When I fed the poor, they called me a saint.
When I asked why they were poor, they called me a Communist.
Dom Helder Camara
Author: Karl Möller
Very bad news for competitive blokes
Some admittedly rather varied passages from Julian Barnes’s book Nothing to Be Frightened Of:
The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque.
Here’s one that made me laugh:
We can compare the number of synapses that fire during the female and the male orgasm – very bad news for competitive blokes …
Barnes complains about the bureaucracy that has replaced folklore in hospital dying and tells the following story:
Registering my mother’s death, I was dealt with by a woman with a metronomic delivery and no skill – or luck – in human contact. All the details had been given, the signatures provided, the duplicate copies obtained, and I was rising to leave when she suddenly uttered four soullessly otiose words in a dead voice: ‘That completes the registration.’ She used the same mechanical tone employed by the humanoid bosses of the Football Association, when the last of the ivory balls has been drawn from the velvet bag, and they announce, ‘That completes the draw for the quarter-final round of the FA Cup.’
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Time to wonder
Some thoughts on the Sabbath from Colm Tóibín’s book The Testament of Mary:
The Sabbath mornings … were placid mornings, hours when stillness and ease prevailed, when we looked inside ourselves and remained almost indifferent to the noise the world made or the stamp the previous days had left on us.
On those Sabbath days once the prayers were intoned and God was thanked and praised, there was always time to wonder about what was beyond us in the sky or what world lay buried in the hollows of the earth.
Mary, the narrator, also reflects on ‘the peaceful night after the day when we had renewed ourselves, when our love for each other, for God and the world, had deepened and spread’.
If I kill my enemy
Peaceableness toward enemies is an idea that will, of course, continue to be denounced as impractical. It has been too little tried by individuals, much less by nations. It will not readily or easily serve those who are greedy for power. It cannot be effectively used for bad ends. It could not be used as the basis of an empire. It does not afford opportunities for profit. It involves danger to practitioners. It requires sacrifice. And yet it seems to me that it is practical, for it offers the only escape from the logic of retribution.
… The logic of retribution implies no end and no hope. If I kill my enemy, and his brother kills me, and my brother kills his brother, and so on and on, we may all have strong motives and even good reasons; the world may be better off without all of us. And yet this is a form of behavior that we have wisely outlawed. We have outlawed it, that is, in private life. In our national life, it remains the established and honored procedure.
… Peaceableness is not … passive. It is the ability to act to resolve conflict without violence. If it is not a practical and a practicable method, it is nothing. … In the face of conflict, the peaceable person may find several solutions, the violent person only one.
Wendell Berry, ‘Peaceableness toward Enemies’, in Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community
No one would take him for a clergyman
Two thoughts from E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View …
… one a profound comment by the narrrator:
The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
… and one, spoken by Lucy, a little disturbing:
He seems to see the good in everyone. No one would take him for a clergyman.
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The gifts of sun and moon, of ancient mountains and eternal hills
I pray that his land is blessed by God:
with heaven’s gifts from above,
with the deep waters stretching out underneath;
with the gifts produced by the sun,
with the gifts generated by the moon;
with the best fruit from ancient mountains,
with the gifts of eternal hills;
with the gifts of the earth and all that fills it …
Deuteronomy 33:13-16 (Common English Bible)
This, it seems to me, is the way to see our world. If we saw it like that, perhaps we would stop exploiting it in such a mindless way. We are dependent upon these gifts, but they are gifts and need to be treated as such.
Looking into one another’s eyes
In his essay ‘Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community’, Berry laments contemporary society’s ‘gravitation of attention from the countenance, especially the eyes, to the specifically sexual anatomy’, noting that
the countenance is both physical and spiritual. There is much testimony to this in the poetic tradition and elsewhere. Looking into one another’s eyes, lovers recognize their encounter as a meeting not merely of two bodies but of two living souls. In one another’s eyes, moreover, they see themselves reflected not narcissistically but as singular beings, separate and small, far inferior to the creature that they together make. In this meeting of eyes, there is an acknowledgment that love is more than sex.
Brief thoughts & quotes … 