Towers, Poets and Civilisations: an introduction by Shaun Reeder

  Babel, San Gimignano, Manhattan, Dubai, Tokyo, Shanghai...man has always built towers. Sometimes he has done so to laud himself, celebrate capital, either affront or worship God; sometimes he has built out of fear.
   The medieval town of San Gimignano, on the old pilgrim route through Italy and between Florence and Siena, once had to have its addiction to tower-building regulated by limiting the number of such structures to 72. Large towering structures are of course not confined to San Gimignano.
   W.B.Yeats, who bought and lived in a tower in Ireland, noticed a change in his perception of humankind and his relationship to it: he(or, the artist, he would have said) was able to be elevated above life whilst gaining a seemingly prophetic and visionary viewpoint..becoming a kind of quasi-spiritual "watchman" over human tides and trends of art, life, love and politics. I dimly remember he referred to the "blood and mire of human veins", though forgive me if I've misquoted him. As an aside, Joyce referred to this "higher" position of the artist as being in some way akin to Daedalus, soaring on wings fashioned by himself, flying past the "nets" and restraints of religion and politics, so that he becomes "arrested above desire and loathing", even "refined beyond existence."
Yeats seemed later of the opinion that whereas the literal "ivory tower" experience imbued a certain lofty objectivity, it was also a rarified, solitary experience that exacted a price of being hardened, remote and distant.
    As another aside, have you noticed how many great Irish writers grew to loathe Ireland, or at least what Ireland had become: "a priest-ridden nation", as Joyce would have it? Many, like Becket and Joyce, eschewed both the country and the language, so great was their need to distance themselves from it.

   Yeats, along with many writers of his age, sensed and experienced great changes within humanity: wars that outdid any previous wars in ferocity, the dark spectre of communism(though many embraced fascism until its true face was shown), immense leaps in technology, transport and communication.
   Eliot responded with a kind of sympathetic resonance, hearing the groans and reflecting them in his work by writing in a way that he described as "rhythmic grumblings". Yeats believed he saw the signs of universal cycles at work, the intimations of the ends of the age, the outworkings of humankind's destructive tendencies. He tried to speak of this using, say, the symbol of a falcon whirling ever faster away from the falconer, until the line broke: "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold..."
   He also explored the same idea in terms of a civilisation's end being like the fallling of a tower that had over-reached itself.
     Medieval Italian towers cost much money. Only the wealthy and powerful could afford to make such statements of such power and wealth..and as today, who likes to be overlooked? I have found that the people with the biggest and poshest houses are usually the ones who have a more refined and acute sense of threat at the peripheries of their properties.
   Building a tower also allowed one the illusion of escape. Given that medieval Italy was a veritable greenhouse for the Renaissance, it was also a world of internecine, competitive and fearful city states, most of whom became ensnared by the very false gods they feared: Post-plague soldiers of fortune, let loose with the dogs of the Hundred Years' war, were hired as mobile weapons of terror by cities wanting ascendancy over another. These bands of "free-lances", as these mobile sub-units were called, were an invaluable import of English(and wider European) ingenuity. Under savagely effective commanders like Knowles and Hawkwood, these big guns for hire were seen initially as a city state's saving grace...that is, until these armies exacted protection money: you pay us many florins and we promise not to torch your city. For a while.
   Florence was repeatedly harried, Siena disempowered...until Florence finally paid Hawkwood enough to work for the Florentines instead of the Pisans. And with supreme irony, even today one can see a sizeable memorial in Florence cathedral to a certain noble citizen-rescuer of the town, by the Italianised name of Giovanni d'Acuto...a.k.a. our very own and very English John Hawkwood.
 
   Building a tower, then, was not merely an expression of wealth, of power, of humankind being equal to or in the place of God. Not so much a place for a lofty and objectively reflective world-view, as something within which one could hide oneself and one's valuables, guarding one's earthly glory within something that you thought could never be toppled. One could not, of course, extend one's city outwards...that would be to build away from the flimsy protection of the city walls....the only way, quite literally, was up. You were not free...in fact, locked in a tower you were extremely unfree...but you could look out, far above the blood and mire of one's city, or above the and beyond the smoking fields of mercenary-torched stubble: and you could,  for a short while, grant yourself the illusion of freedom and power.

