a bit of canal + creative endeavors + randomness
Just in case you wonder what the occasional random doodles on the blog are about I doodle cards for second hand books I sell over here.
Though to be honest, most of the time they’re mostly just random doodles. There we go, that’s my advertising for 2012 done back to the sexy life of a minister’s spouse. Or something like that!
Looking across the platform at Derriaghy train station it feels almost as if my eye has to go to the other side and carry the light back across.
The colour of the leaves, the rust on the rail track, the damp of the concrete and matt grey of the stone seem to absorb light and become dull making it more of an effort to see. The eye becomes tired with the effort of fetching light and colour. Same in the house late at night.
Dull means eye effort means tiredness means gloom.
So much of our modern life is spent staring into sheets of glass. I’m staring into a sheet of glass typing this.
Light from glass seems magnified and bright, it seems to carry itself to the eye without the eye having to fetch or carry it back.
Gloss means bright means less eye effort means less tiredness means happy associations.
Looking into glass screens for light and a good time is easier than looking at concrete or winter trees for a good time.
My favourite seats in coffee shops are near big sheets of glass. I much prefer the light levels on the train to the bus. I love the reflection and light from the sea.
I’m addicted to the internet, to Facebook, to blogging.
But perhaps it is something else altogether.Perhaps I’m really just addicted to the light source, to the gloss and shine and the way it seems to run into my eye instead of the effort needed to love at the matt things about Lambeg. Glass is dangerous, time for a walk in the dark.
(warning, one of those slightly imbalanced, not sure if what I’m saying is right but I just have to get it out there even if I’m incredibly wrong posts coming up)
This weekend I started to wonder how the early church leaders picked the letters and gospels which end up in what we call The Bible.
So I picked up the first church history book I could find and started reading.
However, the thing that caught my attention was not a chapter on how the books of the New Testament made it in, it was a chapter on why the early Christians were first persecuted by the Roman Empire.
Basically it seems that they were awkward.
Well awkward in the sense that when someone started living like Jesus in Roman society they didn’t fit in with that culture as their lifestyle was something different.
This bit in particular caught my eye as it does a better job at explaining some of how I’ve been feeling in our ‘hyper-economic-profit-competition-and-PROFIT-is-king’ society but not been able to express.
‘The Christian fear of idolatry also led to difficulties in making a living. A mason might be involved in building the walls of a heathen temple, a tailor in making robes for a heathen priest, an incense-maker in making incense for the heathen sacrifices…We might think that working with the sick would be a simple act of kindness. But even here early Christians found the pagan hospitals under the protection of the heathen god Aesculapius, and while a sick friend lay in his bed, the priest went down the aisle chanting to the god.
In short, the early Christian was almost bound to divorce himself from the social and economic life of his time -if he wanted to be true to his Lord’
Church History in Plain Language, Bruce L. Shelley
This is perhaps one of those posts when you try to justify yourself when you’ve been in the wrong, but there is something about those words that struck me.
I’ve found it difficult to make a living as well the last number of years and with that there is a certain amount of shame that you aren’t providing for your family, which is heightened by various scolding voices in the New Testament ( ”Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” )
It’s verses like that one from 1 Timothy which really piss me off as on first reading it’s saying/sounds like it’s saying that my inability to provide a living wage for my wife and extended family is a denial of the faith and worse than unbelieving.
And it’s that scolding of that verse and my inability to articulate things which means tonight I won’t feel comfortable enough to go to Men’s Group as the first question someone will ask me (just as they’ve asked me any time I’ve gone before) will be
‘Well Dave, any news on the job front?‘
because invariably I’ll feel embarrassed and ashamed that I haven’t found work yet, that I haven’t sent out hundreds of CVs or been trying to best everybody else out there looking for a job for the sake of my family
and basically I will get the feeling from these men (perfectly nice, Christian men who are probably just concerned for me and us) that I’m a hopeless, lazy Christian.
Yet it’s hard because I do want to provide for my family.
I’d love to provide for my family given half the chance.
It’s just that I don’t want to provide for my family using the ways of the world to provide for them or by helping the hyper-consumerist Empire that is destroying the creation that we should be looking after and caring for.
That is a clumsy way of putting things. Maybe a better way is to say ‘The Kingdom on Earth as in Heaven’.
If someone wants to do everything in their power to prove that they’re a more suitable candidate for a job than another person, if they want to compete,win and earn a job that will provide a living wage for their family I understand.
They love their family and want to provide for them. I admire that and many times I wish God had made me more competitive or more of a ‘man’ , that I was less of a walkover.
But for me, as a Christian I can’t see how this whole competing thing works within the kingdom of God.
I can’t see how scanning the papers and trying to ring in your application before someone else notices the job is particularly Christian. It seems very Darwinian of something.
Why would I be more suitable or worthy of a job than the hundreds of other people who are looking for a job?
Is my family any more important than their family from God’s point of view?
But that’s not the main reason I guess.
The main reason for me is something like the reason the Christian stone mason in the quote above didn’t want to build a heathen temple or the early Christian tailor might have refused to make robes for the temple priests.
