Without Words

A friend died last week. He had had cancer which had metastasized. He had been ill for some time and the last thing I did for him was help him write a letter in English to a subscription account in the UK cancelling his newspapers. I was unable to go to his funeral, since I was away in Morocco at a wedding but hundreds of others did to mourn his passing and recall a life well lived. I was reminded of the timeless circles of our small lives which run inexorably, much as we might otherwise wish. And yet, so many others have suffered even worse. We imagine that war, death and destruction happens somewhere else and its bestial excesses sometimes leave us as detached observers, disbelievingly watching and hardly able to imagine that such things still happen in serene, well-ordered societies such as those we inhabit. Our women do not suffer rape and brutality as the survivors did when the Red Army entered Berlin in 1944,  we do not have to queue for water because infrastructures have been destroyed, our children do not have to learn how to protect themselves during an air-raid warning. Romans 8:28 is sometimes hard to hold on to especially in the light of unspeakable cruelty and pain which assails us all from time to time, either directly or, mercifully, only in the media. A bus full of kindergarten children was hit by a train in southern Egypt and nearly fifty  promising young lives were lost. Over 150 people were killed on both sides in the latest clash on the Gaza border, including six men who were accused of being 'Israeli spies', according to the UK’s ‘Daily Mail’. They were dragged through the streets of Gaza City and executed in front of a chanting mob. Witnesses said the six were taken to an intersection in the north of the city where they were summarily shot for providing intelligence that helped Israel pinpoint key figures in Hamas and Islamic Jihad who were subsequently targeted by their warplanes and eliminated. Gunmen chained the body of one of the alleged collaborators to a motorcycle and dragged it throughout the main streets of Gaza City as a warning to others. It is as if we have learned nothing since the fall of Troy when Hector's body was dragged behind Achilles' chariot. More than a little resonance of Blackshirt nastiness here; my sense of outrage is almost without words.

Bishops and Books

Where we come from, it would seem, is as significant as where we’re going. The Bishop of Durham, Rt Rev Justin Welby, after only a year as a bishop, is to fill the ponderous sandals of Rowan Williams whom history will record as being the most theologically learned after Anselm.  I for one would have lost the bet, along with many others, the dark horse slipped past the post almost without anybody noticing. Much has been made of his past as an oil executive, but also the fact that he, like the PM and Mayor of London, is a ‘posh boy’, an Old Etonian. It’s all too British for words; the fact that he once worshipped at HTB – as did I – is one of the few things we do have in common and  despite the fact that I went to one of the Very Best, obsessing about school backgrounds is outmoded, a little bit trivial and as far as the Press is concerned, contagious. He’s awfully, awfully senior in the pecking order, being ranked first above all non-Royals, called ‘your Grace’, and given a palace to live in. He’s OK about women bishops – as am I, why not – he is not a supporter of gay marriage; neither am I and, worse, feel the need to justify my opinion. If we go down some kind of sacramental memory lane, the word has great significance insofar as one presents oneself before God and his representatives, the congregation, makes vows based upon a homiletic liturgy about children and so forth and thereby binds two people of the opposite sex to a contract made in heaven. There's just not enough historical leverage to widen the goalposts. Two men or women are unable to bring their own children into the relationship, so some other word needs to be found when they wish to publicly and quite legitimately conjoin themselves, which I support and if the C of E must needs write a special set of words and phrases, then, so be it, but let full civil rights be enough without using the M word. Interestingly, the Catholics don't have 'binding teaching', just a 'preference' - try asking Father O'Brien to marry you if you happen to share the same gender. Welby, who lost his firstborn child in a car accident, might be seen as a dinosaur in this respect alone, everywhere else he may well be (sorry) the man for the iPad generation, where rules change, as in business,  with remarkable fluidity.