    Here's a poem I wrote waaaay back in 2001 when I first visited Italy and mused on such things.
The "Torre Pendente" is of course the tower of Pisa, which is temporarily arrested in freefall...and of course we imagine it always to be there, though it began to lean towards its destruction within a very short time of its initial build.
   I was very struck by the notion of falling towers as being signs of the ends of the age, or outworkings of human pride(pride coming before destruction, as the Bible says, and not merely a fall, as is often misquoted).
  When the attack on the World Trade Centre took place years later, it was as though this terrible event was the horrific externalisation of the looming awe I felt about seeing the towers of San Gimignano or Pisa.

   I've written the poem in the form of a sonnet...a Petrarchan sonnet, in fact, as Petrarch was a Florentine rejected by his own even as was Dante, yet who had many a good thing to say. Besides, I thought that if I constrained myself to a sonnet form, it would ennoble the content of the poem. It basically deals with towers and civilisations:

Torre Pendente

The best sacred mouths and lips millenial
At Pisa's tower smacked, with no loss of face;
Slid down, sucked slow silt from beneath her base:
By two hundred years they've delayed her fall.
Perfect in design...built on sand; falling
From the first moment bemused mason told,
"On such shifting ground, centre cannot hold,"
To prelate's purple-robed oversoaring
Pride, who replied, "Size of tower equates
With scale of power(and rivals have yet
Skyish battlements wherefrom falcon bates):
Make haste." Thus centuries' massed thunders split,
Stones crash and sprawl, leashes snap and let fly
Falcons against a mad and mangled sky.

  Here are some photographs. All are mine(that is, 3 of San Gimignano, 1 of Pisa) apart from the Manhattan one.

 

Two Poems

   Every so often, life will present poetical moments. This is not usually the case. More often than not, the soul, the heart, the ear, the eye or some other organ will suffer a momentary arrest or displacement as it projects or even experiences a certain resonance. In these times (and I have to use a simile to even describe this) there is some hidden strand of one's being that is under the exact tension so as to sigh like the string of an aeolian harp as the breeze catches it. The poet then has to wrestle with and arrange the words and ideas and sounds that  enable somone else to bring their tuning up to a pitch which is as close as possible.
   See? I just did that, or tried to. And I used at least one metaphor too, as the simile didn't quite convey it.
   However, as I said, I am not referring to these more frequent moments.
 I am talking about the times when the poem is seemingly just given, like being handed a guitar that has not only been tuned before you receive it, but plays itself...allowing others to believe it  was you all along.

   Here are two pieces of writing that are merely real. That is, they mention real and actual people, with the addition of actual reported events. They are factual and prosaic...so how come I'm claiming they are poems?
   Well, in addition to a real person with a real reported epithet is an inclusion of a separate and imagined idea: each of the two poems can be expressed as follows:

       real person + real reported inclusion + my imagined idea = poem

   All I next did, so as to claim my "poem" tag on each of them, was to edit and chip away at individual words for sound and/or rhythm, then arrange into lines that lead the viewer or reader or audience to what I have judged to be a "good" vantage-point, thereby hopefully to catch the same breeze that I inadvertently strung myself across.
   I wrote both poems about 12 years ago.

David

A kid I used to teach could never even do English let alone French
I'd written off his report before I saw him, hearing that
 he'd legged it after a bollocking, then was seen later on in town
eating a burger
And not giving a shit
He'd just thumbed up a grin at his teacher
Turned his back
And walked away

A year later
I heard he'd got lung cancer at barely fifteen
The boy whose life was a shout and a thrown table
And I hoped
That if he'd been caught out by a dark figure with a scythe
outside a burger bar
He just faced it with thumbs up and grinning
Then turned his back and walked away
Not giving a shit.




Charlie


A bloke I knew (well, to talk to) told me he'd got cancer
In a big, personal lump that he'd started to call Charlie.

I imagined leaving his house after a cup of tea,
Me whistling out of the garden gate
Away from the man and his lump,
Afraid that at any moment I might hear them both shouting in
Tethered domestic hell
And that I wouldn't know which was his voice or which was the man's.

At the funeral, as there must have been,
One of them must have won
But if it was the man
I don't know his name.

