I stand at the door. I knock. If you hear me call and open the door, I’ll come right in and sit down to supper with you” (Revelation 3:20, The Message): that’s the Deliverance Man from Dominus Pizza.

The apotheosis of Nelson Mandela will only be complete when he has a flavour of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream named after him: perhaps a vanilla-chocolate blend called “Half-and-Half Nelson”?

So Martin Bashir has resigned from MSNBC over comments he made about Sarah Palin. He called her an “idiot”, America’s “resident dunce”, which is to state the bleeding obvious. He also opined that someone should defecate in Mrs. Palin’s mouth, which suggests the phrase “carrying coals to Newcastle”. Yes, for such journalistic solecisms, Bashir did the right thing and fell on his pen.

In dubio pro reo, for Phil Robertson, the pogonophilic patriarch of Duck Dynasty, let us be gracious and shave him with Hanson’s Razor.

Tony (“Yo”) Blair – Catholic convert, peace envoy, peripatetic bloviator – called it “irreversible and irresistible”. Grace? No, free-market-driven globalisation, the Abominable Impoverisher. Thus does Blair “do” God – for a fee and a fête.

Your birth day may not determine your future, but your birth address – now that’s an entirely different matter.

The largest welfare state in the world is the US. It’s just that the welfare is corporate, not social: it’s the rich, not the poor, who get the benefits (e.g., of deregulation and tax-breaks) – and who commit massive, not two-bit fraud. (Cf. the rejoinder to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations: Whose Wealth? Which Nations?)

“There is never enough for those who have nothing, but there is always enough for those who have everything” (Manfred Max-Neef). Maranatha! Happy New Year, everyone!

A Christmas carol

Merry Christmas, and thanks for reading my ramblings at F&T this year! Here's a Christmas carol I wrote during this morning's sermon:

Though our lives have fallen down
And though our hearts are sad,
A child is born in Bethlehem
And he will make us glad.

Though the angry nations rage
In wars that never cease,
A little child in Bethlehem
Is called the prince of peace.

Though we're born to slavery
And though injustice reigns,
A baby born in Bethlehem
Will take away our chains.

Though we poison all the seas
And though the earth is scarred,
A little boy in Bethlehem
Will mend what we have marred.

Though we'd lost a paradise
Which nothing could restore,
Our God is born in Bethlehem
And him our hearts adore.

The heart is bigger than the nose: Cyrano de Bergerac

The hero of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac is one of the great comic characters of the theatre. Cyrano is a brilliant poet, romantic, swordsman, and soldier, yet on account of his inordinately big nose he believes himself unworthy of love. Though he has loved the beautiful Roxane ever since the two of them played together as children, he cannot believe that he could ever win her. Because he despises his own face, he believes himself to be despicable. And where he lacks evidence of his despicableness, he supplies the evidence by creating enemies wherever he goes. And so it is that our beleaguered hero ends up helping Christian – a good-looking and goodhearted fellow, though rather brainless and romantically challenged – to woo Roxane.

The new Sport for Jove production of Cyrano de Bergerac, which opened last week at the Bella Vista Farm in Sydney, is a triumph of comedic entertainment. Damien Ryan is a director who knows how to use his actors. In his production, nothing is wasted. There is no milling about. Every character to appear onstage is vivid and fully present. The preposterous stage-performers in the first act, the orange girl, the vexatious wife of Ragueneau, the bloke who heckles Cyrano from the audience, the starving soldiers, the giggling nuns, the gaggle of poets. All of them, even the most minor roles, are wonderfully, exhilaratingly alive – and that is to say nothing of the larger roles like the appropriately hateful De Guiche, the affable Le Bret, the spellbinding Roxane, the hilariously inarticulate Christian. The pastry chef Ragueneau is so good that in a lesser production he might have stolen the show. But this is Cyrano’s show, and nobody steals the show from Cyrano de Bergerac.

