The Scream

I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting -
suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. Munch

Here is a copy of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" - sometimes called "The Cry". If I were looking for an evocative image to portray raw angst of life
this is it ...

This reminds me so much of the other side of Jean Paul Sartre's nausea for whom the idea of other people was hell and for Munch raw existence without connection is also hell. It's interesting that this painting is part of a greater series of painting he did, The Frieze of Life, a series of paintings he produced in the 1890s. The Frieze symbolically examines the journey from love and passion, to jealousy and melancholy, to anxiety and death.

Just examine his biography. Munch's life was full of anxiety. When he was 5 years old, his mother died of TB and his favorite sister Sophie died nine years later. Then he was 25, his father died and yet more happened. After his father's death, his sister, Laura, went mad and was committed to an asylum. I find for myself a link to Nietzsche's death of God and through Munch's being influenced by a nihilist philosopher, Hans Jaeger.

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness ... Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder....My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art.

Munch I think was part of the expressionist period of art history where the artist does not reproduce reality like a photograph but is recording the raw emotional impact on his own consciousness.

I suspect that Munch found this fear necessary to be creative. What sort of fear might be creative or even essential to the human person?

For me I am influenced by Paul Brand's ideas about both the negativity and positiveness of pain. This has been real for me across my life and I met him many years ago in my godmother's home. Few people would count pain as a blessing His publishers assert "But his fifty-year career working with leprosy patients in India and the U.S. convinced Dr. Paul Brand that pain is one of God's great gifts to us. As an indicator that tells us something is wrong, pain has a value that becomes clearest in its absence. Those who feel no pain reap terrible consequences."

I suspect fear is what drives us both positively and negatively. The beginning of Wisdom is fear of the Lord says the Bible. Fear and despair can drive us to seek meaning and purpose in life. Without this we become dead inside.

I prefer strangling and death, rather than this body of mine. I despise my life; I would not live forever. Let me alone; my days have no meaning. "What is man that you make so much of him, that you give him so much attention, ... Job 7:15-17

On the road two - the return

I have returned home after a week away and suffering very deep tiredness. I have always found it difficult to sleep with strangers in the same room especially when there is snoring to deal with. This conference probably bit the deepest in a long while.

After my earlier posting a colleague commented on the very dark circles under my eyes and expressed worry. So much that I got worried myself. I still find the concept of sleep and rest difficult. and letting go is is a serious issue that I carry.

Strange because this is what I find I teach to many of my mentorees. You are not the saviour of the world! God is! Funny that we teach the lessons that we ourselves must learn or perhaps as a good musician friend once said to me. The best teachers of a musical instrument are those who struggle because they have to think about what they are doing while excellent performers often find it difficult to explain what is going on. Perhaps this is God's little joke with me...

I attend a conference on reaching the ipod generation and end up using it to block out the snoring so I can sleep!

On the road one

Sleep and rest are an important aspect of life, but snoring and extraneous sounds prevent me from sleeping. Somehow in these circumstances I've only been able to sleep when I really tired. So it's 1.40am Tuesday morning I'm wide awake after trying to sleep for an hour and a half but just getting annoyed in the hotel room.

Sabbath is something I've also done some important thinking about and yet have failed to significantly integrate into my life, both weekly and over the year. Yet I have never considered myself a workaholic.

I supposed we all carry our burdens on out our backs and eventually we hardly notice we're carrying them. Assumptions, values, worldviews are intrinsic to human existence otherwise how do we make sense of the world. I think this is all still linked into the view that we are what we do. I can assert that is a false view because my value is who I am before God within that relationship and yet at core that value is still firmly entrenched. Can I love without doing? I think so but the problem is a worldview. Charles Reich has a three stage theory of the development of American consciousness.

Consciousness is not a set of opinions, information, or values, but a total configuration in any given individual, which makes up his whole perception of reality, his whole worldview.

In his three stages the first is the consciousness of the immigrant, pioneer or small entrepreneur who founded America in the 19th century. The second is the consciousness of the corporate state where the individual is sacrificed to efficiency. Here I remember Charles Chaplin's silent movie Modern Times which portrays the alienation found not merely in Marx's class struggle but culture's consciousness itself imposed on the individual. For Reich I think the third stage is salvific for the recovery of self, this is a form of transcendence, of personal liberation. However this is not a ontological transcendence rather a domesticated earth-bound hedonistic humanism.

... listen to music, dance, seek out nature, laugh, be happy, be beautiful, help others whenever you can, work for them as best you can, take them in, the old and bitter as well as the young, live fully in each moment, love and cherish each other, love and cherish yourselves, stay together.

BUT ontological transcendence carries two directions
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and Love your neighbour as yourself. Luke 10:27

jealousy and envy and corruption

All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lord Acton

Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra. It's claimed he plays guitar, piano, synthesizer, bass guitar, drums, cello, and violin. He joined Roy Wood and Bev Bevan in forming a band which went on to become ELO. Roy Wood, better known as a multi instrumentalist left, leaving Jeff Lynne the solo creative force for ELO. This picture leads me to doubt the cello playing.

My experiences of life suggest that no christian leader however mature is immune from the deadly sin of pride. (me included) However where one person accuses another rather than corrects then accusations normally reveal the heart of the accuser more than the accused. Furthermore Lord Acton also stated that:-

The man who prefers his country [read empire or self-madeness] before any other duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the state. They both deny that right is superior to authority.

Whether the leadership is ascribed or assumed there are radical problems when success and empires are build. I have found pride inevitably leads to jealousy and envy because a sort of territorialism appears and the childish behaviour or claiming things as "Mine!" returns. I have discovered another portion of Lord Acton's original quotation.

And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

In another situation and another version he wrote in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

I think I would prefer to not be a great man, rather a quiet insignificant person in the world's eyes.

God will bring down their pride despite the cleverness of their hands. He will bring down your high fortified walls and lay them low; he will bring them down to the ground, to the very dust. Is 25:11-12