Compelling Quotes ( I )

We are all beings of our age and time. We are all a consequence of the depth or limitation of our understanding of the world around us, sometimes faulted in that development by the kind of commitment we make to that world, the people who share it with us, and the historical events that touch our lives.

Brian Keenan, An Evil Cradling.

Mack presentation - Solomon (Feb 2007)

NOTE - This is a subjective piece, and thus I don't want to hear about the disputable authorship of Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. No, really, I don't care.

When I was asked about my favourite Bible character, I almost immediately thought of Solomon. I’ve spent most of my time since trying to pinpoint exactly why. Peter offered to help me, but his suggestion was, "Solomon’s my favourite person in the Bible because he was rich, had as many women as he wanted, and still got to go to heaven". So after I hit him for saying that bit about the women, I decided to go with what I had written.

So, why Solomon? It’s not as though there’s a lot I can identify with in Solomon’s life. Immeasurably rich, king of his country, with his famous entourage of wives and concubines - it’s nothing that really strikes a chord in the life of a young, British girl with just the one husband.
What drew me to Solomon was my love of ideas. I’ve always been an enthusiastic reader, and my favourite authors have always been those who really empathise with their characters, and explore human nature by exploring the human soul - writers like Sebastian Faulks, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Heller. My sister was always of the opinion that I lived inside my own head most of the time, and the writings of Solomon spoke to the philosopher in me. I knew very little of the king who lived, ruler of a desert kingdom, born into a troubled family full of both love and bitter enmity, where those closest to the king were also among his most vicious rivals. It wasn’t until later that I learned of the man, his history, his wisdom and his wives.

No, it was his own writings that led me to understand him. As Philip Yancey said, or words to that effect, it’s through writing that you really get inside a person’s head. And of all the people in the Bible who speaks to us directly, it wasn’t King David’s lyricism, or the eloquent theology of Paul that I connected with as wholeheartedly as the poetry of Solomon.
At the age of sixteen, I sat down one evening at a summer camp and read through the whole of Ecclesiastes. My melancholy teenage soul in search of angst - when there was in my life, to be truthful, little angst to be found - found expression in the utterance, "Everything is meaningless...all is smoke...there is nothing new under the sun." And yet there are also phrases of breathtaking beauty and remarkable clarity. Something in me always stirs when I hear the phrase, "He has…set eternity in the hearts of men." I could talk for a long time about the nature of desire and the longing of mankind, based on that single sentence. But I won’t.
Again, when I was a bit older, and had stopped giggling at the images portrayed of cavorting stags and ripe fruit, I was struck by those words about the power of love, "its jealousy unyielding as the grave", and by the timeless warning, learnt by me the hard way, "not to arouse or awaken love until it so desires." His words, written so long ago, seem proof to me of the unchanging nature of mankind.

It’s not just the writings of Solomon, though, that appealed to me. It has to be that he was the wisest man who ever lived, and yet he still messed up.
Why is it that our favourite traits in Biblical characters is sually the fact that they did something unutterably stupid? The greatest, godliest men in history, and what do we love about them? Moses - killed a man. Peter? Denied Christ. And David, the man after God’s own heart? We love David the most, because when he fell, he went for the triple. Deceit, adultery AND murder.
But, I have to admit, part of the appeal of Solomon for me is the warning that he poses. As a student, and especially in teh culture today, when the focus is on everything that's palpable, proveable and logical - even as a Bible student - there seems to be the assumption that knowledge is everything. And Solomon - reputedly the wisest man in history - proved in his life that knowledge means nothing unless you apply what you know. How many of us have been told what we must do, and we know we must do it, yet we still disregard it? As Terry Pratchett points out, there are certain things like the opposite of urban myths, that we all know are true, and we still ignore them - wise phrases like, "Money can’t buy happiness," and "It wont get better if you keep scratching it."

More than that, Solomon’s story shows that as important as knowledge is, it comes second to obedience to God. As Jesus remarks, to see the Kingdom of God requires the faith of a child. Children aren't stupid, and they always ask questions. To become like a child is not a case of following blindly, but it is a matter of trust. Not to mention the clarity which comes with innocence, and strikes fear in the hearts of all children's entertainers - so that you’re not playing along with intellectual games and modes of thinking, but so you can see past the magician’s tricks and declare that he’s got "something funny up his sleeve." Wise as serpents, innocent as doves.

And of course, you need devotion. In short, both the highs and lows of Solomon’s career, and there were real highs, show that wise thinking amounts to little unless your heart belongs to God. Unless I have love, I am nothing. And for someone who has a tendency to live inside my own head and rely upon my own reserves,someone who tends to withdraw from the world when things get difficult, and someone who has to constantly, reluctantly, pray the prayer for God to break my heart for the things that break his, it’s a lesson that I’m constantly having to learn.

Day of Relaxation

I love Sundays. They're the best day of my week. Last night I met a guy from Hungary, who was visiting for a few weeks. A lovely guy, and very brave. Not only did he sit through a church service in English, but he also came to the pub afterwards, and gamely struggled through conversations that included Doctor Who, breakfast in China and the merits of Paris. I was very impressed, more than I was by my own shocking attempts to speak German.

