Landscape

Writing for Remembrance Sunday 2014

Still quiet subdued colours

Of a November Day.

How did humans choose to end

Their war in November,

My month?

My day is the first

Of this month,

All Saint’s Day

My birthday and Remembrance Sunday

Both remember the many

And not the select few.

My written view

Is that of the many

Moving off to War.

Below me is the railway

Along which many travelled

Never to return.

They made their unknowing

Last Journey.

Up the hill is the track

Of Hadrian’s Wall

Where violent civilised men

Defined a line between

Barbarians and Empire.

A border which my poetic hero

Of borders and living on the other side

W. H. Auden utterly understood,

He who did his best to circumvent

World War Two

But lived through

World War One

And went to the

Sino Japanese and

Spanish Civil Wars.

He who used the Pennine metaphor

To understand the Human Condition.

John Taverner’s “Fragments of a Prayer”

Plays from “Children of Men”

A future fantasy of triumph in defeat

Ever the Christian Story.

Our celebration this

Remembrance Sunday

Is unique.  Two of the church’s

Teenage children will be

Baptised this afternoon.

Jesus Christ will not be defeated.

One of those children is my daughter.

We stare death in the face and live.

That is our Gospel.

Underbearing faith. (by Robert Forsythe)

Fear Christianity and all religions
for giving you an importance
the facts do not warrant.

Facts are double faced.

The facts tell us to be humble.
They are not self-indulgent but do not deny pleasure.
For our lives might be all there is.

Yet the facts mean faith has to be faith.
So faith must be humble and not the overbearing religion
it became when faith was fact.
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Have I just sold out on Historical Revelation
and the Resurrection in history?

No. They could never be proved as 1+1=2.

In Christian religion 1+1=1 and 1=3.

Faith relies upon believing that it happened,
Not proving that it happened.

Belief is a greater statement than proof.

But facts sell down the river
the authority manipulated by Church and Bible.
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Religious importance was factual,
so absolute and became tyrranical.

Loving importance is resting our finitude
in the one who is infinite.

Some aphrorisms

Years ago, the questing spiritual side of me started "writing". For a while it was a page on my own website. I took it down when we had Clare. I was too busy to want to deal with "hassle" that my troublesome views might engender. But I carry on writing in a genre that is simply me and as soon as you label it morphs. Over on Facebook some of our photo captions hint at it. I wonder if the blog can stand any of it. Here are some short aphorisms which started the old page.
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The transforming power of love

Appears to me the only basis

By which the Church and Christ

May re-establish themselves.
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Academic research

should not be a methodology

but a drama.
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If the world cannot order itself

To treat its citizens aright

Is it my fault if I cannot cope with it?
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What makes humanity?

That we can do things better.

What might be grace?

When things are done better.
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If Society does not owe you a job

What do you owe Society?
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I would rather be my wife's sex slave

than anyone else's wage slave.
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If Fiona was all gold and mine

I would weep with bitterness.

I should rather die prematurely

than get divorced.
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1+1=1

1+1=2

1+1=3

Discuss in what circumstances these statements might be true.
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Man has always sought a virtual world.

It is the religious driver.
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Women priests are a Biblical impossibility

So also is homosexual marriage.

Grant one and the other might follow.

Two perversities for the conservative.

Why should Christ's grace not liberate us

From the strictures of gender?
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The price of freedom in creation is the price of pain

However for many that may seem a price

Too heavy for the reward.

A disturbing discovery is that Nature bullies.

Vulcanism and glaciation were hardly man's fault.
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