Damian Thompson, the Catholic journalist whom the Church Times once described as a ‘blood-crazed ferret’ is someone whose writing I have begun to enjoy, much against my earlier prejudice. His new book is certainly worth a look – he argues that human desire is in the process of being reshaped. Shunning the concept of addiction as disease, he shows how manufacturers are producing substances like iPads, muffins and computer games that we learn to like too much and supplement traditional addictions to alcohol, drugs and gambling. He argues that addictive behaviour is becoming a substitute for family and work bonds that are being swept away by globalisation and urbanization, with which I tend to agree. We part company a little when he argues that the battle to control addiction will soon overshadow familiar ideological debates about how to run the economy, and as whole societies set about “fixing” themselves, the architecture of human relations will come under strain as never before. Let my psych friends take note – if he’s right, it looks like the client pool is going to increase exponentially as decadence and social cohesion decline. I think it’s undeniable that we are experiencing a social paradigm shift of huge proportions and are just dimly beginning to realise that revolutions such as the one sparked by computers-for-all and the World Wide Web is changing us and will change us irrevocably as a species; furthermore our understanding of these changes necessarily lags behind the changes themselves. Which brings me back to where we come from, and, coincidentally, sex.

It has been argued in a firecracker best seller “Sex at Dawn” that human beings evolved in primal hordes of hunter-gatherer groups in which sexual interaction was a shared resource, consequently shared paternity. The authors further argue that the genetic imprint left by such behaviour is manifested today in the seemingly worldwide phenomenon of male infidelity. Men, they argue, are naturally polygamous, sometimes serially, sometimes not, and women, who have a limited number of eggs as genetic currency, tend to want to spend them more wisely. If we are to believe that our species is metamorphosing into primal urban hordes, without the responsibilities of maintaining social cohesion, a return to more primal sexual behaviour is not inconceivable, but, obviously for different reasons, even desirable. The book further asserts that sexual promiscuity in the absence of territorial disputes over land and possessions tends to lead to peaceful coexistence rather that the aggressive masculine behaviour necessary to maintain and subjugate a territory which is ‘owned’. If so, war may become nothing more than a rumour.

All this may be rather more than His Grace is willing to consider at the present time. Perhaps he might start with something less ambitious, like designing a mitre that makes him look a little less like this. Sorry, everyone.

None of the Above

I’m not a voter – if I were and there had been a square for ‘none of the above’, I might well have placed my electronic finger on it. I am, I have to say, slightly more relieved than not that after endless marathons on television, fundraisers, advertisements, propaganda and economies of truth, America has let the same guy through the front door of 1600 again, postponing the arrival of the inevitably lavish decoration bill that Mrs Romney would almost certainly have insisted upon. For two billion dollars of advertising revenue, quite a lot can be achieved, or, in this case, absolutely nothing. Same old, same old. But, perhaps, not quite. Washington is a fickle mistress, prone to deceit and revolving door loyalties and much as I would like to believe it, I’m unconvinced that things are going to turn out all right in the end.

The president will almost certainly use his final four years to concentrate more on foreign policy. Mr Netanyahu, despite a phone call of congratulation to Mr Obama, may not even be accorded the civility of further interview – instead, he may find himself being sidelined to the bread and soup line - the expensive menu being offered to Abbas, or members of the Muslim Brotherhood. I rather wonder if the President’s last thoughts before turning out his bedside light might be to swear a private oath to himself that he is going to achieve what Carter, Clinton and the Bushes failed to do – find a solution in the Middle East. After all, it’s only politics. Negotiation and even-handedness ought to be able to solve everything since all the players have been dealt hands from the same pack of cards… Not so. Israel has unique status in the world – the Judaeo-Christian heritage which underpins the entire rule of law and freedom of speech enjoyed by the West began with inscriptions on stones brought down from the mountain.

The greatest satisfaction over the re-election of Obama is not being felt in the Democratic Party, deliriously happy as they must surely be. It is not being felt among the media, whose howling and gibbering no longer qualifies them the status of objective observers since they have shown themselves to be a corrupt, partisan mob, peddling the demonising propaganda that was a hallmark of the campaign. It is not being felt among the smug decadents of the western Left who now scent the blood of all who defy their secular inquisition, remorselessly bullying Mitt Romney who didn’t quite have the stones to stand up to them. No, the greatest satisfaction is surely being felt in Iran.

With four more years of delicate and skilful procrastination afforded them by the American voter, Iran must have breathed a collective sigh of relief since it can be sure that it will be able to complete whatever construction is underway in the bunkers of Tehran and Qom, possibly with the covert help of Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett whose roots lie deep in the Chicago Democratic machine. I'm not going to leave this without stating the case for what might happen if the appeasers prevail. The British writer Douglas Murray is at his compelling best at the Cambridge Union, here.

