Spiff it Up

'ja' is German for 'yes'. I don't know what the rest of it means

This post, despite  a tongue wedged in the gap where my wisdom tooth once was, is like a knitting needle  - it does have something of a point to it. On a stand-up show in Las Vegas, the so-called comedian Bill Maher referred to Sarah Palin's Downs' Syndrome son as a 'retard', prompting universal outrage. I haven't seen the clip, and at face value even used in some satirical context, good taste trumps satire every time.Also Public Figures can't hit people below the belt, which isn't levelling the playing field, really, is it? But - is satire sinful? If it is, then my new Facebook address will be somewhere in the Sixth Circle of Hell – nothing to do with the Sixth Ring – Kuwaiti friends please note (it is really but I didn't want to frighten you.)

However, I want to talk to you today about the Use of Words and my point is that we churchy folk have a vocabulary all our own, don't we? I say this in love. Nobody – not even the most primitive of Baptists – understands us, but we get to be quite cosy together in our linguistically challenged little corner. In deference to the pounding legions of progress, it's time to refresh (what a delightfully modern word that is...) our cookie drawer and say what we mean – or is it 'like?” So, let's update the extraliturgical vocabulary a bit, shall we? Spiff it up, as it were?

I did get a little bit of help from the Beaker Folk when preparing this, and intend asking Archdruid Eileen for her hand, and possibly the rest of her, unless of course she has been secretly betrothed to that naughty young shepherd, Gabriel Oak. Surely, she is of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. Since they hail from a little corner of rural England, far from the madding crowd, it's possible that some of the more obscure references might lie beyond the scope of the seething, cosmopolitan audience which eagerly awaits my pronouncements. Nevertheless...

Welcome, welcome, welcome. Sit anywhere you like.

For a start, Cedric, the octogenarian greeter is going to be replaced by a lifesized anime of Miss Piggy, with appropriately Pentecostal head covering and remotely controlled from the organ loft by a man called Alan. About time, really. Cedric died in 1978.

And now for the main course, the pure meat of the word.

First, a question. Can you pronounce the word "Taizé"? No. I thought not.

"Unhappy" is now deeply cringeworthy and is to be replaced immediately with "challenged", "differently inspired" or "fine". “OK” isn't sweeping enough, unfortunately.

"Dreadful". Much too direct - honest, even.  To be replaced by "Truly meaningful" (as in "that's a truly meaningful worship song you've just written, Doris".)

"Moaning whingers, always looking for things to complain about" to be replaced with "loyal members of the fellowship". But everyone knows what it means. Really.

"Worship leaders" was initially replaced with "lead worshippers". No. Neither will do. We're gonna lose them both. We're not replacing them with a new word. We're just gonna pile them all into a minivan with all their instruments and lose them off one of the A7's more remote junctions. Near the sign that says "Taizé".

"Leadership Group" to be replaced by "Enablement Group". This won't make any difference to how any of them think or behave, but it just feels a bit less patriarchal, don't you think?

"People who are praying for you" to be replaced by "friends".

“I prayed about it” replaced with “it occurred to me recently”.

“Sharing”. Monosyllabic interchange with the TV on.

“Deep and meaningful sharing”. As above but with the TV off.

"We just really need to share" to be abolished, with no replacement.

And now for those who teach. Let's hope there's not too many of you and you only have one wife. Mistresses count, remember.

"Why can't your preaching be more inspiring, like at New Wine?" To be replaced by "why can't the congregation be more inspiring, like at New Wine?"

"Liturgical Dance" to be replaced by "Prancing Around In Long Frocks".

"Modern Liturgical Styles" to be replaced by "Prancing around In Long Frocks with Flags and Ocarinas, with fairy lights in the background, and simultaneous prayers in eight languages". Ask Alan for an ocarina, should you have forgotten to bring your own.

"Sunday School" to be replaced by "Sunday Club" to be replaced by "Kids Church, no apostrophe" to be replaced by "The empty room next to the ladies' toilet".

