[ad hoc] Christianity

The Dear Bargain
By Richard Crashaw (1612?–1650?)

I have decided to run a few of these great poems of religious faith by you people who might read on this blog; adding also a few things of my own which might go towards interpreting the poems and maybe also make the re-reading of the poems more enjoyable and lucid for you, especially having people new to poetry in mind?

This first poem is a little known one; a favourite of mine from my long-gone student days where I first encountered it and was won over wholeheartedly by its ‘rough magic’.

Have a read through of it, and then see whether you agree with me about its power and grace; and then, after having borne with me and my peregrinations around its themes and ideas, read it again and see whether you enjoy it more?./Peter

The Dear Bargain

LORD! what is man? why should he cost you
So dear? what had his ruin lost you?
Lord! what is man, that Thou hast overbought
So much a thing of nought?
Love is too kind, I see, and can 5
Make but a simple merchant man;
’Twas for such sorry merchandise,
Bold painters have put out his eyes.
Alas! sweet Lord, what wer’t to Thee,
If there were no such worms as we? 10
Heaven ne’er the less still heav’n would be
Should mankind dwell
In the deep hell,
What have his woes to do with Thee?
Let him go weep 15
O’er his own wounds,
Seraphims will not sleep,
Nor spheres let fall their faithful rounds:
Still would the youthful spirits sing,
And still the spacious palace ring: 20
Still would those beauteous ministers of light
Burn all as bright,
And bow their flaming heads before Thee,
Still thrones and dominations would adore Thee,
Still would those wakeful sons of fire 25
Keep warm Thy praise
Both nights and days,
And teach Thy loved name to their noble lyre.
Let froward dust then do its kind,
And give itself as sport to the proud wind; 30
Why should a piece of peevish clay plead shares
In the eternity of Thy old cares?
Why should’st Thou bow Thy awful breast to see
What mine own madnesses have done with me?
Should not the king still keep his throne, 35
Because some desperate fool’s undone?
Or will the world’s illustrious eyes
Weep for every worm that dies?
Will the gallant sun
E’er the less glorious run? 40
Will he hang down his golden head,
Or e’er the sooner seek his western bed,
Because some foolish fly
Grows wanton, and will die?
If I was lost in misery, 45
What was it to Thy heav’n and Thee?
What was it to the precious blood,
If my foul heart call’d for a flood?
What if my faithless soul and I
Would needs fall in 50
With guilt and sin?
What did the Lamb that He should die?
What did the Lamb that He should need,
When the wolf sins, Himself to bleed?
If my base lust 55
Bargain’d with death and well-beseeming dust,
Why should the white
Lamb’s bosom write
The purple name
Of my sin’s shame? 60
Why should His unstain’d breast make good
My blushes with His own heart-blood?

O my Saviour, make me see,
How dearly Thou hast paid for me,
That lost again my life may prove, 65
As then in death, so now in love.

Peter’s Notes on: The Dear Bargain:

The first thing I noticed I remember, after reading this poem for the first time, was the ways the pulsing and strong rhythms had got to me. It’s a rhetorical masterpiece and the rhythms which carry it along are geared up to reinforce the rhetorical tour de force within the use of language by the poet. Like a good rock song has an enticing melody reinforced by an infectious driving rhythm; a guitar and percussion lifting you out of yourself with animation and joy; that’s how this thing grabs me. First a little history.

Richard Crashaw was the son of Puritan parents and was born and raised in the years immediately before the English Civil War (of 1642 – 1648). He went to University at Oxford and so was very privileged to become educated. Oxford was always on the King’s side before and during The Civil War (against The Parliamentarians) and so Oxford was Established High Church Anglican (whilst the Parliamentarians were the Puritan Non-conformists).

Richard Crashaw was won over to High Church Anglicanism at Oxford; and later, when The Parliamentarians has defeated the Royalists (during the late 1640’s) he moved further over to become a Roman Catholic.

In those days to be a Catholic was dangerous and not conducive to a career or progression in life within the UK. A number of Catholic priests were caught and executed for preaching in the UK at this time. Crashaw then, we can take it, was a man of principle, willing to put his heart and spiritual persuasion ‘on the line’ at a time of a very antagonistic environment.

Late in his relatively short life of 37 years, he published a (final) series of poems in English titled ‘Steps to the Temple’, which represents his mature religious outlook and final settlement of mind.

This poem ‘The Dear Bargain’ is from that final collection.

Before I write about the poem itself it’s worth pointing out, I think, that Richard Crashaw was not hostile to others of other denominations. One of the very major poets of his times was George Herbert, a priest of the Established English Church; and Richard Crashaw’s final collection of poems was in large part a conscious homage dedicated to George Herbert and so it echoes the title of George Herbert’s great sequence of poems which he called ‘The Temple’. (George Herbert will follow in this my series, I hope)

Now that’s the potted history done with; we get on with some talk about the poem.

Richard Crashaw uses a lot of very physical descriptions in his poems. Some people find these a bit unsavoury; the more Puritan readers generally do; and a lot of secular people do too. He talks a lot about items like blood and milk, in a theological context of human suffering and motherly relationships for instance.

You might remember Jesus saying to his followers that they must ‘eat my body and drink my blood’ if they are sincerely to follow him? – and that ‘many left him when they heard these words’, because they ‘could not accept them’. We can assume this implies the followers who left him were a little disturbed and offended at these ideas? Even appalled?

I believe Richard Crashaw was in tune with this aspect of Jesus’ expectations of us, it is built into the Eucharistic rite; and as a Catholic of course Richard Crashaw would subscribe to belief in a Transubstantiation of the Host at the Altar. Regardless however, it seems to me without doubt that any Resurrection promised to us by Jesus in the Gospels, and after the model of his own; should we experience one, will be a physical and a visceral and a hard empirical and factual Resurrection.

It’s hard to deny that this was the Gospel experience of Jesus’s disciple on and after the first Easter Sunday. (See, for instance, Doubting Thomas and his awed adoration; the fish on Galilee shore Jesus cooks for Peter and co.; and the fish Jesus himself eats to show his continued physicality)

So in this way, Richard Crashaw, who would have known the Bible very, very, well, was adhering to an acknowledged Gospel tradition, notwithstanding differences held in particular denominations or sects.

Likewise, ‘the milk of a mother’ is a very Old Testament theme; the Old Testament being in its use of images and descriptions perhaps considerably more ‘bodily’ and visceral than the New? Throughout The Psalms, The Prophets, and The Pentateuch this bodily visceral physicality is emphatically borne out. Richard Crashaw was bigtime ‘into’ actual Biblical imagery.

So that’s the ‘difficult to stomach’ bit dealt with and made a bit clearer I hope?

The physicality and physiological nature of Richard Crayshaw’s images and descriptions are normally connected to religious, even theological, ideas, and he works hard to highlight these ideas, and how they impact as real consequences of belief and of living out The Way (in as far as we can do so). His are the theological implications, if you like, that we need to take notice of if we are serious about our religion, and how these pan out in real life, are not as they are perhaps often managed ‘under the carpet’ by us in our practice?

Thus our status as men and women before God; which in this poem and in his later work generally, were it without an elaborate, baroque, colourful, use of images, could be taken to have been written by a Calvinist:

‘If my base lust 55
Bargain’d with death and well-beseeming dust,
Why should the white
Lamb’s bosom write
The purple name
Of my sin’s shame? 60
Why should His unstain’d breast make good
My blushes with His own heart-blood?’

We are ‘dust’ we practice ‘lust’ we are ‘shamed’ by our ‘sins’; of which our deaths are the wages. This is a heavy indictment of the Human Race, very solemn, very abased and contrite. Richard Crashaw, like Job before him, was wholly humbled and mortified by the idea of the presence of God before him.

The implication here is that indeed we can do little good before God; that we are wholly at God’s loving mercy; and that our Salvations are great and unearned Gracious favours of God towards us. Throughout this poem this is the attitude of Richard Crashaw about the general relationship between man and God.

The use of questions to us from the poet; who piles up question after question at us, is his speciality. None of the questions are ostensibly answered – except by us by our understanding that, yes, this is me, these are my faults listed, and my dependency laid bare. The continuous ‘Why shoulds…?’ he uses, spoken almost in a child’s impetuosity; these big up to the hilt the utter preposterousness of our presumption to expect anything good as a result of our behaviour per se.

The ‘Why shoulds…?’ repeat rhythmically, like the rest of the excerpt does here. Richard Crashaw’s questions are answered, but are answered implicitly by the couplings of their images in their contexts. The ‘white bosom ‘of the Lamb, Christ, answers to the ‘purple name of our sins’ shame; Jesus’s ‘unstained breast’ answers to our ‘blushes’ of shame. There’s absolutely no question what the answers are here. The questions are as we say rhetorical ones.

The long lines of verse are punctuated with shorter and pithy couplets of lines which, like a song’s middle eight, thump a refrain that drums their sense into our ears and hearts. The longer lines sort of tee us up for the short couplets; setting us up for a haymaker as it were. And Richard Crashaw is not afraid of using rhyme. He uses rhyme as emphasis, like a punch line in a tall story, or a halter on a horse used to pull us up most abruptly.

Look at the stresses on the words and syllables in the lines of the extract. There’s a hammer blow given us at every occurrence of the word ‘Should’; and other blows hit us with the words ‘lust’ and ‘dust’ spoken or read. ‘Good’ rhymes with ‘Should’ in the next to last line, and for Richard Crashaw both words would have rhymed with the word ‘Blood’ in the last line, and together these rhyming words take on a powerful emphasis of their own which echoes the thump of the ‘Should’ just given to us.