In addition, who could have possibly predicted that the Arab Spring would have spawned so much Islamism in Egypt and Libya – all quite benign, of course. Had the West been paying attention they might have foreseen what looked almost inevitable since well-organised regimes are much better placed to fill the void generated by a power vacuum.  If power is to be placed in the hands of the people, the people - especially the poor and most easily manipulated - will vote for whomever they perceive is looking after them best, in this case, the Muslim Brotherhood and similar who  along with healthcare and roads will systematically impose their own Shari’a motivated dictatorships on those who have elected them, to which the people submit willingly because the imam told them to and this is how they have been taught that democracy works.

The US, faute de mieux,  is apparently backing al Qaeda affiliates in Syria; refused to come to the aid of Americans being attacked by al Qaeda in Benghazi as a result of which four American officials were murdered; and has repeatedly hung Israel out to dry against Hamas’ genocidal Palestinian attackers and a cacophony of Judeophobic slander. 

Europeans love Barack Obama because in  a surge of schadenfreude, they watch the neutering of US exceptionalism. What they don’t realise is that they too, spavined and  lobotomised by consumer ‘rights’, state dependency, victim culture, sentimentality, postmodern-religion, post-nationalism, post-Holocaust and Empire guilt, are themselves on a slippery slope towards a neutralisation whose irrational and bigoted hooves are already being heard thundering over the ideological landscape.

Luck in the Time of Cholera

With the US elections only days away, a few thoughts today about success, wealth and power. It’s more than enough to leave out Obama and Romney, so much has been written about them and their apparent successes that little else can reasonably be added, except that the pitiless media hordes mercilessly invading every detail of their lives is one high price to be paid for the bright lights. Let the cards fall where they may on November 6^th.  I sometimes wonder whether human beings are hard-wired for adulation, genetically programmed to chase the rainbows of wealth, success and privilege that surround the iconic personality. We like to try to measure people's value - or 'net worth' - as if one human being was necessarily worth more than another because of the size of their tax bill; the richer, the smaller. How much money is easy – the Forbes rich list, the catalogue of the wealthiest on the planet, crunches the numbers for us. But, it does not tell us much else. It gives us no information about the kind of people – if such exists - that have amassed more of the world's goods than any of the others. So, our question today looks below the surface of mere wealth and expensive clothes to the personalities and motivations of such people that most of the rest of us will never ever meet or come into contact with. The media, in their rapacity for facts, tell us what they do, not what they are. 

Whistler's "Mother"?

So, by way of example, I have selected a few people and tried to gauge what factors, if any, have made them the successes that they have become. Perhaps we ought to leave Bill Gates out since everybody knows about the geeky university dropout who built computers in his father's garage and went on to found the most successful software house in the world. First, then, Michael Bloomberg. America's richest politician makes Mitt Romney look almost poverty-stricken. He continues to juggle leading New York City and his $20 billion media empire. Boston-born Bloomberg is the son of an accountant, took an engineering degree from Johns Hopkins and an MBA from Harvard. He became a trader at Salomon Brothers in the 1970's, finally leaving with $10 million in stock. He created financial information services firm Innovative Market Systems in 1982 to sell financial data and analytic tools to Wall Street; the company was renamed Bloomberg LP in 1987. Later, he added a news service, a magazine, cable network, and a radio station. He has given away $1.6 billion to charities which fund the arts and public health. Innovative and visionary, his latest initiative is about promoting a healthy diet in the city he loves.

Comment:  Sheer, undiluted financial wizardry. Intense media savvy, excellent forecasting ability. Has his looks played a part in his success? Probably not.

Larry Page has an MS from Stanford. He is the co-founder of Google and is 24^th on the Forbes Billionaire list. Google rules the search engine, with almost 87% of the worldwide market, giving a new noun to the English-speaking world – it does sound better than 'to bing', I think. Its Android mobile phone system is given away free to phone makers. Page is passionate about energy conservation and has bought up large residential areas of Palo Alto in California which use a revolutionary type of fuel cell.  He rides an electric dirt bike, invests in and drives an electric Tesla sports car and his interests include large-scale rainwater capture and geothermal energy.

Comment: Great Ivy League start, a natural innovator and successful future-predictor. Looks? H'm. Difficult. Boyish charm certainly – but he looks like your kid's English teacher.

