People are strange

A meditation on the sheer baffling oddity of the human species...

Everyone's a weirdo

My Gran used to have an amusing little plaque by her phone with the legend 'All the world's weird save thee and me, and even thee's a little weird'. (Actually it said 'queer' not 'weird', but that doesn't give quite the right impression these days.)

Or as the writers of 'Yes, Minister' had it: 'It's one of those irregular verbs isn't it? I'm an individual; you're eccentric; he's barking mad'.

The title of a book by John Ortberg expresses it rather nicely: 'Everyone's normal till you get to know them'.

Or as I prefer to say, people really are weird buggers sometimes.

Inconsistent and irrational

Humans are inherently inconsistent, irrational and idiosyncratic

Human beings - that's you and me, hopefully - are inherently inconsistent, irrational, idiosyncratic, paradoxical, unpredictable and unfathomable. They are prone to mood swings and sudden apparent shifts of personality. They may be as nice as pie one minute and bite your head off the next. They may state an opinion with great conviction one day only to state the polar opposite the next, without apparently realising any inconsistency. They can quite happily hold double standards and mutually contradictory beliefs. They can be intelligent in one area yet stupid in another; able to understand complex cosmological theories and yet unable to hold down a job or form a successful relationship. History has demonstrated that it's even possible for a kind and loving parent to be at the same time a brutal concentration camp official.

Pride and prejudice

People are given to groundless yet unshakeable prejudices, glaring blind spots that they alone fail to see, irrational fears and desires, weird tastes, bizarre beliefs and opinions, unpredictable sensitivities, odd habits, illogical reasoning, strange and twisted ways of thinking. They are quick to take unnecessary offence and to leap to improbable conclusions. They can be sceptical of obvious facts and yet be taken in by ridiculous hoaxes. They can construct the most elaborate and bizarre conspiracy theories rather than accept the plain truth. Perhaps most bizarrely of all they can fool and deceive themselves in the most complex and clever - yet utterly stupid - ways imaginable.

Secrets and lies

nobody is without some secret oddity

People have secrets and strangenesses you could never guess. The quietest and most obliging person can be fantasising about murder; the most respectable pillar of the community can be hiding an addiction to kinky porn. I genuinely believe that nobody is without some secret oddity, some element of sheer barking weirdness or hidden unpleasantness in an otherwise apparently sane and decent personality. For a few, this emerges in newsworthy acts of madness or monstrosity. For everyone else, it remains hidden or comes out in more minor and harmless ways.

Sadly, all of this still includes you and me. Well, definitely you anyway, and perhaps me just a tiny weeny bit. All the world's weird save thee and me, and even thee's a little weird...

False prophets and heresy hunters

The other evening I spent a couple of hours on the internet researching some dubious American preachers and self-styled prophets - notably Todd Bentley, Patricia King and Bob Jones (of Kansas City not of Bob Jones University). Just watching a YouTube video of the three of them chatting together was enough to set fifty-five alarm bells ringing - daily visits on demand to the Third Heaven, accompanied by the smell of vanilla? Satan's hooks in your life all being pulled out as you journey through the Second Heaven? Angel orbs and angel feathers appearing as you pray? Nutcases or frauds at best - perhaps something more dangerous.

However, what actually disturbed me more were the many Christian websites warning against these guys as false teachers. Not because I disagree, but because these same sites also warned against a vast array of other preachers whose views I might not share but who I certainly can't see as heretical - David Pytches, Mark Stibbe, Mark Driscoll, Nicky Gumbel, Tony Campolo, R.T. Kendall, Bill Hybels, Rick Warren... Indeed, the more I read, the more it seemed that no-one in the charismatic wing of evangelical Christianity is exempt from dangerous heresy and false teaching.

Of course it's important to think critically and be open to criticism - always to be ready to evaluate and re-evaluate the sources and validity of one's teachings and practices. It's also important not to put any teacher or movement on a pedestal as 'God's anointed', above reproach or question. I suspect that all Christian teachers and movements are wrong in some aspects of teaching and practice, however closely they try to stick to the Bible and however open to the Spirit they are. We need to health-check ourselves and our teachers regularly.

But... it does seem to me that there's an opposite and perhaps even greater danger in heresy-hunting and sin-hunting, as represented by the many sites I visited condemning Purpose-Driven Rick Warren et al alongside nutty Third-Heaven daytrippers Bob Jones and Todd Bentley.

