Spring has come to England, with beautiful and quite warm sunshine, and daffodils and other spring flowers brightening up our gardens and streets.
Steph from New Zealand is rude about English daffodils, but has she seen them in all their glory? I didn’t have to look hard for these photos; these are flowers which grew up almost by themselves in my garden, as captured by my mobile phone.
I hate celebrity culture. I could almost say that I hate celebrities, especially when they fund their addiction to fame out of my pocket through my TV licence, but in Christian love I have to renounce that hate.
But the story of one celebrity has touched my heart – that of Jade Goody, who is dying of cancer but has taken this opportunity to have herself and her two young sons baptised. Sally has written a moving post about this story, with this quote, Jade recalling a conversation with one of the boys:
When I told them I was going to Heaven, Freddie said to me: ‘Heaven is a bad place, it’s where people go when they die.’
And I said: ‘No, that’s not right. It’s where people who are poorly go to get better.’
I’m not sure how much Jade understands about the Christian faith. But it is clear that she trusts in Jesus and in God to take her to heaven when she dies, which could be very soon, and she wants her sons to do the same. I’m not much of a believer in baptism of those too young to make a clear Christian profession, but in this case I see the point of it. Jade’s Christian witness, even if imperfect, can touch the nation. Let’s pray that it does. Let’s pray also for her in what may be her last few days, and for her children as they face life without a mother.
But I can’t help wondering something. I agree with Jade that heaven is “where people who are poorly go to get better”. I also believe that the church is meant to be a foretaste of heaven on earth. Heaven is not so much where good people go when they die as the presence of God, which we can know here today among God’s people. So then shouldn’t the church be the place “where people who are poorly go to get better”? At the moment I don’t have much faith to pray for healing for Jade on this earth. But surely this is what we as Christians should be praying.
This morning I watched the film Finger of God, which was shown at my church as part of a course that I am doing. The film is full of testimonies of healing and many other wonderful things which God is doing around the world.
One of the miracles described in the film, in fact right at the start, is the miraculous filling of teeth. The director includes close-ups from inside the mouths of several Americans, including his own uncle and aunt, who have reportedly received gold teeth from God. They clearly have at the backs of their mouths several gold teeth, or crowns on their teeth. Personally I cannot be sure that they were put there by God and not by human dentists.
One might wonder why God needs to do such miracles in the rich USA. But given the cost of dental work there I can quite understand why poorer Americans need to rely on God rather than dentists to sort out their teeth.
As it so happens this afternoon I had to visit a dentist, for preparatory work for a crown to be fitted to one of my back teeth. This will be quite expensive, but thanks to the NHS affordable. But on the NHS I cannot get a white crown. I was offered a choice of gold or silver, in colour. As I don’t want to mislead people in my church into thinking that God has given me this crown, and as I already have silver fillings in my mouth, I chose silver.
One day I can expect to receive a golden crown (compare 1 Corinthians 9:25, 1 Peter 5:4, Revelation 4:4), but not on my teeth! Until that day the silver one will suffice.
PS I do not want to discuss in comments here the genuineness or otherwise of the miracles shown in Finger of God.
PPS Unlike some of my blog friends, I haven’t given up blogging for Lent. But my life has been full recently and looks like continuing to be for the next few weeks. So blog traffic is likely to be light.
This may sound unbelievable, but there does seem to be some truth in it: according to this article (thanks to Sam Norton for the link) there are actually circumstances in which carrier pigeons can do a better job than the Internet, and their advantages look set to increase. To simplify the calculations, this is the current situation: a carrier pigeon can carry a 2 GB memory card; on a regular broadband Internet connection it takes four hours to transfer 2 GB; the pigeon can transport the data up to 200 km in that time; and so for shorter distances pigeons do better than the Internet, at this one task of transferring bulk data. The prediction for ten years’ time is that memory cards which pigeons can carry will have a capacity of 2 TB (terabytes). This means that for the Internet to keep its advantages over the pigeon regular domestic connections will need a speed of 8 gigabits per second, which seems unlikely even with fibre optic connections.
It is easy to see that if a carrier pigeon carrying one gram can compete with the Internet, a van carrying a tonne of memory cards, that’s a million of them, leaves the competition in the starting blocks!
Of course this doesn’t mean that the Internet will go away. It can’t be beaten for instant access and interaction. But these calculations do have real implications for the way some services are developing:
For example: is the internet suited for the large scale distribution of high resolution movies or television programs? Many people see this as the future, but it seems not so plausible. It might turn out that it will always be faster, cheaper and more practical to send high-res movies by postal service than by internet …
In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.
Karl Rahner, as quoted by James Spinti from the forthcoming book The Furious Longing of God.
I agree. Faith that is based only on truth understood by the intellect will not survive difficult times. Only faith based on a real personal experience of God can endure the worst that life can throw at us and last into eternity.
My readers are surely familiar with Father Doug Chaplin who blogs at Metacatholic (but has just hinted that he might stop – please don’t, Doug, your blog is great!). They may not be quite so familiar with Father Vsevolod Chaplin, although he has been described as a “heavyweight” in his own church. These two are brothers in the priesthood (even if they don’t officially recognise this), the first in the Church of England and of the Anglo-Catholic variety (hence “Father”), the second in the Russian Orthodox Church.