In my heart working in somewhere like Tesco or any company where the core purpose is to increase the profits of the company at any cost would be like working in the heathen temple of our age.
I’m not condemning those who do, Christian or otherwise.
Well maybe I am in part. Perhaps I am lazy.
But what if you’re a Christian working hard in Thales Air Defence making missiles?
What if you’re a Christian working for Tesco to grab customers away from local shops?
What if you’re a Christian working for a bank that was more concerned with profits than people?
Does working hard, getting a wage and providing for your family necessarily mean you’re doing the right thing?
It’s just that it my heart I do want to provide for my family but I don’t want to do that by bowing my knee to the great god PROFIT or free market capitalism or whatever way we want to describe our present day Emperor as, or by doing work that is destructive and unloving to my neighbour, my neighbour in our local community or our global neighbour.
Seeing the fear that THE ECONOMY or THE GLOBAL ECONOMY can strike into the hearts of politicians and how that they will do anything to keep it appeased makes me want to run a mile from it as.
Basically it seems to be our Roman Empire or something very similar,
the thing that will bring worldwide peace if we keep it onside by our sacrifice and hard work.
But if the Bible is true, it won’t bring us peace. Jesus brings us peace, not whoever is up the Swiss Alps in Davos deciding that we must do this or that to bring world wide peace.
So Paul if you can help me understand how to provide for my family while at the same time not depending on false kingdoms for my daily bread I’d love to know.
A few conversations from the minister to the wife and friends has me wondering why religion feels so heavy in this part of the world?
It is suffocating and hard to free yourself from it. It lays heavy burdens on people and doesn’t lift a finger to help. Or at least it feels that way to me.
My wife mentioned the word ‘repressed’ and I countered with ‘oppressed’ and maybe the word ‘depressed’ could be all added into the mix.
Walking home from Tate’s Avenue to my part of Lisburn I counted something like 19 different Protestant churches of different denominations.
In Lisburn itself there is something like 106 different churches (probably more and I don’t think that includes chapels).
Yet…….well I can’t do words to what is wrong.
The atmosphere doesn’t seem right in proportion to the number of church goers and places of worship. Is that fair to say?
It is hard to talk about this stuff as it’s home for many people. They love it here.
As for church or a church, how do you even begin to talk about church and not come all over self righteous and bitter?
It’s a variation on the old line of ‘everytime you point the finger three more point back at you’. As so we go around and around in the same old structures doing what we do and have always done and will probably always do.
I have to stop, it’s dragging me down…
So there I was sitting in a coffee shop in Lisburn with one of those silent flat screen TV’s stuck on Sky News and ‘headlines’ scrolling across the bottom minding my own business when my eye caught this headline
‘Subway to Create 6000 Jobs Over the next Three Years’
which I filed away alongside the announcements over the past couple of days of
‘Asda to Create 5000 Jobs in 2012′
and
‘McDonald’s says 2,500 new jobs a lifeline for young unemployed’
Bloody hell, that’s great news isn’t it?
New jobs in a time of recession for the young unemployed who are fighting for jobs! A spark of hope in a time of gloom! All hail McDonalds, Asda and Subway!
Well not quite. At the same time I was reading this bit in Colossians Remixed
‘If we want to find abusive language and identify the discourse of violence of our time, we are terribly short-sighted if we don’t look beyond the obscenities of the street or the schoolyard. It is in the double-speak of corporate executives, the spin of politicians, the come-on of the advertisers, the cultural lies of the pharmaceutical companies and the biotech firms…’
That’s just it isn’t it?
We’ve a very short sighted view of what makes abusive language.
For instance a good Christian man or woman will probably not like my use of ‘bloody hell’ a few sentences up and would like it even less if I said ‘shit’ or fuck’. It’s bad,violent, offensive language, unclean and rude and a sin by all accounts so cut it out
It’s also a classic when you’re watching a film at home and your parents walk into the living room just the point the F-bomb is being dropped all over the show during some violent scene.
We don’t like hearing violent language on a personal,intimate level.
Yet so much violent language just slips past our sensors and worse than that is thought of as normal, good language.
I was thinking about this with relation to the ‘_____ create thousands of new jobs in 2012′ headlines from the media and PR departments.
Yes, I’ve no doubt that McDonald’s, Asda and Subway will create new jobs but at what expense?
Are the creation of these jobs an unquestioned good or is there violence in what they say as well?
Is the phrase ‘____ creates a 100o new jobs’ an unquestioned good?
For instance McDonald’s might create loads of new jobs for young people but many of those jobs have been created by young teens eating in McDonald’s. (‘McDonald’s UK does not publish like-for-like revenues, but it posted underlying sales growth in the “low teens” in its fourth quarter after an “outstanding Christmas” – The Independent.’)
Creating new jobs ‘good’.
Younger teens eating junk food more often in McDonald’s maybe not so good?
I’m not saying kids shouldn’t enjoy a McDonald’s every so often like we did,
it’s just the language of ‘creating new jobs’ mightn’t be the unquestioned good it sounds like on Sky News with some politician grinning on a podium saying it’s brilliant news.