Wallis Simpson, the American woman who stole a king, once famously remarked ‘A woman can never be too rich or too thin'. Is it true, I wonder, whether successful women have clawed their way to the top in the same way that the men have done?

Donatella Versace, mostly. The rest is man-made.

Among fourteen females worth over one billion dollars worldwide representing only 2% of all self-made billionaires, at least five of them started their business with their husbands, brothers or sometimes both, so I have had to discount them. For example, Giuliana Benetton originally knitted sweaters that her brother Luciano would then hawk around retailers on his bicycle.  Number three is, however, a little different. J K (Joanne) Rowling studied French at Exeter University, and then worked for Amnesty International in London. On a Manchester-bound train, the idea for a scrawny, bespectacled kid who didn't know he was a wizard just 'fell into her head'. But, from conception to birth was a painful road. Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling, depressed and suicidal, saw herself as "the biggest failure I knew." Her marriage had failed, she was jobless with a dependent child, but she described her failure as liberating. For her, as for many, failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. She writes that she stopped pretending to herself that she was anything other than what she was, and began to direct all her energy to finishing the only work that mattered to her. Had she really succeeded at anything else, she might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where she truly belonged. She described herself as being set free, because her greatest fear had been realised, she was still alive, had a daughter whom she adored, an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which she rebuilt her life.

 After a long gestation, Harry Potter was born in a succession of small Edinburgh cafes where she wrote frenziedly, her sleeping daughter beside her in a push-chair. She typed out the manuscript herself in the evenings and the rest, as they say, is history. Now worth at least $900 million, she has received honorary degrees from five prestigious universities, including Harvard, and believes that those who have more than they need have a moral responsibility to give to those with less. To this end she has set up charities which combat poverty and social inequality. 

Botox-free. How very nice.

Her new novel ‘The Casual Vacancy’ is basically a character study of human nature faced with power and crisis.  No last action heroes, not much plot, little real action of any kind, and not that much resolution of existing conflicts by the end of the book. Just a little sketch of a bit of small-town English society, quite nicely done. She writes very well and even punctuates properly, but some critics' praise is a bit too fulsome and luvvie; 'brilliant, profane and funny' rather overstates, I think. The prose is relaxed without resort to gimmickry and distraction and even the cover is understated. ‘Cranford’ for the 21^st century - something which for a new novelist would hardly get a second glance from a publisher - stands well by itself, the execution is competent and writerly enough. She's no Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but, since it’s her….

Comment: One great, passionate and all-consuming idea and the willingness to sweat blood and tears to see its fulfilment.  Looks? Irrelevant. What a surprise.

So, what do we conclude from this little exercise. What is it about the wealthy that makes them rich and therefore different? Is there a pattern? Probably not a simple one, otherwise I’d be right up there with them, but all of them have a few threads in common. Vision, passion, single-mindedness and being in the right place at the right time about sums it up, together with the magic secret ingredient which not even Harry Potter's Galleons could buy. Luck.

The Myth of History

A friend wails that social media accounts, their overlaps and interactions, have been overwhelming her, so that she is no longer sure who her friends are in each compartment. Social leakage, far from simplifying her communication strategy has complicated it beyond description. This made me think about my iPhone which  has become almost sacramental in a postmodern city.  It demonstrates with pitiless clarity that our social context is not merely indifferent to but actively hostile to memory. Indeed, the postmodern city as an organism is itself proactively destructive of memory, or rather, the retention of memory, hence the incentive to remember is lost. Looking at one's messages or emails on a smartphone, for instance, one notices that the device yields a snapshot, a brief twinkling of social interaction, after which it is immediately forgotten as if the door to memory can be closed, thus, details about the past and how it came to become the present are dismissed almost as instantaneously as they appear. This suggests that the present is only important while it is in fact the present; as soon as it becomes the past - something else - its relevance ceases and a black hole of history is created. A rather disturbing parallel can be found in a report from the BBC on the retention of old data on social networking sites another icon of the postmodern city. Rather than being a limitless storehouse of memory, the report refers to an article which outlines a tendency within social networking to lose information about an event, whether through manual or automatic deletion, as early as a year after its occurrence. By way of example:

On January 28 2011, three days into the fierce protests that would eventually oust the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, a Twitter user posted a link to a picture that supposedly showed an armed man as he ran on a “rooftop during clashes between police and protesters in Suez”. Supposedly, because both the tweet and the picture it linked to can no longer be found. Instead they have been replaced with error messages that claim the message – and its contents – “doesn’t exist”.

