New Heavens and New Earth

It is, I suppose, merely a sign of increasing age that I have become (a little :-)) less idealistic.  A sometime-reader of this blog will remember the enthusiasm with which, twenty-five or so years ago, I told him of my plans to build "the world's best short-wave receiver."  I have thought of my own tendency towards perfectionism - which has very often worked against any actual tendency in me toward perfection - as my inclination to building yet another "world's best receiver."

I'm not really cured of the disease of perfectionism.  Every time I start something, I have to fight the tendency to be sidetracked into WBR syndrome.  "If I am going to finish my Yapese dictionary, I really need to get all the words in the Yapese Bible in.  Oh, but then I'll have index them to the context they are a part of.  But in that case..."  I must keep in mind Chesterton's (What's Wrong With the World): "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

We must work.  We must do what we can.  Yet all our efforts are imperfect - and at the end, all that we do will fade - like the grass of the field that withers.  All is vanity.

And yet ... it is not so.  The same Bible tells us (I Cor 15:58) "...your labour is not in vain in the Lord."

It is a mystery to me what "new heavens and new earth" can be - yet somehow I think that what we do - especially what we do with love here in the old earth under the old heavens - may be re-presented to us one day, perfected and shown in real beauty.  Will it be rather like being a pupil of a great master artist?  We will listen to him, make our attempts at drawing something beautiful - our frustration always there are our inability to do perfectly what we want, yet knowing that we are trying - and then - perhaps? - he will take it, change a line here, a colour there - and let us see what we were aiming at all along?

Today at Mass - the Fourth Sunday in Advent - I felt, somehow, that the Lord was with me - that even now, in the old earth and under the old heavens, He is encouraging me to try, to do my best, knowing that it can never be good enough - but knowing that the end of all my starts and uncertain attempts will be to be renewed - to be made, after all, what I had always wanted them to be.

May it be so.

Bigotry

A friend of mine has asked me a question - or rather expressed a difficulty he has and wonders if I have any thoughts on the matter:

I am trying to come up with a suitable response to (or way to approach) the "new atheists" (Hitchins, Dawkins, etc), who strike me as bigots, i.e. persons motivated by hatred of belief and believers, who do not take religious belief seriously.

A bigot (in the Wikipedia article's words) is "A bigot is a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices, especially one exhibiting intolerance, and animosity toward those of differing beliefs."

I am, of course, not competent to answer this question :-)  I have not read the books by these authors attacking religion, and am not going to do so.  I have what seem to me sufficient reasons to put my faith in Jesus Christ and in the Catholic Church.  I do not see that anything anyone could say against these reasons could change that.

So does that make me a bigot?  I do not think so.  In the first place, it is not as though I have not considered, and considered at some length, the various arguments against faith.  These arguments appear to me not to offer anything to believe in, but only to suggest that the reasons persons have for believing in the Christian faith might have difficulties.

Fair enough - these reasons do unquestionably have difficulties.  Every question of importance in life, from whether to trust a particular person's integrity in business or love to the question of religious obedience has difficulties.  There is not - and, I think, cannot be - an argument in favour of, say, believing that my wife loves me that is totally unassailable.  She might, after all, be an imposter - in it for some benefit (which, to be sure, I cannot currently imagine: wealth, physical attractiveness, and social prestige would seem, at least, not to be in question :-)).

So I do not think I need to read yet one more attack on Christianity to feel that I have sufficiently considered the objections to my faith.  I absolutely believe in God.  I have what Newman calls assent.

But if I were inclined to try to respond to Hitchens or Dawkins - rather like that mouse responding to the lion, I would suppose - but still - if I were to try to respond, I hope I would take them seriously as persons convinced of a point of view.  From the discussions of their books that I have read on-line - and from the bloggings of persons who quite certainly share their point of view - I would say that, yes, they are bigots.  These reviews and bloggings do not, indeed, seem to me to take religious belief seriously.

Well, so what?  Why should they?  They consider God to be a delusion.  Do I take seriously the views of some maniac locked up in an asylum who assures me that he is Napoleon?  No, I do not.

But of course I do not write books to show him that he is deluded.

