Descending order

After a long longing I have finally found out more about my family tree. I am descended from farming stock! Its really surprising to find this out and not what I expected.
In this photograph is my great great Grandfather Archibald, with the horse and cart at the back of the picture. He was a dairy farmer and is pictured here outside his own dairy buildings at Rhu, near Helensburgh on the north Clyde estuary. In front of him is his son John, about whom we have no dates or records yet, so guessing John's age in this picture to be about 30, and taking a date between his siblings, Neil,(b.1867) and Isabella (b.1872) then maybe this picture was taken in 1900. Maybe a special occassion to mark the turn of the new 20th century?

So now I am a little less lost and have my descending order;

Neil McLellan (Ploughman)
Archibald McLellan (Ploughman, then Carter) b.1839-d.1910
Neil McLellan (dont know occupation) b.1867
Archibald McLellan (Doctor, Captain British Army) b.1900 d.1942
Neil McLellan (Doctor) b.1931 -
Gavin b.1970

Between

I am between jobs just now and in this verse I have tried to capture the various moods and phases that I've been experiencing recently.


Between jobs feels like
the gap between Trailer and Feature.
A departure and a lounge.
Relief comes in making the announcement, disclosing;
'I am leaving.'
Then an ebbing of one's power,
'When I'm gone'
Especially when making the surreal expression
'for my successor'
Then maybe that can be done, or maybe not
Suddenly one's opinion is inconsequential

Then comes the revelation of your real Identity
of one's true Companions,
staying with you after the Emmaus road.

With breath withheld
Comes the silence of Critics,
after the gavel drop proclaiming your verdict;
'I'm done here.'

Messages surprise
warm the doubtful, wavering heart.
Doubt flutters and fades,

Then Importance suddenly shows herself,
Priority crystallises,
Promise glitters
and Resolve beckons.

Defining Hope

Brazilian theologian, Ruben Alvez, described hope in this way:
"What is hope? It is the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It is the suspicion that the overwhelming brutality of fact that oppresses us and represses us is not the last word. It is the hunch that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe, that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual, and that, in a miraculous and unexpected way, life is preparing the creative events which will open the way to freedom and to resurrection. "But, hope must live with suffering. Suffering, without hope, produces resentment and despair. And hope, without suffering, creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness. So, let us plant dates, even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see.

Photo I took on my trip to Palestine of YWCA workers in Jericho polishing locally grown dates for sale.

Random commentary verse #1

This is a mash-up rip-off scrapbook poem composed from random phrases taken from press commentary on the current economic meltdown.


We are living through
first intimations
of crisis, crunch, collapse
nobody has been able to understand.
Each attempt to deal
consumed by an irresistible,
often concealed within the balance sheets,
abject surrender to the new orthodoxy.

The last came
triggered
by oil price spike
dramatic rises
to inflation
ending a long boom
after the war
consolidation.

Now
we are living
through price hike, triple spike, off mike
commentary
narrating Google streets
everything public
but no-one rules the world
after the squeeze.

Jesus came to my house

Another imaginative worshipful challenge from Iain. Many of us at wgnc have written about Jesus coming to our house. Here's my offering.

Jesus came to my house today. I really wish he hadn’t. Don’t misunderstand me I desperately wanted to meet him. Its just I’d rather have gone along to an evening at someone else’s house, a kind of fireside chat, some selected friends and, wow, Jesus would be our guest!

But he wanted to come to my house and said so publicly. Why did I climb the bus shelter to get a good view of Him? All the way from Byres Road we traipsed to my house, everyone and Jesus, every hanger-on.

I must admit the days have passed so pleasantly and peacefully even with everyone around, so many visitors! So many people I don’t know and yet I have become host and slightly hostage. I’m captive and captivated.

I don’t know how He does it. Everybody’s name He knows, and the conversations! It should be startling and set us on edge but you know the way he knows all about you? He says exactly the right thing to everyone every time. Even through the window to people outside in the rain.

I’m not stressing, but get this, every time my wife Shirley and I go to the fridge for supplies as yet more guest arrive, it remains provisioned. It hasn’t expanded Tardis-like. It just has an undiminished abundance. We have wine, of course, pouring out of vases, bottles and plastic cups.

Sometimes He just looks you in the eye. Smiles gently and sweetly. I can’t articulate the energy and rush of feeling this gives. Not goose bumps, more like an inner earthquake. So much said without words. He laughs a lot too! With us never at us.