Fear and Humbug: an essay

  Fear and Humbug

   In Frank Herbert's Dune novels is a prayer-like mantra called the Litany Against Fear. It is a short formula recited by the main characters when facing a fear so powerful as to be both mesmeric and paralysing.
   Early on, the central character of the first two books is required, in the company of his mother and a formidable woman by the resonant name of Reverend Gaius Helen Mohiam, to do a simple thing: to place his hand inside a box.
   The young man, Paul Atreides, is facing not only a test of his manhood, a rite de passage; he is under serious scrutiny to determine whether or not he is the prophesied saviour, the Kwizatz Haderach.
   With understandable tension, Paul asks what is in the box. The reply from the loathly lady is "death". His human instinct shrieks at him to withdraw his hand: yet at this instant, hovering over his flesh like a deadly wasp, the woman has placed her Gom Jabbar. In answer to his ensuing anxious query about wht this might be, she tells him that this single needle-point contains a poison that is immediately fatal to animals.
   His mother increases the reader's tension by covering her own fear with momentary anger:
"Are you suggesting a duke's son is an animal?" she gamely asks.
   Calmly, the Reverend Mother replies that she is merely ascertaining his humanity.
     As the test proceeds, the young man feels firstly an itching, that soon is replaced by "pain upon pain," as he is convinced he sees in his mind's eye his flesh charring and crisping within the box. To his mind, to his present sense of reality, there is the terror of impossibility in the choice he presently faces: more pain than humankind can bear within the box....or certain death from the poisoned barb if he dares give way to his body's natural response.
   Thus he recites the litany: I will not fear. Fear is the mind-killer, the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will allow it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
  Young Paul is successful in passing the test. He is, within the context of the novel, aware of both the immense forces within humanity's experience and the need to be master of, rather than slave to, fear.
    
   Many people have had occasion to explore or reflect upon the nature of fear.
   Edgar Howe opined that, "a good scare is worth more to a man than good advice,"  attesting alongside at least one classical Greek teacher who used to hit students so they would remember the bon mot  he was explaining at the time. Ah, the educational possibilities of  fear....
    Frank Baum, in The Wizard of Oz(the real themes of this book were to be explored in cinema several years later in the film Zardoz) reveals some of the nature of the fear experience, like Herbert, drawing attention to how fear is given power until faced up to.
    At the end of the characters' journey along the yellowbrick road, they draw closer to the terrifying wizard, who is walled up in the hard beauty of the Emerald City. They manage to approach, though almost paralysed by the roaring, the smoke, flames and the threat of death and pain. Sitting behind a curtain, however, is the "wizard", revealed for what he is. When challenged, this lying , weak and lonely old man admits to being "humbug"; his manipulation of the populace is now evident, as medicine-show special effects and flammery provided the means to frighten them.
    In other words, the real nature of his power was revealed as nothing more than  clever lies. However, he relied on the people's enthronement of those lies: their feeding of their own fears allowed fear itself, and thus the old man too, to rule in their lives, exacting worship and sacrifice.
    An old German proverb translates as, "fear makes the wolf bigger than he is," whereas Luciano Pavarotti gives his own version of feeling the fear(and doing it anyway, to re-coin the phrase): "Of course I am afraid of high notes. What sane man is not?"
 
    It would seem then, that it is the right sort of fear, in the right amounts, at the right time, which is helpful. Indeed, having fear of excessive speed, heights, temperature extremes and pain  reflects a necessary means of life-preservation.
  Yet, as young Paul said, fear is still the mind-killer. A fear of excessive speed when travelling at 10mph is inappropriate; a fear of heights when sitting in one's chair would no doubt generate an additional terror all of its own....
   
  Similarly,  fearing violence, abandonment or death when unthreatened by any such scenario, is plainly not at all good. It is  illogical, unhelpful, disempowering...it is humbug.
   And yet this something we do as if, er, our lives depend on it
 
    I've frequently mused on why such tv programmes as "The Apprentice", here in the UK, are so popular. Are we, I wonder, experiencing the same catharsis-by-remote as the Elizabethan groundlings when they were gripped by a Shakespearean play, for instance? Young, talented, mouthy, iconoclastic young things undergoing a series of Odyssean tasks whereby to gain riches, understanding and defeat the beast ...so that, by the Grace of God, we ourselves do not have to? Their pratfalls, their fear, their pathetic relief, along with the dramatic irony when we see too well a pit they are to fall down.....'e's behiiiind ya!
    Oh no he isn't.
   And who is the wizard, the mind-killer, the Grendel, the Scylla and Charybdis? Why, none other than our own Alan Sugar, the titles of "sir" and, more recently, "lord" adding resonance, depth and reverential awe: the terrible wrath or abandonment by whom means death, and to whom hushed tones and sacrifice are due. Be a very good boy...or else the Sandman will get you...or the Struwwelpeter, Fagin the Jew, Big Bad Osama, Uncle Tom Cobberley and all... and all. And we writhe in fear as the occasional irreverend youngster dares to twitch the curtain: will they get zapped....or rewarded for their heroic pluck?
   
