Calvin's Cronies

I have found myself in recent times thinking about "church". I don't get to go as much as I did - we travel from Paris to the South a lot and for the past month or so, the rail link from home to St Lazare has had maintenance closures, so weekend services are very severely limited and people are bussed to another station before being able to get up to town. No, I don't feel guilty, nor do I think someone should try to make me. I miss 'church' in some ways, although a flagship building and strong, qualified, doctrinally sound exposition doesn't really make up for the fact that it's quite a friendless place, on the whole. As in any other large organisation, there seem to be circles within circles and the vagabond in me likes to sit at the gateway, nod, smile, dutifully sharing the Peace with people I've never met and speak to no-one.

On the subject of flagships, it's been interesting, and rather saddening, to watch the implosion of that New Calvinist behemoth formerly known as Mars Hill whose charismatic if rather outspokenly brash senior pastor Mark Driscoll has been dismissed. It seemed he let his enthusiasm run away with him, smacked around a few too many followers, and a lot of vulnerable people found themselves browbeaten and abused by someone who should have known better. Now amidst the rubble, fallout and haemorrhage, both pastoral and financial, the whole structure is being dismantled and sold off in the ecclesiastical equivalent of a fire sale. When church becomes big business, it becomes susceptible to all the temptations of profit, status and media approval ratings. How it could have been prevented is a different thread.

I've always been in favour of small over large. Small means being known, large means anonymity where the secrets of the heart can be more easily concealed and transparency lost.

It seems that Mr Driscoll has apologised. Small means that apology has more meaning - usually, individuals are those wronged, and if one claims to apologise to an organisation, it's like apologising to the bank for exceeding one's overdraft limit, it lacks conviction and can be filed away under the header of the politics of expediency. It may only be at the circumference of the problem, not at its centre. A narcissistic apology with no desire to make amends is no more than manipulative theatre since it proclaims "I am hurting because of this", rather than "You are hurting because of me".

But, of course, the big/small issue is only a part. I don't want to 'belong' to a large organisation so large that the man in charge takes on the status of a rock star, the worship team has its own fan club and in a time of need you have to queue, call or make an appointment to see someone who doesn't know you and ends up just giving good advice which you probably knew already, not sitting with you in the ashes, with a servant heart. Neither do I want to belong to a small organisation which replaces pastoral care with a Blackshirt beating which is why I find New Calvinism particularly unappealing. It's just like Old Calvinism in ripped denim jeans. There's even a Facebook group called "Calvinism. The group that chooses you". They are still relatively few in number, but that doesn’t bother them: being a persecuted minority proves they are among the elect. They are not “the next big thing” but a protest movement, defying the woolly baa-lamb mainstream that, they believe, has gone soft on sin and has watered down the Gospel into a glorified self-help program. A protest movement headed up by a Sherman tank of a preacher who once wrote that the mainstream church has turned Jesus into a "hippie, queer Christ, neutered and limp-wristed....  a Sky Fairy of pop culture" is bound to cause a few casualties, which is a shame.

I've seen my fair share of church breakups, most frequently caused by a systematic lack of humility together with self-aggrandisement conveniently masquerading as 'vision' sometimes laced with a sadistic sense of self importance consequently I'm quite relieved not to have been a part of this one. I found myself comparing it to ISIS. Cult minority status, unquestioning obedience to leaders, dissent stifled, emphasis on militancy...

Or, perhaps I go too far.

Observation

There’s an interesting French word, “flâneur”. Translated it could mean: stroller, lounger, saunterer, loafer. An idle wanderer having no particular destination or objective. Flânerie refers to the activity of strolling and there are people in France, especially in Paris who are flâneurs. It sometimes seems as if the entire city is populated with them. And while they strolled, they observed and while they observed, some of them took notes. Sherlock Holmes once said to Watson ‘you see but you do not observe’. Most of us just ‘see’, most of the time.

The extraordinary slides imperceptibly into the commonplace, gliding past our consciousness as if non-existent, or it only existed as a fleeting, half-remembered impression, instantly forgotten. What colour was the coat the woman was wearing? What was curious about the dog across the road? Why did the man in the car seem to be waiting too long before turning?

Writers sometimes sit in cafés, watching. They fleetingly devise scenarios, stories about the people that pass them, who never notice that they are there. The mental filing cabinet fills with thoughts and ideas. It’s easier with individuals. An impression crystallises almost instantly, a collection of information about gait, facial expression, dress and a multitude of non-verbal signals which are assembled at lightning speed, the limbic and reptilian brain assessing threat, fear, anger or desire.

By way of explanation, I was turned loose in the city yesterday for a little bit of flânerie and found myself sitting at the interface between two arrondissements, drinking coffee. There was noise across the street. Several men, Afro-Caribbean in appearance, were talking loudly amongst themselves. Arms were waving, fingers being pointed and a few pushes and shoves exchanged. To Western eyes, this looked close to the breakout of a violent, possibly drug-fuelled confrontation. Very few stopped to watch. Parisians don't. After a few minutes, as swiftly as it had started, all was quiet. People went their separate ways.

I found myself wondering what were the circumstances that led to the small window of events that I had witnessed. Possibilities flitted ephemerally through my mind before I just filed it all away in the mental lockup. One of these days, I might pull all the files out of the filing cabinet, put them all together and call it a novel.

Work to Rule

This isn't altogether my own. In fact, it's shamelessly plagiarised from somewhere or other with a bit of my own creative editing to bring it up to date. To the individual who first produced it in an obviously bourbon-sodden haze, I raise a metaphorical 'l'chaim' to you.

From a pillar of British journalism. The facts on the ground.

