Tricked not treated!

Why are people suckers for tacky fads? Halloween is becoming so commercialised. We all complain about this. So is it who buys the tat? I saw a garden tonight with plastic lit up gravestones and skeleton hands reaching out the ground. This was in a wealthy suburb. Funnily enough they glowed RIP! Why let yourself be ripped off? Apparently manufacturers of this tat says its getting as good as Christmas;


Halloween used to be a bit of spooky fun. The kids would make a costume (yes, even in the 70's and 80's) and go round the neighbours, tell rubbish jokes and wail tuneless songs. You would get monkey nuts in your poly bag. These are now replaced by glow in the dark witches cauldrons or jack- o-lantern pumpkin pots. There are face paints, pull-over latex masks, ready made costumes galore. Every 'guiser' looks perfect now. No-one needs to ask; 'so what are you then?'

We've fully embraced the Americanism of 'trick or treat' something earlier generations would have been too embarrassed to shout on strangers doorsteps. Of course the evangelicals decry it as a pagan, satanist thing that will harm our children. Hand me the face paint, think I'll go and get myself treated.

Emerging interest

Really enjoying this site for stimulating ideas about new ways of doing church;
http://www.emergingchurch.info/stories/prayerfeeder/abstract.jpg

Burma talk

Today I did a talk on Burma for church. It was a prayer focus service. This slightly annoyed me as Burma needs more than prayer. Burma needs us active, conscienciatised and lobbying government and corporate powers.
I picked up a few stories of the 1m+ displaced people that where truly horrifying. Its not difficult to find information for a country so closed off. Many exiles are working hard to keep up profile and video clips abound. Its a kingdom thats beautific and horrific. There are many many unsung heroes, and many hidden atrocities. Blood soaked oil.

I have a distant affinity with Burma. My grandfather Captian Archibald McLellan died there in 1942. One of 27,000 souls with no known grave.

Not very European

Just back from Rome. I want to be Italian! Prego! The coffee, cafes, the wild traffic, the shoes, the azure sky, cypress trees. In the fug of a Gauloises' fog the special last week in a movie-scene cafe just off Piazza Navona was Lobster and Gnocci! Heaven. In the blaze of the following afternoon I watch two men pull up in scooters at the Colunna Traiane. They unpack their boxes and start wrapping on togas, plastic breastplates and helmets. Moments later getting their pictures taken with every fabulous looking woman that passes. Tourist tat but somehow more impressive than the bagpiper in Glencoe.
There's an easy passion here that's not very celtic. Northern fringe people don't do Gladiator. They can get passionate, heated even, but but not like venus or vesuvius. No explosion of emotion. Any gesticulations are quickly brought to heel. At the Colosseo though, everyone is humbled. That's two thousand years and still standing still awesome. Not even the orbiting, dizzying traffic can rumble it down.
Had very limited time for sightseeing and gawping at Rome's shameless treasures. Time was spent in plenary, in discussion groups, in break outs and in smoky fugs with multi-lingual bright young europeans. A moment I remember in a discussion about funding for our campaign one UK fund had turned us down because they said they didnt think they had a remit for European issues. This brought smirks and guffaws of various franco, italian and slavic tones at the insular brits. I didnt find it funny but completely understandable. Because I was acutely aware of my otherness, my North Atlantic airs and aloofness. Being the product from the island of the mongrel race; roman, norman, viking, saxon, briton, gael. I saw how I had been blended into a root beer of insipidity. Not skillfully tongued but monosyllabic, monocultural, well almost, I knew some euro music..right?..
Perhaps I would have felt better if I was more culturally distinct. Not with tammy hat and kilt, but maybe bearing some northern edge, some longer hair and beard, leather and fur, tattooed celtic knot, some poetry and hipflask of dram. Actually I'd rather be italian.

Competition blog: My New Scotland, Sunday Herald

We can’t seem to shake off this notion that Scotland needs its freedom. Braveheart. Flower of Scotland. ‘Free by 93!’ Remember that! Soon after we were lambasted for being 90-minute patriots. John Buchan would have agreed as he said, “The truth is that we are at bottom the most sentimental and emotional people on earth.” Well, certainly the case when our national identity is being debated.

