The plans of mice and men

I’m led to believe that the reference to the best laid plans of mice and men is attributed to Robert Burns. I can’t help think about it as I look out on the pouring rain and gale blowing outside my window at this moment. It is what we call in the UK, a bank holiday today, a day off for most workers. In the area where I live, over this particular weekend there is an annual Air Show that lasts over the Sunday and Monday. Yesterday the morning rain gave way by lunchtime to just cloud with the odd break of blue sky. It was not good air show weather. Today they are forecasting that this rain and very strong winds will continue – even worse air show weather. Somebody, somewhere, must be wondering, “Why did we spend the last year planning for this non-event?” We do it for the times when it doesn’t rain!

I’ve commented on it before but it never ceases to give me a chuckle, this uncertainty of life. I mean, there we are most of the time, feeling quite content with life, quite secure in the ordinariness and repetition of life, when suddenly, pow, and we’re left in a daze, wondering what went wrong, or why we didn’t foresee it, or why life seems so unpredictable and so mean. It’s so often an uncertain world. The uncertainties are many and varied. Some of them we bring on ourselves and some of them were right outside our hands.

In the UK at the present time there are some obvious things (very many  in reality) that we bring upon ourselves. Two will suffice to make the point.  Statistics tell us that we have an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, largest teenage pregnancy numbers in Europe, and growing abortion figures. (When one of the leading abortion clinics in the country starts making concerned noises, you know it is out of control!)  So if you happen to be a teenager and you find you have a STD, and that you are pregnant and someone is suggesting you have an abortion, the last thing you do is wonder, “Oh dear, I wonder how this happened?” You know how it happened! When you did it you were throwing dice hoping it wouldn’t happen.

We also appear to have a knife culture among our young. The numbers of teenagers being killed with knives seem to be escalating. A mother recently showed me the knife that her teenage son had been given for his birthday by some friends. Now I had a sheath knife was I was a boy; I don’t think knives are anything new, but what is new is the size! This birthday present must have had a a nine inch blade. That is a serious weapon. What is he going to do when he is threatened on the streets? Take his long blade with him, and the rest will be history. When he knifes someone or is knifed and there is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, will it be a surprise? It shouldn’t be.

But then there are the things that come along completely unforeseen. When planning an Air Show, bad weather is completely unpredictable at ten month’s distance, and then when two days before the event the forecasters speak of torrential rain and gales there is nothing you can do other than cancel or scale down. We human beings seem to have the capability of having such short sight that we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of feeling we are invincible. At the most mundane level it happens with personal health. We feel fine, we even feel strong, the weather is good and everything seems to be going well. We feel secure and strong and even brash and bold – and then we get the flu! Where did that come from? It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you feel like you are dying and you are utterly helpless.

Financial flu is something a number of us have been predicting for a number of years. We have watched greedy banks handing out more and more money to more and more people for many years, and as debt soared the sense of impending disaster grew – but not, apparently, in the minds of those in control of the system – government and big business. No they just carried on thinking it would go on for ever. Now the governor of the Bank of England says we’ve come to the end of the good times. Surprise, surprise! One of the most unfortunate men in Britain at the moment has got to be Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.  Did Tony Blair see it coming when he got out? If he didn’t he must be thanking his lucky stars that he did get out before it all came tumbling down. The ongoing media feeding frenzy over Gordon Brown continues unabated.  Can he stay?  Will he stay? Watch this space.

As a Christian I am not immune to the ups and downs of life. I hope I am largely immune from the bigger follies of life, the disasters brought on by our own disregard of God and of His design for us – but even there, even the best of us are vulnerable, as Job testifies. When Jesus said, “Without me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5) it was in the context of the picture of him being a vine and us being branches that grow out of him. He was essentially saying that Christians come about out of his life and activity, and for us to grow and flourish and bear fruit, we have to remain in close contact so his life flows in and through us. It is a picture of closeness, of intimacy, if you like. If doesn’t guarantee total immunity from the follies of the world – because we still have free will and there are also things that other people dump into our lives – but it certainly helps. It is in fact the only security that I know of that hold us before, during and after the crises of life.  Especially the ‘during’ bit.  Knowing ‘him’ is the most meaningful thing possible.

Another Day

So another day arrives. It’s a day of cloud and,  we’re told, rain. Yesterday was the same but the previous ten days were bright sunshine and blue skies. The weather in the UK changes so quickly. If it wasn’t for the weather people we’d be living in constant surprise. Variety, they say, is the spice of life.  Variety isn’t always good though and talk of the weather can be utterly mundane in the face of the bigger issues of life.