I think I’ve said enough about how the poem works for now, for you to get the drift of things, and to see how very complex and effective Richard Crashaw’s use of English is here in the poem ‘The Dear Bargain’.

Why not try reading it again? This time aloud? When the poem was written people, even when reading in private for their own amusement only, spoke the lines they read out, unlike our modern silent way. If you feel awkward reading it again and aloud to yourself, then get you wife or husband or child to be your audience. Remember, hit the rhythm, the rhyme, the stresses, the emphases, use the short/long lines in teeing things up, make plain the power of the images and descriptions used, and remember the theology behind them, its Biblical nature. But most importantly, keep the meaning and the feelings that this poem raises in your heart, and so enliven this your rendition, so as to convince your audience of the integral authenticity of this marvelous poem and of the sincerity and genius of its creator – Richard Crashaw.

Memorable quotes for: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449088/quotes

Jack Sparrow: Where does your allegiance lie?
Tai Huang: With the highest bidder.
Jack Sparrow: I have a ship.
Tai Huang: That makes you the highest bidder.
Jack Sparrow: Good man. ‘Weigh anchor all hands. Prepare to make sail.

The question is: Why is this quote memorable? I want to write a few thoughts about this question, maybe answering it in part, and from a point of view as a follower of Jesus.

In the first place it is witty – in a cheeky Jack Sparrow way – sharp smart talk. It’s pithy, to the point, no bones about it stuff. And what makes it memorable for me is this repartee quality which lays bare in a few exchanges a whole ethic for life based on hard empirical circumstance.

It a is funny typical Jack Sparrow exchange, the wide-boy, who lives by the skin of his teeth, by the seat of his pants, on his wits and on opportunity as opportunity arises. Remember his loveable bathetic boast;

‘This is the day you will always remember as the day you nearly caught Captain Jack Sparrow’

He’s the type of a character whom, in common wisdom, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to get an advantage over. He can turn things round in an instant, from put down and offence received to riposte in joyous rebuttal, just thrown off the tongue as light and airy as a spring morning. And this refreshes us; we joy in it along with Jack, and recognize truth of a sort in his outlook and modus operandi:

Captain Norrington: ‘You are just about the worst pirate I have ever heard of’.

Jack Sparrow: ‘Ah! But you have heard of me!’

Weaselling and a little bit deferential; but also there is defiance here and the salvage and recovery of a dented self-esteem

Jack then is the Loveable Rogue. Not completely loveable; some things he does are beyond the pale, unacceptable, as humour, wit, or by conscience. His marvellous draw on our continued attention is carried by the way the unconscionable things in Jack Sparrow’s repertoire of tricks and wheezes are made to redound upon him, to chastise him, to knock him back, and as the US citizens say, bring him back into line (in as far as he ever gets completely ‘in line’).

We see then by giving attention to Jack, and it is there for us to learn from, there is quite a bit about life, and how it operates on people in general; how people are ‘kept in line’ by the machinery or maybe the Providential direction that subsists our in living out human life.

This direction of Providence (let’s just call it that, it’s the choice I favour) is not merely or even exactly present in social life; in the changing and dynamic relations between people in any form that will approximate to simple cause and effect.

Although it is true that many of us in a social sense ‘get away with’ trespasses a hundredfold that are done by us among our acquaintance; and true also that conversely many insinuating social trespasses we do are ‘paid back’ by our acquaintance. Notwithstanding it’s all still a bit pot luck, because, nonetheless, ‘paybacks’ can begin feuding and grudges, and pan out as disproportionate to the peccadillo they serve their rough justice on, and these harsh responses to affronts are socially destructive and chronically so in many instances.

How many of you know of an auntie or nephew who ‘doesn’t talk to’ and hasn’t talked to a relative any more for over the past X many years?

So social remedies for stepping out of order, when these are directed directly by the wills and intents of men and women upon those acquaintance who have offended them; these remedies are not adequate to the Providential task of chastisement with a view to reformation of the person.

Experience tells me that ‘pay backs’ like revenges generally lead to more deep and more permanent social dysfunction between injured parties, so that ‘pay backs’ are working, at least as often as not, contrariwise to the tendency a benevolent chastisement might be expected to lead: i.e. towards reformation.

Socially and institutionally the case of prison sentences, and of how far these punish for attrition’s sake, or at the other extreme, correct for rehabilitation’s sake, continues to be a plaything cast about so as to accord with the expediencies of politicians

Many, maybe most, people want to deliver punishments for attrition’s sake, especially when the victim of the crime is themselves, or a person close to them; although there are many besides who wish attrition in principle, (or should I say, by nature?)

Few people are in earnest about wanting prison sentences to turn prisoners around. Our motives are never pure of course but maybe there are some few whose uppermost desire is to want to make offenders good citizens; and who put this motivation above any lesser reason or outcome?

As for the law courts, these are in existence exactly because human justice cannot be left to personal action, and because our social fabric benefits from, or rather does not receive harm from, the appointed persons of judges being our umpires and referees in our commonplace disputes and offences. In general everyone accepts the sentences of the courts, and thereafter matters lie more or less settled.

Even so, human justice is not remarkably efficacious in handing down appropriate ‘readjustments’ to the lives of the persons it ‘puts away’. It’s not that judges don’t get their sentencing right, or that juries make mistakes now and then; they do, generally speaking. It is because a judge sentences using a very different set of criteria than Providential chastisement tends to use.

A judge is considering ideas like harm to a victim, to society, the gravity of the offence, the knock-on consequences including deterrence value, and making an example to others; even the temper of the day enters into sentencing, according to what we believe as nations to be right, wrong, punishable, understandable, and so forth. The focus of a judge then is on a) the victim’s injury and pain, and b) the requirements of society as embodied in (up-to-date) statute law and relevant case histories.

So in social relations, even in those formalised within a nation, the correction, the justice, the punishment meted out to transgressors is markedly not suited to, – what shall I call it? – maybe ‘old fashioned character-building’?

Now words move house from time to time, and some are evicted onto the streets where they die shortly afterwards and are heard of no more. ‘Character’ has moved house from a stately residence downmarket into a semi-detached small flat which tenants low income residents.

When do we hear the word nowadays? ‘He’s a character!’ ‘A character part acted in a drama’. ‘That character there knocked over my coffee!’ Rarely otherwise nowadays, not even ‘He is a man of character’, or ‘she has developed character since I knew here at school’. Maybe, just seldom, a judge might use the phrase ‘She is of previous good character’, although I doubt many of us understand well what this statement ought to be telling us?

Character is something beers and wines have these days, and maybe cheeses? Character is not what makes an individual distinctive any more; and this is ironical in an age that would be an age of individualists.

A casual remark from usual individualists these days is said when they are challenged; it is said as an attempt to distance themselves from rebuke; when they normally claim something like:

‘It’s my life. I can do what I like.’

It is as if being an individual and showing individualism is found in shrugging off burdens which often in fact are social graces; burdens embodying acting responsibly and contributing towards supplying others’ needs and their legitimate desires. The bolthole ‘It’s my life’ is perceived by those who run to it as liberational for them; as ‘breaking free’. It is somewhere near being ‘free from’, but nowhere near being ‘free to’.

Perhaps uncomfortably for too many, character, when defined as a willingness and ability to bear burdens, is burdensome; especially when it vitally includes actually bearing with gladness such burdens. This looks like the contrary to what individualism looks like to many people today, who make very little or nothing of an idea that character as such is a defining mark of an individual.

The trend and consensus has been for perhaps 30 or more years now that shedding your burdensome loads frees-up a person, to be him/herself. It is as if being most-fully human is to be achieved when one most disassociates oneself, almost in laboratory-like distance, and rejects and denies connection with needy others, or caring for them, as if they are persona non grata.

This understanding of life is common, and it says:

‘This is my world (substitute ‘car’, ‘business’, ‘life’,) and I can invite into it just whom I want and choose to; and have a right to keep out of it just whom I don’t want and don’t wish to come into it’

Being human is primarily experienced in our living relationships with one another, in social organisation, and in an affirmative engagement with current issues and concerns

‘Character’ has a first cousin, which is the word ‘duty’. This word too has also come down in the world in a rapid decline. ‘Duty’s’ once-honourable station has sunk and is more or less derelict.

‘Duty’ is what you pay on shopping trips to Paris and New York. Policemen and officials still have duties, although the word’s usage in this context is a technical one with little concept of honouring obligation by self-giving for no pecuniary reward.

Duty, as a burden a person voluntarily takes upon herself with all good will and joy; and without looking to recompense or congratulation; is not really part of a modern mindset. I suspect there are persons here and there who work with a passion to do their duty with joy, commitment, vigour and goodwill. And to do this demonstrates their character.

Having written this digression on words, I want to go back to Jack Sparrow and how he fits into the workings, ‘seen through a glass darkly’ by fragile humanity, of that chastisement sent to reform us by Providence.

I have claimed that society because of its temper and its institutions cannot normally supply correction for the sake of reformation to us. Not by means of society’s directly collective and conscious intentions.

Neither tit-for-tat vengeances nor statute law can supply the conditions which lead to regeneration for prisoners or by means of feuding or vendetta-like relationships.

What might be a clear example of a Providential chastisement at work and which displays some of the means by which it is effectual? Maybe that wonderful portion of John’s Gospel which is omitted too often from Bibles as being supposed apocryphal: John Chapter 8 verses 1 to 11 – The Story of the Woman Taken in Adultery.