I opened my bedroom curtains the next morning and there were three tents in my front garden. I waited 20 minutes for a homeless family to finish using the bathroom. I hadn’t seen my own children yet. When I did there was my son is sitting on His knee. The stories He can tell! Everyone was spellbound.

He did some dishes with me and then helped Shirley hang out some washing and without warning said He needed to go.

I gushed out a declaration that I would give half of all I had to the poor and repay all my rotten debts to everybody I’d wronged. I didn’t meant to, it just was drawn out of me like a long withheld breath. Yet I feel it rung true and I can do it.

He smiled beatifically and said “salvation comes to this house today.” I really, really think it has. I wondered, momentarily about following, dropping everything, but it didn’t feel that was what He wanted. I left it unsaid. I was still looking out the living room window hours after He and all the followers had gone. I remember Him looking back, straight back at me, smiling, crying, praying all at once it seemed.

The phone rang, my anxious boss wondering why I wasn’t at work. “I’m sorry,” I said, “ Jesus was here, is here, He came, he really came, and.…I’m alright now.”
“Right so you’re coming back today then?”
“ No I’m all right, all right, everything! Totally everything, its just …”
“What!”
“Its not like a funny turn or anything, its just, well I’m not coming back!”

An iphone poet

Looks like new tech is recultivating the old art of poetry, or maybe just making it feel easy and accessible. Here's an offering of iphone poetry from blogger Michael Toy

iphone-poetry-from-university-ave

Random IM verse #2

A jammed printer
shouting swearing obscenities
not usually heard in the office
wasn’t the real distraction
instead for those with eyes to see
maybe the tautness of my face
victim of exposure to the harshness of the sun
I forced myself to breathe deeply,
sucking air into my lungs
to blow the printer and monster away

but to no avail
just mere breath can't change things
or can it?

What words can move mountains?
Empty phrases surely?
Can they really?
Change the world?

Lapsing back into the tyrannical tedium
I 'cancel print job'

Random IM verse #1

My good friend Linda and I experimented with some poetic co-creation. This is the result, the first co-authored random verse through the medium of instant messaging, line by line. Hope you like it. The link below gives the topicality.

Ed is so brilliant
a wizard on Ning
no bad thing
but not really social
one silent night
it was too hard to listen
even owls took flight
without a hoot
into the deeply dark sooty sky

logging on gave no clarity
he mourned a lack of parity
on tax and havens
he climbed the highest mountain
searched optimally for justice
wondered if U2
like him
suddenly found themselves
friendless

U2 and tax havens

Gaelic is endangered, should I care?

According to UNESCO's 'Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger' Gaelic is 'definately endangered.' A language is endangered when its speakers stop using it, or use it less often and stop passing it on to the next generation.

There were just 58,552 Gaelic speakers left in the 2001 census. Thats about the population of a town like Dunfermline.

This Times article lays into the "Gaelic triumphalism" which "surfaces whenever the little that remains of the culture comes under threat of further erosion, at the same time as Gaelic is crowbarred into an ever-increasing number of crannies in lowland life."

At £20m a year for BBC Alba? Sounds a lot but still only £350 per head per speaker. But taking in the wider public spending (£50m) on 1.2% of the population this rises to about £850 a head.

But consider this.

Koichiro Matsuura, Unesco's director-general, said: "The death of a language leads to the disappearance of many forms of intangible cultural heritage, especially the invaluable heritage of traditions and oral expressions of the community that spoke it – from poems and legends to proverbs and jokes."

How important is it to know that Bheinn Mhor means 'Big Hill?'

Africa needs God?....

I've been getting peeved at the over-use of Matthew Parris' recent Times article, "As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God," by evangelicals in church sermons. If you missed it then Google it but essentially he has done a confessional piece saying that his experience of mission work in Africa confounds him as a diehard athiest. " I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa" he writes.

His main interest is not so much in the cause but the effect leading him to conclude "a whole belief system must first be supplanted."

An unbelieving colleague was appalled and made this blistering critique which I find hard to challenge:
"Unfortunately this article doesn't really go into that debate but peddles some really racist stuff - I'm suprised it was allowed to be published and surprised at Matthew Parris. Traditionally in parts of Africa people don't look you in the eye as it's seen as a mark of disrespect - those who do are likely to do it because they have been around lots of Western people, not necessarily christians. Africa has
had a lot of crap imposed on it from the West - and I would argue Western democracy was one of them. Democracy in the west took centuries to develop along with the civil society that shaped it. Imposing democracy on other cultures has undermined traditional systems some of which are much closer to the true concept of democracy. The idea that as Mr Parris suggests we should now "supplant a whole belief system"
completely appalls me - he must have missed the whole climate change debate if he thinks the west still has good ideas for the rest of humanity.