The news of the past two weeks has largely focused on two natural catastrophes, one in Burma and one in China. In both of them there has been large loss of life. We have now grown used to seeing on TV bodies floating in murky water or lying in open scrubby land or being dragged out from under piles of rubble. In the eyes of the media the second one, the earthquake in China has eclipsed the first one, the hurricane and flooding in Burma. This seems a bad thing because the magnitude of the first one seems much greater and also seems to need the pressure of world opinion and politics to make the generals’ junta of Burma act to let help come it, which hasn’t been happening.

As this is supposed to be a blog about faith, it might be useful to ponder some lessons from these two terrible events. We may not be able to influence them, but perhaps we can learn from them. The first and obvious thing that comes to mind is the whole question of the problem of evil and suffering, and God’s activity or inactivity. For the atheist with no God to blame, this is just an example of a terrible world that does terrible things to its inhabitants. For the Christian believer it is not so cut and dried as that. There’s a bigger picture and that involves a God of good who made this world perfect, yet within that perfect design had to build in free will into humanity. It is a world that is both material and spiritual and the spiritual affects the material. With the exercise of that free will to reject God and go their own way (Gen 3), that expression of what the Bible calls Sin, appears to have spiritual impact on the material world that makes it ‘malfunction’. Thus we have tectonic  plates moving to cause earthquakes and weather systems that get out of hand, all materially and scientifically explained things but with spiritual backgrounds, according to the Bible.

Why doesn’t God step in and stop it, asks the cynic?  Because He has given mankind that freedom and to remove it means He removes free will and we cease to be human beings. Should He stop us living with the consequences of our actions?  Similarly that would flow against His constant desire to let us be who we are, and that includes being people who learn about responsibility and consequences. Those are the first big issues that face us every time such a thing happens, but there are issues about us, not God, that are revealed here.

Suppose you were a friendly alien visiting this planet. Suppose you skim round the world and observe all that is going on. What sort of opinion might you arrive at in respect of these creatures who apparently rule the planet over all other creatures?  Flying over Burma or China, or possibly any other nation for that matter, how might our advanced alien observer think about each of these ‘nations’ where ruling juntas (or whatever) live in great affluence and power but large numbers of their population live in abject poverty? What might he (or she) think about the fact that everyone takes it for granted that the slums of Mumbai (for example) exist while some Indians live with incredible wealth. What would they think of a world where generals refuse to let in helpers while millions of people suffer and hundreds of thousands die?

I get annoyed at hearing that old criticism of God being trotted out, “Well, as I drove into town on a bus, I saw a dog caught up in barbed wire, and later in the day when returning home, it was still there, severely hurt and dying. Surely if there was a God he’d do something and wouldn’t let it suffer.” Get off the bus you insensitive idiot. You are God’s answer to the dog’s suffering!  Do something about it!  But the callous insensitivity of such carping criticisms reveal the heart of sin: we’d rather find reasons to blame God than listen to Him and receive His wisdom and grace to provide help in the face of need.  One day we will face Him in heaven and perhaps He’ll ask, “Why didn’t you listen to me? Why didn’t you take what I was offering, the ability to act and bring change?” But perhaps He won’t ask such a question because we already know the answer.

We human beings have tremendous potential for goodness and greatness and I don’t doubt that there are many people who are not Christians who are both good and great because we are all made in the image of God and these things are naturally there in all of us; it’s just that in most they are largely crushed by the sin thing.  I rejoice in goodness wherever I see it, in whoever it might be, but I also rejoice in something else, something that seems even more wonderful. It is when some of those people who are subjugated by sin and who live miserable, self-centred lives, hear the good news about Jesus Christ and respond to it and have their lives utterly transformed.  As I watch I see now there is hope, now there is joy, now there is concern, compassion and action, now there is humility, gentleness, graciousness and goodness. These are the things I see happen within the human race, and these things give me hope, on a bad day when juntas refuse to care, politicians takes bribes and two thousand and one other expressions of bad are expressed in the papers or on TV.

In the face of the most terrible of disasters we have to look at the bigger picture. There is a world after this world; death is not the end. There is hope in the midst of pain and terror, for God IS there, reaching out arms of compassion and comfort and, for us onlookers, wisdom to know how to help. That help may not be for the big disaster, it may be for the old lady around the corner, the single parent family along the road, the old guy living in a cardboard box, and who knows who else. The worst thing we can do is just stand and watch and do nothing. God’s love has been expressed through the incredible life of His Son, Jesus Christ, and his death and resurrection.  Christians realise that this was to bring us forgiveness, meaning, hope, restoration and reconciliation, and all that means a new life. Each such new life is a means to bless the world with His love even more – yes, even in the face of the mega-disaster – but perhaps even more for the ‘people next door’.