"And finally" to be replaced with "Just ten more minutes. Please don't leave just yet. The match won't be on for at least half an hour."

I'm glad to have got all that out of my system.  If you can tear yourselves away from the last episode of "The Borgias", at our next gathering – so much cosier than 'meeting' or 'service' - Revd Dr Margaret Witherspoon  - do check her link - is going to be, er, sharing, on the probability of apocalypse next Sunday. That is, she's going to be speaking next Sunday; the spreadsheet algorithm isn't quite refined enough yet to predict a particular day. Assuming we're all here, of course, and the Arctic methane eruptions haven't turned whichever part of Eden you inhabit into a treeless, smoking cinder. Have a nice day, now.

Bees and Booze

A year or so ago, perhaps more, it became clear that we had a little problem. A few wild bees were seen crawling in between the gaps in the brickwork in the Pump House. They seemed small, made no mess, didn’t seem to swarm and we’d resigned ourselves to some kind of joint occupancy since it’s illegal here to simply exterminate them. A relative had tried injecting foam into the cavity wall, to deprive them of building space. However, this year, the problem has become greater by an order of magnitude. They have justified their reputation for industry, that's for sure. They have constructed their own Burj Khalifa all the way up the wall. Beekeepers came – the objective being to gently lure them out into the open and persuade them, as Fagin put it,  to ‘change lodgings'. Two separate experts came, suited up and proclaimed the problem insoluble. It was suggested that we block off the entrance, reasoning that if no more could get in, the current occupants would simply succumb and all would be well. We didn’t consider that even if this worked it would leave behind an open invitation for more perniciously invasive guests, like rodents who can smell a free lunch. After a trip to town yesterday, we arrived home to find the entire lower floor filled with angry buzzing and the house uninhabitable. Depriving them of the front door, they had, with admirable resourcefulness, found a back one which they seemed more than capable of defending. We called the fire department who knocked a few holes in the wall, reopened the original hole and pulled a huge, black and gold glutinous mess out on to the grass. They injected resinous poison into the smaller orifices, blocking them up afterwards. After they left, it became clear that the surface had barely been scratched. Come evening, a menacingly ominous humming could be heard in various locations behind the cavity walls. It was clear that although one part of the swarm had been eliminated and they might have lost round one, the fight wasn’t yet over. No, indeed.

Strangely, I found myself thinking “this is war.”

Various strategies came to mind. Opening a hole in the wall, squirting insect poison through the hole and blocking it up again? Rejected. Waste of spray. Good enough to pick off the stragglers who wander unbidden into the house, useless for a high volume Panzer attack. Canute knew he could not hold back the tide and so do I. Next option - a tiny Spartan army held off thousands of Xerxes’ hordes at Thermopylae by bringing them to battle in a funneled valley. But, as yet, the bees don’t want to fight and provoking them to do so by trapping them in might provoke a response of such disproportionate magnitude that even if thousands were lost, more would quickly replace them. King Leonidas was betrayed because a small path behind his lines was revealed to his enemies who promptly outflanked him. Napoleon had numerical advantage most of the time, but still lost at Waterloo. Third option. Get someone in to tear down the entire wall and dig out comb, foam and queen. Collateral damage, considerable, but, problem solved. Fourth. Pray. I wonder why I didn’t put that first on the list.

I used to drink. Alcohol, that is. A lot. Much too much, as it happens. For the first few years, the booze and I rubbed along together, much like a small, but inoffensive honeycomb behind a wall. There were inconveniences, but nothing more. However, the man takes a drink, later the drink takes the drink then the drink takes the man – as the Japanese are fond of saying. The infestation into one’s personality becomes more and more pervasive, money, jobs and friends evaporate, there were unwelcome police interventions – oh, yes - until ultimately, rock bottom is struck with a bone-shattering crunch and something has to be done or a whisky-sodden grave beckons. There were palliatives – visits to clinics and hospitals, dryings-out, group therapy and other equivalents to squirting poison into holes. But, the beast with red eyes refused to die for a long, long time. It took dramatic, divine intervention before the whispering black dwarf was finally and permanently dislodged from my shoulder.