I've got soul but I'm not a soldier!

A revelation today. My son, nearly nine, has expressed a new life aspiration, to be a soldier! I'm shocked to the core.
"Because so many people are dying!" And he wants to help. Not for King and Country. Not in the killing, he wants to help. There's something noble in this. To Fight, to Protect, to Defend!
I hadnt thought through any desire to be in warfare or a battle with any sense of justice any sense at all of a positive putcome, surely there must be sometimes. Or is liberation usually just a transfer from one tyranny to another?
Can a combatant be a subversive peacemaker?

Secular Sunday

We had a secular Sunday today just like the majority of our neighbours. Slept in, had a brunch of baguette and scrambled egg and ham, filter coffee, just eased into the day, glided around the house. Then all of us out for a family swim after walking the dog along the Clyde for a little stretch. (Just to be clear we swam in our local pool not the Clyde!) After that a very late lunch in IKEA; the ultimate secular temple.

It was wonderful and one of the most restful Sabbaths of long while. Why should this be so? Obviously the novelty factor, then the absence of pressure, the lack of challenge. But I'm wondering what else. Why would anyone give that up to go and be part of a church worship service?

Quantum of humanity

Well I’ve seen the latest Bond movie. The recipe has changed; mixed much more quickly, faster fight scenes with lots of bone crunching sounds, no gadgets, no humour, no black and white, no fantasy island evil empires, just brutal, clinical despatching of whoever gets in the way of the grudge, ‘duty’ and a hunger for revenge.

Bond has never been warm or human. He has never been so efficient. He has never faced a corporate eco-terrorist before. This Bond wears his glamour like work overalls which is reasonable enough because its dirty stuff his duty requires. He shows a quantum of humanity.

That quantum is this; a drive to find the right order of things, a drive to find love, to find acceptance and approval. There is a residual trace element in the 2008 Bond of these traits of humanity.

The portrayal of omnipresent corporate greed, acting almost as a sovereign empire, carving up the world, for a shadowy elite isn’t that far fetched. Its worryingly accurate.

Advice

"Be regular and orderly in your life, that you may be violent and original in your work"
Gustave Flaubert

Looking for Divine Nobodies

This thought comes from mulling over the sermon of two weeks past. Our guest preacher was a lovely guy Barry Grecu of Ministry Emmaus Inc, of Atlanta.
I liked his motif of a 'divine nobody.' People who have quietly, persistently, maybe even invisibly impacted upon our lives and our lifecourse leading to a deeper and closer encouter and journey with God.
It seem close to the premise of Mitch Alblom's magnificent novel 'The 5 people you meet in Heaven.' That the unknown quantities in your life, footnotes, passers by, observers may be much more significant than we could ever realise. So I will be looking out for them and hoping that I too may be impacting, may be just a ripple that forms a wave and then tide of change.

More unbearable infanticide

Its seems the brutality towards our young is on the rise. I'm thinking of the double murder of the Tamil children in London and the death by starvation of the 7 year old Indian girl in Birmingham.
How can this be happening? Are we simply seeing the media mining a theme here and grisly child murder stories that otherwise wouldnt make through the newsrooms are now flagged up for public consumption?

World that cant bear children

Some people, like me in their thirties, say they won’t have children, even if they married. They say they couldn’t bear to bring children into the world, because the world has become so bad.

I used the think that attitude was incredibility selfish. Isn’t it the most wonderful thing in the world was to bring in a new life, and share in its blossoming and development?

Yet I now sense some of the empathy and depth of that position. Its only because I have children myself that I have been dumbfounded by the increasing hostility to children portrayed by the events that have unfolded in the media and emerged from Amstetten, Dewsbury, Praia de Luz, Liverpool, Glasgow, Dunblane.

It seems there is a pervasive disregard for young life. Could this mark a civilisation on the edge of collapse? Yet isn’t there the possibility that obscene events like this have happened throughout history? Fathers abusing daughters, uncles abusing nieces, children killing children?

So could it be that it’s the portrayal of it that’s the new unsettling dimension? Think of the Madeleine story. A year on, still headlines. Unprecedented apologies from tabloids for over a hundred fabricated stories. But isn’t that drive for stories itself driven by the demand for the freak show thrill of ‘true’ shocking sensational revelations? What does that say about our sick society?

