Illness Project, Six Months In

I have just spent a fun and fascinating week being investigated in hospital. I'm not sure this is how one is supposed to experience hospital, but that was how it was: the food was delicious and I had a view of the Edinburgh Tattoo fireworks. It might have been different had the various tests to rule out serious complications unearthed any new demons, but I appear to be safe. This seems a good moment, six months after the crippling joint pains of what turned out to be Lupus first appeared, to reflect on some of the things I've learned from my "illness project" so far…

Give me a broken rock, a little moss...
And I would ask no more; for I would dream
Of greater things associated with these,
Would see a mighty river in my stream,
And, in my rock, a mountain clothed with trees.
John Ruskin

• The only limit to your horizons is your imagination.
• Show-offs are naturally cheerful in debility because it's the only way they can still impress people.
• It is difficult to do an ECG scan through breasts.
• Serious misfortune is as necessary as a good education to give a lucky and privileged individual confidence in their convictions.
• Physiotherapists are magicians.
• Lupus gets its name from the belief when it was first discovered in the eighteenth century to be caused by a wolf bite. Cool!
• Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels are rubbish.
• The CT scanner is by far the most exciting piece of hospital equipment: like a trip in the Large Hadron Collider.
• I can still remember almost all the words of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat after thirty years.
• The staff of the Department for Work and Pensions are in fact quite helpful and sympathetic, and not mere Ian Duncan Smith robots out to meet welfare sanctions targets.
• If I had to choose between an iron lung or an unhappy marriage, I would choose the former.
• However often you take paracetamol, it doesn't get any easier to swallow.
• It is difficult not to regard the size of the bottle for a 24 hour urine sample as a challenge.
• If you can't sing or move your fingers, you can still make music on the swannee whistle.
• It is difficult to find the spleen on an ultrasound scan.
• Church folk are hilarious when you are ill. NO I DON'T NEED PRAYED FOR!!
• Most interesting side effect so far: Tramadol makes your nose cold.
• Shakespeare's classical plays are splendid.
• If you have to have a fasting blood test, it is wise to lie down.
• The environmental crisis is more important than anything, and should be at the top of everyone's agenda - not just those lucky enough to have nothing else to worry about.

 

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The Armour of God

23 August 2015. Readings: 1 Kings 8: 22-30, 41-43, Psalm 84, Ephesians 6:10-20, John 6:56-69.

I have a special affection for the "armour of God" passage from Ephesians which is read in churches around the world today. It was the basis of a sermon by the man I studied for my PhD, Daniel Sandford, Bishop of Edinburgh 1806-1830 and founder of St John's, Edinburgh, delivered to young people whom he had just confirmed. It drew attention because the rite of confirmation itself was new and strange in Presbyterian Scotland: a bold statement of Episcopalian resurgence.

But I was more interested in what the sermon suggested about Bishop Sandford's religious culture. He is usually seen as part of the ecclesiastical late Enlightenment. Characterised by rationalism, evangelicalism, scholarly sermons delivered in sober black gowns, it was superseded over the Victorian period by a preference for robed choirs, processions, Eucharists, stained glass and all the other furniture which became standard in the Edwardian church. A hundred years before, however, Bishop Sandford seemed to be ahead of his time in promoting a more artistic and emotional approach to spirituality in the New Town of Edinburgh, enabling me to argue in my PhD that this previously obscure figure in fact made a groundbreaking contribution to history.

You do not need to read Bishop Sandford's sermons to see this. Simply walk into St John's and realise that it was built a quarter of a century before the Victorian Gothic revival supposedly began. But his "armour of God" sermon is interesting because it suggests why this sea-change in British religious culture had at least one of its beginnings in the Edinburgh New Town.

St John's Church. Photo by chrisradleyphotography.com

The Bishop played up the chivalric romance of the Ephesians passage, addressing the young confirmands as if he were King Arthur, and they his valiant knights, sent out on heroic quests. It was published in 1809, just at the time when Walter Scott's chivalric romances The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), and Marmion (1808) were causing a British publishing sensation. Scott lived nearby and was closely connected with the chapel. Popular literary culture had suddenly been drenched in the romance of chivalry, and the fountainhead was on Sandford's doorstep. Sandford used today's passage from Ephesians to harness that literary excitement as religious excitement, and in doing so brought the romantic movement into religion.

So, now we've examined some historical church culture, let's examine our own.

Despite their ubiquity in the gospels, most of us, whether Christian or not, feel deeply uncomfortable about the idea of supernatural miracles being performed today: miracles do not fit with our scientific worldview. Yet it seems to me that we feel equally uncomfortable with the idea of questions performing "heroic" acts. We have a similar sense that well heroism might have been acceptable in "olden times", it is awkward and inappropriate in the twenty-first century. But what is the logic behind this? A British fear of showing off? The lesson of the World War trenches that "heroism" was a sham, a fruitless waste of life? A cultural reaction, in fact, against the chivalric romance of Walter Scott. There is nothing evidential or scientific about our antipathy to heroism.

