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Job Centre Plus taking the Bible literally – ” To those who have not, even what they have will be taken away…”

Let's start with a Fibonacci – you know the drill now, a spiralled increase of syllables for each line so that each line contains the sum of the syllables in the two previous lines. Simple. Well simpler than what I'm about to try and explain further down! Anyway it goes like this 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 – and 55 if your are feeling silly, or have a lots to say. This time I've a lot to say!!

Job Centre Plus Fibonacci

Shout!

Rage!

Outrage!

Shout outrage!!

Job Centre Plus calls!!!

Job seekers, premium numbers.

People on benefits, made to phone 0845?

Job Centre Plus, a public sector service, diverts enquiries to premium charge lines!

Enquiries by phone about a letter intimating withdrawal of benefits cost a job seeker more than seven pounds to resolve.

Unemployed and looking for work; job seeker on minimum allowance; human being determined to maintain dignity; good citizen complying with written instructions; and costs them an eighth of their weekly income!

…….

Now the next line should be 89 syllables. And that would be really, really, silly. But since I'm trying to write coherently about a policy that makes coherence an emotional, intellectual and moral challenge, I'm going to try to write an 89 syllable one sentence essay entitled,

"The 0845 Job Centre Plus Scandal"

By definition people on benefits are low income, and in a recession there are few jobs and more and more people looking for them, and those recently made redundant, or the long-term unemployed, whether young or old, male or female, are anxious to get a chance in life, so why does Job Centre Plus claw back benefits from those enquiring by phone about jobs? Scandalous!

…..

Only when it becomes personal do we discover the hidden injustices others have to put up with, day in and day out. Someone close to me took the £7 hit for phoning, as requested, to clarify the benefits position, and phoning, as advised, about job possibilities. I did a quick internet search and came up immediately with exchanges about the 0845 Job Centre Plus racket. You can start by looking here. I'm intending to follow this up with a letter to the local MP, and to the Minister at the DWP – that would be Iain Duncan Smith who did some research while in opposition into the difficulties faced by people on the lower ends of the income scale, if I recall….. Wonder if he remembers. Of course this nonsense pre-dated the present Government – but they haven't moved to change it either.

22 January 2011
Journey by moonlight, ambushed by beauty

The drive to Aberdeen from Glasgow was a journey of two halves, or a journey of two worlds. Glasgow to Dunblane was frozen fog, a thick grey blanket of low visibility .

Beyond Dunblane the sky cleared and just about Gleneagles the full moon appeared above the hill line. Pale orange, a luminous disk suspended like a chinese lantern over Perhshire hills, creating the impossible illusion of glowing warmth on a frosty night.

Then passing Forfar the same moon reflected on the loch that is home to hundreds of waterfowl, as if an artist with a coarse hair brush had painted the surface the colour of the moon with one stroke – and decided to leave it at that.

By the time I got to Laurenckirk the magical moments were beginning to come with alarming and delight filling frequency. The moon still low over the Mearns, I looked at the new windfarm and at just the right moment the gigantic three blades were framed against the now bright cream moon. And for a brief epiphany it was the CND sign captured by heaven and earth, the moon and the mill co-operating in the sign of peace.

Finally, crossing the River Dee at Maryculter, the entire river seemed to be illumined by a thousand ripples of pale cream light, and against the background of silhouetted Scotch Pines through which the moonlight streamed with carefully controlled extravagance.

There's an enchantment that I guess is embedded in our spirits when we see such beauty, and we feel and know deep down the reverberations of our own createdness, the answering upreach of our own longing. A journey like that can change an entire perspective on life, or at least remind us that to enjoy and grow through the life we have, a first necessity is open eyed wonder at the gratuitous loveliness of the world. Tonight I gazed at the varied canvases of a night sky, painted from the palette of the One in whom is truth, beauty and goodness.