The intensifying trend in recent years of news stories about cruelty and abuse to children, sometimes ending in murder, risks desensitising us to events are true, shocking and real. Yet they need to be heard however inexplicable, inexcusable and in the case of Amstetten, for so long, unsuspected, undetected, and unknown.

Can the punishment fit the crime?

One of the worst elements of the Amstetten crimes is that they are so shocking, so off the scale, that forgiveness and justice are rendered impotent.

It would be inconceivable that Elizabeth Fritzl could ever be able to countenance forgiving her father. That she could find it in her heart to not hold it against him. That he was a damaged man acting under impulses he couldn’t control. No it’s all too premeditated and calculated for that.

The gravity and depravity of the man’s deeds are such that forgiveness seems too costly for his victim, someone who has already paid such a high price already.

Justice is weakened as he is a 73 year old who has had a long fulfilling life enjoying himself doing what he likes best, controlling and dominating those around him. For a man who is now eliciting sympathy with the line ‘oh well at least I didn’t kill them” a prison sentence in his last years is surely nothing more than a time out. Even the death penalty doesn’t cut it. Its surely better that he pays in time and is imprisoned with his freedom curtailed like his victim offspring.

But I feel there should be something more. My feeling is that there needs to be, in every country, an exceptional space in the justice system for crimes that are so unprecedented, so heinous, that a public execution is the ultimate sanction. That way there is humiliation for those monstrous perpetrators in their perverse denial. Justice is seen done and a message to goes out society at large that evil can be and will be reckoned with.

But then in our baying for blood it makes monsters of us all.

Multi or mono-faith?

An interesting thought bolted unexpectedly out of Sunday’s sermon. There is apparently a serious prospect, or at least a debate, of the Church of Scotland proposing offering some of their churches for multi-faith worship.

This provoked a somewhat unnecessarily staunch defence of remaining a Christian worship community. There has been no desire in our own community of believers to unite with others for multi faith worship. The notion is not even on our radar.

However I do believe we would do well to think it through. The prospect of Scotland’s main denomination opening out to embrace all faith worship seems strange and unnecessary. Yet as a counterpoint and also increasingly disturbing is the creeping secular intolerance of faith groups (although secularists target mainstream Christianity and don’t dare take on other faiths)

It seems unnecessary for the Kirk to consider this, as I can’t imagine any reciprocity in the arrangement. Will Christians be welcome to inter faith worship at the Mosque, gentiles to Synagogue?

As usual our 20-30 centuries old scriptures don’t give direct guidance. Like climate change, genetic engineering, nuclear arms, the topic of multi-faith worship is a modern encumbrance.

The OT gives the story of Ezekiel on Mt Carmel. This is seriously confrontational multi-faith worship. Taunting the followers of Baal to invoke a miracle of fire, which the Lord finally brings burning up any credibility in following a false faith.

Yet Jesus took a much more gentle approach with the woman at the well. He willingly debated the place of worship; Samaria or Mount Zion. He unveiled the inner place of worship in Spirit and in Truth. But qualified this worship as the kind that the Father seeks.

Would not the Father hear and seek the genuine worship of one true god in the heart of the Muslim Jew and Christian? With our monotheistic and Abrahamic brothers and sisters can we not bond over our common heritage and shared scriptures?

Grass greener

Now that my post holiday blues have receded and I'm settling back into normality again I wonder why the grass gets greener?

Now that Ive stopped Googling for affordable island homes on Mull and imagining an idyllic alternative lifestyle in the Hebrides I have realised it's our false concept of life that's to blame.

Holidays are a recent invention. Our great grandparents would in all likelihood not have had any. Certainly the Hebridean islanders of even recent times would not have taken any time off except for sickness and maybe for exceptional family reasons that forced them to travel somewhere. The other exception being the 18th century rich young who were despatched on grand tours of Europe. Going more distantly through history travel was the exclusive domain only by necessity inhabited by soldiers, sailers and merchants. The only people opting to travel were ecclesiastical scholars and missionaries.

This current and the last generation are the first to regularly travel for pleasure. 'A change as good as a rest' entered the lexicon and expectation. Holidays and time off incrementally became personal rights. Hitherto these had been communal things; festivals, religious feast days.

So in deliberately exposing ourselves to the possibilities of alternative lives in undreamt of locations we stoke fires of jealosy. We envy Meditteranean lifestyle, culture and diet. We envy tanned skin. We covet a place in the sun.

Then we are led to disdain our driech grey skies even more and become so dour that 4 weeks in sunny climes every becomes almost a medical requirement for national health.