Listen Up

Some great material from the latest 1517 conference!

Chad Bird on Sanctification.

Daniel Emery Price on sinners' "Sainting Boldly".

Enjoy!

Homeward

 Life's journey so often, and so quickly, takes us into unforeseen curves and seemingly bottomless valleys that none of us can avoid. In this wonderfully honest and open talk on the greatest loss in her own life, Mockingbird writer and speaker Sarah Condon tells it like it is, and shows how suffering so often can bring the last thing we're expecting - a deeper life, and a genuine expectation of something better ahead.

Cruciform

"And the angel showed me, flowing from the throne and the Lamb and God the water of life, situated in the midst of the street at the heart of the city, along with the flourishing of the tree of life".

Revelation 22:1 & 2.

So this week we were provided with a debate between the likes of Francis Collins and Richard Dawkins on the validity of MRNA vaccinations, the worth of evolution, and the question of the existence of God. After finding common (woefully predictable) ground on the first two, the debaters came pretty close to some level of consensus on the possibilities of the third, at least until Mr Dawkins began to refute the "total nonsense" of the miraculous aspects of Christianity, and especially the notion of something as ridiculous as the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus being the actual cornerstone of a relationship with God.

After floundering on morally-related issues, Collins merely affirmed what, presumably, he believed, which was clearly unsatisfactory for Richard Dawkins.

So that's that, then - nothing more to say.

Enter the latest work - The Truth and the Beauty - by one Andrew Klavan.

Mr Klavan has produced a work on the English Romantic poets that will stop you in your tracks. Whilst he's not right on everything (his Reformation history and his analysis of Science Fiction could do with some refinement), his central theme and the manner in which he unpacks this is a magnum opus for the 2020's.

Which brings us to the Cross.

In the central chapter of the book entitled The Gate to the Garden, the author examines the material of the joint work by Coleridge and Wordsworth in the original publication of Lyrical Ballads. In his concluding section on Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he makes the following observation:

Aside from the beauty of its language and the nightmare brilliance of its imagery, the genius of the poem lies in the way it locates the Christian mythos in the imagination of man. The senseless killing of the 'Christian soul' of the albatross with the crossbow; the fickle passions of the crew like the mob outside Jesus' trial; the interior change of mind that reveals nature through love; the love that frees the mariner to pray so that the body of the bird that hangs around his neck like a cross falls off; the redemption of the dead - it is all as Coleridge was showing us that even if Christ had never died, the truth of His life, crucifixion and resurrection would still be the shape of our perceptions because it is the logos built into nature.

The Gospel is the underlying reality of reality and would be murkily apparent in the interplay of nature and our imaginations even if it has not been revealed clearly in history and scripture.

That, to borrow from Paul's statement to the Philosopher's at Mars Hill, is indeed what all men everywhere are seeking to 'feel their way towards', which is why so much of what is best in art and rime, whilst not blind to our troubles, also seeks to point us to the need to reach for the good, to hope for the day of redemption.

It is indeed sad when the notions which we deem best blind or block us from growing in such a splendour.

Oikophillia?

It's not a term you come across every day. Coined by the late Roger Scruton, it means a love for place - home - where shared things of value can be passed along from one generation to the next.

It's an important ideal to value in a moment when my country sees both trust and caring becoming deemed something irrelevant to those in power, who want to replace such meaning with the dross of greedful gain and vile self aggrandisement at the expense of the loss of everything that should be cherished.

What brings about such a radical adjustment?

It really all boils down to how you see another person.

Are they - 

a momental work of art

a product of unceasing utilisation

a vector for continual exploitation

Those are the three principal choices on the table in 2022.

Option 1 seems pretty 'away with the fairies' to most, who want something more pragmatic than that.

Option 2 sits nicely with those wanting us to accept the agenda (whatever it is today), but it also provides little resistance to

Option 3 - where we can be well and truly 'attached' to the "Metaverse" for as long as we're deemed 'viable' (generating wealth for others), and then - striked out.

That's almost certainly what the last few years have been all about - seeing how a variation of John Calhoun's famous rodent experiment would run amongst us in real time, with virtualisation becoming the only legal means of escape. it's a "game" that's been in motion for most of my adult life, and the roots go back way before that.

The second and third options are generally acceptable today because they are sold in the wrapping of offering 'security' in return for your acquiescence. The cost is high ( individual freedom in respect to mobility and expression are gradually removed ) but the 'high' is the dilution of moral responsibility for anything that is not deemed imperative by the "rights" provided as essential. Internment, in other words, even euthanasia, become rational and critical given the right imperatives are understood and accepted.

Exclusion is equally correct when anyone - a school girl or a training minister - seek to pause and ask what is happening - deviation is pestilent.

So, in the emerging universe, there is no sound as the tree falls in the midst of a great wood, because there is no one to hear it - we are entirely deprived, or will be very soon, of a real sense of Oikophilia, not only in respect to place but the vital values that imbue such a sphere with "moment" - connection that makes us beings with eternity in our hearts.