Nor is there anything unbiblical about heroism: the "armour of God" passage was a gift to Sandford in his context of Scott's poetry, but he didn't make it up. Paul really did write about heroism, and Christians have been inspired by the passage in many eras of history. It seems to me we are suspicious of heroism merely from prejudice formed of historical baggage. And this is the point when my cultural antennae go up and I ask, have we lost something valuable?

The projections of extinction rates, climate change and deforestation on the one hand, and of realistically likely scenarios of changed society, business practices and political will required to avert rapid catastrophic environmental collapse on the other, are now so pessimistic that many scientific commentators would say that nothing short of a miracle could save the world.

Perhaps now your antennae have gone up, suspecting me of shoehorning a "modern issue" into the traditions of Christianity? Look no further than the psalm set for today: "Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God" (Psalm 84.3). There are supposed to be sparrows on the altars.

Yet not only do we live in a society in which Christians have forgotten that the Bible is far fuller of biodiversity than our modern urban life; we live in a society in which scientists do not believe in miracles. The obstacles to saving the world seem to be insuperable.

Yet again, in the Bible, the key quality for miracles is not so much supernatural magic, as heroic courage.

And it is quite clear that to save the world from environmental destruction, we do not need supernatural magic, but a heroic courage so unlikely it would deserve the term miraculous. The obstacles are not physical, but only psychological – which is just what Paul writes to the Ephesians: "our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil". Not poltergeists, horned devils or crazed axemen, but doubt, depression, cynicism, low self-esteem.

So where would such heroic courage begin? Not zapping down from the sky; nor infusing like vapour around society. It can only begin inside a single, individual heart.

And what resources do you have to save the world? You don't have the power to make gods zap from the sky. Nor do you have the power to infuse the whole world with miraculous vapour. Your only resource is the only thing that might work: a single, individual heart.

"Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled round your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God."

You are called to be a hero. You are called to save the world. And because, like all the best heroes from Anne Frank to Superted, you are just a perfectly ordinary person, when the world is saved, it will be a miracle.

 

 

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Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels: I've read them, so you don't have to

Can You Forgive Her? (1865)
Phineas Finn (1869)
The Eustace Diamonds (1873)
Phineas Redux (1874)
The Prime Minister (1876)
The Duke's Children (1880)

When I was mad keen on all things Celtic, I remember being hugely amused by a scribe's marginal note which went something like this: "Here endeth the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. The longest, most tedious work ever written. Thank God, thank God, and again thank God!"

This was pretty much my reaction to reaching the end of Anthony Trollope's Palliser Chronicles.

One of the good things about being ill all summer has been the opportunity to engage in some extended reading projects. I've always meant to read Palliser. Trollope's Barchester Chronicles were the first grown-up classic novels I read. Warm, gently insightful and frequently hilarious, the cathedral precincts and rural parishes of Barchester with that subtle and loveable characters remain amongst my favourite fictional escapes. The first one, The Warden, was the inspiration for my modern retelling, "Ursula". The Last Chronicle of Barset is on a short list of novels which have made me cry.

So I decided it was high time I read Trollope's other series. Written after Barchester, and dealing with the grander world of national politics, rather than the politics of an English diocese, I have heard them spoken of as the greater of the two. I found they were longwinded, humourless, snobbish, and shallowly sententious. That is (according to Kindle timings) 74 hours of my life I will never get back.

There are endless minor variations on the same handful of plot devices and character types. The narratives all hinge, not on any events or revelations, but on one character remaining unerringly and unreasonably stubborn until the denoument where they suddenly and inexplicably relent. Most depressingly, the only characters with a fragment of personality and pluck, Bergo Fitzgerald, Mrs Sexty Parker and Major Tifto, all fall victim to their own personality flaws and the grinding inevitability of the narratives, and all have their loose ends tied up by being made pensioned objects of aristocratic charity, with no hope of rising in the world again. The reader is supposed to be satisfied.

The final novel, The Duke's Children, has a little more spark than the rest. At last, the comedy that pervades Barchester makes an appearance as election candidates go canvassing in pouring rain. The relationship of the shy and geeky Duke of Omnium, whose career we have followed throughout the series, with his grown-up children, is sweetly and delicately portrayed.