It feels a bit like that with the bees. I don’t like leaving the story half finished, so next time we meet, there’ll be more to tell. One thing is sure, there will be victory. One way or another.

Shouting Methodists

A long time ago, I read "Uncle Tom's Cabin”, Harriet Beecher Stowe's seminal novel about slavery and forgiveness. I was not alone – over a million copies were sold in Britain, it had the reputation for laying the groundwork for the American Civil War and was the second best-selling book of that century, after the Bible. The hero, a Negro slave, Uncle Tom, was a Methodist and one of the more perniciously pious white females in the story refers to them -that is - the members of the slave church as "shouting Methodists. Horrible". I haven't come across many 'shouting Methodists' in recent times but have been following with some interest various events wherein Uncle Tom might have found congenial company. Not because he was a slave and black, but because he belonged to an anonymous, poverty-stricken, powerless community which hope swept up and out from temporal misery.

Others have written about 'the Cwmbran Outpouring' – perhaps its flames have now been fanned into a full-blown revival along the lines of the great Welsh Revival of 1904-5, an early leader being another Methodist, Joseph Jenkins.

Cwmbran is a new, not particularly affluent town in Wales - a search turns up advertisements for a shopping centre and not much else. 

Victory Church is part of the Elim pentecostal denomination – as if that really matters - and its congregation meets in a building on an industrial estate. Around the country there are a thousand more churches just like it, some successful, others struggling to make the rental payments and pay the pastor more than minimum wage. For the last month or more, this apparent backwater seems to be hosting happenings that look like a rerun of a hundred years ago, painted in fresh, bright colours. Many visitors have simply said: ‘this is the most authentic move of God of our generation’. One of the pastoral staff famously remarked the other evening ‘we don’t know what is going on’. This suggests two things. First, we are, it would seem, capable of recognising a genuine 'move of God'. Second, having been caught up in it, we have no idea where it is going, where it will lead us or the outcomes of our climbing on board.

All of this, of course, offends those who like their religion nicely cut, dried and presented in a palatable and digestibly rational form. Some are fond of liturgy and organisation and get squeamish when any emotion surfaces, shuddering and turning round nervously, looking for the exit signs. Some are cynical, having seen too many white-suited

American preachers putting on slick presentations to thousands then climbing into their private Gulfstream jets with the proceeds. Others go and stand at the back, almost expecting to see manipulation, looking for what they believe to be 'rectitude' – I'm trying hard not to use buzzwords here – where nomenclature, pronouncements and utterances are calibrated against a scale which truly only exists in the mind of the observer, for participant they surely are not. At the first sulphurous whiff of dominionism or replacement theology, they stand back and smugly fold their arms. These calibrations are often denominationally configured and such is the variance of interpretation, are almost inevitably subjective, hence flawed. Then there are the third type – those who have no background, no religious affiliation, no yardsticks, measuring instruments or preconceptions, who walk in off the street and are confronted what one blogger who writes much better than I do called a wild goose, which allegedly was the name given to the Holy Spirit by the founder of the Iona Community. In any event, nomenclature tends to become less important if, as has been widely reported, 'signs and wonders' are happening at the nightly meetings. Karl Barth once famously wrote about the 'otherness' of God. I remember having to write an essay about it when I was at theological college. I came to the same conclusion then as I do now. That which we perceive as God is not like us, in the sense that the way things are done in 'places' other than our own isn't predictable or necessarily subject to the immutability of what we call reason. Supposing that God 'thinks' like we do is analogous to a belief that our dog is anthropocentrically similar to ourselves. C S Lewis' Aslan is no more human than the wild goose, time has a different meaning and irrational events crowd in one after the other as some kind of hidden portal to heaven is mysteriously opened and glory pours down like liquid gold. Why? I have absolutely no idea. Is it real? Probably, or possibly not - it rather depends on one's definition of reality. How much do I know about crowd psychology to possibly form an opinion? Does it work? Yes, in the sense that participants touch the ineffable in ways that they didn't before and more importantly, are touched by it, possibly permanently, like Jacob. Will it fade? Almost certainly, but until it does and the waterfalls of presence, power and grace that seem to be being released in an anonymous little Welsh town are continuing. I find myself thinking that it is this 'otherness' which all believers reach towards and cry out for from places in the depths of their being that even they can't see or comprehend. They may look for it in a Benedictine abbey, at a meditation retreat, or in the familiar words which their preferred dish on the liturgical smorgasbord apportions them. The thirsty traveller who searches for water, often content with finding little, one day turns a corner and is engulfed by a tsunami in which he has little option but simply to bathe.

