the lanyard

'The Lanyard' is a poem by the poet laureate Billy Collins, and I read it in the comments section of another blog the other day. It touched my heart a little, so I thought I would share it here:



The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room
bouncing from typewriter to piano
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the "L" section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word, Lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past.
A past where I sat at a workbench
at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard.
A gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard.
Or wear one, if that’s what you did with them.
But that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand
again and again until I had made a boxy, red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold facecloths on my forehead
then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim and I in turn presented her with a lanyard.
"Here are thousands of meals" she said,
"and here is clothing and a good education."
"And here is your lanyard," I replied,
"which I made with a little help from a counselor."
"Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth and two clear eyes to read the world." she whispered.
"And here," I said, "is the lanyard I made at camp."
"And here," I wish to say to her now,
"is a smaller gift. Not the archaic truth,
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took the two-toned lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless worthless thing I wove out of boredom
would be enough to make us even."

a veritable tea party

I've been in Boston since Friday, visiting Ben Hanchett. It's been really good to hang out with my old childhood chum and we've reminisced about the glory of our rollerblading days, cruising down the hills of Hallet Cove. Now we're a little older we like to hang out in more refined places; Ben took me to the Boston cigar room, and we sat in high-backed leather armchairs, puffing fat Dominicans, and dreaming about the future. We also went to see the new Bond film, which I highly recommend, although the suave and witty tete-a-tete we have come to love of our roguish British intelligence agent was sadly missing.

The problem was that after buying hotdogs from a street vendor, we only had 6 dollars between us -not enough for a taxi ride- and thus ensued a long walk home in the bitter cold; minus 8!. While eating said hotdog, I lost all feeling in my fingers which were cruelly exposed to the elements in the act of grasping and directing the hotdog toward my food hole.

Last night I met up with my sociology of religion professor from Liverpool Hope University, and we sort of crashed the Oxford University reception at the Society for Biblical Literature conference. I managed to chat with the director of postgrad admissions, which was helpful and clarified a few things in my mind. But the free cheese and wine was the highlight of the evening!

to lighten the mood

Ok, so Johann Metz probably went down like a lead balloon and made you feel guilty for not having sold everything and moved to the Amazonian jungle to evangelise lost tribes. So here's some light-hearted fare to make you feel better :-)

First, this delightful comic from Perry Bible Fellowship (probably not actually a church). Click on the picture to enlarge.


Second, check out Pandora which is an online radio site. It's quick and easy to sign up, and then you just select a genre of music and it streams songs as long as you want, free of charge. You can discover loads of great new artists you'd never heard of before doing this. I often stream classical music while typing assignments. Keeps me chilled!

Thirdly, check out this latest from John Mayer.

who you calling bourgeois?

Here's a very thought provoking excerpt from Johann Baptist Metz, a German Catholic theologian:

"The bishops sense the dangers which the practice of bourgeois religion contains for the life of the church. They are aware that the church will not so much change the hearts of the bourgeois as it will be changed by the bourgeois into the institution of 'their' religion, becoming a church which is there simply to service their own security needs. Nevertheless, the pastoral approach of our church toward bourgeois religion tends rather to be one of resignation: it is a strategy of latent mistrust fed by the suspicion that in the end the bourgeois are no really to be trusted, and that they would ultimately overwhelm Christianity totally with their priorities and preferences if one were to give in to them in a single instance. So the bishops react with legal rigorism in those cases in which actual or supposed truisms of bourgeois society come into all too open conflict with the preaching of the church: for example, in the question of divorce, especially the readmission of divorced people to the sacraments, in family and sexual morality, and lastly, in the matter of cumpulsory celibacy. What I am saying here is in no way to attack the Christian ideal of monogamy, to make a plea for sexual license, or to oppose the eschatalogical-apocalyptic virtue of celibacy. The question is only whether such legal rigorism is the way both to overcome the contradictions of bourgeois religion in Christianity, and to make the Christian alternatives to a bourgeois way of life really visible. Or to put it another way, whether this is the direction needed to heal the split between the messianic virtues of the gospel we preach and those which the bourgeois practice; that is, whether conversion leading to discipleship will become possible."

The problem here enunciated is that faced by a late modern institutional church in Europe, with it's own peculiarities. It's significance for now is simply this: the way a certain moral rigorism takes the place of a genuinely radical gospel lifestyle. This was paralleled in the way that forms of early Pentecostalism banned all sorts of things - smoking, drinking, dancing, fun of any kind - and this was not alongside the radical politics of Jesus, but replaced it, so as to exhaust the radical impulse of Christianity in personal moral legalism, instead of solidarity with the poor and oppressed (see Luke 4). This substitution occurs today, to take one example, in the way that Christian commitment to financial discipline manifests in the practice of giving to the church for it's buildings, rather than to the poor. Church activity becomes a proxy for genuine world-engaging discipleship, and one feels very committed, but the radical gospel lifestyle is absent. Deus meus, misericordia mea.

listenings and thinkings

To compound the basic jealousy you undoubtedly all feel toward me for having a free-ride year in New York, I would like to continue sharing various aspects of my rather enjoyable social life.