Post-Modern Suspicion?

I recently commented on this blog about truth being in short supply in these days and my post-modern suspicion of all things ‘modern’ has stumbled over a new source of question marks. I happened to be browsing through the Independent the other day and found that the word ‘report’ seemed to appear rather a lot. Now only last week I had cause to make some rather negative comments about the Times and a recent Rowntree Trust report on a minimalistic survey about modern social evils so perhaps my sensitivities was somewhat heightened at rather a lot of news that was based on this or that ‘report’.

Having been negative about the Rowntree report I was intrigued by the headline in the Times, “Churchgoing on its knees as Christianity falls out of favour” which led into an article about how Christian Research, an organisation I thought had fairly good credibility, brought out a report indicating rather large declines in church attendance in the UK. The article did observe that Lynda Barley, the head of research for the Church of England disputed the forecasts: “There are more than 1.7 million people worshipping in a Church of England church or cathedral each month, a figure that is 30 per cent higher [than the Sunday attendance figure used by Christian Research] and has remained stable since 2000. We have no reason to believe that this will drop significantly.”

I needed to go to another website to find a fuller picture where I found, “Christian Research points out that the shortcomings are to be found in the sensationalist interpretation of their data by The Times newspaper and others, not in the work they have published.” Tut! Tut! The Times at it again! And “head of Christian Research Benita Hewitt … told Christian Today e-zine: “The church statistics were looking at only Sunday attendance – and I completely agree with Lynda that it’s missing out those who attend less frequently than once a week, because increasing numbers are attending midweek and are attending less traditional forms of church. I agree all those things are missing,” which rather indicates the Times got it a bit wrong (perhaps!).

I find these things slightly perplexing because from where I stand numbers are going up, not down. Yes, I do know of a local Anglican church that was shut down but that was because it was right out in the country with few houses anywhere near it and so the few locals couldn’t sustain it financially. However I suspect there is a measure of truth about church going decline in traditional denominations, even though it is not true for the rest.

Another ‘report’ that caught my eye was in an article that declared, “Europe is facing a “demographic winter” as pensioners outnumber teenagers and birth rates fall, according to a report by the Institute for Family Policy.” The report was entitled, “The Evolution of the Family in Europe 2008.” If that one is accurate then we are living in a depressing era in that there is one marital breakdown every 30 seconds in Europe, the average marriage lasts 13 years and there are 1 million divorces annually. We’re obviously not very good at relationships – with God and with each other!

Another bunch of ‘report’ people who must be feeling rejected this week are the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). A report from the group said scientific evidence pointed to a “probable, but weak, causal link between psychotic illness, including schizophrenia, and cannabis use”, concluding that the health dangers from cannabis did not justify its inclusion in the higher category the the Government is going ahead with anyway. More suspicion of reports.

So in those three reports we find a) questionable data, b) unpleasant data and c) unpalatable data. I Keep finding my mind drifting back into the area of research integrity, or to be more precise, the lack of integrity that sometimes seems to flow around the world of research and assessment. It means, unfortunately, that there is a lot of skepticism floating around and the modern liking for knocking out research and research reports at the drop of a hat, only seems to fuel this skepticism. Perhaps these three reports I’ve cited today might be categorized as a) disputed, b) depressing and c) dismissed, none of which does a lot of good for the average punter looking for a lift in life!

Maybe it’s because I am a postmodern skeptic or maybe it’s because I am a Christian concerned about ethics in the twenty-first century, but however we look at these things we have to admit that we live in an age where truth is questionable. Is this information correct? Are these conclusions correct, or have we concocted conclusions to suit our presuppositions?

One of the things about all of this, it seems, is that in this period of history, despite all our information collecting, we are even more unsure about life. Many will even shout that there is no such thing as truth, until it comes to issues directly personal to them. There are no absolutes they say – but it is wrong for you to lie to me! We may not sack our politicians today for committing adultery, abandoning wives and families etc, but we will if they lie to us. We may have reduced our list of  ‘don’t do’ things, but we still have them and always will have them.  Our playing with research and reports, is a vain attempt to decide that is right and what is not, yet even as the report on drugs has shown, if we don’t like the report, we ignore it.

I look forward to the day – and it will come – when we will find society accepting that the best arbiter for right and wrong comes from “God said” but while people refuse to even examine the validity for that premise, that time may be a long way off. In the meantime we will continue to suffer reports telling us how bad the world is getting (meaning our lifestyles!), how God is not relevant (because we don’t like being told we’re wrong), and how this or that is bad for us – or not – we think – for the moment – perhaps – maybe!