    Fear breeds fear, so they say. I have wondered from where that fear arose, apart from within the minds of the protagonists as fear was bigged up by report and action of others...because if fear was passed on , as by the laying on of false hands or report, that must mean it began within the one generating it:
     The Reverend Mother's fear in Dune was of loss of power, influence and meaning to her universe; the Wizard of Oz was similarly afraid of losing power and authority, and ultimately afraid of the one thing that terrifies all of us: aloneness. Abandonment. I cannot comment on any fear within Lord Sugar(and how the irony of that name could add its own frisson): an  East-EndaLondon barrowboy from a Jewish immigrant family driven on by the wandering spectre of poverty, so afraid of being poor that he'd fight 24/7 to avoid it? Who knows.
    Fear is the mindkiller. Yet so many individuals, bodies and nations are as addicted to its presence and use as, say, the 21st century is to oil.

    However, one could consider this: are we not afraid of what has already happened in our lives? If someone were living in fear of abandonment, would this merely be not a fear of the unknown....but of what has happened already at some stage in the past? And if this has already happened, then the outcome is a known thing....and if, then, it is already past, experienced and known, then why on on earth do we still fear?
    And if fear, then, is actually an unreal thing apart from when a healthy measure of it is prevervational to life, then whence does it come?

    In Christianity, fear is considered a healthy emotion in the right and building context. "Fear the Lord your God", and, "Fear is the beginning of wisdom," are Biblical precepts. And of course, for those whose eyes and ears are already attuned to the experience of fear rather than love, say, this enables such rantings to be seen as justification for leaving such a fundamentalist and medievally-backward religion well alone. It is easy then for a person thus emotionally triggered and "in the zone", to state "the Inquisition" or "The Crusades" as outpourings of negative and fear-based religious responses...which is true enough, but throws the baby out of the manger with the bathwater.
    Mind you, the Bible says that if one has the right fear of the right thing, there is both no space for the wrong sort of fear and a more truthful recognition of its real nature.
  And if all fear is based on a fear of abandonment to aloneness, then what can we say ? Presumably one could say that if God existed and has the power over life, death and everything, then to be abandoned by Him is worth fearing? One has then to consider whether the Biblical Jesus is telling the truth about being the only "way, the truth and the life"...and as C. S. Lewis comments on such outlandish and foolish claims, if someone states stuff like this, then that someone is either telling the truth or is a deluded liar.
   And what of the other shadowy figure, the enemy/evil one or being that goes by a myriad of other names? The words "fear" and "demonic" would appear to go together like the Iron Maiden and a shriek. Jesus says that by His own obedience to God and His death and resurrection, any temporal and temporary power this being once had, has been more than annulled once and for all. And if fear is a transmitted disease from the feared, then the feared is very afraid.
    Inasmuch as fear of the Wizard of Oz or our Reverend Mother was rooted in and outworked from their own fear...then of what is the Christian devil afraid?
     Well, if we also work along the premise that all that we are afraid of has happened already, we get the following:
    The Bible says(and I'm merely submitting this as evidence for yourselves to peruse) that this enemy/devil is a created being: an angel,  once beautiful and in charge of worship-leading, then expelled from God's presence with a third of all the rest of the angels for rebellion and seeking such worship for itself. If we go with the biblical account, then not only has this being been disempowered but its future already certain, ending up in a lake of fire for all time. Interestingly, this notion of "hell" is not reserved for man but for this enemy and its followers, the other expelled angelic beings. Logically then, within the framework we are considering, this devil, this enemy, is indeed exhibiting a very real fear: terminal abandonment and utter separation from God prior to destruction.
   (As an aside, how much more annoying it must be for it to see such puny and blownabout creatures as humans in churches leading worship in the place it once had. Little wonder then, that so many worship leaders and musicians in churches get so many fear-based issues, perhaps, given that even though the Wizard was humbug all along, he could generate fear by illusion and loud bangs.)
     There would be no need for this being to fear God if the same God did not have the power over its present and future. Ergo, God does; ergo, God is the only being for whom fear or at least a cautious respect, is both healthy and life-preservational.