20 January 2011
The Cross in Our Context – an eye-opener for sleepy Christians!

Here's why I think Douglas John Hall is one of the most challenging theologians around. His book The Cross in Our Context, is a distillation of his three volume systematic theology. It is a passionate and compelling book, learned without being technically forbidding, and written as a forthright challenge to the church to stop lamenting the loss of Christendom and embrace again the call of God to be a community of the Cross. What that means is explored by a theologian who has spent decades teaching a theology that critiques power, empire and cultural conformity to consumerism. Here's his primary point:

If you claim to be a disciple of the crucified one you must expect to participate in his sufferings; if you preach a theology of the cross, you will have to become a communityof the cross. Anything else would represent a kind of hypocrisy. A purely doctrinal or theoretical theology of the cross is a contradiction. This theology is only authentic – only "for real" – insofar as it gives birth to a community that suffers with Christ in the world. Nowhere does Christendom difference from the New testament church show up more glaringly than in the fact that the birth of Christendom in the fourth Century C.E. brought about a species of Christianity that with rare exceptions could be practiced without any threat or hint of its being a process of identification with the one who was "despised and rejected". (pages 140-1)

Further comment superfluous.

19 January 2011
37 years on, Small is [still] Beautiful

"Call a thing immoral or ugly,

soul destroying or a degradation of man,

a peril to the peace of the world

or to the wellbeing of future generations;

as long as you have not shown it to be 'uneconomic'

you have not really questioned its right to exist,

grow, and prosper."

That was E F Schumacher in 1973, in one of the great tracts of the 20th Century. Small is Beautiful fell like a benediction on a planet slowly awakening to the dangers of greed, extravagance, exploitation, over-fishing, acid rain, deforestation, habitat destruction, over-consumption and the long term toxicity of the myth of sustainable growth. But a benediction often unheard, and as often unwanted and unwelcome. And the consequences are piling up decade after decade. In the realm of religious economics, the word 'uneconomic' is the definition of sin, and economic growth the terminology of sanctity. The economy is divinely ordered and the quest for economic production, and market growth equates to the search for the good life. And the irony is that our pursuit of economic growth is ruining life, suffocating life, extinguishing, eliminating, crowding out, diminishing, devaluing and finally buying and selling the means of life in a crazy festival of waste. Read Schumacher again – and ask what is beautiful, moral, peaceful and future preserving about the economic policies of the developed, and yes the rapidly developing world.

And pray, "Lord have mercy".

16 January 2011
How to save your local library

I love this!

Go see!!

And smile!!!

Bibliophiles of the world unite!!!!

Been having a down day till I saw this.

15 January 2011
Being careful with words – is that part of the radical Gospel too?

All depends how you say it.

If a local councillor expresses mild concern at the inconvenience of temporary roadworks, the headline reads " Councillor slams rogue firms amid ongoing traffic chaos". Made that up.

If a 24 year old high profile footballer for whom English is a second language comes to Manchester City and says the majority of manchester people support City, but admits he doesn't know much about Manchester, the headline reads. "Dzeco lays into United". "Star's first job to anger United". Not made up.

The devaluation of words, the addiction to verbal hostility, the habit of rhetorical over-exaggeration, – the manufacture of news by inflating the commonplace – all of them signs of a decadent discourse. By the way, exaggeration should suffice – over-exaggeration should mean the effect is dissipated by dawning incredulity – fatal to all propaganda!

Wonder how careful Christians are in the way we talk – Jesus' warning that we would have to give an account of every word we speak is another of those sayings sometimes reduced to manageability by saying it is recognised as Middle Eastern rhetoric, not literally meant. But suppose that's just the rationalising accommodation of Western minds trying to tame the wild words and moral demands of the Kingdom of God, in order to justify our own verbal proclivities? If I do have to explain every word I speak to One whose recall is entirely accurate and whose surveillance of heart, mind and voice is more comprehensive than any technology we can invent and install, I've had it. Or at least, I will have to do what in the end we all have to do – ask for mercy. But in the meantime – repent, and try harder to heed my words.