What about me? Do I want to go and see, professional Zacchaeus as I am? Yes, and no. I have seen things I cannot explain before, felt the weight of the Presence, been almost deafened by holy laughter and tried to step back from bodies untidily littering the aisles. Put another way, the ferocity of heaven's joy and the sovereignty of God's disconnecting temporarily the physical body - whichever you like. I'm fascinated and, perhaps, justifiably so. If not here, where? If not now, when?

Girlie and Me

The riverbank

Bizarre, isn't it. I have begun to talk to my dog. We don't discuss philosophy or national politics or anything like that – we just sit together and she nuzzles approvingly every time I have a witty or amusing thought. Of course, I don't need to share it out loud with her - how weird is that -  she understands perfectly and eyebrow-speak is quite sufficient. We share a common language in an arcane and almost religious way. When it's feeding time she sits down, briefly, then rises as if there's a burr on the floor that she's just sat on. Remembering herself, she sits again, licking her lips. Meanwhile, I open the door to the food cupboard. She trots forward, then, recalling I don't much care for poor manners, sits again. Luncheon is served.

Dogs have moved in next door. Three of them, girlies to a man. They do what all women do when they get together, twitter, chatter and fuss, doubtless discussing the relative merits of different brands of kibble. Large and boisterous, they are like three Lancashire lasses in search of booze and boys on a Friday night. My little girl, unaccountably, wants to join in so there's a short but intense barkfest as we pass the vixens' den on our morning outing.

She's a sociable girlie. Friends with all, except the homicidal white Russian wolfhound across the pathway who disembowelled a careless visitor a while back. On our afternoon jaunt the other day, we went as usual to the expanse of common where the tall grasses slow her down a bit. There was a lady, dressed in one of those funny peaked visors, sitting on the grass, reading. Even at a distance, her discomfiture was palpable. At our approach, she looked round nervously as if to find a place to hide. I thought it best to keep Girlie and self a discreet distance before unleashing. But, no. Obedience decreasing as the square of separation meant that from thirty metres away instruction was meaningless. In consequence, friendliness and curiosity got the better of her and she bounded up to the lady, who was clearly catatonic with fear, and announced her goodwill by jumping all over her. The stupid woman started screaming and waving her arms about, which amused Girlie no end and she had to be dragged away, both of us helpless with laughter and trying not to show it.

It's rather fun when one has a dog, since one has to develop something of a canine perspective, according to the book I've got which is readily to hand in the bathroom - the only room in the house where I can be sure to be alone. We discuss the book together, Girlie and me. Large upright persons are chieftains of some description, High Ups, and if you jump all over them, most of them don't much care for it – but it doesn't matter because you know they're friends, really. Then there are the smaller versions who squeak and giggle and turn out to be remarkably easy to knock over. If this happens, some kind of shrill altercation tends to take place where small person is raised heavenward by larger variety, which, of course, makes them harder to get at to play with and jumping up to try seems to make things so very much worse. And, why are the Big People so fussy about their clothes? It's only a bit of mud on the Versace – it'll wash off.