In other news, I've really been enjoying the recent rain. Proper summer rain, not this drizzle malarkey. It makes the trees look happier, don't you think?

Why Watching Scrubs All Day Isn't Always A Plus

Hopefully not a long post today. I just came back from house group, which has just started a study based around John Ortberg's book, 'Everybody's Normal Until You Get To Know Them', a book I picked up several years ago because I liked the title, read two pages of, and then, as I usually do with even the best non-fiction books, got bored of because it didn't have a story in it. It's a good book, though, and covers the two themes that have been bugging me recently, those of personal vulnerability and proper community.

More of that tomorrow. On another positive note, I have noticed a marked improvement in two areas of my life. Firstly, I am learning to put towels back on the peg in the bathroom, and not anywhere I happen to take them off. My last attempt made it to the radiator, and I was even congratulated by PeterBell, who said the execution was a bit sloppy (being scrunched up on top of another towel that was already on there) but that it was a marked improvement on the last one, which I left on a pillow.
The other positive is that when jobhunting, having a rubbish job is far more of an incentive than being jobless.

Some Things I Should Have Thought About Sooner.

I'm geting a little fed up of my blog already, for several reasons.

Firstly, it takes too long.

Secondly, it's hard to get the tone right. After my first couple of posts (couple meaning anything between two and four in this case) I considered changing the title to "Conversations I wish I'd had". It's dawning on me that the reason that I write these things and don't discuss them is that they're either too flippant or too indulgent for anyone to put up with for too long.

Thirdly, it's hard to get the depth right. Unless your sole purpose is to be entertaining, then keeping a blog requires a certain level of honesty, which is hard to attain when you always have at the back of your mind the knowledge that anyone could be reading your blog. And it's not the idea of strangers reading it that bothers me.

This evidently requires some more thought. But not today. It's stopped raining now.

There Can Only Be One!

I watched Highlander last night. It's a great film. Nowhere else could you get away with a Scotsman with a french accent meet an Egyptian who's working for the King of Spain and sporting a broad Scottish accent. The moment when Sean Connery uttered the words, "What's a Haggis?" brought tears to my eyes. There's some dodgy wire-work, and I have no idea why a woman would agree to have dinner with the only suspect in a violent murder spree, but who cares, it's fun, there's big swordfights, and Christopher Lambert has a wink worthy of a young Mel Gibson.

Worth watching, no matter how you feel about Queen.

Ode to Seagulls

I love seagulls. I went to Flatholme island courtesy of my husband. It's a conservation island given mainly over to seagulls. They're actually an endangered species. It seems strange to think so, when you can't seem to move for seagulls nowadays, and gone are the times when you'd only see them on beaches, but they traditionally migrate for several years until they're adults, and the recent growth of litter in the cities means that they'd much rather hang about and eat junk food than do all that wing-work. So they hang around, and eat lots of nasties, and get botulism. Seagulls eat a lot of nasties, including each other. I can't decribe to you the feeling of horror you get when you're walking along, and the grass gets a little, crunchy, and you find that you just trod on a bird skull. With bits of flesh still on it.

Anyway, I digress. The main reason I love seagulls is because they look so angry all the time. They have this expression of pure annoyance, like the little old lady who's just come out to yell at the children for trampling all over her begonias. And you can see it all building up til it gets too much for them, and they just throw their heads back, open up their throats, and let out this long, gutteral screech. They put their whole heart into that screech. And then they fly off to bully some pigeons.

The best characterisation of a seagull has be Kehaar from Watership Down, a book that far too few people have read. Here's an extract.

The creature in the hollow was a bird - a big bird, nearly a foot long...The white part of its back, which they had glimpsed through the grass, was in fact only the shoulders and the neck. The lower back was light grey and so were the wings, which tapered to long, black-tipped primaries folded together over the tail. The head was very dark brown - almost black - in such sharp contrast to the white neck that the bird looked as though it were wearing a kind of hood. The one dark-red leg that they could see ended in a webbed foot and three powerful, taloned toes. The beak, hooked lightly downwards at the end, was strong and sharp. As they stared it opened, disclosing a red mouth and throat. The bird hissed savagely and tried to strike, but still did not move.
As they squatted, looking at the bird...it suddenly burst into loud, raucous cries - 'Yark! Yark! Yark' - a tremendous sound at close quarters - that split the morning and carried far across the down...

"You hurt? You no fly?"
The answer was a harsh gabbling which they all felt immediately to be exotic. Wherever the bird came from, it was somewhere far away. The accent was strange and gutteral, the speech distorted. They could only catch a word here and there.
"Come keel - kah! kah! - you come keel - yark! - t'ink me finish - me no finish - 'urt you dam' plenty."

"You hurt?" said Hazel.
The bird looked crafty. "No hurt. Plenty fight. Stay small time, den go."
"You stay there you finish, " said hazel. "Bad place. Come homba, come kestrel."
"Dam de lot. Fight plenty."
"I bet it would, too," said Bigwig, looking with admiration at the two-inch beak and thick neck.
"We no want you finish," said Hazel. "You stay here you finish. We help you maybe."
"Piss off."