Freedom for Scotland? Doesn’t this put it best? “Scotland will be reborn when the last minister is strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post” alleged Tom Nairn. Ask a granny and she’d say ‘it woudnae be possible to strangle somebody wi’ a newspaper!’ Typically pithy, practical, and dour. A glass-half-empty worldview. McConnell at least tried to do something about the poverty of ambition, and then said what all the problems were, but nothing about what the ambition could be.

I’m with Tom Nairn’s assessment. We need to throw off our wee encumbrances. Our ‘cannae dae’ and ‘aye been’ culture. Its great there are signals of this abandonment already even with our in-by-the-pants-of-wan-seat Nat government. Why not have a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation. Why not have a seat at the UN?

Isn’t it odd that the Irish, Italian, Indian, Pakistani and now a plethora of diasporas find their new found freedom in Scotland? Yet Scotland’s own that find themselves with a perceived barrier to that same freedom. Like these entrepreneurial and risk taking immigrants we Scots need to reintegrate ourselves with some ambition and vision. What do I want Scotland’s freedom to be like? One that's moved on from subsidy junkie talk, and had some inspired grand dreams fuelled by hubbly bubblies on Great Western Road cafes. No more what’ll it cost us? What about the cost of staying on as constitutional co-habitees?

“Scotland's separation is part of England's imperial disintegration” said John Mclean. Of course a new Scotland means a new England, new Wales and new Ireland. A determined diversification rather than a homogenous huddling. Bring it on! Until the last Sunday Post wraps the last deep-fried mars bar supper in Scotland.

Inheritance Tracks

A friend of mine recently started a great email discussion about what your earliest musical influences were and what you wanted to pass on the next generation. Its based on a radio programme in Scotland, you need to recollect the person who introduced you to the earliest piece of music you can remember, then you need to think about what music you would now introduce to a child and why.

Here was my answer.....

My earliest memory of a piece of music that I really loved and was passed on to me by my father was the andante from Sibelius’ 3^rd Symphony. It’s a wonderfully gentle, minimal, sparse, a delicate weft and waft of strings and woodwind. I used to ask for it to be played on my dad’s ‘Binatone Music Centre’ again and again when I was about 7 or 8, maybe 8 or 9?

It puts you in mind of crystal clear lakes and sunsets in the artic north, of floating over jaggy snow capped peaks and fjords. Being Finnish I suppose gave Sibelius that clarity and subtlety. Its fairly repetitive for orchestral music but the rhythms are so lulling and soothing, layering up to a very pleasing uplifting crescendo. Such a contrast to Finlandia and En Saga with their Viking like brass blasts. But if you’re familiar with the Swan of Tuonela you’ll have a sense of the 3^rd’s simplicity and striking clarity.

The other piece was the theme tune from M*A*S*H which for a period of about 6 months marked my bedtime. I wasn’t allowed to watch it but I was allowed to listen to the theme and watch the helicopters swoosh about and land in the army hospital. I had no idea it was called ‘Suicide is Painless’ or indeed what M*A*S*H was about. That was also true even when I watched it when older!

Well from there I developed eclectic and seasonal tastes, dipping in and out of everything; pop, rock, heavy metal, progressive rock(!) jazz, folk, country and classical. . Went with the crowd on a lot of the time, so much so that I actually did go and see Simple Minds three times!

Many of the songs l love are melancholic, wistful, turning on unrequited love and the bittersweet. I’m not sure why. I suppose these kind of songs have a realism and rooting in emotional reality that I felt connected with me and my experience in the world. Its so difficult to pin down a song that I would pass on but I have picked out two that may serve the task in hand.

The first is this lovely album track from Crowded House – just recently gloriously reformed again. It’s the sentiment of not being imprisoned by the past that I like. This track also has soaring strings and maybe that harps back to my early exposure to classical.

All I Ask

Crowded House

Written By N. Finn & T. Finn

All I ask is to live each moment
Free from the last
Take the road forgotten
Don't leave me here
Oh please let me stay
Far from familiar things
All I ask is to live each moment
All I ask is to live each moment
Free from the last
Strange roads going nowhere in particular
All I ask is to live each moment
All I ask is to live each moment
Free from the last
Free from the last
All I ask

I am an unashamed U2 fan. I saw them in Hampden Park, Glasgow two years ago. Undoubtedly the best concert I have ever been to. I can air guitar and sing so many of their tracks better than Bono and the Edge (but only alone in the living room.) Bono to me is one of the most inspirational Christians alive. He has a streetwise sassy faith unbound by tradition and form. Many of the U2 songs are better than the dreadful contemporary worship splurging out from the Matt Redman school of blessed navel gazing.