What about the types of jobs created? Or is this even worthy of consideration?
Will they be good, healthy jobs or will young people be homogenized and turned into McDrones with some spin coming out about the qualifications they have earned?
My mum works for one of these companies by the way and it hurts me to see the way that she is treated by managers and the systems. You’re really just commodity or a resource to be used to earn maximum profit for the company. But if you’ve worked somewhere like that you probably don’t need me to tell you that.
When you say jobs do you mean full time jobs or do you mean part time, flexible jobs? What kind of jobs do you mean?
Also, what about all the jobs that will be uncreated by one of those three stores moving into a locality?
Do you expect me to believe that if an Asda moves into a community it won’t have knock on effects for other retailers in the area?
Maybe a more accurate headline would be ‘____ creates 1000 new jobs but wipes out ____ old jobs’
What about the uniqueness and character of a community being obliterated under the wheels of ‘well that’s just the way things go..’?
Anyway, that’s the way it goes I guess.
It feels almost pointless mentioning this stuff as I know that I’m very much in the minority and people need jobs and money to work (me included) and part of me wonders if I’m just finding ways to justify laziness or sloth. What I should really be doing is going out and sending my CV to McDonald’s, Asda and Subway and competing to get one of these jobs.
But another part of me doesn’t think it’s pointless at all.
We don’t have to live under the Roman Empire but we not stupid enough the think that there isn’t some type of ‘Empire’ over us and sucking us into it’s hole?
The Bible would probably call it ‘the World’.
A phrase I heard once heard to describe it was ‘corporate evil‘
Why have we assummed for so long that we don’t live under some type of system that blinds us and bind us to the way things really are?
And do we just have to suck it up and get a job with companies we fundamentally disagree with just to earn enough money to put bread on the table?
I’ll finish this later, I’m starving!
Priceless Shoes once had a shop
But their profits continued to drop,
They packed and left town
Their shutters went down,
And our high Street continued to rot…
It’s one of those strange ones.
I’ll admit I do like it when some people read a blog post,
or listen to a song I’ve written and say they enjoyed it,
or buy something I’ve doodled
but
the moment I feel that there is an audience gathering (no matter how small that audience is or even if there is no audience at all and ‘the audience’ is only in your imagination) I start to freeze up and not know what to do.
There is definately something liberating in being able to do your thing in obscurity but at the same time it can deeply discouraging. Perhaps it’s just a paradox?
Robert Hughes writes a bit about this sort of thing in ‘The Shock of the New’ when describing how Picasso and Braque came up with Cubism. I’m not saying I’m Northern Ireland’s answer to Pablo Picasso by the way, just that the fact nobody is reading your blog or listening to you allow you freedom to experiment a bit and say things that you would never get away with if you had an audience.
‘But he [Picasso] was so little known, and Braque so wholly unknown, that in the public eye neither artist existed. The audience for their work might have been a dozen people….This might seem like crushing isolation, but it meant that they were free, as researchers in some very obscure area of science are free. Nobody cared enough to interfere. Their work had no role as public speech, and so there was no public pressure on it to conform. This was fortunate, since they were engaged in a project which would presently seem, from the point of view of normal description, quite crazy’
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
This is a sight familiar to us all, the daily bag of rubbish to be sorted and recycled.
During 2011 I walked back and forth between our green bin exactly 29,432 times which would have taken me 3/4′s of the way to the moon if I had walked in a straight line.
There is something deeply troubling about trying to live less greedily because basically it seems like there is no escape from waste.
There is no escape from the bain of my life, the 2L milk carton and 400ml tins of plum tomatoes. There is no escape from the paper that clogs up the bins.
John Seymour, author of ‘The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency’ (a magic book) said
‘The dustman need never visit the smallholder’
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams went even further with his statement that
‘God doesn’t do waste’
and William Morris penned these words.
‘I tell you that the very essence of competitive commerce is waste’
So perhaps waste is a sign of our sinfulness or the way that THE SYSTEM has got us trapped and bound up, that we’re slaves to THE WORLD.
Perhaps a trip to the bin might require us to be humble because it
a) reminds us that we’re not God and we’re trapped in an oppressive system that we can never hope to escape unless by some miracle
b) that we’re living on a planet of limited resources that is dying no matter what we try or how wisely we try to live.
But at the same time (and in my determination not to the let the darkness eat me up) there is redemption of all things and ‘God doesn’t do waste.’
There is the possibility of redemption and recreation even in what we might throw in the dustbin or discard as waste.
G.K Chesterton writes something in ‘What’s Wrong With the World’ that I could read all day, something that makes me want to go out and redeem the rubbish
“The most prosaic thing about the house is the dustbin…..If a man could undertake to make use of all things in his dustbin he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare. When science began to use by-products; when science found that colors could be made out of coaltar, she made her greatest and perhaps her only claim on the real respect of the human soul.
Now the aim of the good woman is to use the by-products, or, in other words, to rummage in the dustbin.”
Redeeming the by-products, rummage in the bin. Make rocket stoves out of tin cans, plant herbs in milk cartons, make compost.
