Walking Backwards

The latest talent exhibited by the Squirmle is walking backwards, which he demonstrated with some glee on the way to the corner shop the other day. He started out with a few sideways steps (just to make sure nothing dreadful happened), and then went into full reverse gear for several yards. Later, he tried it in the house, but discovered that you can't go very far without receiving a clonk on the back of the head from a door or a piece of furniture.

He has also made his first definite step towards literacy. For months he has been playing with square fridge-magnets bearing coloured letters, but this week he suddenly pointed to the letter 'O' and said "O" quite distinctly. Just to show that this was not a fluke, he then found another 'O' and said "O" for that one too.

Of course, much more exciting for him has been the arrival of snow. We have made lots of footprints, and produced a small snowman on the drive (about a foot high). He even pointed at a residue of bubbles in the bath and said " --'now", so keyed up was he to the observation of piles of white stuff. The snow has also had some less helpful side effects: Thursday's Toddler Group was cancelled, and the day nursery closed at lunchtime on Friday, so a morning spent usefully tidying and cleaning things was succeeded by an afternoon of building piles of blocks and watching a "Clangers" DVD. And then I had to go to work on Saturday to make up the time. Woe!

Reconstruction?

On 26 September I wrote I am therefore going through one of my periodic attempts to see whether a sustainable liberal Christian faith can actually be reconstructed.

Since then, I have had a curious encounter with a book: Ludemann's The Great Deception. This seeks to reanalyse most of the reported sayings of Jesus as doctrinally-loaded interpolations by the early Christian church, which owed its origin chiefly to Paul. I had myself been toying with the idea that one or two sayings of Jesus might have originated in charismatically inspired "words" given to early Christian congregations, which were incorporated into the oral tradition and then "read back" into the Gospels. Despite my openness to the idea, I found Ludemann's arguments poorly and incompletely made; but curiously, the book has nevertheless made an irrational impression. To myself, I have ascribed my tenacity in retaining a grip on Christianity partly to personal loyalty to the figure of Jesus Christ. As that figure becomes historically deconstructed, even by such unsatisfactory arguments as Ludemann's, that loyalty is showing a tendency to dissipate, leaving me with little more than an emotional attachment to certain expressions of spirituality in art, music, poetry, and liturgy.

I now find myself entering the New Year as rather more of an agnostic than before. I have long described myself as a "Christian agnostic", paying lip service to the notion of "religion as human construct", though applying it mainly to the developed doctrines of institutonal Christianity, not to the core assumptions of theism. I have (I now realize) retained a substratum of more or less traditional theistic assumptions. These seem to have departed, at least for the moment, with what feels like rather dramatic suddenness.

It is not the first time that I have, as it were, woken up one morning to discover that I am an atheist. I cannot say that I find it liberating in the least. In the past, I have viewed the "Sea of Faith" approach to Christianity from the mainstream liberal perspective, as an extreme position to which I felt I might ultimately be drawn. I now find myself looking at it from the other side, wondering what it is about the human religious exercise that makes it worth engaging in. Last time I was an atheist, I gently lapsed back into faith as the social and cultural matrix of Christian observance and interest continued to sustain me. This time, under pressure of family life, I don't know where I will find the time or the energy for the effort of spiritual reconstruction.

When, at a talk at Greenbelt 2007, that verse from the Gospel struck a chord with me ("Launch out into the deep" Luke 5:4), I wasn't really expecting the water to be quite as cold and deep as this.

More Thoughts on Intelligent Design and Theodicy

Deus absconditus (the hidden God) is not clearly and widely manifest in the world, but here and there, like touches of dappled sunlight, divine action seems to break through. The rest, though, is darkness of human sin and the inescapable unpleasantness of physical existence.

The most obvious challenge to "Intelligent Design" is that it is merely a form of "God of the Gaps" theology, in which God is invoked to explain things that are currently beyond either our theories or our imagination. Natural selection is perfectly adequate to explain (say) mammalian morphology, but when it comes to (say) the mechanism of ciliary action, we don't have surviving instances of any intermediate stages, and we can't imagine what they might have been, so the propenents of ID usher in God as the explanation. This seems both unscientific and intellectually feeble.

Might it be reasonable to expect God's action in creation to be similar to his apparent mode of action in the here-and-now universe? Most of the time it is a chaotic maelstrom of mere material cause and effect, on which the mischoices of the human will are superimposed; but where an opening exists, God is able to act. Where a human soul opens itself in prayer, there is an option for the divine. The problem with applying this to the non-human world is that it requires some kind of vitalist theory of the universe: the heterodox notion that something analogous to free will is possessed by elements within inanimate nature. Without this, there is no logic to the occasions on which God acts: why should he so beautifully design the biochemistry of the cell, and then sit back while parasitic insects chew their way through the larvae of other species? I am not convinced.