She has been seized by the holy men of Jerusalem and brought before Jesus for him to pronounce punishment upon her. It is a trap. As the KJV has it, there is a plan to ‘catch him in his words’ hatched and plotted by the same holy men.

For Jesus to forgive her outright is for him to dismiss and to deny Mosaic Law; thus undercutting his claim to be in the line of Moses and the prophets; the Anointed One who was to come.

For Jesus to order her stoned to death, the Mosaic punishment for adultery, brings into conflict his teaching of the cardinal sanctity of forgiveness, mercy and love. No way out, then?

But he answers his enemies and pronounces on the woman with that astounding sentence:

‘He who is without sin among you; let him cast the first stone’

Jesus then sitting quietly looking down, writing in the sand with a finger, until the consciences of the mob surrounding him, aroused and pricked by an arm of Providence, sends them away slowly, and a little at a time. First the eldest leave, those who most have worked to live the Law longest, and who have the greater life experience. Then follow others down to the youngest who also at the last disperse; because the youngest lack the ballast of sufficient inner-conviction and have no support in the older ones (the assurance of the authority in the elders) and have small life experience. And Jesus says to the woman now alone:

‘Has no-one condemned you? Then neither do I. Go and sin no more.’

There is no supernatural miraculous intervention, sign, act, done here; Jesus has allowed life, in that vital temper of experience we accrue with years, naturally to work itself out; and so it did. Our consciences and understandings are enough to enable us envisaging the only route of integrity to us – we must walk away.

The tables have been turned on the holy men; who have been hoist on their own petard; the trickery they were planning to force Jesus into a corner has redounded on themselves. ‘Those who dig a pit for others shall fall into it’

Therein lay Jesus’s absolute trust and certainty in the action of Divine Providence; one that is embedded, dynamically, in all things. I say it has been put there and is sustained there by the God in heaven.

There’s no aery metaphysic in what I’m saying, no giant leap for mankind; but instead there is nature, if you like, including our sometimes savage and heartless human nature, carrying a superscription within it; a spark, a breath, an image, a vestige, a token, of the Divine heritage planted as seed in us and originating out of God’s Love towards us.

Such a Providence is not exhausted by the work of conscience in us; but has a direction and chastisement of a much broader extension.

Let’s get back to Jack Sparrow: I believe it is a Spanish proverb which says:

‘God said; ‘you can take what you like; but you have to pay for it.’’

Jack Sparrow hears this sentiment in the advice given him by his father in a scene in the fourth movie.

‘It’s not about life, and living forever; but the trick is, if you know what I mean, it’s living with yourself.’

Jesus says with simplicity, before the crowd that is wanting the blood of the adulterous woman, and he speaks not in a spirit of inquisitive searching after faults in us, but out of the tenderness that there resides in God’s love for each of us.

Such is the lesson that even hard-headed economists acknowledge the costs to the self seated within all experience; as the late Milton Friedman was quoted as contending:

‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’.

Jack Sparrow insolently accepts thanks from Barbossa, for a deed done which he did not intend as assistance or benefit to others. Barbossa counters, ‘Not you, we called the monkey Jack’. Jack Sparrow is silenced and mortified. He is towed back into line again.

Of course, like life in the real world, all the power-hungry, audacious and unscrupulous characters in the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ saga step in and out of line as opportunity permits and as the world knocks them back again; except that the movies are entertaining.
The movie characters are pitched one against another in a loose and plastic anarchy of wills for supremacy; building alliances and making betrayals as quickly and as conveniently as is expedient. Jack is the gem in the story, with the wittiest lines and the smartest ripostes; but all are at it, carving out a destiny from hard fortune and a total absence of fidelity.

Jack Sparrow: Where does your allegiance lie?
Tai Huang: With the highest bidder.
Jack Sparrow: I have a ship.
Tai Huang: That makes you the highest bidder.
Jack Sparrow: Good man. ‘Weigh anchor all hands. Prepare to make sail.

In the real world things go on just the same; things that we call corruption, insensitivity, malice, greed, avarice, pride, the whole seven sins for the whole nine yards. It’s ugly though and not at all photogenic.

But where do we see in this real world the workings of God’s Providence to reform and regenerate men and women on this dreadful, sinful, calloused earth we mourn for daily upon each hour of news bulletining graphic images displaying so much wrong and pain and needless rapaciousness?

Where? Where?

Take Mali – in the north rebels, said to be loyal to Al Qaeda; recently have taken large areas and towns and cities. Timbuktu’s ancient libraries have been burnt and looted. Ordinary people have been displaced, and reports say some have been massacred by the rebels.

The French flew in troops and gained back some ground; and the bulletins reported rumours of reprisals and burnings by Malians against their own who had collaborated with the rebels – maybe to save their own necks? Ugly, harsh, real life.

What can be said of this terrible mess? What hope can come from this despair? How can God work here?

Only the baddies get their comeuppance in the movies; in real life comeuppance is democratic and a leveller.

Mali, as with much of Africa, is enormously rich in natural resources; and the men and women who love wealth and sway have a presence in legion, extracting minerals and wealth from the land and from the populace; that bounty which God planted under their feet.

Local people are generally poor to the point of subsistence living; live off the land, a few crops; or employment at a mine or quarry. Wages and returns are meagre – a dollar a day economy.

So young men of initiative form bands and look for a highest bidder to sell their allegiance to; and become militias, guns for hire, guns for survival, serving, say, Al Qaeda?

Perhaps some few believe in Al Qaeda; for most, Al Qaeda pays the bills and serves up the dinners.

Look now to Afghanistan. The Taliban is another plastic and moveable feast of an enemy. One year one tribe is with the UN allies; next, when the deal goes sour or the terms pick up, the same tribe is with the Taliban. One of the chief weapons in the armoury of the UN allies has been the commercialisation and economic development of Afghanistan; which policy in the ‘noughties’ was highly instrumental in bringing and keeping the peace in place in Northern Ireland.

Give people something to lose and you get their affiliation. Provide for people and you kill the violence.

The reverse is also true. Keep them poor, as in much of Africa, like Mali, and you keep them forming militias and fighting. Remember the repartee between Jack and Mr Gibbs at the close of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie:

Jack Sparrow: ‘Take what you can!’

Jack and Gibbs in Chorus: ‘Give nothing back!!’

A sour philosophy; and one for the unregenerate and nearsighted

Compare and contrast the Anglican Liturgical response at the Eucharist:

Priest: ‘All things come of Thee’

Response: ‘And of Thine own do we give Thee’

Here if anywhere is expressed succinctly the vast and abrupt chasm between the sacred and the secular outlook in men and women of the world.

There is irony here too. By us looking after ourselves firstly and exclusively, by us taking and not giving, by us exploiting and not sharing, we bring down on our heads the consequent maladies due from primarily looking after ourselves.

Were we to offer from our great store in the West just some substantive amount to the peoples of Mali, of Afghanistan, and the dollar a day economies; not just money, which for us is easy to give away and is an easy give away extricating a more engaged commitment; not our culture and our ways, which are the causes of many of the maladies and deprivations; not just technology and know-how and capital projects, aid and direction; but LOVE – we would come alive by the giving of life – and the dollar a day people would come alive also.

When a man or woman can get enough to feed and shelter and clothe and gain respect for his or her family, and tribe and town and city and friends and acquaintance; without having to carry a gun and earn bread by way of giving death and oppression; he and she will do so. The greatest power of the militias is the power of our reputations in their world outlooks. It’s hard to kill someone, or think ill of them, when you know they are kind and loving and that they try to love you.

I am going to say something now which is highly controversial – but true. The criticism of the West by its enemies has too much in it that is near the bone for us here to rest comfortable with our own complacencies.

We revel in Dickens, and Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchitt, the loveable poor; set on high moral ground against the rich and reprobate Scrooge and Marley. We especially revel at Christmastime. How outraged and maybe piously-so we are when Tiny Tim, in prospect, dies, and how vaingloriously self-satisfied we are when Scrooge, in prospect, meets his own gravestone.

And how marvellous it is that this happened in fiction a hundred and fifty years ago: and how we have moved on and progressed and are beyond this nowadays.

‘Thou hast committed fornication
But that was in another country
and besides the wench is dead’

The relation between us and the Malians in the bush whose militias are carrying guns in the name of Al Qaeda; this relation is as the one between Scrooge and Tiny Tim; between Marley and Mali.

It is my conviction that were the will there, then the peoples of the world can be fed, housed, clothed, cared for, and that resources can be found to do this, and that finding these; and we being instrumentally contributory would do us no end of good and bring us back to life from the brink of a stale and dying culture and society.

But God’s will is not for enlightened self-interest – it is not a bargain made on eBay, a bid or a gamble or a comfortable compromise. God’s will has no compromise. God’s love is unconstrained and unlike scare commodities is boundless to overflowing – enough and more for everyone.

To realise this, to make it so, as Captain Picard says, is no less than to build the Kingdom here.

William Blake’s – Jerusalem
And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon this land’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On this land’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the countenance divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear: o clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight;
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In this land’s green and pleasant land.

I declare that all this I have written here is true and accurate, and that I have a good faith belief that the postulations made here are ‘reasonably practicable’, as the statute law has it.

I declare that I am assured in myself by long reflection upon and consideration of my and others’ life experiences, that God has so made things, as for things in motion to ensure without exception, that we are always acting to cheat ourselves when we seek to cheat others; and that we are always harming ourselves when we seek to harm others, and that we are always denigrating ourselves when we seek to denigrate others.