That's where option one comes in.

Recall the moment when you fell in love, or saw someone you loved again for the first time in a very long time, or shared the moment when your beloved gave birth to your first child - pick your moment (there are loads to choose from). Suddenly, the "light" of a far greater realm adorns the occasion with a charm and elegance that transcends time and space and fills you with a joy that barely fits into words. You totally inhabit the fact that something much richer than the norm is happening, and you want such a juncture to spread out and fill your days, but even though that won't happen, those moments provide a source of comfort and delight in your days ahead.

You see the genuine significance, the majesty, of what we are... and what we were meant to be.

Well, that's the case when you allow the mindset of option 1 into the world.

The trouble we face continually everywhere right now is the mindset which is relentlessly seeking to rub that option out entirely - to make us 'test tube' examplars of a world without sex, without genuinely individuality, without roots, without hope - creatures driven by fear of loosing the security 'they' provide, and therefore, conformed to the consensus.

"What a work of art is man", noted Hamlet, echoing the themes of scripture, but we inhabit the day of the demon of denying and dissolving that work, and it is making us evil, in the worst possible way.

Will we see a return to better days, or is this indeed the eve of our destruction?

The Reflection

 "It's like when you're the youngest and weakest kid on the playground. And when the biggest kid smacks you, that's all right because he noticed you. That means you're alive. It's better than when they ignore you... When you're really alive, other people know it".

"What's that got to do with having the enemy in your hands?"

"He's alive - he's got the same kind of aliveness as me. Each of us is the enemy, to the other and to himself. I'm the enemy within myself".

Frank Herbert - The Dragon in the Sea.

"For now we see through a mirror, darkly".  The Apostle Paul.

It's that telling moment in the Disney version of Snow White. The Queen, filled with vanity, thinks she's about to be re-affirmed in her presumption that she's the radiance of the kingdom, when all her illusions are crushed by a single statement of fact - there's someone far more fair. The resulting rage brings to the fore all the true malice of her nature in her attempt to murder what she cannot attain - to expel any virtue that reveals the true misery of her evil.

Fairy Tales, like any good story, tell us huge amounts of truth about ourselves.

Through the continual refining of numerous algorithms, vast numbers of us now spend inordinate amounts of our small time here looking into our own dark mirror, wishing and hoping it will bring some narcotic rush through another like or friending or some other necessary bonus that keeps us coming back for more, but woe betide the person(s) who seek to query or publicly counter what our virtual persona says about us - the nightmare of Stephen King's 'Carrie' doesn't hold a candle to what we can become in such circumstances in our dismantling not only of their view, but the assassination of their persona in revenge.

The tragedy in all of this is the extortionate amount of investment we continually give to something so delusional, yet so possessive of us. Never before have we lived at a moment when it is so easy to genuinely take control of an individual and feed them into becoming a part of a manipulate collective to the point where what is truly free thought and action is entirely circumvented, and any necessary criticism is entirely quashed as disinformation.

The horror at the core of this misery is that we buy the lie about ourselves - that we in fact "are" what these manipulations sell to us.

The analysis of documentaries like The Trap (Adam Curtis) or The Great Hack (Netflix) reveal to us something truly sinister. Macbeth's fate was sealed once he followed the words of witches. Ours are likewise knitted into a web of self beguiling and ascendance the moment we 'view' what we are through the mirage of social media.

It isn't a case of theory concerning a conspiracy that owns us, the reality is in our faces, 24/7 - so pervasive that we merely accept its requirements and judgements as entirely correct and normative in respect to our status.

Our definitions of the sacred are reduced to these algorithms. We can no longer see a 'god' beyond our own reflections because to do so would rob us of the presumed security and 'must have' nurture of the womb of our SM sites. The fact that these places own and define what we are, continually harming us in a manner which rarely jolts our karma is deemed beyond what counts to most users. The 'fix' is all, and it is such "levelling" of our society as a whole that will conclude our entire undoing before a terrible malevolence.

Faith calls us to stand outside these gates. To pursue a deeper beauty, a richer truth, which most certainly values the vital image we are meant to bear and seeks, often through endurance, to fashion something eternally striking in these tents of flesh.

The hammer and anvil that holds and shapes such fire is the body and blood of the one who made Himself of no reputation to heal us through death and resurrection - and the call is to such pressure that genuine joy and splendour is moulded into us.

Genuine and lasting good is something beyond the virtual.

May we have a relish to seek and satisfy in such a treasure!

Enthralled

"The Lord has made everything beautiful in its time". Solomon.

Have you ever wondered why we spend so much time and industry seeking to employ the pinnacle of our modern technology to create something which, we hope, will emulate or at the very least correspond at some level to what we are?

Why do we so want something like that?

Why aren't we pouring those massive resources into devising and then constructing something that is entirely different from ourselves - something devised that is so absolutely 'other' to us? Why is 'the future' something which is perceived as something which presumably enhances and elevates the human?

What is it, in other words, about us that we consider worth saving?