But here, I think, we can see at least one aspect of the attack of the "new atheists" on religion.  For the religious point of view is not held by a single unfortunate schizophreniac.  It is held, and held with vigour, by billions of persons.  Great good is done in the name of religion - but great evil is done in its name, as well.  Religion is no mean opponent.  Both of these men sincerely believe, I think, in the fundamentally malignant character of religion.  Both think it worthwhile to try to point out this fact.

The, to me undoubtable, bigotry of their approach is therefore the more regrettable.  If, after all, there is something to their argument, it seems to me they would win more hearers on the other side - that is, on the side of religion - but taking seriously the point of view of religious believers.  The best of religious believers have been the best, also, of humankind.  I do not see how a clear-sighted view of history can deny that.  There must be something in it that makes us accept what Hitchens and Dawkins think a delusion.

I do not have the impression that they really want to know what that is.

But then I have not read their books, and do not expect to.  So they have the last laugh - for now, at least.

Habits

Well, see, I was going to post something here every week.  Then I missed the week-end of 20-21 November - not, I suspect, for any real reason but just because I did a bit of this and a bit of that - and then the week-end was over.

Once you do something once, it gets a lot easier to do it again.  The following week-end was pretty intense orchestra rehearsal.  And the week-end just past - 4-5 December - was the concerts.

I think a major reason I don't write is that I cannot really convince myself that anyone would be interested in what I have to say.  Occasionally I get a response, which appears to mean that my feeling is not entirely correct - but, still...

No, I am not urging anyone to start writing stuff back just for the sake of it!  I am just explaining how I feel.

In any case, I cannot write anything much at the moment.  It is Monday evening the 6th of December (Happy Feast of St Nicholas!).  I have been on leave all the week before the concerts, and today; tomorrow I am back to work.

We had a wonderful Saturday evening concert.  Sunday afternoon was very good except that one idiot totally failed to play the fairly obvious solo line at the end of one of the pieces everyone knows.

Yes, of course it was me.  The piece was Strauss's "Blue Danube Waltz"  I somehow missed the conductor's cue.  Nevertheless, the rest of it went well.

The business that led the doctor to talk about COPD (emphysema and chronic bronchitis) has continued to be a problem.  The doctor says it is not COPD - and doesn't know what is going on.  I have been referred to Middlemore to the ENT specialists there.  It is troubling - my voice is getting permanently hoarse.  At night my lungs get congested.  I would be glad of prayer.

I will try to reform my habits, replacing bad with good.  Next week-end I will try to write something - on what, I don't know.

Sabbath

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

Exodus 20:8-11

And the Pharisees said unto him, Behold, why do they on the sabbath day that which is not lawful? And he said unto them, Have ye never read what David did, when he had need, and was an hungred, he, and they that were with him? How he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the shewbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him? And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.

Mark 2:24-28

(I notice that in the Exodus Sabbath command, the command is addressed to "thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates" - Susan wonders if that means wives don't get rest on the Sabbath :-)).

I confess I find the Mark 2:28 passage puzzling.

The Greek (for those of you who want to see it :-) - no accents or breathings and I'm too lazy to find a version with them) says:

"ωστε κυριος εστιν ο υιος του ανθρωπου και του σαββατου"

That first word - 'ωστε' - really means just something like 'therefore; so that; with the result that.'  So the King James quoted above is matched more or less by other translations in English and other languages I know.

It seems odd to me, and may be no more than a sort of textual puzzle.  Perhaps the underlying Aramaic doesn't mean that.  Doubtless there are Biblical textual scholars who could tell me.

As it stands, Jesus appears to be drawing a non sequitur.  What He says - the examples in which a technical Sabbath-breaking was justified by the ministering to human need - surely needs little explanation, is natural, is matched by many other Dominical sayings, and is a principle He says they themselves will do even for an ox;

The Lord then answered him, and said, Thou hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering?

Luke 13:15

None of this is the least puzzling.  We ourselves are inclined to be astonished at the rigid religiosity of the Pharisees, who want to upbraid Jesus for being kind to people.  It is surely true that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

But then Mark 2:28.

Why 'therefore?'  Why 'so that' (as some translations have it)?