Newton’s Law of Motion states that ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’. Simply put, this law applies every bit as succinctly and as scrupulously in matters of living human life, and applies in life every bit as broadly and forcefully as Newton’s Law applies in the world of physics – or, the study, as it was once called, of Natural Philosophy.

This Divine law of reciprocation, of swings and roundabouts, of GIGO, of ‘give is to receive’ and ‘lose oneself is to find oneself’ in the area of human conduct may sometimes work itself out in human terms inadvertently; and yet still nonetheless through the course of human agency; but I say absolutely over the course of time and by way of life choices made by us in the course of nature – it ALWAYS works out.

By means of fixing on a single choice as a course of action we inevitably create for ourselves those multitudes of cul-de-sac alleys where there is for us no return to and no returns from; and which in the act of choosing we leave behind us as we close off their routes to what could have been, might have been, maybe sometimes what should have been; and which as alternatives might have developed into maybe more amenable and appropriate choices of direction for us?

Right now, as I look backwards, all such turnings and ‘roads less travelled’ which I opted against taking are wholly gone to me, into ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’.

As an empirical argument it remains impossible to anyone to verify the truth of many of these, my postulations. They are held on a precept of faith that goodness reigns and that life is directed as by a kindly hand.

I believe also that our lives are not unalloyed equal and opposite reactions to forces that are applying themselves to us. These reactions are, I contend, confusingly and mazedly mixed and intermixed with, what I guess to be an awful lot of ‘time and chance’ as The Preacher has it.

Nonetheless, I am convinced that a principle of nurture via Providential chastisement is strongly at work on men ands women in all things, and is even discernible by us in part, as it sits within and works among the tares and chaff of chance events. I believe moreover, it has an upper hand and is working over and above the world’s apparent confusion, so as to mould and confer on you the substantive person and character you have chosen to make yourself become.

‘Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the LORD, whom you seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom you delight in: behold, he shall come, said the LORD of hosts. But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appears? for he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fullers’ soap: And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer to the LORD an offering in righteousness’.

When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars

This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
The age of Aquarius
Aquarius!
Aquarius!

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation
Aquarius!
Aquarius!

“The 1967 musical Hair, with its opening song “Aquarius” and the memorable line “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius” brought the Aquarian Age concept to the attention of audiences worldwide. These lines are considered by many to be merely poetic licence, though some people take them literally. An example is the identification of Valentine’s Day 2009 as the “perfect alignment to support our collective manifestation of love and peace and dawning of the Age of Aquarius”

The musical ‘Hair’ may be considered commercial mush; the ‘Age of Aquarius’ may be considered fantasy tosh; but you can’t get away from what they represent historically and psychologically.

This is that: THERE WAS A LONGING FOR BETTER THINGS when ‘Hair’ was a Broadway smash; and furthermore that: SOME PEOPLE CONTINUE TO LONG SO HARD FOR BETTER THINGS, THAT IMAGINATIONS TAKE THEIR HOPES OVER and so they look for the dawning of a Golden Age of Aquarius in human affairs.

Just like 1967 we have the politically engaged who long for better things; we have still astrology and astrologers; we have communities here and there attempting as hard as they can to live kind, honest lives and with a goodwill towards others. Many people give charitable donations. There are lots of ways of expressing this human need still being used now by people.

The hope has diminished considerably though; the sense of movement and optimism in those heady days; that just around the next bend (in that generation then growing towards leadership in the world) was an earnest with a dedication and a faith and a determination that the Age a-coming was to be BETTER than the one it was to replace.

Bob Dylan sang that:
‘The blind men make the rules
For the wise men, and the fools’

And insisted that this order was coming to an end, and that

‘The times they are a-changing’

They did and they didn’t. The times changed, but not in the way which so many post-war Baby Boomers had hoped for; if you’re considering only what they hoped for before they got in the driving seats themselves.

Rock n Roll liberated us. Affluence pampered us. Harsh and hard times quickly dropped away for many in the West, and we enjoyed it and indulged it, because we had found it all so fun and exciting – inspirational even.

As the meek, we inherited the earth. We spoke of, and many of us believed in, ‘Make Love; Not War’, ‘Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out’ and ‘Wear some Flowers in your Hair’. Many of us had seen enough of war, even though in UK where I was there was no draft and no war we were directly engaged in.

I am old now and can yet remember vividly at home, after work, every evening, sitting down to rest and seeing the gorgeous Technicolor TV of bombing runs and plumes arising from dense jungles; flights of, not angels, but fighter jets, or helicopters, or bombers, almost in formation pulling away from these pyrotechnic feasts and the saturation devastation of a whole rainforest.

We got the casualty numbers too, listed and emphasized each day; not as grim for us as for USA because the guys (and gals) were not British. We got the propaganda, the upbeat cheerleading of the media companies; and like the news from Iraq day after day some 40 years later, the rhetoric did not do justice to the carnage.

So we knew pretty well what war was, what it was about and how it was waged. We in UK, like our compeers in USA, saw it with our own eyes and grieved likewise on our own souls. Those newsreels of flame and vivid colour did much more than they get credit for in rousing the massed UK youth presence over the course of years daily outside the US Embassy in Trafalgar Square London, in vigil and protest and frequently in a disturbance. The newsreels were on our side; they did our work and helped us immensely.

And for those of us who were not there in the Square, or who did not keep vigil religiously there; the newsreels kept awake our sense of outrage and horror and sadness at the events in South East Asia. Oddly enough, these were thought acceptable viewing at early evening broadcasting back then!

No other war before or since has been covered by the same immense an intense detailed recording on public media of so much horror and murder and sheer human madness. The Generals and Governments must have learned from their huge mistake of showing the war as a Soap Opera at peak viewing nightly to the ordinary folk whom they expected to take it all lying down.

Nowadays, and since Vietnam, TV news and coverage of our wars has been in comparison severely muted; there were no embedded reporters then, who nowadays get the access on terms of military censorship.

We were all good. Life was good. Except to enjoy a good life with such hell and conflagration nightly on the box seemed really, and not just synthetically, unacceptable and obscene. That was a general feeling, a prevalent reaction to our newfound liberties and affluence and joie de vivre.

Tell Me Lies About Vietnam

I was run over by the truth one day.
Ever since the accident I’ve walked this way
So stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Heard the alarm clock screaming with pain,
Couldn’t find myself so I went back to sleep again
So fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Every time I shut my eyes all I see is flames.
Made a marble phone book and I carved out all the names
So coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

I smell something burning, hope it’s just my brains.
They’re only dropping peppermints and daisy-chains
So stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Where were you at the time of the crime?
Down by the Cenotaph drinking slime
So chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,
You take the human being and you twist it all about
So scrub my skin with women
Chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

– Adrian Mitchell

Of course we could not sustain all this. While we were young yes, and unmarried, or single, without children or mortgages; although some of us did. They went to live in Teepees in the hills on the rolling pastures of central Wales and are there to this day living working the land, educating their children, keeping the faith.

But mere mortals like most of us succumbed to what looked like necessity and buckled down to jobs, careers, power, and orthodoxy. Not before we had achieved – or had helped achieve – one of the most stupendous turnarounds in any history anywhere in the world. Sennacherib at the gates of Jerusalem compares.

The war ended – victory was conceded – and as much by homeland distress and pain as by valiance in arms, the Vietnam War just stopped, quite suddenly.

Maybe we had no other cross to bear, of equal magnitude, and so we just drifted away into a nowhere land and made our peace with our angry shamed rulers? Maybe we needed Vietnam like Vietnam needed us? But as the seventies wore on and rock n roll became either pop or marginalized, so too did our Movement. The groups became bands and the decline that began with ‘glam-rock’ set in, and the commercial hands grabbed those now unfocussed ideals and principles and turned them more and more into hard cash.

I knew people who set up their own schools; who tried hard not to depend on MD doctors, and who were committed to bringing up families with a truly alternative outlook and aspiration. The watchword for these was ‘self-sufficiency’ and they eschewed even State handouts to low income families.

If a child was very sick, they were pragmatic enough to bring an MD in, they were human and sensible. They were very largely the spur for the commercial book publishing companies to begin the health and fitness ranges that thrive so well today. Health food shops were almost their sole creation and became an industry. Grow-your-own; candles, incense, learn guitar or harmonica, wholefood cooking; and a host of other ‘lifestyle choices’ of today ,were given their initial thrust into the laps of the wealth generating machinery by these kind of people being determined to hack it out on their own, in their own way, for so long.

As I say, some are still there in Teepees, but in the public consciousness they might be in oblivion these days. We’ve lost that lovin’ feelin.

It’s trite and easy to point out that commercial hands grab and bring in from the cold and the fringes anything seen to be worth half a buck. It’s true though.

But is it just commercialism that has adulterated many of our ideals and principles by its Midas Touch? Or did we sell ourselves when we lost focus and moved mainstream? Or is it that the aftermath of a compassion binge is compassion fatigue? Have the foreign lands we fight on become more remote for many of us? Are we more insular, less cosmopolitan nowadays? Has our acclimatization to undreamed of goods and services in over-liberal quantities; our ring fenced harvest provender we seem still to enjoy even in these days of austerity; all just dulled our senses to the harder edges of basic subsistence living?

Have PCs and the geeky techie stuff hauled us even further from, dislocated and fractured our connections with raw living? People said so about TV, they probably said it about movies and radio when they first came in big time; but our dependence on IT is entire and blind and vital to us these days. If the TV busts we get a baby boom a few months down the line, but if the clouds burst and the acres of banks of servers in California blow, we are back in a state of primal chaos.