    Fear suggests; fear speaks; fear accuses; fear uses illusion, curtains, smoke and mirrors and the suggestion of things in boxes.
    Fear suggests to us  that what we have already feared in the past and is thus known, is actually an unknown, replaying our past  abandonments and the little death of imagined aloneness. Humbug, in other words, yet with the addition of a believer's ready ear and imagination, able to rule an entire world...as indeed did both the Wizard and our Reverend Mother's order, amusingly called the Bene Gesserit by the author.
   
   Even though unhealthy fear may be humbug, it has the seemingly immense power to both spin illusion and to speak. So, what to do?

      Dorothy and the young Paul Atreides in their separate universes nevertheless did the same thing: they answered back.
   They put the truth into words, stated it with their mouths... and passed through, enlightened and unscathed.
   
   When Jesus was in the wilderness and that same enemy suggested and spoke, He answered it back with words of truth. And it went, disempowered...or rather, seen in its real nature as being already disempowered. Indeed, the Wizard and the Reverend Mother did not suddenly lose power there and then: they never had it anyway. They were always humbug and had always been so, relying on lies and fear to mask their true nature. Once the truth had been spoken to that which was generating the notion of fear, the real nature of the accuser was revealed.

   And we ourselves, how do we respond?
    There is much in modern life to separate us from others and ourselves, whilst giving the illusion that we are more included. If we had our Blackberry, i-phone, mobile or cell phone taken away, would be be more or less afraid...and would this fear be real, illusory, helpful or destructive? Are we indeed more of a "global village", so that our comforting walk down to the shops is pleasantly subsumed by an email(or blog) to someone in the opposite hemisphere? Do we face our fears, speaking the truth to it...or do we erect curtains, put it in boxes, build towers and walls and empires against it whilst all along, its size apparently increases just at the limit of our peripheral vison and hearing?
    And if we spend our time building walls against it, do we ever succeed, given our allotted years...? Because would it not be both a crying and fearful shame to have spent one's life walling it out by building a glittering and hard emerald city...then finding on the last day that we had spent all that energy merely walling ourselves in?
                                                                                       Shaun Reeder, December 2010

Maths Debating

I find myself proofreading some chapters of a mathematics textbook.
   Huzzah, not much English to worry about then...but then realised I had to settle down to the learner's viewpoint and do the sums so as to identify any problems.
   It was very hard not to imagine I was doing this at my old grammar school desk, amidst a pinging of rulers and clacking desklids, reading that Spanner Sat Ere enchained for 2 1/2 hours and wondering whether to spend my dinner money on food or 3 Number Six from the lady at the sweetshop who apparently understood the stresses of being 13.
   Of course in those days(as I realise attack is the best form of defence), all we had were slide rules and our heads: given that the latter of these was stuffed with porn, Deep Purple, Hendrix and how to wear a badge with Fred Trueman on it without incurring lines, it's a wonder there was any space left to contemplate the hermetic arcana of the School Maths Project. We didn't have calculators until the 4th year...er, that'll be Year 10 in new money...and then it was only Thommo, but he was always messing about with batteries and crap while real men played guitar by slorming the stylus repeatedly over the beginning of Focus At The Rainbow in order to learn Jan Akkerman's opening widdles. I just didn't get Thommo(nor anyone else) until 4 years later when I realised that the shouting, terrifying Scottish bloke who fell over down our road and stank of scotch was his dad. And it's only now my heart bleeds for him.
    Maths. What's that all about then? When on earth am I going to even wish to know the volume of a prism? Hm?
   The area of a football pitch...the volume of a house: maybe: but, I ask you, how often will sorting out the volume of an extruded shape make my life any more bearable? Algebra is sort of rescued by having some kind of order or symmetry..or rather a catharsis when one has found out what x is.
   Thing is, what has bloody x done to be so popular? x is always having to be found, or worked out, or made allowances for; x is a spoilt and overused monitor of school books, always top of sports, ingratiating itself with teachers, never swearing and always being a self-righteous bastard. Discuss.
  Given that every other value, your y and your a, b and c, do this and that, get upside down and over 1, or involved with pi, and squaring itself up to something and cubing something else...it's always smarmy bloody x that has to be rescued, found and given a nice double underline before smoothing its forelock, giving the bastard Horlicks, saying "well done boy" to it, before sending it upstairs. And what it does up there, ruddy and smug, is its own business, but we all know really. I hate x.
   True, one gets a kind of satisfaction from its completion. Putting it in the same company as going to the bog, bashing one's head against the tiled wall of the school shower block and childbirth. And I'm sure that's what childbirth must be like.
   Yep, still crazy after all these years, maths is still up there in the top 100 most boring and pointless things to do with your time...and probably sharing its position with watching a plank warp.
   A definition then: Maths is like a blind man whistling in the dark on a journey to nowhere. Discuss. And what a soulless, sighing journey, like Dante's nether regions of the inferno without the amusing company or things to point at; or the pilgrimage of the Canterbury Tales after everyone got bored listening to each other's coprophiliac stories, and they've pissed off, leaving a dead fire and last year's pewter medal of Thomas a Becket, priced at 4 groats too bloody dear.....Given that all the pilgrims had 1 medal of Thomas a Becket at 4 groats, what would be the resultant value of the medals, given that the rate of depreciation is 0.3 groat per bubonic infection, with infections happening with a probability of 2 in 5 on a fish day? Yeahright. And why not convert the groats to silver pennies that have their edges clipped once a fortnight? I mean! Thud goes the desklid. Right, put your chairs back; finish for homework....