I confess this is rather only more of a linguistic puzzle than a sort of spiritual lesson.  Nonetheless, there is something in it - at least something for me.

The key, I think, is in Our Lord's title for Himself: The Son of Man.

Perhaps I am quite wrong in this, and if there are any real Biblical scholars reading this, I would be grateful for their correction.

In its first usages in the Old Testament, "Son of Man" is just Hebrew parallelism - Numbers 23:19:

God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?

and passim.

Ezekiel begins to make it seem like a title (2:1):

And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee

(sadly, some modern PC "non-sexist" translations destroy the connexion to Jesus's words by translating "Son of Man" in Ezekiel as 'mortal' - bad translation, bad theology, and bad English - but that is rather a different matter :-))

Throughout Ezekiel, God addresses Ezekiel by this inchoate title.

Jesus uses it almost universally for Himself.

The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath - wherefore the Son of Man is the Lord even or also of the Sabbath.  The Son of Man - Hebrew 'בן אדם' - "Son of Man" - "Son of Adam" - is what Our Lord is.  What Adam lost has now been found.  The Lord of the Sabbath is the Sabbath - the eternal rest.

The wonderful Easter anthem cannot be improved on:

Berkeley

If I had gone to Berkeley in my first year, my experience might have been different.  When I first went to UCLA, I was a worshipper at the shrine of science.  Berkeley was my second year and I was by then beginning to be self-confident, and interested in the idea of student life.

Or perhaps second-year University students are always like that.  The term 'sophomoric' is no accident.

At UCLA I had lived in a student residence; at Berkeley, four of us from Oroville - David Bennum, Lanny Cummins, I - and someone else - Lee Gunderson?? - lived together in a set of rooms in a rooming house - run by Mrs Logy - Logey?? - and I feel a retroactive sense of apology to her for the experiences we put her to.  I suspect she ran the rooming house because she had to have the income to survive; it cannot have been in any sense a positive experience for her.

Oh, not that we were drunkenly staggering through the place, vomiting on the furniture, anything of the sort.  We drank what would, today, seem astonishingly little.  Well, it was, after all, illegal!  We were, that year (September, 1961 - May, 1962) 19 years old.  In California, at the time, you had to be 21 in order to drink legally.

What we drank was wine.  How did we get it?  I don't really recall.  Perhaps David had some contacts.  We also were pipe smokers - this was, then, the thing for University students to do (I had a few really lovely smoking pipes - spent too much money on them and on tobacco) - and we bought a 'hookah' - a water pipe - with, I think, four pipes.  We put wine into it and smoked through it.

Then we tried to drink the wine :-)

I felt quite sorry for Lanny.  Lanny had, I believe, been brought up a serious Jehovah's Witness.  Our behaviour - that of the rest of us - was loud, foul-mouthed, inconsiderate.  I think it was quite upsetting to Lanny.

Lanny's life ended tragically - at least, it ended in a way that is distressing for me to contemplate.  Jehovah's Witnesses are pacifists - or, rather, they will not serve in the military of governments, because Jehovah's Kingdom is the government they serve.  I do not know anything of how it came to be - nor, in fact, have I any independent verification - but I was told, many years ago, that Lanny became an officer, went to VietNam, and was killed there.

I think this must represent a major turn-around in his religious thinking.  I pray daily for his soul.

Two things happened during that year at Berkeley that had significant effects on my later life.

The first had to do with my studies.  I was majoring in astronomy.  I hoped, eventually, to do my PhD in astronomy.  As I said in an earlier post about UCLA, a PhD programme at the University of California at the time required either three semesters of one foreign language, or two semesters each of two.  I had done second semester French at UCLA (having been given credit for the first semester because of my four years of high school French).  I started Russian there - or perhaps I took the two semesters of Russian that first year.  I don't remember.

But at Berkeley I took Spanish.  What was in my mind at the time, I do not know.  I think I probably just was following up the fascination with language that had been mine as long as I can remember.  The beginnings of what eventually led me into linguistics can be seen here.

Something of far greater significance happened to me in, I think, March of 1962.  I met Edna.

Immanent injustice

OK, the title is just a play on words from the last post - the injustice in this case being my own telling you I was suffering COPD - when, according to the spirometry that was done on Thursday, this is not so.