But what has happened to us; or am I just getting old? The ambience seems to be that there’s nothing much to believe in these days. Little aspiration because little hope. Little hope because – why? Everything is laid on? We have snailed back into our shells, our shelters, no need for tin hats though, there’s just no place worth going to for water and refreshment of the soul anymore. There’s little recognition of a need to refresh the soul, of a soul itself, for too many of us.

Like the Wandering Jew, or Dr Frankenstein’s monster, we are present on earth but have no home no direction. No Direction Home: Like a Rolling Stone. We are buried by the very solid presence of earth, imbedded in it, because that is all we conceive, all that we accept as real. Without question, without question, we accept the earth. Without question, without question, we do not look for other, different, else.

Defeated by our own successes; quelled by our own achievements; depressed by our own aggregations; limited by our own liberations. There’s always a moment when you sense you have chosen the money before the beauty; the gain before the conscience; the tangible before the feeling; the satisfaction before the true. We all have moments we can recall we did this.

‘Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?
All the perfumes of Arabia cannot cleanse this tiny hand.’

Whether we have lied, or injured, or smeared, or tempted others, we all of us know our wrong choices. We all of us know what it is like to have fallen:

‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action’

Each lie, each injury, each smear, each temptation, like each man’s death, diminishes us as perpetrators, takes away from us, crushes us, and we become less alive, less human, less expansive, and more constrained, more bestial, more carnal, more beyond hope and we sense we are further out of reach of a true sense of freedom and liberation.

Missing Dates
by William Empson

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequence a life requires;
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills
Of young dog blood gave but a month’s desires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills
Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
The complete fire is death. From partial fires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

This is our lies and our misdemeanors murdering us. This is life not wreaking a revenge but calling us back, from a great distance calling, over vast journeys and long time, calling us back to that air that was free and electric and charged with meaning, purpose and direction before we died to it.

I remember saying to a doctor I had visited to get some help with depression: I said, I remember: ‘I feel that if my brain, my mind, just had a latch, a hook, a small clip or grip to catch hold on; that somehow, I could feel well again. That a little primer, or a mental leg up, or a kickstart, would be enough to begin my rehabilitation.’ I was looking for a germ, a seed, an idea, a thought, a firm thing I could without fear of collapse and relapse, base my entire recovery on.

‘The card that is so high and wild you’ll never need another’

This card was not to be drawn by me that day, or for many days and years after this conversation. The way up was difficult, slow, and filled with pain and distress, fear and uncertainty, and arduous to the point of misery. I never got that leg-up, that germ seeded; not before I had been tested and sifted and put through the wringer backwards and forwards, and I had remained unsure why I was allowing myself to carry on what seemed pointless and of no avail. I remember reciting:

‘Come what come may
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day’

I was in a small museum for Rural Life in Usk in East Wales one day with my wife and my first child in her belly. The museum was given over to much rusty and ancient farm equipment and strange shapes and implements which farmers today would be bemused and put to it to explain. Rooms of  stuff, along with some more familiar domestic hearth implements and stoves, pots and pans, bellows, a tea service, and a table laid with an antique cloth.

On the wall, almost to be missed among the vast store of memorable junk, was a Victorian Sampler, a woolen picture with a saying embroidered on it:

‘To THY Cross I Cling’

Mine was no Damascene affair, no bolt from the blue, but an awakening from a buried desperation in which hope had been incarcerated. It was slow, uncertain, wavering, fearful, worrying, and almost invisibly drawing me on. The Sampler struck me. It moved me. Almost surprised and unexpected it made me stop and realize I was feeling a response I had never felt for such a message ever before. So I was confused but attracted.

Even though I was very much better in my mind than when years back I’d visited the Doctor, I see looking back there was a very long way ahead for me to come to where I am today:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
BY ROBERT FROST

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep

Here was my germ, my latch, given to me at the time when I didn’t expect anything; a time when I considered I had made the upward journey out of my depression largely on my own by way of my own efforts. I was not prepared. I was not even a novitiate to this business: it was the smallest beginnings of a realization that the pompous pride of life stands (for us all) the single obstacle preventing me or you from becoming real and whole.

It wasn’t Rapunzel letting down her hair; it wasn’t Escape from Alcatraz; it began small for me that this wasn’t a fiction; that it might be worth pursuing (even then I was thinking myself behind the driving wheel) and that almost against my will I was going to pursue it.

John Bunyan’s Pilgrim goes a fair way on his journey and meets a good handful of dreadful creatures and misguided people before his author narrates that his pack on his back drops away and the weight gone from his soul. That Jesus is our Hope, and our Life and our Guide is my confirmed understanding drawn from life. He is the Liberator, the Giver of Abundant Life; the Person behind the door with the light, waiting on us to ask Him in. Do it.

The song of Master Valiant-for-Truth     by John Bunyan (1618-1688)

Who would true valour see,
Let him come hither;
One here will constant be,
Come wind, come weather.
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avow’d intent
To be a pilgrim.

Whoso beset him round,
With dismal stories,
Do but themselves confound;
His strength the more is.
No lion can him fright,
He’ll with a giant fight,
But he will have a right
To be a pilgrim.

Hobgoblin, nor foul friend,
Can daunt his spirit:
He knows, he at the end
Shall Life inherit.
Then fancies fly away,
He’ll fear not what men say,
He’ll labour night and day
To be a pilgrim.

A person so supremely able in logic, and with as great native perspicacity for human affairs, as Lewis Carroll, gives us no surprises by passing judgement that the human world is nonsensically absurd.

The antics of power are portrayed with strong comic objectivity right through the Alice books. How untamed emotional rages reign behind so much political and social performance, and are rationalised into a shape, packaged by due process, for the sake of our greater assurance as citizens that we rest ultimately in safe, solicitous-for-our-welfare hands.

Steadying announcements from government that ‘the better-off will be hit’ by the latest round of austerity tax hikes are reminiscent of Alice’s Mad Hatter logic. Alice cannot have ‘more tea’ since she ‘has not yet had any’; yet she is able to have more because she cannot have less than no tea.

This is the trickery with words and reasoning which are the staple of politics. Alice’s arguments at table expose the dislocations inherent between necessarily imprecise language and the hard facts of events. The politician knows these dislocations are always available for exploitation. They allow utterances to show plausible which have constructively misleading purpose. Politicians being adepts, seek to bury and hide the derelictions contained in their misleading constructs.

The people of power also have a weight of authority behind the pronouncements they make; a weight not so much bestowed or representative, but one surfacing among their milling electorates, out of a sense of absence of control, power, adequacy, cohesion, and sheer where-to-begin?

Importantly most people have instinctive inklings when they are asked to wield authority. Intuitively they understand they are at-a-loss, and see lucidly this chimera authority is not readily found in the catalogue of human affairs. Powerful men and women become shored up by this; the ordinary person’s sense of his/her lack-of-grasp for affairs, and by other natively understood insufficiencies.

Hence the absurd yet royal commands and directions from authorities; like the caterpillar, the queen, and the hatter; and hence Alice’s bewilderment and exasperation at their dyed-in-the-wool unrelenting flagrant stupidity

What better metaphor than The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party for all those boardroom and congressional debacles where are floated daily the times’ most wildly ambitious and inane ideas; by which prevail policies based on cosmetic, interested, exploitative short-term partisan wins, and in the face of sounder grounding in better judgement?

There is a ‘musical chairs’ conditional to this scene setting. The regular movements of the hatter’s watch move moderate panics in persons shifting positions for no sensible or clear understanding. Move round one place, for form alone, to no purpose. Participants’ characteristic behaviours, their exact identical absurdities are carried one place round likewise. Our eyes and ears tell us of merchant bankers sitting regulators over merchant banks; news executives heading enquiries into news broadcasts; a bank governor going from one national post to another; and the Administration shuffles its pack of playing cards dealing its members a new hand.

And buried among this absurdity that is authority is its singular thematic raison d’etre

The prevailing logic of our public life has always been, and continues to be, the settling of scores, repaying favours, scratching backs; in the name of good governance. Justice is always served cold. Today there is little pretence of principle in these affairs; since so many of us are so far disappointed in our governance as to be gladly ignorant about its health.

There is a sense among life’s vainest contenders that authority is available there for the taking; that the persons who grasp for it obtain it; because we the ordinary folk have little sufficient sense of how or where we might be headed, or of where we should like to be headed, as a society or as individuals.

There is, in place of these, the present pervasive phenomena of commercially-led ‘individualism’, by which we are courted and wooed and made much of for the sake of an encouragement to spend and buy. The thrust and appeal of most marketing, and much social activity, nowadays is to flatter the identity of persons, to massage the personal selfhood, to persuade one’s vanity to pay out. Products are positioned as objects for life-enhancement, as beat-your-neighbour objects, as keep-up-with-the-crowd objects, the next-advance-in-things object; and always and exactly closely-cut to suit you and your special personal/marketing needs. By these means we are all becoming individuals in an alike mould; a nice piece of Lewis Carroll logic.

For as long as we buy smart phones; HD items, streaming, do the social networks, jump to the cues and pass through the set-piece hoops, we can each feel ourselves special; a state of being well-deceived. Like so much provided down to us from the powerful, most is a bumbaste provender for the keeping of the herd; enabling its shepherd-wolves to fill their larders with plenty, store, and feasting.