    And yet: Avogadro...Leonardo...the genius polyglots of the renaissance, hanging and flying and soaring in a holistic learningfest before science, art and nature were pigeonholed as such just so the common and bureaucratic mortal could keep track of them: maths to them was a language, a mystery, a knowing... a way of seeing intimations of immortality in the fractal curves of spiralling water, snail shells and tornados...
    And again the earlier Islamic explorers of the inner and outer worlds, seeing hidden fires in metallurgy, mathematics, chemistry..indeed, our very words "chemistry" and "alchemy" coming from the same root al- kemi....and algebra seen as named after its magisterial 12th century practitioner Al Jibbar...
   The  "golden ratio", the Vitruvian man...mathematical curves and fractals spiralling out like filaments of light against a universe of dark and superstition.....
   Maybe at the end of these snaking trails into the dark there will be not God, but man staring back into a void that is so pitch dark as to be a perfect mirror of the one clever enough to get there, the abomination that is desolation....or will even the algorithmical perfection and genius of the temple of Jerusalem merely only ever be grasped as a holographic and unreal image, a metaphor given by God and no longer inhabited by Him?
   And will we step inside the vast filigreed perfection, still whistling, checking the clean cupboards and the perfect stairs, as time slips from the hills with the stars going out like fireflies in a camp-fire, thinking we've made it...only to find in the final chirrupping dusk, that we missed the call from Him to say that He'd like to meet us somewhere more local...and that while we were regaling ourselves for a long journey, He'd been there at the back door for ages, waiting for us to open the door...?


    The following poem by me(who else) might or might not have anything to do with the above.
 Well, actually, nor might the first bit.
  Discuss.


 In Three Weeks

In three weeks
The bluebells went from promise to tatty-grey edges
The clematis a future joy to a flower that flowered years ago
And inside
The book fills the space to stop others from leaning off the shelf
The names of all creation forgotten

On some far plain a Spring has come
The traveller's foot a  memory of a bruised petal
From here the mountain is somewhere in the mist
No laughter in the sun from where you see its
difference

I came across the fields, dry ground, blasting storms
Standing before the door in Spring
Three keys for three doors, three doors with the handles inside

I cannot stay long in the shadow while the barley grows those few fields from here
I called for you, called for you
Saw you through the dirtied window as you flitted back to inner rooms
 of dustsheets and silent clocks

Come now
The keys are in the doors and see
 Push from the inside and they will open
For I cannot enter without invitation

And seasons since
I have called for you
called for you
I have prowled and  knocked like the wind at windows and doors
 have always heard your fearsteps
Walk with me; the harvest comes
And I cannot stay long in the shadow

The Road Less Ravved (3): and finally Lazarus...