I have just a few minutes now, having just come home from Mass and getting ready to leave for orchestra (pre-concert rehearsal and then the concert), so here is the collection of stuff, for those interested in my health, that seems to have come from this last week's tests and consultations:

• I do not have COPD
• I do not have asthma
• I almost certainly do not have lung cancer or tuberculosis
• My doctor does not think my cough is caused as a side effect of the blood pressure pills I take (cough is a rare side effect of them).

Which is all very well, but:

• I do have some sort of increased amount of guck in my bronchial tubes - keep having to clear my throat, cough, etc
• My voice has, over the past six months or so, gone very hoarse

My doctor is inclined to doubt the cancer-from-chewing-betel-nut connexion - saving that as a last resort.  She thinks I am experiencing a combination of (disgusting subject alert) post-nasal drip and reflux.  She has put me on pills for the latter, antihistamines for the former.  If no improvement in six months, then she will send me to a specialist otolaryngologist (ear, nose, and throat man to us ordinary mortals).

I hate talking about my health - disgusting subject - but some have asked, so I have promised to give this run-down.

Off to concert shortly.  It has been so wonderful being able to practise a fair bit these last few weeks, because I have been on leave.  Back to work on Tuesday!

Immanent Justice

Belgian Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard made a stir recently by calling AIDS an example of "immanent justice".  It's an interesting concept - Jean Piaget thought that it was the natural assumption of children - what we call poetic justice is closely related.  I think the Archbishop only meant that AIDS was the natural consequence of certain sorts of behaviour.

Be that as it may, I am experiencing a bit of immanent justice myself (no, I haven't got AIDS!).

From the age of about 13 to 27 I smoked regularly, and, through most of that time, pretty heavily - for the last 6-8 years of that, probably at the average rate of two 20-cigarette packs per day.  At the end of 1969 I became a Christian, and in March, 1970, with intense prayer, I was given the grace to quit smoking.  I have not smoked since.  The statistics on smoking more or less seem to say that after this long a hiatus, my likelihood of lung cancer is not different from that of the general population.

There are other consequences.  Smoking damages the physical integrity of the lungs - and aging contributes to the process.  The consequence is an increased likelihood of COPD - "Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease" - which typically takes one of two forms (or both of them :-)) - chronic bronchitis or emphysema.

Over the past year or two, I have had an increasing tendency to cough, without any actual infective disease for the reason.  The last few months have seen the business get worse.  As I am on leave this month - October - I decided to go to talk to my doctor about it (again - I have talked to her about it in the past).  She sent me for chest X-rays, had me come back.  It is her opinion that COPD is what is happening to me.  They are going to do some spirometry tests next week to try to determine whether I am in the chronic bronchitis range (upper lungs, basically), emphysema (lower lungs), or both.  There is no treatment except that some of the anti-asthma drugs - like Ventolin - can give symptom relief.

I am always a little leery of posting personal experience stuff here - what a drag, to listen to old men moan on about their illnesses, or carry on about their garden, or whatever! - but my children do read this, and rather than e-mailing each of them distinctly, I thought it easier to put it here once for all.  Oh, and some of my children smoke - you know who you are! - so you might want to think about this.  The damage caused by smoking is irreversible, but continuing smoking increases the damage.

Just a thought :-)

But the idea of 'immanent justice' - that things that happen to us as a consequence of what we do are not just problems we have to deal with, but the actual appropriate results of our behaviour - interests me.  Are these things actual justice - or just the unfortunate consequences of things, and if we could find a way of avoiding the consequences, would the things be all right?  I would say that at least the latter view is tenable.  I don't think smoking is a sin - except, arguably, because you know it is likely to damage your body, and that (deliberately or negligently damaging your body) is sinful.  Yet it is interesting that the concept of 'immanent justice' is not simply obviously wrong.

It is said that chewing betel nut leads to an increased danger of cancer of the mouth, pharynx, oesophagus, and stomach.  For the eight years that we lived in Yap, I chewed betel nut heavily (never having been one to do things in moderation, as my two-pack-a-day cigarette habit shows).  I wonder if I have some more 'immanent justice' awaiting me :-)