Is it because, from what we can actually state, that we appear to be the only material part of the visual universe that have the capacity to stop and ask questions like "Who am I? What am I?".

Thinkers like the late Roger Scruton argued that it was precisely because of these issues that we bothered to pursue the likes of art and science to establish our place and significance amidst the realm in which we exist.

The most telling shock any of us undergo in our days here is not the joys or the trials of our common life, but the moment when an awareness of what is so much more profound and enduring than us pierces our presumed notions of what we are and begins to make us aware of a wisdom and splendour behind the majesty of what is. Such a moment of transition, of overwhelming revelation, re-defines the common into the miraculous and the barely comprehended into a realm of inexhaustible wonder.

It resonates with us like a child enjoying the genuine magic of a Christmas morning, or a writer suddenly capturing an idea that he instantly knows in the depths of his marrow will amaze and entrap his audience by its originality and surprise.

Inspiration in the "composing" of a work of astonishing charm that staggers us, in comprehension continually frolics upon our consciousness in a manner that seeks to cheerfully whisper of a wisdom and elegance akin to a Dickensian apparition of joy - to intoxicate our reductionism with an expanse of revelation.

Herein then we find an uncommon jewel uncovered in both the weaving of an artistic masterpiece or the unpacking of a ground-breaking mathematical formula - we are drawn to sourcing an underlying splendour which, via our engagement, pours into our realm to allow a previously untapped spring to flow and form in concert with our gifts to elevate our days - to express a fraction of the unseen and to enthral and spur us to further discovery.

Such wonder is upon us continually, and yet, is barely comprehended in respect to the 'message' it is seeking to convey. Take the case of non-utilitarian beauty. Non-Adaptive order, as it defined in science, is everywhere, from the numerous variety in the forms of leaves to the concentric nature of flowers. Such forms have absolutely no survival function and yet, they pervade the natural world. Such patterns are quite extraordinarily exquisite, but they carry no actual biological function, leaving us with a remarkable paradox as we observe and appreciate such expressions of something so fundamental to life, yet totally beyond the utilitarian.

Non- adaptive elaboration speaks directly to our aesthetic and creative character, finding resonance with our seemingly innate ability to engage with such beauty and be inspired by this- to 'see', in other words, something teetering upon the transcendent; a pointer to mind reflected in both creativity and what has been created.

Such texturing, variation, distinction and elaboration for no required functional purpose clearly speak to an intention - to weave a particular manner of splendour into the natural order which would allow our cognitive abilities to comprehend and appreciate a richness which requires appreciation and prompts us to look and wonder at the true intent in this realm and relationship to this.

Beauty, be it within a painting, a sonnet, or a mathematical axiom, requires and gains our attention and engages us at a truly profound level which opens our ability to revel in the exquisite. Remove such elements from the nature of reality or from our consciousness, and the universe would be a very cold, austere place with nothing beyond rudimentary survival to offer.

We do not live in such squalor. We inhabit a realm bursting with opulence and splendour.

Perhaps we should ask ourselves why.

Perhaps the reason we don't is because when properly considered, the existence of such beauty leads us to some quite troubling conclusions...

The Indelible Mark

 "Once I was told that love could fly. Yeah, but it's been so long, I just can't remember why". Randy Stonehill - Keep Me Running.

David Wood is on superb form here on the matter of our being made in the image of God from the first chapter of Genesis, and why it still resonates very deeply with us today.

Being comfortable with 'a long way to go'

"Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, mindful of your own business and working with your own hands, just as we said to you, so that your days here may win the respect of those outside, and not be dependent upon anybody".

1 Thessalonians 4: 11 and 12.

I read a really insightful piece on Mockingbird this week on the, ahem, fine living of someone you may have heard of - a rather significant person named Abraham. What is so good about it is how the author plays with some of the most popular slips-ups people can make (about God and neighbour) and shows how they just apply readily, naturally, to this man of faith, as of course, they often do to us, So the next time you think 'oh... what did I do that for?', just look at these helpful examples.

Also just wanted to point you here in respect to a new book that's on the way in a very similar tone to this article, to help us keep ourselves firmly planted in what really counts.

Peace

 "And through Christ to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross". Colossians 1:20.

This morning I watched, a tad distressed, as a huddle of Christians, no doubt seeking to do what they thought best, badgered a soul who had confessed they still struggle with their sins.

"You must repent", they cried, and keep on so reforming yourself until sin is the farthest thing from you.

Genuine repentance allows us to look beyond ourselves. Like the thief who "repented" (changed his mind) as he hung dying next to Jesus, he came to understand that only what was outside of him, what was being done for him, actually mattered, then and now - because it is only the life and the death of another that provides, entirely, the full measure, of what forever reconciles us to God and marries us to full redemption - Jesus confirmed that in His reply to that wretch who cried the one thing worth anything in this broken world - Jesus, please help me.

With that in mind, here's a message that will encourage us to see that manner of help for each of us.

(Oh, and I sought to share the same with everyone engaged in that dialogue this morning).