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One looks inoffensive, the other scary. Which is which, do you think? But perhaps it is just because in Russia, unlike in the west, it is not traditional to smile during formal photos. Friends have joked that this is because in England and North America we say “cheese” when our photos are taken, which makes us smile, but in Russia they say “syr”, with the same meaning, which can be pronounced properly only with a face like the one on the right above.
I thank Vara for bringing to my attention the second Fr Chaplin, in comments at Voice of Stefan starting here. See also the discussion in the following comments. Vara has blogged about Fr Vsevolod several times, most recently here, and it is her picture of him I have included above. His first name means “Ruler of all” in old Russian, but presumably this is not intended as a blasphemous claim; rather he was named after several ancient Russian rulers.
As Vara commented at Voice of Stefan, the Russian Chaplin doesn’t seem to be scary in real life, as he is quite a humorist. Like Vara I loved his commandments of post-christian paganism, despite the less than perfect translation and the same scary photo provided by the renowned Interfax news agency. And like Esteban I laughed at his jokes, especially this one which could give a glimpse at the eternal destiny of the other Fr Chaplin:
An Anglican bishop, a righteous man, dies. St. Peter greets him in Paradise and shows him around the Hell.
– Here we have murderers, blasphemers, here are robbers. Here are those who sinned against their confession. Here are Orthodox who did not observe their fasts, here are Catholics who criticized the Pope, here are Baptists who did not read the Bible.
– Do you have any Anglicans?
– Yes, we have one…
– What did he do? (Anglicans are known for their liberal treatment of dogmas and church practice.)
– He did not know how to hold a knife and a fork in the right way.
(Updated 09/03/2011 with a new photo of Doug Chaplin because the old one had disappeared.)
I thank Eddie Arthur for embedding in a post the Disasters Emergency Committee Gaza Appeal, as a YouTube video. I am also embedding it:
This is the appeal which the BBC has shamefully refused to broadcast, a decision for which it has been criticised by among others two government ministers and the Archbishops. A petition from Avaaz calling for the BBC to reverse their decision has attracted 14,000 supporters, including myself.
But, as even a BBC correspondent has suggested, the ban just may turn out for the better, as it has given this appeal a lot more publicity than it would otherwise have received. Indeed it has prompted me to donate, through this link, although I am usually quite resistant to appeals like this, and might well not have even seen the appeal if it had not been for the internet publicity.
Eddie closed comments on his post. I will not do the same because I welcome comments about the appeal. But, like Eddie, I do not want this to become a general discusssion about the political and military situation in Gaza, and so I will not allow off topic comments.
The BBC has an article about what has been billed as “the best job in the world”:
six months working as a “caretaker” on Hamilton Island in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
And it comes with a £70,000 salary and a luxury villa. I must say part of me is tempted.
I have an advantage over most possible candidates in that I can “call on first-hand knowledge of the region”. I haven’t actually landed on Hamilton Island, but I did visit two neighbouring islands in the Whitsundays group, on my 2003 tour of northern Australia. At this time I snorkelled and scuba dived (only a short sample dive) in these waters, and learned to identify quite a lot of the local wildlife.
On that trip we sailed past the mountainous Hamilton Island, and I saw something surprising. On most of the islands in the group there was nothing visible inland except for tropical rain forest. But on this island I saw what looked from a distance like strange vertical rock formations. From closer up it became clear what they were: skyscrapers! It seems that much of the island is covered with huge tourist hotels.
For Hamilton Island, I discovered, is the favourite destination for Aussies seeking the winter sun and a bit of fun. This is their equivalent of what the Canaries and Ibiza are for us in England. I don’t know first hand what the hotels are like, but I can guess by analogy from the hotel I did visit on nearby Long Island, which, although tastefully hidden behind the beachfront coconut palms, was dominated by a karaoke bar.
So maybe Hamilton Island is not quite the kind of paradise that it is painted as. Maybe the job on offer would in fact be the best one in the world not for a nature lover but for someone who loves to party in the sun.
I went out for a short walk a couple of days ago and found myself walking through a farmyard, a mile or two from home, with three livestock pens, one of cows with calves, one of geese, and one of turkeys. The turkeys could probably look forward to nearly another month of safe gobbling, including gobbling up lots of food to make them fat. (According to answers.com, the verbs “gobble” meaning “eat greedily” and “gobble” for the sound made by a turkey are unrelated, so I suppose I am making a word play here.) And probably the same for the geese. It won’t be until four weeks from today that they will very likely find themselves the central attraction on a dining table.
But I understand that my American friends can’t wait for Christmas to come before killing the fatted bird, and serving it up with such strange accompaniments as pumpkin pie. So, to any of my readers celebrating today, happy Thanksgiving!
Last week I bought for a friend a book, through an amazon.co.uk reseller, for 1p (plus £2.75 shipping). It is a paperback novel, the kind one might expect to find for 10p at a jumble sale. The reseller had probably received it as part of a clearance lot and was glad to make the pound or so profit on the shipping.
But just now I went back (just for interest!) to look at the availability of another copy of this book. The best price now is £228.40 (plus £2.75 shipping)! That is more than 20,000 times what I paid, or 2 million per cent inflation!
This was not entirely chance. My friend had been looking out for this book to buy as a Christmas present (I won’t name the book in case the intended recipient reads this), and hadn’t been able to find it as it is known to be rare and hard to find. The seller’s mistake was not to recognise this rarity among a pile of rubbish.
Has anyone out there bought a better bargain than this?