For a start, there's a strong danger of setting up your own views or interpretation of the Bible as the Ultimate and Infallible Standard of Truth, which I can assure you they certainly aren't. Secondly there's the danger of plank-eyed judgementalism, not something Jesus greatly encouraged. Thirdly there's often an overridingly negative focus - always on the lookout for the bad rather than the good. And finally there tends to be a Pharisaical obsession with so-called 'sound doctrine' and external behaviour above all other aspects of the spiritual life. In the end, all you can see is heresy and sin - but in everyone else, never in yourself.

Of course most of these ultra-condemnatory sites are from the fundamentalist end of evangelicalism, so if you can't tick all their self-prescribed boxes of belief in Biblical inerrancy etc - as I can't - you will fall straight away into their increasingly over-populated 'heretic' category and be summarily written off.

I ended my two-hour internet research not enlightened but confused and disturbed. My own silly fault really - if I can't recognise an obvious bunch of nutbags without having to consult professional heresy-hunters, what do I expect?

The Joy of Falconry

This is getting to be quite a year of firsts for me - sledging, punting, and now falconry. (Oh no, that sounds far too like hunting, shooting and fishing. I'm not posh! Honest! I went to a state school! I live in Croydon!)

Anyway, my wife bought me a half-day falconry experience as last year's birthday present but as it was down at Escot Park in Devon it didn't actually happen until last week - just after this year's birthday in fact.

Top right is Tigs the White-Faced Scops Owl.

Below is J.J. the Harris Hawk, who wasn't too sure about landing on me and made about 15 abortive attempts:

And this is Marmite the more obliging Barn Owl:

For the more ornithologically pedantic, I know neither of these are falcons but I did get to fly a Lana Falcon and a Kestrel as well. 

The birds are absolutely beautiful, and handling raw chicken meat was good for my OCD tendencies though may put off vegetarians. All in all, I totally recommend the experience if you have £65 or so to spare (help, I'm sounding posh and rich again! Stop!). Face to Face Falconry who run it are fantastic - friendly, extremely professional and incredibly knowledgeable.

If you go to Escot (which happens to be an anagram of Tesco in case you're interested ;-), do also try out the Drop Slide. You climb steps to a height of about 20-25 feet, and then have to launch yourself off essentially into thin air for several feet of free fall before the parabolic curve of the slide takes you the rest of the way down. Nearest I'm likely to get to jumping out of a plane.

The paradise paradox paradigm

Now try saying that several times fast. I admit the paradise bit wasn't strictly necessary - I just got carried away. I'd like to have included 'paradiddle' but it didn't seem to fit somehow.

Paradox is the living heart of the Christian faith

Paradox for me is the living heart of the Christian faith. Rather than being the static, systematic set of set-in-stone doctrines and beliefs beloved of fundamentalists, Christianity as presented by Christ and the Bible is more like an infinitely-complex, ever-changing kaleidoscope centred around a set of fundamental, paradoxical truths. Because they are paradoxical, they can never fully be pinned down or put in a box; they are always throwing out fresh insights and ideas.

The very nature of God in Christianity is a paradox - God is a trinity, one being yet three persons. If you can explain this you're either a genius or mistaken, yet the Trinity is an idea which gives rise to incredible riches of thought and understanding (I'll try and tackle some of these another time perhaps). And God is infinite and transcendent yet also immanent (close, personal, present within/through creation). He is just and righteous yet loving and merciful. He is utterly holy yet approachable.

Then we have Jesus who is simultaneously fully human and yet fully divine (mirroring to an extent the Bible which is understood to be 'God-breathed' while being fully humanly-authored). We have the mystery of the incarnation, when the Lord of all the universe and time became a tiny clump of cells in a human mother - and a peasant girl at that, not some great Queen. And then we have the Lord and source of all life submitting to death, the sinless punished for the sinful in God's paradoxical act of ultimate mercy, justice and love so that his death becomes the source of life for all.

Jesus' teaching is saturated with paradox - the first shall be last, lose your life to gain it, give to receive, love your enemies... His actions were paradoxical too, confounding all the expectations of what a Messiah should look like and how he should behave. He touched the untouchable and welcomed the outcast while antagonising and criticising the powerful and 'righteous'. He did impossible things - turning water into wine, walking on water, raising the dead - not as a 'conjurer of cheap tricks' but because (among other reasons) he is the Lord of the impossible and the paradoxical.

