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

listen, resonate, don't appropriate

Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?

Joan Jeanrenaud and her Ice Cello, a mixture of art installation and musical performance enhanced by the dripping of the ice provides us with a very fragile and vulnerable image of voice.

In my course we were given a reading from Jung Young Lee's Marginality a book I read 10 years ago. This drove me back to my Master's thesis and the importance of listening without an appropriating ear. Many people claim to speak from the margins but Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has asked whether true marginal people can ever speak because in being heard i.e. having a voice they either become part of the dominant centre or they are appropriated. Some of the worst compassion I have ever heard has been I know how you feel because (this...) and (that...) happened to me. No-one can ever know how another feels. The supposed listener has hijacked the pain of the other. They have neglected the fragility of others.

Over the years I have learned to talk less and listen more. Gabriel Marcel, a Christian existential philosopher, introduce to me the notion that to be truly present to another person is to be available to them. That I think is a challenge to any relationship and perhaps at the core of what any spirituality should be about.

'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' ... 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Matt 22:37, 39

collective nouns

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. ... Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind John Donne

The Kobe International Cello Festival was an incredible gathering of cellist 500 or 1,000 cellists!

What do you call a large group of cellists? No, not an orchestra but according to wikipedia they are a parenthesis of cellists. Can we believe them given the claim of rigged and biased information and even fake authorities posting articles? A flock of geese and a herd of cows and even a pod of whales but a parenthesis of cellists?

This year the trees have resisted giving up their leaves until the rain and snow fall of this last week. But now there are carpets of leaves under the trees. What can I believe and what do I believe? We need a collective to believe, we need relationship to truly believe, to have faith.

The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into the body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves...

This quote comes from Meditation XVII from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions by the metaphysical poet John Donne. This meditation focuses on the collective or communal aspect of church in which the interconnection between each person and each part is important.

Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. Romans 12:4-5

Running out of time

Why do I feel like I running out of time? the clock is ticking and I feel so left behind... Moulann

I love an old song called Stressed Out by Moulann (myspace) (listen to the song), whose music my friend Matt played to me quite a few years ago. I have two opposite behaviour patterns when I'm all stressed out. One is to become super organized and prepare things way in advance i.e. I confront and control the objects causing stress. The other is total avoidance until the deadlines create desperation, i.e. I become a victim of the stress. I've reached a point at the moment where I'm in avoidance which if you know me is very rare. But I have a number of people I'm worried about including my Auntie Mary, plus I have a horrible schedule until after Christmas. I need a number of miracles.

The problem as I know is placing my trust correctly and releasing the worries. I've scarcely played my cello in a while and am not giving enough time to praying. Praying is a real tension about trusting God will deliver and my own responsibility of human action of doing something to bring things about.

Our Study in Romans last night just brought all that home to a reality. Why am I blogging so much about this? Perhaps I've got to get playing/praying...

See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame. Romans 9:33

Waiting patiently

When we have the Lord to look forward to we can already experience him in the waiting. Henri Nouwen

I am amazed sometimes how ideas collide from different places. This last week I've been talking and listening and have come to conclusion the younger you are the more the challenge to learn patience in a relationship with God. Sometimes its worrying about what we are going to do with or for God and yet more we want to get on with it. We are impatient with ourselves because we seem not to be getting any better. The run up to Christmas, called Advent is a season of patience for Israel needed a lot of patience for her Messiah and for us awaiting the second coming and also in the frenetic tensions of the season. Today being Black Friday the beginning of the shopping season! My reading today from Henri Nouwen was on patience.

If we do not wait patiently in expectation for God's coming in glory, we start wandering around, going from one little sensation to another. Our lives get stuffed with newspaper items, television stories, and gossip. Then our minds lose the discipline of discerning between what leads us closer to God and what doesn't, and our hearts gradually lose their spiritual sensitivity.

Without waiting for the second coming of Christ, we will stagnate quickly and become tempted to indulge in whatever gives us a moment of pleasure.

Let us live decently, as in the light of day; with no orgies or drunkenness, no promiscuity or licentiousness, and no wrangling or jealousy. Let your armour be the Lord Jesus Christ, and stop worrying about how your disordered natural inclinations may be fulfilled. Romans 13:13-14

enough faith

To pray means to be willing to be naive, [not to have everything right or sussed out nor pure without self motives]. Emilie Griffin

This trio is a Gibson harp guitar, a Gibson mandolin and a cello (origin unknown). I can't really imagine the sound or what sort of music they played.

In prayer I don't know what makes for sufficient faith in some circumstances. Sometimes I make bold claims in prayer for God's action and other times I am penitent and not even sure what to ask for. We've been praying for unemployed individuals to find and jobs and I heard 7 found work. We've been praying for 30 students from my campus to attend International Christmas - I don't know whether this is bravado or a faith statement. I spent an hour talking together with a student a couple of weeks ago about thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. What can I pray for and is there something I shouldn't pray for?

I read Richard Foster's Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home in April 2003. I noticed this quotation ...

To pray is to change. This is a great grace. How good of God to provide a path whereby our lives can be taken ove by love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control. The movement inward comes first because without interior transformation the movement into God's glory would overwhlem us and the movement out into ministry would destroy us.

Prayer is more about being changed by the presence of God and less about asking for things. Prayer isn't about a quantity or quality of faith but a relationship always deepening, openness and willingness for change and transformation.

But to this day the Lord has not given you minds that understand nor eyes that see, nor ears that hear! Deut 29:4

A shadow, not yet

Two days of limited activity and the flu and I've already dropped 5 pounds. One of the advantages of Western good living means I have all this excess weight to live off when I get sick. But then again when you're sleeping a lot during the day as well as the night you don't eat that much. But my helping students still goes on.

A phone call tonight brought the need to understand conflict and conflict resolution. There are four types of conflict pseudo, content, value and ego. I'd never heard of these initially so a frantic search on the internet to understand what the question was. Pseudo conflict isn't really conflict at all, merely behaviour which irritates. While content conflict is frequently a disagreement over a fact which awaits confirmation. When we get to value conflicts we reach situations of difficult resolution because the opposing people have different values. Finally we reach ego conflict where conflict reaches its most personal though it still involves value conflict. It reaches a point where they cannot “agree to disagree!"

I suppose my conflict with the virus in my body has reached the ego stage, we cannot agree to disagree. I think I'm winning at the moment.

Sickness and Tiredness

I'm borderline today... My body is complaining and my mind is just tired with a slight headache. I think I have flu but I'm not sure. I got up once for 15 minutes, then 30 minutes and now I hope for an hour or two and then
I'll go back to bed. Strange my legs ache but not the rest of my body.

All the best plans for today have disappeared and I've got nothing done. But at least it was the weekend. I'm sort of frustrated and yet I can't really be because it takes too much energy.

Read the Primary Text

In Academia it is frowned upon when you work from secondary texts and not the original. When you reads another's writing about the first piece you get an interpretation and sometimes I wonder where it came from. This video, which I made in 2004, is about our dominant culture's secondary text about Christmas. What is Christmas all about?