This treatment of communications as disposable is symptomatic of the postmodern city's attitude to memory. "Now" is a special messianic moment within postmodern culture. However, this is far from the fulfilment of the same passage we find in 2 Corinthians 6:2. To intensify the significance of "Now", "Now" is deliberately cut off from its connections with a past as well as a future, and life ends up becoming a process of disjointed often imperfectly connected present moments. I find myself having more and more trouble with the conceptual consequences of this. We have friends from China staying with us, where revisionism is the way things get done and doublespeak is the conjoined twin of corruption. I find myself seeking more and more to validate my own social and intellectual existence by making reference to a past which has a reliable matrix, thread and structure. If such no longer exists, memory is replaced by myth, vague and insubstantial and open to a variety of explanations, none of which may be true because the original information 'no longer exists'. I wonder whether my relationship to my own history would change if I simply disconnected, went 'off-grid'. Not for a 'period of time' but for good. What a catalogue of mental gymnastics I would have to learn. I would have to cross the street with a coin in my hand to use a phone, or offer to pay for the call with a friend's. This would be inconvenient to the point of embarrassment and would lead me to ask myself whether or not I really needed the telephone conversation in the first place. 

I would use a pen and write letters, freed from  the derogatory trail of socially obnoxious slime that the word 'snailmail' evokes and would have to think before allowing the Mont Blanc to make a single permanent mark on the paper. I would meet with friends and actually talk to them, indeed, listen to what they have to say, without electronic interruption, insofar as their own online lives allowed. Which of course is the  problem. My online life is inextricably linked with everyone else's and I want to say all of this before it gets relegated to a shadowy, half-remembered thought in a dark crevice of my mind. I am no longer an observer, but a contributor to the myth of history.

Loadsamoney

Sunday at ACP. It must be lexicons, or something. We had Job, then Mark. The preach was from Mark’s rendition of the so-called ‘rich young ruler’, reprised in the other two Synoptics.  I can’t actually remember what the good lady preacher was talking about in ACP except that she must have drawn the short straw, since it was about the rich guy. She was earnest, well-prepared and the delivery was fluid without being unctuous. Good. I can’t stand the story of the rich guy.   There’s something about it which I really don’t get so I’ll be glad when it’s over and I won’t have to listen to Mark 10:17-31 again. I’ll be glad to see the back of him.  Which puts me right up there with Kim Fabricius from which most of the rest of this has been borrowed with the odd snippet of my own.  I hope he won’t mind very much and will be OK with me posting it. Preaching must be a really bum deal sometimes.

“In Matthew he is “young”, and in Luke he is a “ruler”, but in Mark he’s just some rich guy. Of course, one has tried all the textual manipulation, and special pleading, to avoid the thrust of the story, to dodge the bullet, to deflect it from having anything to with me – or you.  For example, turning the rich guy into a very rich guy, like Bill Gates or Richard Branson, J. K. Rowling or Adele, people out of our financial league.  Maybe the filthy rich will have a hard time getting into the kingdom, but not me – not us.  But that doesn’t work, does it?  Because compared to people who live in Third World rubbish dumps or even UK sink estates, compared to the homeless and the hungry, we might just as well be Gates or Branson, Rowling or Adele.

Another for-example: we say it’s not the man’s money and possessions as such that are the problem, it’s his attitude towards them – he’s got an “attitude problem”.  He wasn’t in control of his wealth, his wealth was in control of him.  Or we suggest that surely he abused his wealth – we might speculate about his “conspicuous” consumption.  We, however, have our finances under control – savings, standing orders, direct debits – “all things in moderation” is our economic catchphrase.  But, er, where in the text does it say that the rich guy was out of control, or that he was a spendthrift?  On the contrary, doesn’t the text explicitly state that he’s obeyed all the commandments all his life?  Which means, in fact, that he was diligent in charitable giving, because the provision of alms was a fundamental religious obligation for a pious Israelite.  Indeed, Jesus sneaked in a “Do not” that isn’t actually in the Ten Commandments – “do not cheat”, “do not defraud” – and the rich guy says has a tick for that one too.  He’s not a tax-evader or a benefits cheat.  So why assume that the rich guy was greedy, with a gold Rolex and a Porsche?  And why do we presume that as long as we’re not, as long as we’re modest and generous, there’s no problem?