 I'd already made the mistake of slipping back into swearitis and gloom yesterday, when within minutes of being faith-deficient, the RAC man had not only saved me a bomb by immobilising my recalcitrant immobiliser. By the evening I was wishing I had a fuller capacity for thanks, so impossibly For My Good had things turned out.
    And yet today, I made the mistake of again thinking smaller than God does. In fact, had things today turned out as I'd expected, I'd have been limiting God in His provision.
  When St Paul talks about the way God does it, he mentions it being "immeasurably more than we can ask for or imagine": an outlandishly hyperbolic statement to the modern ear that is ennured to the exaggerations of mdeia around us.
 And back to Elijah again: prior to his undignified conduct in praying for rain and repeatedly sending his servant to look for clouds, Elijah had come through rather a huge battle:
  Basically, he'd had a contest with the priests of Ba'al as regards whose god was the 'ardest: the God of the Israelites or Ba'al. The contest involved a length session of prayer followed by an invocation of divine zapping: whichever deity managed to set light to the sacrificial fire on the mountain-top, was shown to be the winner.
   Well, off the Ba'alites went, howling, cutting themselves and getting cranked up to fever pitch. Elijah's approach was thus though: he knew that God had been doing everything He'd said He would, with more besides. Thus he had the precedent of God acting on his behalf when he asked for anything in line with God's purpose.
   So, Elijah did something extremely memorable: there, in a time of drought, with water being both scarce and precious, he went and ordered that all the wood be thoroughly soaked with water. He made the scenario impossible, in other words..so that it needed an actual impossible event to change that scenario. Had he not done this, he would have been through fear or unbelief, limiting God's ability to do the impossible.
   Of course, with all the wood now non-flammable, the priests of Ba'al had to raise their game...but their god refused to show up and ignite the wood. Now, had Elijah failed...or if God did not rescue the proceedings, a very annoyed set of people who'd had their god mocked and their precious water thrown away, would have been displeased. Elijah's soon-to-be-much-shorter life would not be worth living.
   As it was, God did do not merely what was needed and asked for, but immeasurably more than Elijah imagined...and not just finishing the demonstration that day but continuing to do impossible things in impossible situations.
 For me and the sake of this story, this means that how today went with the car needs a tale above and beyond what I expected.....it also soberingly means that whatever God has done today is not the end of what He is doing, that there will be some relevance of this one day to something larger in days to come, and not merely for the sake of myself, but for that of others, and with a result of the same God being spoken of as the same impossible God as that of the Israelites.
  And I underline the above, because obviously at the moment , the future is hidden from me...but I take it that the underlined bit will come about because I've seen precedents of God already doing similar. Time and events will be a witness, then, of whether I am lying or not...so you could always follow this blog to be proved right or wrong if you wish, as the days or weeks come about...

    Well, Elijah first, then me: With the priests frustrated at the no-show of Ba'al's power, Elijah called on God. ZAAaaaPP, I guess the soundtrack must have been: fire from heaven came down with such intensity that not only was the wood and sacrifice consumed, but also it burnt away all the water from the trench around it that they'd filled with water. Needless to say, the priests of Ba'al did not live long and prosper. Also, despite the city around being a Ba'al stronghold, God had still, as He told Elijah, set aside several thousand others(apart from Elijah) who had not bowed the knee to Ba'al.
  Now, Elijah had a nature like ours: yes, he'd seen God at work in his life doing impossibly more than he could ask or imagine..but needed to be jollied along by God, as he fell into fear and unbelief readily. In fact, the very next day or so, despite having been part of the trashing of the Ba'al priesthood, it only took a snarly threat by Jezebel(the king's missis) to see our Elijah immediately forget God's visible demonstration and past victories in his life, turn tail and run so far and so fast that he was reduced to eating bits of fallen carrion dropped by crows and other rubbish-scavengers.
  The "moral" thus far being, I guess, that one day you'll be witnessing God's power and being thankful and sensing His reality...yet no matter how excellently-professional you can put your head up on a Sunday morning, you are pretty certain of falling into your fallen behaviours the very next minute.In fact, if you did not, you wouldn't have the same nature that is common to either St Paul, Elijah, your dustman, your wife, friends, Adolf Hitler, Uncle Tom Cobberley and all.
    Well, I guess I'm in select company then!
 I was anxious that the car might not get all its hidden bits diagnosed and sorted; I just about cranked up the faith to think that most would be done..and even got a bit of thankfulness going about the alternator being there to put in as well as having just about the funds to cover the work plus the alternator: because hadn't God already saved me money by both getting me a year's free RAC cover without ordering or needing it, and by getting the immobiliser passed on to that big Parts Bin In The Sky..?
  I got the call in the afternoon, some 5 hours after I'd dropped the car at the garage.
 But..talk about impossibly more than I'd asked or imagined: the bill was a mere £30. Thirty quid?! That all?
  Yet they tested then cleaned each earth connection, replacing one corroded one: and guess what? The alternator had not been faulty, as the problems had all been caused by the unseen enemy of the earthing.
  Consequently the battery was now receiving the charge it was supposed to.
   And there's impossibly more than this, which I certainly never imagined:
....You see, I'd become used to the electric windows opening super-slowly for a year or more, thinking it was the car's age or tired servos; I'd been well-used to the lights dimming upon slowing down under engine compression for ages. So you can imagine my utter amazement at yet another blessing: the windows now go "whee" in double-quick time and the lights all seem brighter as if new bulbs have been put in and the headlamps cleaned. Now, I'd never expect that, nor even would I have imagined that this needed to be asked for, let alone not asking for it as I was not aware it was needed, THEN having it restored anyway.
  