God seems to enjoy working in a topsy-turvy, upside-down, skew-whiff way

Paul comments that God's foolishness is greater than man's wisdom, and that God chooses the weak and foolish things of the world to shame the strong and wise. God just does seem to enjoy working in a topsy-turvy, upside-down, skew-whiff, expectation-confounding and ultimately paradoxical way. And I for one am very glad about it.

Because of this, we can't second-guess God. We can't ever fully understand him. We can't say that because he did or said such-and-such once, he will do so again. We can't box him or predict him. I'd like to finish with a slightly tongue-in-cheek song I wrote a few years ago to the tune of 'Our God is an awesome God' by Rich Mullins:

Our God is a paradox
He heals, yet sends the pox
Can't put him in a box
Our God is a paradox

Our God is a paradox
He comforts and he shocks
His ways aren't orthodox
Our God is a paradox

Hell and other cheerful thoughts

Call me strange (no, really), but I've been a bit obsessed with the subject of hell for a while. While the Christian faith is primarily about obviously good (if horrendously difficult) things like love, hope, new life, justice and forgiveness, in the background there always lurks this nasty threat of hell. It's Christianity's darkest and most terrifying doctrine, one which many believers would gladly remove from their creed if they could, and which I suspect has driven more than a few over the years to the brink of madness, despair or to abandoning their faith. One of my friends tormented himself for years over the thought of his friends going to hell, and I'm sure he's not alone.

Some kind of hell is common to most faiths

Let's remember that some kind of hell or afterlife state of punishment is common to most faiths, in folk versions even if not the mainstream teachings. It seems hard-wired into the human religious mind that there should be justice and punishment for unrepentant evildoers in the afterlife. Probably most of us feel deep down that the likes of Hitler and Stalin deserve to be punished for their deeds; that those who have got away in this life with murder, rape, child abuse or whatever crimes we see as most heinous should be brought to book in the afterlife and made to suffer in some way for what they have done. The idea that we, our families and friends may also find ourselves on the wrong end of divine justice is a bit less comfortable though.

Views of hell in different religions

Probably the most barbaric and horrifying view of hell is the Islamic depiction of unending physical torture in literal fire, where Allah causes skin to be regrown each time it is burnt away in order to prolong the agony. Among the mildest is (surprisingly) that of Old Testament Judaism, where there is no fully-developed picture of the afterlife, and Sheol (the grave) or Hades is seen as merely a place of shadowy, ghostly half-existence. It's only in the inter-testamental period that the idea of post-mortem punishment and bliss starts to enter Hebrew writings, particularly the idea of hell fire.

Christian views on hell range from a sub-Islamic place of eternal conscious physical torment - which I find almost impossible to accept - to a very figurative state of regret and possibly of purging/cleansing. Some Christians even hold that there is no such thing as hell - that those who are not for whatever reason able to enter the bliss of the redeemed are simply blotted from existence into oblivion.

Hell in the Bible

The Bible presents a very mixed and complex set of pictures... none of them are literal depictions

The Bible itself presents a very mixed and complex set of pictures of hell. As well as the classic lake of fire of  the Book of Revelation we have images of prison, pit, outer darkness (outer space?), exile, exclusion or separation, annihilation/destruction and a state of restlessness (the opposite of God's 'Shalom' peace).

This range of pictures should tell us at least that none of them are literal depictions of a physical place - for example, it would be hard for a literal lake of blazing fire also to be outer darkness or a prison. (Indeed, in the Revelation account Death itself is thrown into the Lake of Fire, which makes it fairly clear that the author is talking figuratively.) Instead, each image describes some particular aspect of the state of those restless souls who are not (yet?) able for whatever reason to enter the rest and peace of God's kingdom.

Images of fire and darkness

Fire is the most common image of hell in the popular psyche, but the view of lost souls tormented in flames by demons with toasting-forks comes from the grotesque medieval imagination rather than from the Bible. The Bible does talk of fire, but as a metaphor not a literal description. Fire depicts both God's own blazing, dazzling goodness and also his righteous anger and judgement against those who violate, destroy and dehumanise others. It represents destruction (rather than torment) - 'Gehenna', the word Jesus uses for hell, was the smouldering rubbish dump outside Jerusalem where waste and detritus would be burnt away to ash.

