A request What do you do when events (in MLPK, not elsewhere) leave your intellectual, theological and emotional viewpoints in sharp disagreement with each other, and stir up similar feelings in the household?

You pray for peace, for shalom. And ask others to do so too. So, to any of my readers out there who feel so inclined, please do, we would appreciate it.

I may be able to explain later, but I may not.... there are some things that cannot be blogged except from a distance. No-one's died or dying, so you can relax about that.

May peace reign in your inner-places too.  ¶ 2:02 pm 1 comments

  Lightning Conductor Brilliantly encapsulating much of what has been circulating around the blogs I read is this piece by Richard. Go and read it, ALL of it, NOW...

Then come back and answer the following question.

So, here's the rub - how do we take the message, the intention, the whole bang-chute that has been flying through the ether over the last week and "earth" it? How do we take it outbeyond the "virtual" and into "reality", to be salt and light in our culture, our neighbourhood and our churches?

And, no - I have no easy answers either - although I wonder if Greenbelt, might among others, be part of it.  ¶ 8:29 am 0 comments

  Dulce et decorum est ...pro patria mori.

I can't say that I'm aware that I ever believed there was any truth in the saying. ("It is a beautiful and fitting thing to die for one's homeand.") I'm not sure there are many of my generation who could relate to it. Nor can I in good conscience sing "I vow to thee my country" - a patritic song which seems at best misguided and at worst plain heresy.

I guess that makes me like most Brits. We are not very 'good' at devotion, at least not in any way that has long-term, or eternal, meaning. We have no real concept, culturally, of the term 'fanatic' except in the shortened and socailly acceptable form of 'fan'; pertaining to sport and to that particularly British triablism - football.

This cultural mileu makes the concept, indeed the distinct possibility, that the London attacks were carried out by British suicide bombers even harder to grasp. As a teenager, zealous in faith, and equally lacking in tact, my new-found Christianity was referred to by my parents as a fad, "something he'll grow out of."

So the likelihood that four British Muslims were so serious in their devotion to their understanding of Islam that they were willing to sacrifice their lives for it (or as they would no doubt have put it, "a holy cause") is all the more disturbing to the national pyche.( If we can bring oursleves to recognise that we share a common nationality, as well as a common humanity, that is. Big if)

On the one hand it forces us to confront not only our illusions of immortality, but also an issue that for most Christians in this country, whether culturally or actively so, seems a distant and idle speculation. Whether we would be willing to die for our beliefs.... and not, I hasten to add, not in a brief moment of incandescent 'glory'. The likelihood for most of us to be individually challenged to 'recant or die' is something light-years removed from our minds.

This distance, both in mileage and probability, allows us to be, and get away with being, luke -warm and accepting, especially when coupled with an almost pathological dislike of radicalism. It removes us from the very real question of the value of devotion - the need to treat anything with life or death seriousness. So, how are we to interpret the totality of Jesus' teachings? Not just about the primacy of love, first for God, and then for fellow human, but about the issues of Hell and judgement that he also addresses? Does the eternal matter enough for us to engage in the uncomfortable pursuit of challenging others, even to the point of upsetting them? Certainly Jesus did not shy away from that, nor did he expect his followers to either.

On the other hand, if reports are to be believed, English genteel-Christianity is not the only faith being challenged to look to it's founder. Just as we need to wrestle with the parts of Scripture with which we disagree, so Islam needs to recognise the oft-denied fact (so often uncritically accepted) that the Holy Qur'an can indeed be legitimately interpreted to sanction violence, armed struggle and the suppression of religious minorities. Certain strands of Islam can see a place for them, and argue the case from text and tradition.

Where does that leave people of faith? How do we seek to engage with our world in a meaningful and truthful way?

We can keep our heads down, inoffensive and mild mannered - and at the worst never give an opion or assent that there is such a thing as absolute truth: or we can stand for what we believe and be branded as intolerant and offensive. We too may need to be ready to be branded with the same language as the zealous four, who now will stand before the awesome and just judgement of Almighty God (just like the rest of us). And that human language speaks the words "fanatic" and often "fundamentalist." Are we ready for that?

But to return to the starting statement... Did the flower of British youth who died among the mud of Flanders, or the jungles of Burma, and in countless other places in the first half of the last century, believe that it truly was "a beautiful and fitting thing to die for one's homeand," or, for that matter, one's faith?  ¶ 1:44 pm 0 comments