It’s amazing, isn’t it, the way you can avoid seeing something that’s right in your face.  The way you can read, hear the story of the rich guy again and again and not see the connection.  The connection, I mean, between the cash and the commandments. Because it’s right there in the text.  Some Christians do, of course, see a connection, but it’s the wrong one.  Prosperity Gospel Christians who claim it’s precisely when you keep the commandments that you get rich, and that being rich is a sign that you’ve kept the commandments – and, of course, that you’re “saved”.  But Jesus says just the opposite!  He says that if you keep the commandments and get rich, so what? – it’s got nothing to do with salvation.  Indeed being rich – and being rich as such – makes it harder, not easier, to enter the kingdom.  With consummate sarcasm Jesus says you might just as well be a great lump of a camel, which was the Porsche of the rich in Judea, trying to squeeze, hump and all, through the eye of a needle.  And yet even this startling image has suffered egregious self-serving spin “at the hands of bourgeois conscience-tranquilizing” interpreters (José Miranda), with the claim (going back to the Middle Ages) that the “eye of the needle” refers to a certain small gate in ancient Jerusalem through which camels could only enter on their knees!

Now, it’s CAT time - Close Attention to the Text.  Here in Mark 10:17ff. Jesus encounters a man who is not a hostile or defensive questioner like the Pharisees at the beginning of chapter 10.  No, the question the rich guy asks Jesus is a genuine one about how to order your life in a morally integrated way.  He wants to honour God and treat fellow human beings with dignity and respect.  He begins with a courteous salutation – “Good Rabbi” he calls Jesus – while Jesus replies modestly with a well-known proverb, “No one is good except God alone”.  The stage is set for an honest and constructive conversation, no hidden agenda, no point-scoring.

Then Jesus draws the man’s attention to the commandments that come from the so-called Second Table of the Law, dealing with our behaviour towards our neighbours.  Interesting that.  People ask what they have to do to be “saved” and they get a lecture about believing X, Y, and Z, or being “born again”, or getting “baptised in the Spirit”.  But Jesus says nothing about these things, nothing, in fact, about God at all.  As I say, interesting.

Then, yes, the rich guy says he’s kept all these commandments – including that extra one – and we observe that Jesus doesn’t contradict him, he takes him at his word.  But then Jesus adds, “Oh, I forgot one thing, a small point: sell everything you own and give the proceeds to the poor.”  Which sounds extreme enough to us, but in first-century Palestine it’s extremer still, even inhumane, because it meant parting with your property, your land – and land was important to the Jewish people.  And that this is precisely what Jesus means is confirmed when he shortly refers to would-be disciples leaving their land.  So make no mistake: Jesus is demanding a sacrifice beyond measure.  Is it any wonder that the rich guy can’t make it?

But Jesus still hasn’t delivered the knock-out punch.  That comes after the rich guy has walked away, and Jesus discusses what’s just happened with his disciples.  For there we see, unmistakably, that it’s not only those with loadsamoney who are rich, it’s anyone with any money who is rich.  The disciples’ question “Then who can be saved?”, and Jesus’ reply “Humanly speaking, no one”, make this absolutely clear.  Whether you own a new Porsche or an old Punto, no chance, makes no difference.

But, hey, nothing personal here. There’s no suggestion that you and I are personally unjust, avaricious, or irresponsible.  The point is systemic: that is, it is simply the case that people with money, and even nations like the US and UK, live in and off an unjust system – a deliberately fixed and intrinsically biased market – which ensures that poor people and nations stay poor.  As the American theologian Stanley Hauerwas starkly puts it: “The truth of the matter is that all wealth is the result of murder.”  The colour of money looks green, but in fact it’s red.

So then, is everyone feeling guilty?  Absolutely not.  There is good news here.  First, because there is truth here.  Avoiding reality, living in denial, looking for alibis may make us feel more comfortable, even righteous, but it won’t set us free.  Only the truth will set us free.  Even when painful, the truth is always good news.

Second, though keeping the commandments will not save us, it is better to keep them than to break them – it is better to be generous than selfish.  For then we can be sure that there is at least a little bit of God in us, for God is generous, not selfish.  And then who knows what may happen, for didn’t Jesus say that, yes, on our own, no chance of salvation, but with God – with God there is every chance?