14 January 2011
Why, now and again, I read the King James Bible now and again…..

It can't have escaped the notice of alert blog readers that 2011 is the 400th anniversary of the publishing of the King James Bible (The Authorised Version). Leaving aside the issue of the textual reliability of the Received Text, and the reliance on Erasmus's Greek New Testament, itself an insecure textual foundation, and the wholesale borrowing from Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament and part of the Old Testament, the King James Bible remains a stellar achievement of English literature, and one of the glories of the English language.

However accessible or contemporary, relevant or scholarly, all other translations by comparison dilute, diminish and render banal a text produced by a rich vocabulary distilled into stylistic concentrate, and then composed into sonorous prose and sublime poetry. Mixed metaphor? Yes. Exaggeration? Caricature? Possibly – but only slightly.

Since the mid 20th Century, translation of the Bible has become a hugely profitable industry. Leave aside (yes, please do) the hundreds of sectional interest Bibles – I mean, recently we were insulted by the issue of the C S Lewis Bible. I can just hear Lewis delivering his lecture in heaven on the occasion of the publication of the C S Lewis Bible. And beginning with the acronym he used to describe the hated task of writing his allocated volume of the Oxford History of English Literature – OHEL!

Leaving aside all that nonsense, there has still been a conveyor belt of translations sponsored by publishers and major church traditions. The RSV, the Good News Bible, Living Bible (described by Ian Paisley as the Livid Libel), Jerusalem Bible, New English Bible, The Common Bible, New International Version, Today's English Bible, New RSV, New Living Translation, Today's NIV. And yes, even a New KJV!

There are now substantial books written to guide Christians to the right Bible for them. Criteria range from readability, accuracy, theological presuppositions, cultural resonance, and marketing terminology includes new, today, contemporary. I get all of that. And I recognise that reading the Bible isn't easy for committed Christians, let alone the casually interested or dismissively indifferent. So there is a good case for accessibility balanced with accuracy, and readability linked to reliability. And I have absolutely no brief to defend the King James Version as the best translation – it isn't. Nor am I saying that the others are inferior in all ways to the King James – they are most decidedly not.

But. If as an English language speaker and reader you want to hear the Psalms rendered into poetry written by a genius that sounds as if it was written by a genius – then read them in the Authorised Version.

And if you want to be moved to the deep places in your soul and ignited in the complacent corners of your heart, read the Authorised Version of Isaiah 1 and 2, 35 and 40, 53 and 55, and catch a glimpse of images that flash from inspired words. The Beatitudes read and sound in the Authorised Version like promises that, if they were true would be miracles, and in the unforgettable rhythms of the Authorised Version they do indeed sound miraculous. The King James translation of Romans 8 is a text worthy of Patrick Stewart's voice as Jean Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise declaring that life and the universe are ultimately and finally redeemed.

The scan of the big black Bible above is of my ordination Bible. And though seldom read in church now, and I preach from the New RSV (though I still love my even larger RSV!), now and then I take up this Bible with my name stamped on it in gold, and I read it. Not because it is accessible, relevant, the last word in textual integrity, culturally resonant or ecclesially approved – none of that matters. I read it because it is great literature. I read it because the cadences and rhythms of language are a joy to read and hear; because our language is sequined with words and phrases that still catch light and sparkle with meaning and point. I read it because it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, and its language is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.

And I read it now and again, because now and again, in the dumbed down discipleship for dummies approach of much contemporary Christianity, I need to hear a language that reminds me that God is Other than us, that the transcendent God whose eternal love is known in Beauty, Truth and Goodness, is one who is beyond the language of the news bulletin, whose holiness and mercy eludes the appeal of the too-clever advert, and whose Being is way above and beyond the reductionism that tries to domesticate majesty, or dissolve indescribable mystery in a solution of oversimplified prose justified by the impudent adjective "New"!