U2 deliver songs racked with doubt, raw energy and spirit. Anthems that reverberating in your mind. Words that speak about the search and hunger for more of God and for more out of life. And the best of all of these…………..

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

U2

I have climbed the highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you.

I have run, I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you.

But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for.
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for.

I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her finger tips
It burned like fire
(I was) burning inside her.

I have spoke with the tongue of angels
I have held the hand of a devil
It was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone.

But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for.
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for.

I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colours will bleed into one
Bleed into one.
But yes, I'm still running.

You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross of my shame
Oh my shame, you know I believe it.

But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for.
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for.

But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for.
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for.

Has everything under the sun already been done?

My friend Kieran posed this question on Facebook. Only 50 words are allowed in response. Obviously I need more verbiage space.This is my attempted answer.

Well ‘the Bible says so’ as the refrain of the grim verses in Ecclesiastes say; ’there is nothing new under the Sun.’ with its pessimistic take on the world and humankind. But I don’t think that is anything to do with human activity or our perception of relentless progress or terminal moral decline. Rather it is about the relentless cyclical nature of death and rebirth in the created world, the seasons, in nature and the ‘three score and ten’ of man. Nothing is actually new, its been before and is renewed, dies, is born again. When we discover a new species, its not actually new, its always been, but was just outwith our detection.

If it were, about humankind, history and progress, then I suppose the question you may be also posing is– what new things are there still to do? On this score there is a lot. Ecclesiastes was in a pre-technological age. It was about toil. No-one then could have ever thought we could change the temperature of the earth, or even fly out from the world into orbit in space. We are living in the transition from the industrial to the post-industrial to the information age and then the biogenetic age. Just edging into another technological orbit under the sun.

Maybe, to take a ridiculous example, in the next 100 years, in the same way as we see piercing in places you didn’t before; (noses, bellybuttons, lips eyebrows) we’ll see biogenetic cosmetic enhancement; natural hair extensions any colour your like (or think!) Maybe for the macho male, some cranial horns, skin colours and tints of all hues (already available for eyes) webbed feet for swimmers or sea dwellers (due to global warmed sea level rises.) In this sense there is plenty of invention and change ahead beyond our wildest imagining.

So there will still be plenty of technological advances, new things to be done, our sons and daughters taking up careers serving and served by technologies not yet invented. There will be the merging of electronic with neural, of machine and body. But is that ‘nothing new under the Sun’ in the sense of the scripture? I don’t think so.

These words I think point towards the limits of evil and the impossibility of renewal on earth. There is no shocking crime or evil that has not been committed before. In this sense the verses are very encouraging. The world is not getting worse and worse. Its just the same. It seems worse to us because of the scale, speed and awareness of events. There are many billions on the earth now (6.5Bn) More living now than have ever lived in all history (itself a mind boggling proposition.) So it seems there is a proliferation of evil. But paedophilia existed in ancient Greece and Rome. These are not modern phenomena. Same for conflicts and wars, only the technology and scale has changed.

So, in this world, under this sun, nothing really changes. So everything has been done. The world and we are fixed, limited and natural and therefore fallen and unrenewable. The only possibility of change and of meaning (as opposed to meaninglessness as complained of in Ecclesiastes) is change that comes beyond our selves and the world. It is limitless, spiritual, supernatural and it is of course a new creation – and all of those have not yet been done.

Ha Ha I'm back! Was blogged out for months!

Its like coming out of a hibernation. I got blocked out since the change to Beta and Google accounts and could never get reset to get in again until now!! Not that Ive been trying every day or anything.? Swithed to Bebo and Facebook for a while, which are a lot of fun, but not expansive enough to drone on like here.
So now I need to think of more postings;
Things that have bothered me in the media - coverage of Madelaine McCann's disappearance, expecially criticism of the parents; broadcast of clearly inflammatory vox pops after the attempted bombing of Glasgow Airport; LIVE Earth's undermining of climate change campaigns; the non event that was Brown becoming PM