Yet one cannot dismiss the suspicion that Trollope created the love-interests in The Duke's Children, the noble but low-born Frank Treagar and the angelic American Isabel Boncassen, to atone for his deeply snobbish treatment of the characters in the previous novel, The Prime Minister. The hero Arthur Fletcher, blonde, loyal, principled, with a landed pedigree going back to the Normans; and anti-hero Ferdinand Lopez, dark, charming, lying, obsessed with money, of obscure Portuguese parentage, are a shocking pair of feeble racist stereotypes.

If you get as far as The Duke's Children you are doing well. You have to wade through the first one, Can You Forgive Her? nicknamed at the time, Can You Finish It? Phineas Finn is innocuous enough, and if you survive the cast of unpleasant characters which populate The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux feels like a breath of fresh air in comparison. After struggling through the unpleasantnesses of The Prime Minister, one hopes that genial and now mature statesman Finn might make play some part in The Duke's Children. He doesn't.

I realise I did not read these novels as Trollope intended. They were the soap operas of the day, published in instalments over fifteen years in magazines. They served a purpose at the time: they made money, and passed the time of bored Victorians. The commercial nature of the project is evident in the numerous hunting scenes, which are by far the most exciting episode in the books. Trollope does not conceal his moral qualms about hunting: the swathes of land designated to aristocratic pleasure, the harsh crackdowns on poaching, the worldly pretension, display and waste of the whole charade. But he can write a gripping gallop over the fences, so he cannot resist doing it again and again, with only the mildest of authorial censure.

Our descendants may well acknowledge that Eastenders, Neighbours or The Archers were great cultural institutions of our time. Someone might well read through the entire scripts and write an interesting PhD on them. But we would not expect these compositions to be widely read as literature.

Everyone should read Anthony Trollope's The Warden and Barchester Towers. But don't read his Palliser Chronicles. I did, so you don't have to.

 

 

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Flesh-and-blood Religion

Since I haven't heard a sermon for a couple of months, I thought I'd write one, for a lark.

16 August 2015. Readings: 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14, Psalm 111, Ephesians 5:15-20, John 6:58

Today's gospel reading presents special difficulties for those of us brought up in the intellectual tradition which has dominated Western thought certainly since the days of David Hume. It is the passage where Christ says, "my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed: whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood shall have eternal life".

Before being abruptly halted by illness last March, I was researching how nineteenth-century mainstream Christianity, which was evangelical, was enriched by narratives of the Gothic imagination - initially to explain why those evangelicals left us so many neo-Gothic churches. Those Victorian Christians loved bible passages like this one. It is rich in the Gothic emotion which had rescued their evangelical "economy of salvation" from a tendency to cold, dry rulebookiness. It adds drama into the Lord's Supper, enhanced with music, robes and images. Above all, it was exciting, titillating, with just a hint of vampires: vital tools for making an intellectual religious tradition popular with the masses.

This was all very well for the Victorians, and I believe was genuinely vital for infusing the Gradgrindish society of the 1830s and 40s with the twin ideals of middle-class social responsibility and working-class self-improvement, resulting in the public libraries, better housing, universal education and so forth of the later Victorian period.

But it is no use for us. We may enjoy vampire stories more than ever, but we cannot take them seriously. "Gothic Evangelicalism" has lost intellectual credibility. Our reaction is that of the Jews in the story, which was, more or less, "What the fuck is he wittering about?"

The Jews in the gospels, and especially the Pharisees, are always depicted as lacking imagination, stuck in a rut, their whole identity invested in an outdated worldview. The Jews of Jesus' time are clearly the equivalent of our "establishment" thinking today, whether religious or secular. I said at the start that we live in an intellectual tradition overshadowed by the scepticism of philosophers such as David Hume, although its roots go back to Socrates. It has stood us in excellent stead, providing us with the tools to access to seemingly unlimited riches, power, and scientific knowledge. It has been a good tradition to commit to. Evangelical Christianity was a product of this tradition, a historical fact which often surprises non-Christians today. Yet if you went back to the Christianity which evangelicalism slowly replaced – belief in the divine right of kings, doubts about the humanity of black Africans, unwillingness to promote popular education in case common people had ideas – you would easily see it was a religion of the enlightenment. Evangelicals built schools, abolished slavery, spread democracy. (There were also, of course, plenty of selfish, cruel or greedy people who hijacked the evangelical bandwagon to promote harsh capitalism, conquest or imperialism, but they were not the soul of the movement).

Modern secular humanism, often seen as the opposite of or alternative to evangelicalism, is really the same philosophy. It rubbed off its religious veneer to accommodate the loss of intellectual credibility; but in doing so weakened it, by losing the narratives and traditions which enrich and sustain any worldview over long periods. "Liberal" Christianity represents various shades of attempts at compromise between the two.