Feel better now. Sorry. Didn't mean to rant – much. Think it's time to remember the One who "maketh me to lie down in green pastures; [and] leadeth me beside the still waters…and restoreth my soul". Yea, verily…"my cup runneth over".

11 January 2011
Literary criticism, love story and good poetry

I hadn't realised that Joy Davidman, who married C S Lewis, was such an acerbic but accurate critic in her own right. Her letters are entertaining, educational, funny, understanding of what makes a human life well lived or not, and have a value beyond whatever light they throw on Lewis and her relationship with him. This book helps to establish her as a strong personality, and a complex rich character with her own indivoduality. An intellectually gifted woman of philosophical and literary sharpness, a writer for whom honesty and integrity are essential for a valid and worthwhile aesthetic, and therefore a centre stage player alongside Lewis, not a foil for his cleverness nor a hanger on who eventually became a permanent fixture in Lewis's life and affections.

These letters help explain why a man who was curmudgeon and children's writer, literary scholar and Oxbridge snob, Christian and confirmed bachelor with views that still anger even moderate contemporary feminists, ended up surrendering bachelorhood and all the other defining characteristics in the embrace of a friendship that grew into one of the great love stories that preserves love from facile romance or low commitment partnership. This was a marriage, the joining in companionship of two soul friends, a coalescing of life interests and startling life differences that had no chance of working except as two protagonists negotiated the risks attendant on an act of folly made only as secure as the commitments of love ever make anything.

And out of that relationship the late flowering and fulfilling of two people each having a second chance – Davidman post divorce and Lewis post bachelorhood. The love story that gave us A Grief Observed; there's a book to reckon with – little more than a long essay, but the most touching report from the far country of grief, concerning intense sorrow, theological dispute with the Almighty, and the searing honesty and bewilderment of a heart and mind cruelly robbed of their greatest treasure. The dramatisations in Shadowlands only approaches the impact of the book – but though Joss Ackland and Anthony Hopkins in two separate productions, capture the joy and grief of Lewis, neither productions does the same justice to Joy and her capacity to avoid the shadow of Lewis, and at times her ability to out Lewis Lewis.

These letters are a delight to read. The several long ones to Aaron Kramer are amongst the most incisive criticism I've read in years. She must have been hard to keep as a friend, because she was hard on her friends. But Kramer had the sense to believe her when she tore into him "for his own good". I hadn't heard of Kramer before, and in a footnote she commends one of his 4 line poems –

Tired

Tired are my feet, that felt today the pavement;

Tired are my ears, that heard of tragic things –

Tired are my eyes, that saw so much enslavement;

Only my voice is not too tired. It sings.

How good is that. The last line is almost Isaianic in its defiant optimism, its hopeful perspective, its trust in music and the human voice as means of reconfiguring a world awry and broken by the unholy trinity of power, greed and inhumanity. This is a book that educates at different levels, and in several directions. That's often the case with the correspondence of the best letter writers.

10 January 2011
Living Wittily is four years old

It's now 4 years since Living Wittily came on-line. Even by then blogging seemed to have reached its peak and others who had been blogging for a while were giving up and moving on. Any activity that takes time and commitment to maintain on a near daily basis has to have some justification. And there is the challenge of actually saying something worthwhile, that someone else might read, and that might make a difference to their day.

Making a difference doesn't have to suggest world-changing scale. It can mean making someone smile, encouraging someone to keep going, changing a viewpoint, challenging assumptions that are unjust or untrue, opening up new perspectives, pushing back limited horizons, adding to the sum of knowledge (rare I think!), bringing others into conversation, pointing others to good reading as a beggar telling other beggars where there's the chance of some bread. And way at the beginning of Living Wittily I tried to say what the blog would be about, why I thought it worth investing time, ideas, and daily discipline of thought.