Last Thursday I went to see the Smashing Pumpkins at the United Palace Theatre, on 175th and Broadway. There was a lot of anticipation about this comeback tour, but not all the fans left happy. I was one who left elated. They played a few of their more popular numbers - today, bullet with butterfly wings, tonight tonight - balanced with several of their newer ones, but the crowd shouted for alot of songs they never got. Instead, Billy Corgan fully indulged his guitar rock-god dreams by busting 10 min jam sessions and incredible, sonically complex mixtures of delay and feedback effects. It was phenomenal. After about an hour, they brought out a miniature drum kit, an acoustic guitar, and a rhodes keyboard. I'll get my gripe out of the way - Americans find it impossible to sit still, not talk, and appreciate the music. The delicate acoustic session was permanently disturbed by a continual hum of background chit-chat. I wanted to kill someone. But the beauty of the music and harmony was enough to soothe my troubled soul, and I closed my eyes to soak it up. After 30 mins, they switched back to the normal set-up and proceeded to outdo themselves with an even heavier session of hard metal, topped with an awesome cover of Pink Floyd's "set the controls" For the encore, they came out and the band lined up in front of the microphones, only the pianist playing. They sang 'they only come out at night' and then one guy repeated the melody with a kazoo...surreal, and funny for that reason. Billy then began talking to the crowd and basically mocked them. There had been some booing during the solos, and in his final coup de grace, he imitated them like this: "Oh Billy, why? Why won't you play the songs I lost my virginity to?" Needless to say many laughed, and many felt chastised and booed some more. Well, this is New York after all, the city of cynics. For me, it was the best rock concert I've ever been to.

I also went to an art gallery exhibition/social justice event, which featured amazing photographs by a woman who had been touring Uganda and taking photos of people in a certain village that was having a well dug. After perusing the photos, sipping white wine, and pretending like a knew good photo art when I saw it, we all gathered round to listen to a brief talk by a guy called Sean who related his adventures in the Congo where he discovered a prison of child soldiers, met the Colonel of the resistance army, and forged press documents to sneak into the prison and release some boys. His story can be found here at Falling Whistles, which is also the name of a charity he started to raise awareness about the situation in Congo, which is currently the worst humanitarian crisis anywhere in the world and most people don't know about it.

While I was there I met a guy who was a magnificent embodiment of an American stereotype. He was a high school football star in Montana, but he broke his ankle. He was then spotted in the mall by a model scout, moved to New York, worked as a bare-chested Abercrombie & Fitch store rep, and now he does all sorts of modelling - product launches, runway, and best of all club-going. Yes, that's right folks, there are clubs in New York that hire models to go to their clubs to boost it's reputation for having young and beautiful people. So his job, if you can call it that, involves getting paid to go to the best clubs, get drinks on the house, and stand there with his fellow models looking good. The only down side, he tells me, is that the conversation amongst them isn't that exhilirating. A small price to pay, I say.

as time goes by

A few people have mentioned how late (or early!) I write my posts, which slightly puzzled me, and I've just figured out. I began this blog in the UK, and so it registered me to UK time. Hence, I'm writing this post at 10.08pm but if you look below it will probably say 3.08 am or something like that. If not, I'm staying up much later than I thought!

a little bit more on love

I thought I'd write a little bit more about the quote from Karl Rahner, partly in response to Colin's comment. Rahner's idea of love is based on the basic structure of human existence. To use a very simple example, if I want to perceive the cup sitting on my desk, I have to open my eyes and focus on that cup. Whatever thought of self-awareness I may have had is displaced as the thought content of 'that cup' fills my mind. The structure of this movement from self-focus to focus on an external object requires a certain 'openness' toward the world. The root of Rahner's idea is that this openness is basic to human existence - we are designed with the purpose of being open to the world. Therefore the person who is open, more fully realises their humanity than the person who closes themselves from the world. This is true at the basic level of looking at a cup, or the more complex level of other persons. When perceiving inanimate objects, our openness operates at a low level because the object only makes a visual (or aural, or auditory) demand on us. The object is static and able to be controlled and manipulated by us. However a human person, unlike a cup, has their own goals and aims, and thus our openness to them works at a deeper level because their subjecthood will make all sorts of other - moral - demands on us. Hence the love of neighbour is the fullest form of humanity because it is the action that maximally realises the openness required by the fundamental orientation of human beings to the external world. The 'Thou' is the formal idea of the other, of the external, of the 'not me'. Insofar as human persons have two basic thoughts - the thought of self, and the thought of the other - the other translates into other "I's". And so the 'Thou' is perhaps equated formally with other people in distinction from oneself, but the Thou is never equated with 'us' as in "us humans". Now obviously, the most different 'other' is the Creator himself. While all other created things seem very different, they all share this - that they all instantiate created being. Yet God is not created, and his being is fundamentally different from ours, and therefore God stands as the most 'Other' that calls forth the most radical openness that calls us not merely to forget ourselves, but to die, that we may gain life.