And a final thought: there is only one time in the whole of the gospel of Mark where Jesus is said to love someone – and it is here, it is this rich guy: “Jesus looked straight at him with love” (Mark 10:21).  Jesus loves rich people!  What a relief, is that good news, or what!  For a moment there … God certainly has a bias for the poor, because the poor are always getting screwed, and because the rich can – and do – look after themselves – thank you very much – but God loves the rich just as much as he loves the poor.  And, yes, love can work wonders.  Indeed, I wonder whether we should automatically assume, as we do, that the rich man rejected Jesus’ call, for he walks away with a heavy heart, grieving, not scoffing, and it is precisely such distress, when one feels disorientated, that marks the start of personal transformation.  In fact, early church tradition has it that that rich guy was named Barnabas, a cousin of the evangelist Mark, one of the earliest church leaders in Jerusalem, and the disciple who first introduced Paul to the apostles, and who became a companion of Paul on his missionary journeys.

Which makes me rethink my opening gambit about the rich guy: perhaps I’m not glad to see the back of him at all.  In fact, I may even be beginning to like him.

Oh, yeah. I’m not rich. But, that’s not really the point, is it.

Walking Away

There is a wild, untamed restlessness in some young people, a faraway throwback to times when survival was determined by uprooting and pushing outwards into the unknown. The tragic, compelling story of Christopher McCandless, graphically told in Sean Penn’s film “Into the Wild” chronicles the angst of a young college graduate, articulate, athletic, and capable, who left his comfortable home in the south, gave away all his savings, rode his thumb into Fairbanks, Alaska, and headed out alone on the Stampede Trail, determined to find himself, armed with little more than Thoreau and Tolstoy and a .22 Remington rifle. The young man had about him a certain dreamy other-worldliness, a wide-eyed willingness to take spectacular risks and a less than average serving of common sense. Although driven to solitude with all its attendant mental bear-traps, he was by no means a candidate for a psychiatric ward and did not conform to the common bush-casualty stereotype. He wasn't in any sense a social outcast, and although incautious to the point of foolhardiness, he was hardly incompetent or he would never have lasted over one hundred days living off wild game and edible fruits and berries. Tragically, he succumbed to starvation and his body was found six weeks after his death in 1992 by hikers in the abandoned bus in which he had made his home.

If one is searching for predecessors cut from the same exotic cloth, if one hopes to understand this personal tragedy by placing it in some larger context, one might do well to look at another northern land. Off the southeastern coast of Iceland there is a small island called Papos.  Forbidding, rocky, treeless and inhospitable, unceasingly pounded by howling North Atlantic gales, it could hardly be described as a first-choice destination. According to early Icelandic sources, the island may have taken its name from its first settlers, the Celtic monks known as papar. They could have arrived as early as the fifth and sixth centuries C.E., probably having travelled from the west coast of Ireland or the Scottish isles. Setting out in tiny curraghs, made from cowhide stretched over light wicker frames, using sails and oars, they crossed one of the most treacherous stretches of ocean in the world without knowing where they were going or what they might find.  The papar risked their lives—and probably many were lost, not in the pursuit of wealth or personal glory or to claim new lands. As the Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen pointed out, they undertook their remarkable voyages "chiefly from the wish to find lonely places, where these anchorites might dwell in peace, undisturbed by the turmoil and temptations of the world." When the first handful of Norwegians showed up on the shores of Iceland in the ninth century, the papar decided the country had become too overpopulated, even though it was still all but uninhabited. They climbed back into their curraghs and rowed away toward Greenland, leaving almost no records of their existence behind. They were drawn west across the storm-wracked ocean, past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than hunger of spirit, a queer, abstract, pure yearning that burned in their souls.

I checked on a friend yesterday. Two years of studying philosophy at university had left him angst-ridden and troubled. His Facebook account had been closed which seemed unusual. His brother told me that he was entering a working multifaith retreat house or monastery in Wales. His mother is an Anglican priest, and childhood had loaded him with the kind of baggage which is neither disposable nor easily shed. His answer, it would seem, is a radical walking away from all the well-trodden social paths, the comfort zones, into his own wasteland, in the hope that a long-forgotten sun would shine brightly enough to set his soul in order and therein he might find peace. I hope he does.