It takes an uncommon actor to cover the full range of Cyrano’s character, but Yalin Ozucelik does it with all the deceptive ease of a trapeze artist or a juggler of knives. He is every inch a Cyrano. Passionate, intellectual, violent, magnanimous, sentimental, dashing, dejected – and, in all this, charismatic and utterly lovable. By the end of the last act he has made his mark on every other character to appear on the stage. He has commanded every corner of the stage. He has commanded the heart of every last picnicking playgoer too. On the opening night he even commanded the moon, which came out from behind the clouds exactly on cue, just as Cyrano pointed and cried, “Look, the moon!” And the audience was so spellbound by the world Damien Ryan had concocted that we took this bit of miraculous staging in our stride. Though we marvelled afterwards at this lunar coincidence, at the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world for the clouds and the moon to respond to their cue. I suppose if the moon itself had answered in rhyming couplets, it would still have been Cyrano who held our attention.

Damien Ryan knows how to use his actors, and he knows how to use the stage too. Not a bit of the big outdoor space at the Bella Vista Farm was wasted: the grand spectacle of Ragueneau’s bakery, the gripping swordplay, the balcony scene (a funny and touching parody of Romeo and Juliet). Indeed one stage was not big enough for Ryan’s vision, and in the fourth act the audience was marched off to an adjacent shed where we sat on rough-hewn wooden pews and witnessed the starving soldiers under siege.

Even the final (and, let's face it, ridiculously melodramatic) act was handled with perfect tact, so that this last spectacle seemed like merely another natural expression of Cyrano’s inexhaustible personality. If it is the power of great comedy to make us laugh and cry at the same time and for the same reason, then this was great comedy.

And it is the power of great theatre to open our hearts and to make us see differently and feel differently. On the way home my wife said, “By the end of it, I even loved his nose.” That monstrous appendage, so shocking and repulsive when it first wagged its way on to the stage, was, in the course of three hours, imperceptibly transfigured into something beautiful and good and true.

Just as the beauty of Cyrano is hidden from himself and from the woman he loves, so at first it is hidden from the audience, concealed as it is behind the man’s impetuous violence, his French bad manners, and his immensely ugly nose. But by the last act we have learned to see Cyrano correctly. We love him all the more for his magnificent deformity, and we would not trade that nose for any well-sculpted face under the moon. For the secret of Cyrano is that comedy is bigger than tragedy, and the heart is bigger than the nose.

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! (a hymn by Kim)

by Kim Fabricius

(Tune: Sussex / Laus Deo)

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!
God’s in heaven, all is well!
No, he’s not, and all’s not well here:
“God’s on earth, but earth is hell.”

Jolly families in December,
round the telly, watching Morse –
that’s the image, but remember:
child abuse and bleak divorce.

Roof extension, central heating,
double glazing, sofa bed;
while the homeless, in the sleeting,
search for doorway, box, or shed.

British blood and UK passport,
porridge, Guinness, cawl, and tea –
this is our land, for our own sort:
no room for the refugee.

Bonus for the city slicker,
cuts in care for sick and old,
politicians strut and snicker:
same old story, newly told.

Tyrants – they will not enslave us;
terror – we will not condone;
but our formless fears deprave us:
now we hunt and kill with drones.

Jesus, we have come to greet you,
star-crossed child of midnight birth;
now we go to tell or tweet you:
“Earth is hell, but God’s on earth!”

Two new publications

I feel very proud to have a chapter in Beverly Gaventa's excellent new edited volume, Apocalyptic Paul: Cosmos and Anthropos in Romans 5-8. My chapter is on "A Tale of Two Gardens: Augustine's Narrative Interpretation of Romans 5." Even though I don't really identify anymore with the "apocalyptic" strand of contemporary theology, it was a great pleasure to be involved in this project on the theology of St Paul, and to explore one aspect of the world-shaping influence of Paul's thought.

My new book, Salvation in My Pocket: Fragments of Faith and Theology, has been released too. My daughter has been reading it and she says she really likes it – so there's an early unbiased review for you. Regular readers of this blog will recognise most of the material, though I also added about a dozen new pieces and some other humorous and heart-warming material. Plus, reader, you will find everything very artfully arranged, with each piece interacting – or at least exchanging friendly glances – with its neighbours. The book should be properly stocked soon at Amazon, and it's available now from Book Depository or direct from the publisher.

Speaking of books and such, I recently came across the most sensational two-sentence review of Christ the Stranger over at Goodreads – it's the second review on the page, written by an intelligent, charming, and obviously quite exceptional person named Jenna Smith. Thank you, Jenna, whoever you are! Out of all the reviews I've seen, this was my favourite.