Enough, already.

As is so very evident, I am being slowly and inexorably deprived of whatever sense and gravitas I once had. Somewhat against our better judgment, we took Girlie for her first trip into town yesterday. In-car behaviour, immaculate. Underground car park? Er, no. Stairs or the elevator? Neither. When a twenty kilogram animal decides she's not gonna move, sprawling on the sidewalk with paw and claw digging into the concrete and wearing a mutinous expression, options shorten. We had to carry her back to the car, to the intense and ribald amusement of the sex shop touts on the Boulevard Clichy. No, I had gone to buy guitar strings and we were on our way up the hill to Montmartre, before you join too many dots. It was quite a relief to get back home and across the footbridge for a little gallop down the towpath. Her, not me. Or, should it be 'she, not I?'

Unnatural Science

I'm marking IB. Again. Trying to remember all the things that I knew lots about once. Amazing how it all comes if not flooding at least trickling back along with the sense of either hilarity, outrage or despair at what students write down. For some, hope indeed springs eternal, at least in the temporal time-warp of the exam-room. Physics is agonisingly, piercingly precise and there are people out there of strange persuasion who like to both make up exam questions then tell you what they think the answers should be. Such persons are known as Chief Examiners. I am constructing a mental picture of mine. I expect him to be conservatively dressed, probably in a grey suit with a plain shirt and tie, together with polished black shoes whose laces are exactly the same length. Little Mr Neat without the centre parting. Shortening his name to an affable “Mick" or "Dave” earns a frosty, disapproving glance. Probably from his wife, should he ever have summoned the nerve to acquire one. Assuredly, he is introverted to the point where he still blushes, slightly but distinctly sociopathic, perhaps obsessive (no perhaps about it), and certainly compulsive. A grown up version of Sheldon in "The Big Bang Theory". If anybody I happen to know should say "Ah" at this point, they can consider themselves unfriended from Facebook.

"Interesting. You're afraid of insects and women. A ladybug must make you catatonic."

In between banging my head against the wall it was quite nice to let what's left of my mind wander and think about when the immutable laws of nature got bent a little bit. Neglecting the halving of the angular velocity of the Earth in Judges 10, where a day became 48 hours, the thermodynamics of Pentecost sprang to mind, by way of example. Did the entropy in the Upper Room increase dramatically, I wonder? The tongues of fire – was anything actually ignited, or was the internal energy throughout the room just raised by a few kilojoules? After all, there'd've been plenty of oxygen from the 'rushing, mighty wind' to support combustion. And, what about calculating the average power during the Ascension. Let’s suppose the ‘ascensee’ had a modest mass of 60kg, hence a weight force just shy of 600N. Let us further suppose that to save a crick in the apostles’ necks, they only had to watch for a minute until clouds covered Him. If the cloud cover that day was at 1200m, that means an ascension rate of 1200m/60s or 20m/s. Power being force times average velocity, the average power would have been 600N x 20m/s or 12kW. Isn’t physics fascinating…

Finally – always save the best till last - what about this.

“March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams’ horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priests blowing the trumpets. When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have the whole army give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse.” 

(Joshua 6).

Excellent. Lots here to think about. Roman armies broke step on bridges so they wouldn’t collapse. A steady tramping round the walls for nearly a week might have set up a subsonic resonant vibration in the foundations. The citydwellers might have noticed a bit of subterranean rumbling, like a Tube train, perhaps the odd flake or two of mortar falling off the ceiling but thought nothing of it, after all the apartment was insured. Seven times on the last day, just to pound the foundations to pieces. Then, the good bit. If you’ve never heard a shofar being blown by an expert, it’s worth hearing. Now imagine quite a number of priests, well-practised and non-smokers, giving it large for an extended period. The Noise Abatement people would be knocking on the door within minutes. Long blasts would be like standing in Earl’s Court Road with a Guns N' Roses concert going on inside. People take cover, scuttling for their prized possessions as the walls require a different resonant frequency to the foundations and begin to vibrate, as the textbooks say, with ‘increased amplitude’. The wall of shouting does the rest and eventually, bricks and mortar being quite brittle, the whole structure just caves in. For those who don’t believe a word of it, watch what happened to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. No shouting or marching feet this time, just a 'mighty rushing wind'. The bridge collapsed in November 1940 because of a resonant effect between the material of the bridge and the wind whistling down the gorge, rather like blowing a reed wind instrument to make a loud sound. So, ha. Thanks to my other blog for this. 
Postscript. Pentecost Sunday was last week and we were all asked to wear red. I was going to go as Santa Claus, but thought better of it.