The aggregation of authority gravitates to the persons whose passion is to take up the world in both hands; as a plaything of the gods. Earth to these is an object which is no object. It is a resource likewise for the taking, to be used, maybe use-up, to be flown, cruised, mined, administered, manufactured, sold, bought, purloined, and undermined, as there were no tomorrow; for we live now.

‘Enormity’ is the apposite descriptor. Not only of such grossness, audacity and magnitude, as of the total seven sins amalgamated; these qualities and more go into the time’s vicious bids to scoop-up mighty mountains and carry them vast sea journeys; to sculpt the same sea’s features into fantastic power-trophy leisure resorts, to erect buildings high and mighty, the statements of ostensible, brash, boastful concupiscent hungers, knock their heads on the stars.

These antics feed a sense of being in possession, of having hold of, of ownership and title to, for stamping a presence on, for staking one’s claim to and broadcasting one’s credo and name out loudly accompanied by a thousand brass instruments; adding up to a wholesale mighty delusion which proposes surety and permanence, importance, an extension and effulgence of selfhood.

This is our bedtime story fed by movie moguls and media giants, the arts in bed with commerce, to we, a placid, passive, ogling world; who see ourselves emulators-in-miniature, paying homage in plastic imitation, adoring by aspiration; or else perhaps appalled in repugnance and dismayed by futility. The story vends the mind-set of land-grabs and deforestations, of forced migrations and child/slave labour, share-hikes, trade-stings and of Stockmarket rush and fever. The virulence in turning the fast-buck

In reply we are asked by those who run us, their refrain, and catcall: How should do without them? We are told, benevolently, that here stand before us our benefactors, whom we owe; they who feed us, keep us, we ingrate dependants. Thank God for Goldman Sachs, and Chase Manhattan, for The Federal Reserve and Sir Mervyn King; bless Rio Tinto and Google: bless them, and give them thanks.

Moreover, we are advancing together as a society, as a world, and are all in this triumph together. So they say, yet we possess no clear idea of advancement. There is no presentiment that we have lost things in our embrace by advancement. Not only gone are many authentic ways of living, and whole disciplines and vocabularies of heritable skills, trades and works, jettisoned with multiple percipient ways of seeing and learning: all these registers of grounded contentment for living and for hoping; we have lost our way.

Never has there been a time when we were wholly on a right path. There have been times when we were on a rather less wrong path. The prevalent myth today is that there are no alternatives to the path we are treading. We have ‘The Triumph of the Market’; ‘The Victory of Democracy’ and ‘The End of History’. Even in today’s time of dire turmoil the answering refrain from the financial fortresses in London, New York, Zurich, and Frankfurt is solely, exclusively, we need ‘more of the same’, ‘more of the same’.

These are the voices of interest who have every vested incentive to say such; so as to retain the holds they hold.

To choose another way is not about people equally enjoying power, grabbing fame, wealth, and celebrity; spreading them nicely like butter. It is about a human need to have lives wherein we are grounded in a fully-realised authenticity, a life in abundance, one of non-commercial goods which gain extension exponentially as they are passed on; goods of fierce virtue and generous graciousness. Not lives rested on reckless flimsy fabrications; on invitations to treat offered by descendants of cattle-rustler robber-barons, who, travel with the rest of us, sailing down river in a world of Alice’s looking-glass.

Those of us who are most interested in words are those most acutely aware of the struggle for words. How words are able to get you to say things you didn’t want to; how they stubbornly resist your feelings and thoughts, and just will not allow themselves into your hands adequately when you are looking for expression.

A number of us write down our thoughts in neat phrases and manage to get along pretty well with such imprecision. People not concerned with close accuracy; and concerned only with getting enough precision to be understood in fairly straightforward terms.

A number of us use codified registers of language. Registers that denote whereabouts we belong, to whom we defer; those groups and outlooks with which we align, and even represent. The great Ben Jonson said: ‘Words make a man; speak let me see thee’.

Like handwriting experts who analyse script, there are persons able to show themselves pretty closely upon an examination of their use of language.

Gradations in stresses, and use of hyperbole, little deftnesses skipping over consequences, sleights of hand excluding difficulties: fierce protestation as sincere profession, smoothing, eliding, coalescing, leapfrogging, insisting, and demanding, are all dark hints at our fingertips.

Our reasons for the most part justify our feelings. We are each a knotted ball of fiery emotion; we are impossible for us to unravel. At best we can go only some way unwinding the tangle, and if we are not careful, we end up more confused and strung up than we were beforehand. But most of us don’t look too closely at the workings of our human hearts; and we go through life without much thought whether we have attempted fairness or have put a reasonable case.

We want mostly release for our feelings, our prejudices, our allegiances, our frustrations our expectations; and we are glad to let off steam and not be elegant, and we can be convincing if we show sufficient vigour.

Language then becomes a chattel, it carries loads and does chores for us; is no more than a useful tool for clearing our chest or for sticking it to someone.

We stand in danger here too of becoming the tools of language; like the smartass doing a flanker on us; a fast one we didn’t notice. There’s no-one more likely to perpetrate and to suffer this than an educated, but uncultivated person; a person versed in the use of words, who fails to discern or maybe to accept the critique that the world passes on her/him; the hammer of life experience beating on the subject about her/his way of life and choice-taking.

We can fool ourselves sometimes; marshalling language and emotion so valiantly that we lose sight of hard fact. And no matter how much we know, or how much one is on the lookout, none of us gets away and in the clear from this trap every time. Each of us has at some time tripped over her/his own tongue and/or keyboard, either in an attempt to fool others or else fooling oneself in the course of wrestling meaning into language.

It remains that unless we obtain a sense for this clarity of vision, which is issued by and derived from that conduit passing to us the wisdom that living our lives teaches, completion of our educations are likely to remain attenuated and our knowledge, even when immense, avail hardly at all. How a person is able to receive this life-wisdom, and how one person is less or more able to receive than another, is a Godly mystery. Maybe a few things about it can be said?

Is it an unreasonable paradox to say that cultivation in the self is accomplished accordingly as one’s self is abnegated? And is to say this, like suggesting that the more a person learns the more aware she/he becomes of how insufficient to her/himself she/he is? And are these two paradoxes making the same kind of statement, of a kind that ultimately denies the motto ‘Knowledge is Power’, and effectually assert its opposite, that ‘Knowledge is awareness of lack of Power’?

To progress in understanding, in a becoming towards cultivation, one must give up, perhaps, and in equal measure, a certain instance of one’s self? And this instance of self is perhaps the driver of much of our assertiveness and assurance; although its giving up is not a resulting in our greater timidity or uncertainty? Because to give up this instance of ourselves is healthful and of benefit to us because it is that part of ourselves which prevents us and of which we would gladly, once relinquished, have let go?

Or is this nonsense? I believe not.

I like to think that the prophet Micah was of this mind, who spoke of the Lord’s workings before us as ‘like a refiner’s fire’, and continued saying ‘who shall stand when he appeareth?’ Like age wears us away in our physical bodies, passing time in our minds wears away our selfhood’s resistance to acceptance, with all the ambiguity of that phrase.

Not a toleration only, which is not acceptance, but opening us up for something to enter into us, something provided by I can hardly say what, but which is undeniable, and, when one has been made well-prepared, irresistible.

And the opening up, and the acceptance and the loss, and the giving up, of self, are one undivided act of refining us being done by some truly powerful providential and unseeable hand which is only inferable; and inferable only by the results of its workings, but so strongly felt as present because its effects on us are so astonishing and abstruse.

We are left with what then? The rare silver? The dross having burnt off? Less yet more? Outwardly less; less time remaining, less presence for the world, less dealings within it, and less need for recognition arising out of it. But with having a more sure sense of a solid foundational grounding, of conviction there is vexation in accounting ephemeral particulars, plus greater coalescence of character and connectivity, within oneself and also with this something which rules all things so relentlessly.

And to delusion? Isn’t it just getting meanings wrong? Using language in ways that confuse meaning? Delusion is also perhaps to think that an obtrusive self matters? That this instance of self we are asked, taught, and required to shed matters, whose shedding is so gradual and so long time coming, and so reluctantly agreed to, as though too much too soon would be overmuch to sacrifice, too overpowering to contain; and by which we receive only in measure of our robustness to sustain. Like Moses bearing only sufficiently to see the Lord’s hinder parts pass by; and with some trepidation.

True to our natures we fight all the way against our encouragement towards our improvement. We give up willingly only what we understand we have no longer any use for. How such a dynamic might work unless there were a driver who stands outside us and engineers its workings; being the source and supply of this guiding kind of Grace, is hard to see.

Wealth is death; so many die
Before their appointed confrontation
Before them pageantry of person
Images title, aspiration

Becomes them captures up by homage
Control and influence becoming prison:
Bought out, bought into, sold up, dummied
Life balled and chained a mind-made shackle

Decided thrall towards concession
Declension, incident constraint
Rewards in irony as written,
In triplicate, is signed regret

Blind willed trajectory, thief, allure,
Birth wild careers, ensample draw
String tangle, puppeteer, dress, dance
Tie in, tie up, tie down, despair

Our animal bucks, blood overmasters,
Attempts but master’s resolution
Brought under, broken, saddled, quartered,
Beggars our dream was for ourselves

A wonder man whose undergoing
Before, ahead, inspirited
Invites on highways undeniable
All must regard, he broker is

Discovers paradox on beauty:
Who dump their luggage fare weighted down:
Forgoing sheer germane humanity
Released enjoyed enslaved profound

Upturn revalue eject immovable
Eyes, wall vision, keys, your store
Lay down day labour set it here before
Proofed, unassuming, gift and open door

The axiom, on which what I am to say rests, is a presupposition of a Divine law that allows the consequences of the actions of people to follow on in the natural world. Not to say such law causes consequences; not to say it directs consequences; only it allows these consequences to follow on, as Polonius says, ‘as night follows day’. And that we are able to perceive and determine these consequences to be arisen from natural causes.