In four years there has been a lot of traffic, emails to take conversations further, from friends in Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand and places in between, and a regular stream of comments. I've happily desiderated on poetry and art, discussed theology and current affairs, recommended books and books. And it has been great fun. I often think as I write, and so end up writing what I didn't know I thought! Or I've felt strongly about something and felt better not just by saying it, but by taking time to understand why I felt so strongly in the first place.

But whatever I've written, has come out of the experience and the intellectual life that is who I am. Down the years of trying to live this life we call Christian, on this journey of following faithfully after Jesus, a discipleship of the intellect, I've tried to keep my heart open and my mind generous, itself a spiritual discipline that is the intellectual and affective expression of humility. That is, truth is not so much what we say, but what we seek; listening to the unfamiliar and hearing from another country of the mind and soul, is a disposition of hospitality and welcome; and so amongst the deeply rooted assumptions of my own intellectual life, which I try to tend with an all but horticultural carefulness, is the vastness and beauty of God, the limited horizons of all our human thought, and therefore the graced excitement of knowing that to seek truth, beauty and goodness, is to be truly and fully engaged as a human being, and a child of God. It is to live wittily.

8 January 2011
Vat increases and the unedifying spectacle of ethical deflation

I am not an accountant.

I am not an economist.

I am not a professional poltician.

The world of national, international and institutional finance is as complex to my mind, and as inaccessible, as an esoteric gnostic myth, written on a much used palimpsest, in an ancient language barely visible let alone legible, to my untutored eyes.

But my uninformed gut feeling is that the impact of an across the board rise in VAT will make life so much harder for lower income people and families.

And my moral instinct is therefore that such a tax adjustment is demonstrably unjust, ruthlessly ideological, lacking in moral commonsense, devoid of political imagination and socially irresponsible.

It isn't the big consumer goods – but the increased cost of fuel, domestic energy, clothes, basic foods, the necessities, that will erode the security of poorer people.

Yet Tuesday morning we were afflicted by the sanctimonious tones of the Chancellor, Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister that this is a tough call, but one that treats everyone the same. When will it dawn on them that to treat everyone the same is unfair, because not everyone is the same – else why a welfare policy at all!?

My elderly friend getting by on her pension will now pay an even greater proportion of her income to the Government, and do so from a margin of financial security with few footholds left.

The refusal to increase income tax we were told is based on the judgement that this would indeed hit the lower paid – well, how about increasing the threshold, or bringing back the 10p band compensated for by extra income tax further up the feeding chain – I use the slang deliberately, because this increase could well come down to choices about food for some people.

As I said – it's all very complex and ordinary folk like me should keep their noses out of such specialist, complicated, technical financiology (new word?) – but noses are not only for sticking in, they are for smelling, and I don't like the smell of a policy that is indiscriminate, declared irreversible, and reeks of social carelessness – by which I mean demonstrates an absence of care.

But I'm no politician or economist. Just a human being insisting that humanity is also an important criterion in socio-economic policy – and this tax adjustment seems to lack that entire dimension.

The photo above betrays the ethical dilemmas facing the LIb Dems – and the runaway ethical deflation reducing their currency and credibility, as promise and principle dissolve into compromise. But once again, that expedient compromise, as with the pledge on student fees, is one which will impact most on those with least.

Or am I wrong?

Haven't done a fibonacci for a while. A poem in which the syllable count of each line is the sum of the two previous lines – it goes thus 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34 and if you feel silly, 55!

DRAT THE VAT! (A FIBONACCI SPAT).

VAT!

DRAT!

Increase!

"Tough but fair."

"In this together."

Chancellor Osborne's perspective.

Single parents, pensioners, unemployed, low earners;

all rightly sceptical about the Chancellor's perspective on what's fair or unfair.

They ask, "Is it fair, a millionaire Chancellor, who has a Two/One in Modern History, from Oxford, should confuse fairness with justice?

5 January 2011