Fire also represents those human passions like lust, greed, anger and resentment which smoulder or blaze inside our hearts, consuming us from within. And finally, and more positively, fire crucially depicts purifying flame, the refining fire which burns off dross till only the pure gold remains. All of these convey different aspects of what hell may truly be about.

Prominent among other New Testament pictures of hell is 'outer darkness... where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth'. The idea seems to be of exclusion or exile, thrown out into the dark outside with only regret for company.

Hell as self-chosen and merciful

Hell is always ultimately
self-chosen

My own current view of hell is that it is not so much a place as it is the post-death (and perhaps post-resurrection?) spiritual state of those who utterly shut out and refuse the continually-offered love, truth and mercy of God. I do not believe that it is necessarily permanent, but that the key to the exit is on the inside and that hell is always ultimately self-chosen. (I also do not think that by any means all who were not in this life professing Christians will find themselves in this state - see post Many ways to one God?)

To look at it from another angle, in the kingdom of heaven there can be no thing or being that has not been redeemed, resurrected, reborn or renewed by and into God. By definition, no evil or corrupt thing can dwell there - it would simply be impossible, just as a fish could not survive in air. All that does not allow itself to be redeemed must therefore remain outside for its own sake and survival as much as for those inside.

The most helpful literary depiction of this for me is in C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. In this, the heavenly country is too solid, too real, for the shadowy unredeemed souls to inhabit - they would be pierced by its grass as if by swords and crushed by its raindrops as if by boulders. To be transformed so that they can live there they must all let go of or give up some particular dear but deadly thing that they have been holding onto (or that has been holding onto them) - for one it is lust, for another resentment, for others self-pity or pride or hate or fear. Sadly, in Lewis's story most find it too difficult and prefer to return to the shadowy 'grey town' where unredeemed souls dwell in ever-increasing self-isolation.

Lewis suggested that hell was God's final act of mercy on those who would accept nothing else from him. It allows humans the ultimate dignity of choice, but also sets a limit on how bad the consequences of that choice can get. (He felt that the image of 'pit' expressed something that had a limit and did not go on getting deeper or worse.)

To punish without hope of redemption is not an act of love
For those who insist on a literal hell of God-sanctioned eternal conscious punishment, I can only say that God is love and God is good. This is the God revealed in Christ. To punish without end and without hope of redemption or rehabilitation is not an act of love. But to allow me to choose eternal isolation for myself - to allow me to reject God's unendingly-offered love - may be.

Love as an act of seeing

Notice. See. Pay attention.

Above all, love is paying attention.

Love is an act of noticing. Of seeing. Seeing not with criticism nor with flattery nor with lust to possess, to control and use, but seeing what is really there; accepting it, appreciating it, seeking to understand it and listen to it – perhaps learn from it. Above all, love is paying attention. It is attending, deeply and fully and without prejudice.

Art, photography, poetry can be acts of noticing. Showing what is there but has gone unnoticed, paying attention to what has never before been attended to. It requires concentration, effort, time. It requires a focus on the other instead of on myself.

In love we see deeper. We see things about a person that perhaps no-one else has noticed, no-one has ever appreciated.

Lust is about possession and control – what you can get, can suck from the other; it is vampiric and parasitic; it objectifies, reduces, demeans, dehumanises. Love by contrast liberates, celebrates, magnifies, gives freely and unstintingly.

Perhaps we are all whispering 'Notice. Notice me. See me as I am, not as who I seem to be, not who I pretend to be. See past the bravado or the shyness, the belligerence or the false niceness, to the real person who lies hidden beneath, perhaps seen by no other person. See and still accept, see and yet do not condemn.'

Neither do I condemn you – now go and sin no more. Perhaps the only way that could be possible would be to know that we are truly, fully known and yet still fully loved.

The world is crying out meaning upon meaning for those who can see and hear, who notice, who can understand. And the world is crying out to be seen, noticed, attended to, understood. To be loved.

The Joy of Punting

For those 1-2 possible readers out there, who have perhaps stumbled headlong upon this blog and are trying to escape, I like to make the occasional effort to show that I'm not entirely just a one-dimensional wannabe Thought for the Day presenter. No indeed, I am an intrepid tryer-out of new and deeply daring things, in this case punting.

And here I am, steering the vessel to almost certain doom on the River Cam under the tuition of my highly capable mother-in-law. I'm proud to report that in my 5 minutes at the punt I didn't lose the pole, crash into the bank or fall in.