The Psalmist of Psalm 81 at verse 12 carefully tells us that God said:

“So I let them follow their own stubborn desires, living according to their own ideas”.

But this is not going to be a treatise on religious matters, even though there are books and books to be written about how religious matters like the one Psalm 81 talks about are wholly relevant and truly salutary for us to know and to heed as 21st century citizens.

I want to demonstrate to you, by taking you step by step through the logic of the necessity, how personal social interactions in general will arrive at hard factual outcomes generally according to the intentional goodwill that accompanies them.

As a people we are very happy to accept the generally stated belief that ‘when a wildebeest on the equator sneezes; a polar bear at the pole catches a cold’.

We are happy to reason that when heavy rains fall in the mountains; then downstream their rivers will be in flood: and not at the same time, but a day or two after the rainfall.

These are two pretty happily acceptable prognostications on the way disease epidemics spread and on how weather has knock-on effects.

We transfer them to the field of human action when we make observations like say, our insurance premiums rise unacceptably when customers claim in large numbers; say after a widespread flood of their homes; or after a commonplace financial mistake or misdemeanour; or when a general consensus arises in people that one should claim for items and on occasions which might not be justified or justifiable for us to claim.

When we cannot justify our claim in honestly to ourselves; we are being dishonest to ourselves; and to the insurance company; and to the persons who also insure to enjoy protection in event of a crisis

No-one disputes this, or doubts these are the consequences. The difficulty is not in understanding the reasoning or acknowledging the dishonesty; the difficulty is establishing the lack of honesty as wrongful, blinded, unfair and importantly, harmful to the dishonest persons themselves.

But let us leave this part of the discussion, and go on to the people who suffered flooding and whom in turn actioned a spate of insurance claims. These persons are not dishonest; they need a payout to make their losses good. The weather is indeterminate and not subject to control or even to prediction with any degree of certainty.

Yet the afforested hillsides further up the mountainsides which had been strong and effective preventatives to sudden drainages of water into the rivers, and so preventative of flooding; these have in the course of the years been cleared away so that commercial growers can grow crops in their place.

This, you might argue, was done because of just lack of appropriate knowledge and general misunderstanding of consequences; and that no ill will or negligence lies behind it. That the commercial growers were in need of income and subsistence, and that they too have a right to reasonable lives and security.

Of course, this is correct. Although such knowledge of how rain water behaves is not restricted to any extent; and many indigenous peoples of the world and all advanced societies understand these things pretty well. Had the will been there, there is a case for saying the flooding could have been avoided. But let this pass.

The commercial growers are supplying the larger cities; supplying persons with generally more affluent lives; persons expectant of greater comforts and provision as ‘necessary to life’ than those levels of comfort expected by the run-of-the-mill commercial grower and his labourers.

There is then an inequality here; but didn’t Jesus say: “The poor you will always have with you”? I guess you are right, there is the authority of the Lord himself for saying that these things will happen.

Nonetheless, let the inequality pass as per how it affects the bread and butter on the tables of the persons in the houses in cities and on the hill slopes.

This inequality remains to be deal with though. It is, at the least indirectly, a major motivation for the persons on the hill slopes to grow what they grow; and for them to have cleared the forests so as to have been able to grow crops. This is not an ethical problem; but it has come about because of an imbalance of distribution of resources in the city as against the hill sides.

You might be a person who says: “Yes, an imbalance, but there are in fact imbalances. They occur, and they occur naturally. One country or people just happens to live in a place which is not as fertile or as rich in minerals as is another place. What should, what can, we, I, do?”’

The impartial observer says in reply to this point of view, ‘be careful; do not make your happy acceptance of such things your excuse for inaction, for uncaring, and for turning a blind eye.”

I work in the protection of copyrights. Lawful owners of property like creative writing or photo images find that another person has taken their work and used it to her/his benefit and I am asked to notify the offender and ask the offender to stop doing this.

When an offender refuses to stop, I write to the organisation which provides the virtual space to the offender for him to continue offending.

The interesting thing about this work is that once the provider of space has heard that the offender is offending, then in law, in criminal law, the provider of space is obliged to act to stop the offender; or else to become implicated in the offences of the offender.

Our laws then, recognise that when we become aware of a crime, we are obliged to do something to help prevent it; or else to be classed as an accomplice of the criminal.

In murder cases it is know as becoming an ‘accessory after the fact’. The person who brushes off the problems of imbalance of resources: is he/she in danger of being considered, because of a lack of concern to act ‘an accessory after the fact’?

But this looks like a veiled threat that is calling down some uncertain wrath that is to come on the clouds of heaven with legions of angels in train; but it is not that at all; because the melodrama is not needed for the upshot of this situation to be made apparent for persons merely brushing away the case of the needy.

Even were there no cataclysm; no apocalypse come raining down fire and brimstone from the heavens on persons who just live with the world and go with the flow; there is nonetheless loss and injury and danger and peril to them in their deciding to turn a blind eye; to live well and forget suffering.

Now, this is not a threat; nor is it wishful thinking; it’s not me putting my sense of outrage, my load on you, and fathering thoughts of vengeance on you; it’s not the moral high ground; it’s not the just desserts nor the impotent anger of an ineffectual Christian, who can’t stand up fight his corner, or cope with life ‘as it is’.

Truly, the person who acquiesces in the world as he finds it does disservice greatly to him/herself; there is no condemnation by anyone except the condemnation s/he has herself served upon herself

Sir Andrew Aguecheek tells us that he thinks that ‘life is about eating and drinking’, and we feel sorry for him, because that is the scope of his horizons. He is one of those persons, of Shakespeare’s creation, of whom Shakespeare had another of his characters say; ‘I could find it in my heart to beat him”.

So no condescension here: but no malicious joy in harming either I hope. Who is the victim? Whom the oppressor? “Is it I, Lord?”

If it is you, it is your acquiescence, your turning a blind eye, has left you with only one eye to see out of, has entrapped you in a thick jungle of further confrontation and compromise for the course of your life, which never would have arisen in the same difficult manifestations had you not just been casually honest and recognised the iniquity of the world ‘as it is”, and then disastrously for yourself, had decided not to allow that pain into your heart, so as to be able to feel.

Once you have recognised iniquity, and then have chosen as policy to pass it by on the other side of the road, then follows the opening of Pandora’s Box of woes on you. You are then dealing with duplicity in everyone you meet, in every transaction you make, in every breath you breathe and word you speak: you cannot escape from it.

Kurt Vonnegut said astonishingly wisely: “Don’t pretend with people, because you become the person you pretend to be”

And all this lives on you; lives in you; for good and for ill; and old age is the receptacle which collects and weighs it all, and is the burden on your shoulders. Many things we do and think when we are young because we do not think we will be old. And what is left then but despair and a person has no good he/she can approve in their lives?

It’s not fear of judgement or of punishment in a life to come; the despair is in the senselessness, the waste, the irredeemable passage of time, and the prospect of being able to cling to no shape, no meaning, no structure, in a life of confused futility almost ended.

One poet said: “After such knowledge: what forgiveness?”

Did someone say of me? “He knew; but he did nothing”

The only good Bible is a Dead One
Is the popular view in the commonplace channels
where a TV faithful stare on a queer
fish, fishing men out without rods, feeding sheep
shady sundaes of bleak pathologies
peddling a dying dream no longer valid

in a vale of tears where all things else
suck but success and combats of ambition
in shelter in shady harbours fed by good team ethics
here the seamy creatures winter dealing wealth in spades

whose bid for light lights up a fierce contention
tears legal wrangles; authors sharp betrayals;
whose education to the educative schools
brings there their Mammon moral worlds
bowed down to Baalim economic; truth
no longer looked-for, meaning harkened not to,

life with no pilot, Pilates all, all strapped
with stocks in barns stored up away before
their latter ends lead thither forth,
from mortal earthly sorrow:
packed aggregates of vain material large
the ballast in a nation, person, state
stands weighed here, founders wanting:

wail wicked West whose wild
incontinence indicted celebrated
as democracy spreads a paw, claws nether-half a world
tears out the innards, swallows the repast
then nip and tuck, the facial job quick done
hides from a household shame beneath a mask
and shadow play as benevolent intended
for charity’s encompassing compassion

far flung from home where charity begins
and ends, if it begun at all, where nature cries
prostrate, is sick is suffered to go on
almost as these crude annals of the poor
speak illnesses, sore plagues, contaminants of lands;
as such are paid off pittances much unhappily
a wrested succour forced with much complaining

why should the healthy rich support this caste
who never take that break that never shows
whose equal opportunity fares dined-on, eaten
scoffed: and show no self reliance, self respect?

these wholly other cattle in Sudan, and
feral fowl from burning Ethiopia
detritus on the earth feckless as sloth
face rather too much sun on horrid strands
infertile: ah! yes these folk should not till

infertile lands, and fertile get and spawn
large offspring burdening the private purse
of such who gender on this world addictive
big business booms, who whereas, wherein reap
what suits the most return, scarce little else
left lees to trickle message thus: ‘be thankful!’