I Caught a Falling Leaf

I was told in my distant youth that this brings good luck. It certainly evoked a chuckle from the infant, as I cavorted across the playground trying to anticipate the flight path of the descending leaf.

Books and Food

I really must get the books physically organized, as well as catalogued on LibraryThing. It is all very well having a hugely erudite collection, but it is annoying when attempting to cook dinner to search on the cookery bookshelf for Marvellous Meals with Mince and find only Hymns of St Ephrem the Syrian and the like.

The mince recipe (a cross between shepherd's pie and moussaka with a layer of sliced beetroot which rather failed to harmonize) received a rather mixed reception. However, it gave rise to a more inspired follow-up: Crimson Venison Casserole (TM). Having boiled the beetroot, I was left with almost half a litre of bright purple cooking liquid, and it seemed a pity not to do something with it. The diced venison in the freezer needed using, and the recipe on the back of the box required dried cranberries, of which we did have an ancient packet in the cupboard. No fresh mushrooms, no shallots: no matter. Substituting beetroot for beef stock, I adapted the recipe so heavily as to make it unrecognizable. The result was really rather delicious. For those who would like to try it, here is the procedure:

Crimson Venison Casserole
by Myopic Bookworm

(Optional: beforehand, soak a small sample of dried oyster mushrooms or similar in boiling water.) In a flameproof casserole, brown handfuls of diced venison in some hot olive oil, removing once brown to a handy plate. Chop a medium onion fairly small, mince some garlic, and fry both in the remaining oil for a couple of minutes. Chuck in a tablespoon of wholemeal flour and keep cooking for another minute. Throw in a decent portion of roughly chopped carrot, a handful at a time, stirring into the flour mix. Add around 40-50g dried cranberries, 500ml beetroot stock and 100ml red wine, a pinch of dark brown sugar, and a good sprinkling of dried thyme, and stir again (adding the soaked and drained oyster mushrooms if you've got some). Lay the venison on top, screw on some fresh black pepper, and put in a preheated moderate oven (can't remember temperature; must have been about 180C in our fan oven) for 75 to 90 minutes. Serve with potato (boiled new potatoes or mashed) and a green vegetable (we had purple sprouting broccoli).

The combination of orange carrot and crimson beetroot juice is just stunning.

Autumn III

Idyllic is the word that comes to mind to describe my brief experience yesterday afternoon. I found myself driving across the Oxfordshire countryside in the slanting sun, through the winding lanes west of Worminghall, with the infant slumbering peacefully in the back seat. As I reached Islip and headed out towards Bletchingdon and Long Hanborough*, the BBC began to play Butterworth's "By Banks of Green Willow". And on cue, I passed a willow tree.

By the time I reached the borders of Gloucestershire, the fields were hazy with dust and mist, the sun was westering, and if you could have distilled the air, it would have tasted of honey spread on fresh-baked crusty bread.

* The village elders seem to have decided that the signs on the main roads should bear the name "Bletchington", and the lorries from the local stone quarry have the same spelling. But I prefer "Bletchingdon", as the older road-signs have it. Aside from the proximity of Abingdon, it feels more distinctive and interesting. There is a similar variance at Long Hanborough, where the railway station is called "Handborough", I know not why.

Existence is Suffering

Sitting in the Chapel of Our Lady by the Martyrdom in Canterbury Cathedral yesterday morning, I was wondering about my present difficulty. Then, looking at the carved crucifix which hangs behind the altar, and wondering what it might mean, I had a thought. Existence is suffering, say the Buddhists. It is no use an atheist protesting at the suffering in the universe: the atheist simply has to accept the world as it is, having no God to protest to. But it is no use a theist protesting either. The world is as it is, whether or not the word "God" has any objective meaning. Just because there is a God, that doesn't mean that the world could have been made in a different way. A universe is a complex thing, and to assert that it could have been done better is a ridiculous pretention. If existence is suffering, then how much more is creation suffering? Even if you attempt to ditch all Paul's theology of atonement, the death of Jesus still stands as a central feature of Jesus's ministry, his most dramatic acted parable. And a parable must have a meaning: the Lamb slain at the foundation of the world. God knows that the world suffers, and in some sense he suffers with it, and in his death Christ shows us that he suffers with it.

Maybe my next heavy book (if I can face any heavy book soon) must be Paul Fiddes's The Creative Suffering of God. For the moment, I shall work my way through Rowan Williams's Tokens of Trust, which I picked up at the Cathedral bookshop. The first chapter is promising: he manages to discuss belief in such a way that the 'existence' of God become almost a non-issue.