Trying to be Human

Rembrandt  'The Return of the prodigal Son'

Living here is sometimes dislocating, often frustrating. I am forced more than I wish by temperament to spend time just being. Not doing – except mundane tasks which are sometimes necessary. My skills, once so carefully nurtured as a source of pride and accomplishment, are simply not necessary here. Being ‘retired’ is like driving a different vehicle on a different road where the car itself has a strangeness about it and the journeys made in it are unpredictable. There is almost a fear of looking inside to find wellsprings of familiarity and old certainties are no longer as well-anchored as they once were. At its heart, such conflict might be reduced to selfishness which is a trite and self-deceptive turn of phrase. I and I suppose many like me – how cowardly to put that bit in -  are fundamentally self-serving. The snarling, growling savage in me feeds himself first and the Devil take the hindmost. The ‘others’ are less important than the ‘me’. My lack of compassion appals me sometimes. A writer in Oxford whose work I admire, spent time as an eighteen year old novice in Kalighat, Calcutta, Mother Teresa’s ‘home for the dying’, writing an award-winning piece here. She will forgive me for quoting her. “Just one drop removed from the ocean of misery but the ocean would be greater if it were not there.” A clear voice magnificent in futility and so very rich in hope.

It is not, therefore, out of condemnation, but out of the desert wanderer in me that I find myself re-reading some of Henri Nouwen’s work. Every time I pick up something of his, it’s like a silver bullet, a lighthouse whose revolving beam briefly illuminates me, trying to be inconspicuous in the shadows. He was a Catholic intellectual, a priest and pastor, who spent the final years of his life at a  L’Arche community called ‘Daybreak’ in Toronto, where people with developmental disabilities live with those who care for them. In his writings, he speaks less of the physical difficulties, inconveniences and setbacks which invariably surround such a lifestyle. Instead, he speaks of hope, reconciliation and joy. After an exhausting lecture tour he discovered Rembrandt’s ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’ and went to the Hermitage in (then) Leningrad to see it. I have to confess to having seen it as well, but it clearly made less of an impression on me than on him. Out of his reflections came the call to make his home at L’Arche. He wrote: “Though I am both the younger son and the elder son, I am not called to remain them, but to become the Father.” It’s interesting that he does not speak as an ‘arriviste’ – part of his deeply embedded humility is that he saw himself most often as an ‘ingénue’. He writes: “Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in the brokenness, fear, confusion and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.” I suppose I have a long way to go, then.

Books on Fire

Nazi book burnings, summer 1933

Yesterday marked the eightieth anniversary of the 'bucherverbrennung'. Over twenty five thousand volumes of Jewish, communist and pacifist authors' work was consigned to the flames amidst cheering crowds of students across towns and cities in Nazi Germany. Less than six months after Hitler's rise to power, their belief in the rightness of their cause is self-evident. Book burning isn’t exactly a feature of modern times, however. Throughout history there have been over one hundred and twenty documented cases of mass burnings, sometimes along with their authors, from the destruction of Ebla in 2240 BCE to the burning of the Timbuktu Manuscripts by Islamist fighters loyal to Al Qaeda in January of this year. Burning a book makes statements. First, it validates and encourages indiscriminate vandalism. Objects that you don’t like, it’s OK to just destroy. Second, it is a clumsy, elephantine strategy to attempt to expunge inconvenient history. Finally and most subversively, it suggests that the destruction of the article itself wipes out the thoughts and opinions it contains. An online post from a supporter of the destruction in Mali wrote: “This is not knowledge we wish to keep. This is not knowledge. This is baggage. We wish you in the west to understand that we no longer carry your baggage.” Nineteen centuries earlier, the apostle Paul writes to the Corinthian zealots thus: “But when what is complete comes, then what is incomplete will be done away with.” (1 Cor 13:10). I hardly think that he had in mind the obliteration of the Old Testament.