this seamy species serves its busy trades,
whose bids for light lights most commensurably
fair palaces of balustrade profusions
unleash the strife, contentions, legal wrangles,
of sharp betrayal: money educates
our educative thrift enamoured schools
appropriating all the moral worth

suborning aggregating social bonds
true immaterial ballast of the state
the nation, person, understanding, weighed
it founders wanting

wail wicked West loose wild incontinence
this gala celebrated as democracy, each progress
calibrated scientifically; spread that paw,
claw a nether-half a world, next you disclaim
and nip and tuck, the facial job’s well done
that hides in indigent and age-old shame

Christ entertains no such unchartity:
attention to the man who takes no stand
on status, or degree, or place, condition; who
foresees beyond the venial masks of nip and tuck
into a place where weathering infamy
so many players make for seeming here
and nod, pour indolence on gracious God

what though his faithful faithful, sized to other shoes
who fail a worldly fit for better tasks
these walk in silent teaching under cope of Heaven
where saved are those who can be saved on bitter blood
and bread.

no scholars need be nor no almoner
the silly simple wisdom of this God is real
reality in truth, in fitness fitting; for we all
are sprung of Abel, Cain, or Father Abraham,
catched all the world, and no one turned away,
from open Heaven blithe; for living here
else also thence thereafter, on a Bible hope

maugre a passive common comprehension
that faith spells death as Bible-being dead
all innocents and madmen who aver it:

the stuff of TV mirth, and wrath, and scorning
is actual death itself, unliving, marking time,
where trains don’t show and railway lines rust, crumble
as crowded stations wait complaining times
are overdue and what’s the point of waiting
since no-one ever comes back anyway

thus this: a Bible worth its salt is one that’s dead
dead to empiric fumaroles of ire
that toils in wraps amid an anxious fatwa
enjoining on that gateway open where
new lives are bidden welcome
an everlasting journey at no charge
than venture fully human and entire
through death to resurrection and a better name
a fitter frame for life stayed on forgiving
for taking grace

these paradoxical imparities gift Bible verse
and chapter trust, confirm their Bible worth
in God, and in all lives, in spades, and in abundance
indeed in no-trumps even; to enlarge survival whole
your wonted hopes, and mending of your dreams

when we appear in prospect of love’s threshold,
with one step either forwards, backwards, and on oath

Money – The Serpent – a faculty that lives persons’ lives

Consumption – Forbidden Fruit – Old, once common, term for wasting away of the body

Consumer – Adam and Eve – one who is bought

Consumerism – A Theology of the Divinity of Wealth

Environment – The Groans of the Earth

Pollution – Knowledge of Good and Evil

Resources – The Garden in the East

Sustainability – Noah in the Ark

Production – The Tower of Babel

Productivity – The Sweat of the Brow

Growth Forecast – The Deluge

Wealth Creation – The Golden Calf

Conservation – A Fig Leaf

Revenue – Temple Tax

Profit – Egyptian Years of Plenty

Loss – Egyptian Lean Years

The Economy – The Promised Land – just making do

Economics – The Holy Grail – Arts of Simon Magus

Discount – Manna from Heaven – a thing thought preposterous

Savings – The Seven Fat Cows – money not spent in a Fire Sale

Credit – The Thirty Pieces of Silver – on presumption put faith in a thing

Debit – The Kiss of Betrayal – that which is taken away

Owe –- The Strait Gate – a loan now overdue

Debtor – Pharaoh’s Baker – a prisoner nabbed and tagged

Debt – The Mark of Cain – Reciprocation owed for goodwill

Demand – Let My People Go – A bill imperative – due for payment

Supply – The Living Water – provision

Interest – Every Hair Counted – Solicitous concern for welfare

Bank – An Altar in the High Places – to invest confidence

Premium – A Burnt Offering – the best

Share – Lion lying down with the Lamb – all things in common

Stocks – The Desert Wastes – Apparatus for pillorying

Dividend – The Temple Treasure – Mutual society distribution scheme

Investment – The Potter’s Field – A good loaned gladly in hope of increase

Loan – The Early Rain – property temporarily passed for use to another

Lend – A Ransom for Many – to pass property temporarily for use to another

Borrow – Jacob’s Ladder – to enjoy temporarily property for use from another

Earnings – Unto This Last – income the fruit of work done

Income – The Moneychangers – amounts accruing over a duration

Remuneration – The Writing on the Wall – income as a return

Bonus – The Extra Mile – award over and above what is due

Finance – A Graven Image – the means to pay

Financier – Assurbanipal – person with means

Futures – Laying up Treasure in Barns – anticipated materials yet to exist

Competition – He who shall be the Greatest among you – overreaching to overtop

Stockmarket – The Division of the Spoils – Battle of Credit with Competition

Stockbrokers –The Philistines upon Thee – Croupiers

Shareholders – A Divider among you – Whited Sepulchres

Inflation – A Thief in the Night – overmatched avarice

Cut – The Two-edged Sword – a slice of meat or share of loot

53:5 But he[was] wounded for our transgressions, he was] bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace[was] upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

It looks pretty conclusive that the OT considers penal substitution as a viable means of redemption from sin.

But I don’t want to get into a does/doesn’t argument about penal substitution. I do want to write down some things about how I think I, and people in general, need psychologically, our psyches need, to accept penal substitution, for the relief and restoration there is in the emotional understanding that another has been made to carry our burden for sin.

It goes back to types. In the UK, and in the USA even more clearly, public and political catharsis is carried on generally and obviously, and with common approval, by the use of penal substitution. Sometimes someone will put up their hand and take the blame. More often a person, normally a person more or less in the thick of the current scandal or outrage, will be traduced and hung out to dry in the press and by media, and our sense of having aired the closet is thus satisfied.

Of course this is not Christian, nor is it suffered voluntary, nor even commendable; but for us the catharsis is very much the same, and it is routed through very much the same psychological highways as those that a person as a Christian might use so as to prefer to feel that Jesus bears his iniquities and his pains, suffers the penalty he should suffer, and bears away sin and its pain and blame for his sake and on his behalf.

This sense of penal substitution goes very deep in me myself, and in us all. The civil versions of course lack the gratitude and the admiration and the love and the astonishment that the Christian version that Jesus brought into the world inspires in lots of people. The civil versions are a sort of palming off of personal responsibility and pain and guilt; a pointing of the finger, and a ganging up on the disgraced or the vulnerable, or the person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Even when the case is grave, and an ugly character like a vicious murderer is the sacrificial victim of the penalty; it is the full burden of others’ bile and spleen and of others’ own ugly brutal sides (that such a murderer is made to bear in public show trials by media and after the fact) that is our noxious reservoir of standing effluent that we happily offload into such a murderer’s lap.

This act is the mirror image, the sinister side of Christ’s penal substitution; whereas Christ’s deed done for us is its inverse, and as such his is the ultimate reality and the beautiful and the ideal and the marvelous.

Much of this inverse ugliness is present, ironically enough, in the Easter story as it is written in the gospels. The almost maniacal anger and rage of the High Priests; their bitter rending of Jesus’ garments; the spit in his face, the mockery and the almost uncontrolled, uncontrollable outburst of hatred and wrath made against him – it strikes a normal person reading about these things that the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin during that night protested too much, over and above anything Jesus could have said or done to deserve such a response. It’s as if indeed that here is that outlet, that opportunity, that release, which the pinched Pharisees have felt previously only a minute inkling of, the mere trace of a sense that they stand in direst need to get their demons out of them, conveniently to burden this man with their almost possessed wrath and ire.

But of course, in any and in all of us such wild uncontrolled rages fuel the fires they start, and the demons who have possession take possession even more so and with greater and securer hold thereafter. This nurtures the mirror image of humility, which like its antithesis is also endless.

So this madness of the Sanhedrin is part of the scorn and anger and despite and vilification that Jesus bore for us; as if, almost, the High Priests were the surrogates for us and did and spoke and hated wiser than they knew and in our names. As if they, the High Priests were the media and the common consensus we share and that we happily acquiesce in when we murder the murderer in our daily publications and on our TVs and in our hearts, as we relieve by living them out our own malignities upon him. This is all in the very same vein of irony as that which Caiaphas mines as he prophesies that ‘one man should die for the people’.

This brings us to the odd conclusion that the vile murderer is in fact a type of Christ, in so far as he bears the wrath and sickness of we who revile him; attacking him with all the intensity over and above that which is due to him as a vile felon. Our rage eats us up. And we would that the vile felon was eaten up likewise.

Anyone who lives with their family knows how anger and blame can and too often does circulate and reverberate and spread like contagion to eventually trouble the whole household, unless, until, someone sometime steps in and does due service, and pours the oil of love into the wounds and binds up the hurt ones.

Our society is likewise a family that has too few relatives willing to step in and do due service. Christ in the UK is not known so well as he could be, should, be; and so the source of all redemption and the balm for all our ills is cut off from the knowledge of too many here. Were he known more widely and understood better we should then route more of our civic troubles and daily strifes through him and so live better, and have more honourable public lives.

Nonetheless it is still the case that Jesus today, in concrete fact, is present in many, many places and presides at numbers of events; he is here in a major way so as to carry away the wrath and dark and madness of our lives and so quell the strifes in our societies – today still he is here and able to carry our sins away and to take our unrighteous wrath and hectic blame upon his righteous self and carry it for our sakes.

We have a hymn titled ‘Take it to the Lord in Prayer’; we have secular songs like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’; we have the great and amazing Isaiah, who for only coining the phrase should be remembered for all time, regardless of whom he thought he was writing for:

‘With His Stripes We Are Healed’