"The unrest began last Tuesday when Hamas announced that the number of virgins a suicide bomber or other mujahid would receive after his death will be cut by 25% after Eid, from 72 to 54. The rationale for the cut was the increase in recent months of the number of  battlefield casualties whose sacrifice falls into the 'martyrdom' category and a subsequent shortage of virgins in the afterlife. Other terrorist groups followed suit, including ISIL and Hizbullah. The subsequent demonstrations stopped short of burning Palestinian flags, so a few Israeli ones were burnt instead. 

The suicide bombers' union, the British Organization of Occupational Martyrs (or B.O.O.M.) responded with a statement that this was unacceptable to its members and immediately balloted for strike action.

General Secretary Anjem Choudary (no relation) told the Press: 'Our members are literally working themselves to death in the cause of jihad. We don't ask for much in return but to be treated like this is like a kick in the teeth.'

Speaking from his five-bedroomed house paid for with jizya from the British taxpayer, he explained: 'We sympathise with our workers' concerns but we are not in a position to meet their demands. They are not accepting the realities of modern-day jihad in a competitive marketplace.'

'Thanks to Western depravity, especially in London, there is now a chronic shortage of virgins in the afterlife. It's a straight choice between reducing expenditure and laying people off. I don't like cutting wages but I'd hate to have to tell several thousand of my staff that they won't be able to blow themselves up.'

Spokespersons for the union in the Northeast of England, Ireland, Wales and the entire Australian continent stated that the strike would not affect their operations as "..there are no virgins in our areas anyway".

Apparently the drop in the number of suicide bombings has been attributed to the emergence of the Scottish singing star, Susan Boyle - now that Muslims know what a virgin looks like, they are not so keen on going to paradise."

Rain Dismal

I had forgotten how depressing rain can be. The kind that falls, straight down like a flat curl-free head of greasy, adolescent hair. Unremitting, continuous, surroundings become featureless, a grey mist that washes colour from the sky. The waterfall cascades angrily, audible from a hundred metres away. When the pool overflows it means that some fifteen centimetres has fallen rather rapidly. Lightning doesn't just rumble, it bangs and clashes like angry warriors in battle, occasionally sparking spectacularly close, leaving a sulphurous, electric odour and clouds of steam. 

This is not good. For electrical components in particular. Internet routers were not meant to be in such proximity to all that electromagnetic rage. Neither were telephones plus their fragile connecting wires, some of which are unsafely draped above ground, instead of being securely cocooned below the surface. Electrons, desperate to find the path of least resistance, envelop the wire. The jolt of energy caused the router to light up like a Roman candle and the phones to mutely expire.

Might as well be Scotland, plus a few degrees.

The Scots had their chance yesterday. The once in a generation opportunity to cut the three hundred year old umbilical, to slip their English moorings and leave the Sassenach behind. They almost did, at least some of them. But, they followed the money instead, led by the business strongholds of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. For the bankers, insurance companies and asset managers headquartered in Scotland, the risks of independence were large, obvious and manifold. They chose the last minute to speak out, leading the ace on the last hand with phrases like 'capital flight' which very probably swayed the floaters and delighted the Queen who might have had to get a passport to visit Balmoral. The Scots are still the unwilling janitors of a nuclear arsenal, they have lost an able First Minister who very sportingly stepped down after losing and still have little time for the Eton toffs in Westminster.

Plum Delight

In order to write divertingly, some might even say, 'amusingly', there has to be a certain, shall we say, joie de vivre, even espèglerie about one's existence. Being mournful by temperament and being aware that "kvetch" is my favorite Yiddish word, I have not been playing to par in recent times, the old golf swing having developed a pronounced slice into the Slough of Despond. Much of this of course has to do with the fact that I seem to be retired. Again. The old war-horse put out to pasture in his declining years, no longer fit for the fields of Agincourt, just a little browsing and sluicing in the better neighborhoods of Paris. 
Just northward of the Place de la Concorde, however, is a small taste of England, a small taste is all that one really requires as it happens, since the smell of rain-sodden woollen clothing and endless queues around London's orbital roads can easily be brought to shuddering recollection. I refer, of course, to W H Smith. England's High Street bookshop. Having been mercilessly seduced by the fact that with one casual flick of the finger, my iPad adds to its not inconsiderable library, it is quite a change to walk into the bookshop - we call them 'shops' in England, not 'stores' if memory serves, and find volumes to delight, enamour and amuse.
Sebastian Faulks is a scribbler of no mean ability, who has dared to take on the languid world of P G Wodehouse's aristocratic ass, Bertie Wooster and his man, or rather, 'gentleman's personal gentleman', Jeeves, in what has been described as a "polished, sparkling, genuine fake". 
As a stripling of pre-pubescent years, I systematically went through all of the originals, like a determined silkworm demolishing a mulberry leaf. The Rev "Stinker" Pinker, boxing half-blue at Oxford and I became chummy and I was a peripatetic member of the Drones Club, clustering in the billiard room along with Gussie Fink-Nottle, Oofy Prosser, Bingo Little and all the others whose lives were made easier by a flat in Berkeley Square and a stonking great trust fund able to clear the National Debt of Bechuanaland. Like Bertie's Aunt Dahlia, I have my own Anatole, legendary hash-slinger who also acts as my sartorial maître d', much as Jeeves consigns his master's more eccentric purchases to the dungeons of poor taste.
In short, the philosopher Wittgenstein and I are in one accord that P G, or Plum, was a soundish egg and full of the right stuff. Interested readers might remember Fry and Laurie as Jeeves and Wooster; this is a classic episode.
Only the galactic talent of one S Faulks might therefore be in a position to imitate the Great Man, which he does with, as Jeeves might have murmured, remarkable verisimilitude. Once again, Bertie is in the soup and it requires all of Jeeves' best and brightest schemes and effortless machinations to ease him out of it, win the girl and make a small fortune on the Gold Cup.