In modern Iran, the current regime’s book burnings and censorship are clearly aimed at stamping out ideas of freedom from repression and also a more nefarious purpose in a line with the early Muslim invaders of suppressing the pre-Islamic culture and values of that civilisation. Only a few years after the advent of Islam in Arabia, Muslim invaders galloped through foreign territories bringing darkness and oblivion with them. They overthrew a great Persian civilisation including destroying many libraries because books were regarded as the symbols of knowledge and wisdom which under the new Islamic system were simply not required and it paved the way for fourteen centuries of darkness in the Islamic world. The pre-Islamic great library of Ctesiphon in Iran was destroyed during the Muslim conquest in 637. Under the caliphate of Umar Al Faruq, which ironically means ‘the one who distinguishes right from wrong’, it was the first Islamic book burning. "If the books contradict the Qur'an, they are blasphemous. On the other hand, if they are in agreement, they are not needed, as for us Qur'an is sufficient.” Such was the caliph Umar’s command to Saad ibn, the commander of Muslim troops. So, the huge library was destroyed and the books, the product of generations of Persian scientists and scholars, were thrown into the fire or into the river Euphrates. 

Christianity has a longer history of defending an all-powerful deity by shielding the mind from strange ideas; there seemed to be a conjoint in mediaeval minds that the author of a heretical book and the ideas within it could be simultaneously dealt with; their solution being to consign the heretic together with his blasphemies to the purifying flames. The Dark Ages in Europe were full of religious atrocity, many thinkers and scientists were burnt with their ideas together with their books. Bigoted ecclesiasticism dammed the flow of free thought, blocking the seepage of knowledge within Western societies. Books were branded as magical and treasonous, and the writer or indeed the reader was punished by torture or death. 1550 to 1600 seemed quite the years for burnings. Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake in 1600 allegedly for defending Copernicus’ heliocentric theories, but more probably for a number of real or manufactured heresies, including the revolutionary and blasphemous assertion that the stars were in fact suns just like our own.  Fifty years earlier, John Rogers, a  Bible translator and convert to Protestantism refused to recant his 'aversion to Popish superstition and idolatry' and was burned under Bloody Mary's purge.

John Rogers, burned at the stake, London, February 1555

Libraries are like the Internet. Most of the contents are narrow, irrelevant, factually flawed, bigoted and incorrect. The remainder is gold, refined in the intellectual furnace of reason and in some cases, touched by the finger of God. We are all data miners at heart. Conjecture, hypothesis, blind alleyways and mistakes are all part of our DNA. Our habitual error is to assume that our own sets of assumptions are unique, therefore unassailably right and by a strange, incongruous leap of logic, thereby giving imprimatur to the erasure of all else. I once thought that the destruction of a book was almost morally equivalent to an abortion, since because that which comes into being - either a newborn idea or a foetus - may be expensive and inconvenient, it's extinction is justified. But, this is not so since a book has a life of its own outside of its corporeal presence and the ideas it contains are contagious.

A preacher I once heard made a remark which stayed with me. “We’re all just stumbling around in the twilight, most of the time.” Once in a while, a lightning flash illuminates the entire sky and for a split second we see and understand everything clearly. Thereafter, we spend the rest of our lives trying to remember what we thought we once knew.