  And "restored" is the word. The car now actually performs better than before it indicated it was in need of attention. It is restored to a better condition than I expected or imagined, as I could never have been aware of exactly what to imagine. Well, you don't, do you, when you don't realise something is wrong?

  So. This not about cars is it?
Or if it is, then of how much more it concerns its driver, as if God does this with an inanimate car then what can I expect from Him..particular when given the coincidence that this is the very week when there will take place some major praying with others about my life.
  Soberingly, then, given the analogue of the car(and the times that He has commented on my life using the car as a symbol in dreams), there may be more "wrong" in my spritual mechanics than are dream't of in my philosophy(Horatio...sorry, the by-product of being an English-teacher by trade). ...
...Yet if  all the nasties get an airing and are made visible in shaming powerlessness, I have to tell myself that an Impossible God is both willing and able to restore me to a better condition than before. And, yes, this I do need.
  One final thought: as insular as often I think I'm condemned to be, these times of being allowed to get powerless so as to actually be willing to let God get past my pride, have always included others.Whether in prayer or by an equally prayerful yet largely unrecognised method of just "speaking and listening alongside" the friends that I've been blessed by walking with, the process seems wired to include others.
  
  Of the biblical Good Reasons for this, I'm reminded of when Jesus restores a very smelly and definitely-dead Lazarus to life..and this ain't resurrection but rejuvenation, by the way.
   First of course, is that fact that the man in need is beyond help and certainly beyond social decency...though you'd almost believe that niceness is a pre-requisite of belonging, in some  churchy manifestations. Jesus has to get up close and personal, breaking all religious and social niceties by practising real love: the love that does rather than merely speaks or even feels.
  The next step is interesting: Jesus commands Lazarus to "come forth": job done. Lazarus lives.
 And Jesus does not address Lazarus further. Lazarus himself has, of course, "come forth" but is in a bit of a state: he stinks of death, is wrapped with bandages that were appropriate to his being dead and all. These bandages are now stopping him feeding, talking, seeing..and are not what he should be wearing.
   So...what does Jesus do?
 Jesus' next words are not to Lazarus. They are to those around him: his friends, family, those who live alongside him, who are blessed and challenged by him, who smile and and weep and get angry with him.
 Jesus' words this time are; "unloose his bandages".
   You see, Jesus does the saving, the initial freeing from the law of death: but it is the responsibility of those immediately around to now get as close and personal as Jesus just has, and for them to do the unwrapping.
   I wonder how many churches, who are full of well-meaning evangelism rather than obedience and love from personal knowledge, realise this? Do they consider that their duty has stopped when they've handed out the tract, or done the fish-flappy-thing as people fall over, and Jesus saves? Nope, only just begun: it's your job to deal with them now you've got them on the pew..or did you think that was someone else, someone more suited in your eyes to being "pastoral"...?.. because your strength, as people have not told you otherwise, is church "evangelist", isn't it....?
  (...And how misunderstood is that very passage about gifts and who-does-what...but that's another sermon...)
   So, like the feeding miracle too, it's the disciples who do the work of feeding; Jesus could do it but He wants us to do it: beter for us, them and God's Kingdom.
  And it's the family that does the unwrapping as you walk forward to take the Road Less Travelled...

                                                     For any lovers of theToyota Rav 4, this is my 1995N GX 2.0
                                                For more of my photos of both it and other springlike beauties,
                                                 have a look at this gallery