...on love

Here's an extract from an article I read for my theology and spirituality class. It's by Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. VI, p. 242.

“When we say that a self-understanding of man takes place in the act of loving communication with the Thou, so that everything else is a moment, presupposition, initial stage or result of this, then we also say of course eo ipso and conversely that the whole incalculable mystery of man is contained and exercised in this act of love of neighbour; it means that all anthropological statements must also be read as statements about that love which is not merely a ‘regional’ happening in the life of man but is the whole of himself in which alone he possesses himself completely… It would be necessary to show by a descriptive phenomenology of love, responsibility, loyalty, venture, and of the unfinished and eternal quality inherent in love, what breadths and depths are implied by love of the Thou, how man really experiences in it who he is, how the ‘no’ to it imprisons the whole man within the deadly lonely damnation of self-created absurdity, how the totality of reality, which freely gives itself and is accepted and understood as the blessed incomprehensibility, opens itself only if man opens himself radically in the act of love and entrusts himself to this totality."

and the winner is...

Barak Obama. And my congratulations too. I may not be an American, but I and many others - indeed, most citizens of the world - have some stake in the American election. And in light of that, I'm happy that Obama won. I think he is the right person for the current domestic and world situation, and more than that he inspires hope merely by his presence. Some may decrie this as an example of politics being all about 'image' and I too share those concerns. However, human beings are not rational. We make many of our decisions based on emotion, and intuitions about the future. Look at the stock market; the fluctuations are all caused by rumours of this or that person that may or may not take over this company or sell this asset or what have you. Parties involved in intractable situations in the Middle East or Ex-Soviet bloc may perhaps see just enough hope after this election that they would come out from behind their 'fences' and talk with generosity of spirit. This may seem like utopianism, but as Obama was giving his speech I rememberd all the things I had seen in my lifetime - in particular watching the Berlin wall come down on tv with my parents, and when I stayed up watching the votes come in for the Northern Ireland power sharing agreement. Change is possible.

I watched the victory speech at a friend's house in Harlem, and saw from the window thousands of white Columbia University students walking up Broadway Avenue into Harlem to gather with their black and latino brothers and sisters to celebrate the victory of America's first black president. Now, foreign observers may be tempted toward indifference to this achievement - what's the big deal? But that betrays a misunderstanding about just how deep racial tension goes in America. A black friend of mine from school cast his vote across the road, at the Riverside Church polling station, the same church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached his sermon against the Vietnam war, and which was probably the tipping point that brought about his assassination. People forget that the Civil Rights movement was barely one generation away - this sermon was preached in 1967, just 14 years before my own birth. And so the bitter history of struggle for peace - racial and foreign - is still on the surface of the American conscience, and the symbolic and actual victory of Obama is a joyful message of new possibilities.

elections

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
- George Eliot

I suppose all the world is watching America today. It's almost Tuesday morning as I write this and New York is abuzz with a sense of excitement at the possibility of an Obama victory, mixed with a sizable dollop of fear that just like '04 the dreaded thing will happen and the Republicans will pip them at the post again. It's interesting as an impartial observer to watch the emotional nail-biting, and listen in to impassioned conversations in cafes extolling the virtues of whichever candidate and denoucing the folly of the opponent. I think it's a very important election, but at the same time I share the concern of those in the know that even if Obama wins, there are some things that are ingrained in American foreign and domestic policy that won't change unless the populace makes serious, informed, and concerted efforts to engage their congressional representatives.

In a lament for US politics, I provide a link to a charming, if melancholic, song.
My Dear Country

screenings and readings and hearings

Tonight I'm going to a preview screening of a film called 'Ordinary Radicals' which is being screened at a church, and the director will be answering questions afterward. It's about Christians that move into run-down neighbourhoods, live communally in large houses, and do all sorts of social justice stuff in the neighbourhood. I'm going with Nate, and we hope to be on time because a few weeks ago we went to the book launch for "Evangelical does not equal Republican or Democrat" but missed our stop on the L train and went all the way out to Brooklyn! We were about 20 minutes late, and would like to avoid such a situation again.

Then on Thursday I'm going to see the Smashing Pumpkins. I'll leave it at that. Yes, you should be feeling jealous right now.