This is the worldview, apparently three but really one, in which I have been brought up. Yet I am convinced that, like the "evangelical" Pharisee and "humanist" Sadducee Jews in the gospel stories, it has become wrong, because the world has changed. In my lifetime, the environmental crisis has unfolded. This week we passed "world overshoot day", when human exploitation of the earth's resources exceeds what ecosystems can regenerate in a year, a date which in 2000 did not occur till October. Since I was born, 37 years ago, the amount of wildlife in the world has halved, and my nephew is unlikely to share our world with large mammals such as rhinos or tigers in his adulthood. Biologists now generally agree that life on earth is experiencing a mass extinction event, such as the last occurred when the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago, but this time caused by our activities. Jesus and the Pharisees, a mere 2000 years ago, suddenly seem like yesterday.

The scale of the out-of-the-box thinking required to face a situation which has never occurred during the existence of homo sapiens, which has unfolded within the lives of still young people, is hard to comprehend. This is why I believe those weird statements of Jesus, and the Jews' reaction, are still deeply insightful and instructive – perhaps more today than ever. I have said before when speaking of Christianity and the environment, that "Jesus" doesn't mean sustainability, social projects, or sensible solutions: "Jesus" means "salvation". Because that's what we need: salvation.

"My flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood shall have eternal life."

"What the fuck do you mean?"

"I mean, if you do not wish to destroy everything which gives you life, and gives your life meaning, you need to unhook yourselves from these enlightenment, rational, theoretical ways of thinking; from your blind faith in human intellect and problem-solving. The "wisdom" which the other Bible readings today keep insisting upon, will no longer be found in that. I don't mean you should believe in made-up nonsense, but rather that you should acknowledge two things:

First, what all great scientists and intellectuals discover eventually: how little we know. Watch a documentary about animal behaviour, or the deep oceans, or astronomy, and see how many transformative discoveries are made every week. Learn humility.

Second, that the establishment "religion" of our society (whether the Christian or humanist version) has diminished the physical world, the world of flesh and blood, bread and wine, into mere objects of study; while our own ideas, in books, on blackboards, on the internet, have become all the meaning, all the gods that we have. But "God" (or "meaning" if you prefer to be secular) is not floating about in ideas. God, or meaning, is here, in flesh, blood, the sporting dolphins, the poached rhino, the cleared rainforest, in bread, wine, the starving child, the obese cake-addict, fantastic sex, wild swimming, chronic illness. God, or meaning, is right here, in me, in my hands and feet, standing in front of you – and can be in you too, if you get the point of what I'm saying. Learn that God is down here."

"What the fuck does he mean? Crucify him."

"Eat, and drink. When you are complicit in perpetrating mass extinction, wisdom, salvation, is not just remembering the things I said, but remembering that I, like you, was flesh and blood."

 

 

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Prawn Wars

I was impressed by the BBC Scotland Landward special, "Prawn Wars", still available on iPlayer until Wednesday.

I thought I was well-informed about Scottish fishing issues, a subject I first encountered in long "Church and Nation" reports at the Church of Scotland General Assembly, agonising about the state of Scottish coastal parishes. Earlier this year I discovered the excellent visitor interpretation at FSC Millport, which highlights the impact of scallop dredging on the delicate ecosystems of the Firth of Clyde estuary, and lets you practice sustainable hand-diving of scuttling scallops in big Belfast sinks.

However, I felt much better briefed after the Landward special, which discusses the similar conflict between trawlers and creelers fishing prawns off the west coast of Scotland. It is in-depth and impartial, exploring the interrelations between sustainability, economics and human communities.

The most important thing I learned was that in the nineteenth century a three-mile limit on trawling in inshore waters was established to conserve fisheries, regulation removed by the Thatcher government in 1984.

It also made me look again at a picture on my wall, painted around 1980 by my grandmother Margaret Jackson who was inspired by the Scottish artist Lowry.

It depicts a Scottish fishing community, although it is not on the west coast, but North Berwick, on the east. It's based on a real scene, although there is not a little dash of fantasy. I believe that may be myself, being pushed in a buggy by my mum in red trousers.

Although the harbour is busy, the fishing industry seems to be struggling. One of the fishermen has retired to take tourist excursions to the Bass Rock. The boat in the foreground, which seems to be a trawler, has caught some rare bycatch. The little boats on the right, which look busy and businesslike, are perhaps creelers, enjoying the last few years of protected fishing.

Perhaps this fantasy scene of pipe-bands and mermaids does not add much to our understanding of the "prawn wars". But, painted at a crucial moment in the history of Scottish fishing, it captures the entanglement of economics, employment, environment, tourism, history, and romance which form the human ecosystem of the Scottish coast.

Thank you, Landward, for making the picture so much more interesting.

 

 

 

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